Anti-Climacus

Rarely do I have much to say about a post that I first saw linked on Postmodern Conservative, but this complain about the dating habits of twentysomething men demands a response:

It is sometimes, though not always, the case that amongst twentysomething women, the author of the post in question very much included, that the identity of the man they are to marry is the last, and least consequential, of the details that will determine their future happiness. They are, on their own account, smart, funny, gifted with appropriate social graces, professionally successful, but happy to give all that up to be someone's obedient wife and mother of their children. Because they are, in all these respects, complete and ready to be married, they fail to understand why it has not happened for them yet, why all the nice and supposedly serious men out there have failed to notice their many captivating qualities and just up and proposed. The worst are those men who will date them once, or twice, or for awhile, and never be prepared to commit. This failure can only be explained by some sort of generational malady, a problem with Men These Days.

Dear readers, it is a fine example of the Nice Girl trope, no less annoying that its companion Nice Guy trope: if I want to get married and there's nothing wrong with me, there must be something wrong with all the people of the other sex who fail to appreciate me. There are obvious and important differences between the situation for men and women, because the societal expectations of men and women are different, but the solution in each case appears to be more self-examination, rather than looking to the world to see what's wrong with it.

The difference between this and other equivalent instances is the role religion plays in justifying this whole system. Christianity has a difficult time dealing with single, post-college people. I have never been to a church that doesn't struggle with this problem. College-age kids can have a standard youth ministry: married people are functionally equivalent no matter what their age is. Single people are problematic because they don't like family-oriented activities and don't like to travel around in one big herd. They have busy professional lives and different social activities. They are not an easy group to deal with.

This is compounded by the tricky place of singles within Christian ethics. The New Testament conceives of people who are married, and importantly conceives of people who might be single intentionally and for their entire lives. There are no precedents for people who are single only for awhile. Ironically, the problem is worse for Catholics than Protestants because, as the post-writer points out, marriage being a sacrament designed to be complementary to taking on holy orders and the two intended to be universal and mutually exclusive, every obedient Catholic has to have one or the other. The men who are not marrying her are actively denying her a grace she might otherwise have. Ironically, the Protestant model, for all the trouble it has with the "intentionally single for life" category, is in a better position, because it can at least conceive a flexible roles and intermediate stages in the lives of non-marrieds.

There's one other difficulty that's worth mentioning here: the problem of viewing marriage as a set of roles that vary little from one marriage to the next. One of the problems with the Nice Girl view is that it begins from the assumption that the woman is basically set and won't need to change; the man can be any man who will fill the role appropriately. And the conservative Christian view of marriage, Catholic and Protestant, encourages women to think of it this way: once they are ready they meet a man who is ready and get married. The alternative is the view that relationships are between two people whose strengths and weaknesses imperfectly correspond to the roles they are 'supposed' to play. A woman doesn't earn or deserve a man because she is ready to be married, any more than a man deserves a woman because he wants to be in a relationship: at the very least, they neither have earned nor deserve the particular human being they are dating, or want to date. If desert enters into the situation at all, it can only be after a period of adjusting to the person they are with. But desert certainly doesn't enter into the situation: spouses are not a prize to be won, and merit doesn't matter.