Happiness Matters
Secular Marriageism and a New Movement to Undermine the Individual
By Jared Feuer
Recently, the activist Sarah Haider tweeted support of fellow heterodoxer Bridget Phetasy’s piece, “How Divorce Never Ends.” Phetasy posits that she and her husband literally became addicts when their respective parents “abandoned their duty” by divorcing. Haider writes, “My tradest [e.g. most traditional] opinion is that ‘no-fault’ divorce should be an option open only to couples without kids.” Receiving criticism for sounding like a fundamentalist, Haider doubled down and said parents that divorce put their kids at risk of *sexual abuse* for the sake of their “individual freedom” (emphasis mine). Phetasy and Haider are not alone in anti-divorce sentiment among the heterodox. Kat Rosenfeld mocks women that end unfulfilling marriages with “Does This Divorce Make You Hotter?” while Freddie deBoer mocks those wanting sexual desire in “I Regret to Inform You That We Will All Grow Old, Infirm, and Unattractive.”
People who place themselves or are placed in the heterodox movement share a broad tent of economic and foreign policy orientations, from socialists to libertarians, hawks to doves. Where they seemingly align is in opposition to social authoritarianism; voices on the left shake off their ‘woke’ allies while those on the right do the same to the religious right. The heterodox are, as a rule, educated and believers in their individual rationality. However, their charged opposition to divorce reveals hostility for the individual. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
At the heart of this attitude is what I call Secular Marriageism (SM). While I don’t believe ‘lived experience’ is a trump card over empirical evidence or that people cannot relate to identities different than their own, our positioning can provide a valuable vantage point. Now that I am divorcing, I am increasingly aware of how many people speak of their marriages. There are little ways to let it be known that you are married and happy, even with your spouse’s minor annoyances. You can see this humble bragging in the face of a stark world (so hold on to your spouse!) with DeBoer lampooning a middle-aged woman dating (“a guy named Chuck who’s too old for you and who you don’t find very attractive but he was the only guy you found on Bumble for drinks that night and you meet and go “oof” and he smells like fish”) and Rosenfeld smugly noticing that in a room of divorced women she was “the only one accompanied by a husband (what can I say? I’ve always liked him)” and Phetasy slamming her divorced parents for “[giving] us advice about raising our kid, as if I would take any parenting advice from them, ever.”
This perspective is particularly visible to me because I wore it for twenty years. For decades I presented myself as happily married even with (and perhaps because) of what I presented as minor incompatibilities. Of course, the incompatibilities were not minor, but because my ex and I were neither screaming nor in constant crisis, I didn’t perceive them as existential. Likewise, the SM perspective is careful to leave space for divorce when there is abuse, serious dysfunction, or conflict, but the barbs come out for those desiring (you can hear the mocking from miles away) ‘fulfillment.’
In my marriage, we looked like an ‘opposites attract’ that you’d chuckle at. I'd like to believe my ex and I were doing a good job raising our children while bills were paid, we took vacations, made posts about each other on social media, went on dates, and believed we were not hopelessly behind the Joneses. But if you looked deeper, we were eating ourselves. I am an exhausting person and need constant stimulation; my ex has a slower heart rate and needs peace. To make matters work, we unconsciously met in the middle as I throttled myself and she operated at an intensity she found overstimulating. We became fluent at this approximation but upon distancing ourselves from the situation, it was obvious that we were suffocating.
Is divorce easy? Of course not. Shifting a life that had decades of momentum to another path is very difficult. Families need to readjust, it’s likely that someone you care about will be very hurt, and if you have kids, you will not spend as much time with them as before - even with an intact parental partnership. That hurts. Logistics and processes can feel overwhelming. And as you go through divorce you realize how the system is set up to make it a cinch to get married and literal legal combat to divorce, even when amicable.
The SM response is that this is why you shouldn’t divorce. Kids, society, finances, extended family, yourself, healthcare, logistics, networks, friends, aging, sex, work, etc. – all require stability. There is a Protestantism to the opposition; you can almost hear, “Just close your eyes and think of England.” It is astonishing that we celebrate, romanticize, and trust those barely out of their teenage years (if that) to make a lifetime commitment, but if people gain perspective in later years, we tell them they are selfish, having a midlife crisis, or are being unrealistic. I recently heard the comment, "Well, sex is going to stop being that important anyway." Romance, sex, intimacy, life, potential – that’s for the half decade or so between 20 and when you get married. Then a few years of honeymoon potentially followed by the chaos of young kids that upon clearing reveals a rewarding bond, dramatic instability, or quiet incompatibility. If it’s the latter, SM says you should stick with it because “it’s not about you.”
But isn’t it? Or is life a never-ending relay where we get a few years before we abandon ourselves because of a decision we made in our twenties and/or on behalf of children who will grow up to do the very same thing? SM says, basically, yes. This is the fundamental stoicism at play in the heterodox. It’s why you also hear them lament modern life, critique therapy, lament antidepressants, mock self-help... We are too soft according to this school of thought and should face our nakedness in a world that is not sunshine and rainbows but rather one that offers value in the slog. It’s not God that should inform us according to SM but self-denial.
Which is not entirely wrong. We should find value and purpose in responsibility and work. We shouldn’t forever be affixed to mediating resources. We should support others and not be too self-centered. Discomfort is good at times. But we also get to be needy, desire comfort, want help, accept frailty, seek happiness, value ourselves. Life isn’t just temperance and eating corn flakes. The individual is the means by which we experience the world in all its imperfection and it should be sacred. Only it isn’t for this emerging movement that positions itself in service of the individual but is potentially the next incarnation of social dogmatists. While heterodoxy rejects earlier external sources of purpose – the Bible or group identity – they are coalescing around a new form of temperance with marriage as the altar (in all that means).
Marriage can be a beautiful pairing of two people to go through a time in life or a lifetime - if the heart is the bond and not the externalities - but there are other ways to live. While there is a needed conversation with empirical evidence and specific policy consideration, with this column I am first attempting to broaden the discussion of possibilities outside and/or after marriage. We can find purpose in ourselves, our extended families, our friends, our ability to set a course for life. The decision to marry should be more thoughtful – can we please end the insane ‘romance’ of a man dropping to one knee - and we should make divorce administrative rather than legal. Yes, outcomes for children in divorce are often less positive than when parents stay married, but the solution is not for the parents to yield but to find new parenting arrangements and resources to help with kids. We need to stop responding “I’m sorry” when people say they are getting divorced, not treat it as a tragedy, and stop the social, familial, economic, and legal moralizing that keep people married when they are struggling to admit they no longer wish to be. Nor should we place guilt or concern on people if they do divorce - that we can’t appreciate perhaps the biggest decision of agency that one can make in life is revealing and makes it harder for others to follow suit. Which might be the point.
Returning to Phetasy and the pressure on parents to stay married for the kids, the assumption is that a consistent nuclear family is more important than the emotional state of the participants. The happiness of the parents is overlooked in favor of the function that they provide. This sets up a zero sum dynamic that overlooks the value of being embodied to parenting. I have noticed that I parent differently now that I am no longer compressing my personality. I reflect anew on my behavior, reconsider assumptions, am more emotionally demonstrative and vulnerable, and focus less on centralizing my kids and more on offering wisdom and support for them to steer their own lives. It is difficult to reconceive and change if your growth has ceased to keep a marriage intact. Furthermore, when a marriage is based on stability rather than fulfillment, the pressure on kids increases, not decreases. Because the kids are why their parents stay together, they are valued on how they validate the sacrifice. Children with parents unhappy in marriage carry all the attention because it can’t be borne by the marital bond – and that leads to less agency and freedom and more compliance and dependence. A situation the children are likely to repeat as they later consciously or unconsciously validate their parents’ choices. But thankfully, not always. I recently was on a hiking tour with a 28 year old who had spent her post college years visiting much of the world and forging her own path, and she felt she would only marry when she found someone that she didn’t have to whittle herself down for. I hope she takes her time.
Those who hold to SM might have been lucky enough to find their soulmates in their early 20’s, but I am skeptical of most. Because if they had, they wouldn't be protesting so much. They'd not tell others to stay in a logistically coherent but barely intimate marriage. They'd understand how special it is to have someone you can engage as yourself and not instruct others to take less. And they’d stop waving the bloody rag of ‘think of the kids’ that sends the message to those supposedly important kids that their parents are not full people and that one day they won’t be either. Existence is not about being a functionary - for God, kids, partner, parents, tribe, society, or anyone else. Taking this approach is nihilistic and one I am disappointed to see endorsed in the heterodox movement. We can be individuals. We can be fulfilled. We can be happy.