Anchored

Looking at life through the eyes of an economist can prove helpful and sometimes provocative, as the book Freakonomics demonstrated several years back. Now, in the June 19, 2010 issue of World magazine, Marvin Olasky interviews economist Jennifer Roback Morse to discuss some of the implications of the erosion of the institution of heterosexual marriage. The cost of deinstitutionalizing natural marriage is devastating on multiple levels, including financial and sociological. Here are several excerpts from the magazine article entitled, “Minimizing Marriage” (pp. 84, 86):

Are men becoming less willing to take on commitments?

 

Single motherhood is becoming more and more prevalent, because you can’t get men to commit. Why can’t you get men to commit? Number one, because they don’t have to; number two, it’s dangerous for them to, because the obligation level ratchets up but the benefits do not. The irony of the whole feminist movement, which started off being something to liberate women, is that now women feel like the only free thing they can do is have a child completely by themselves because there is no way of attaching a child to a father and to the family. The move towards same-sex marriage and artificial reproductive technology are accelerating that trend, and making it more likely that women are going to end up spending their lives alone and doing their child-bearing completely alone.

 

Now we have many more women than men going to college. What does that do to our society?

 

We’re gradually pushing the men outside of the family. Women’s marriage prospects are deteriorating. It’s harder and harder to find a suitable guy to marry, because women feel like they have to get educated because they have to take care of themselves, and men think, eh, maybe they have to get educated because they might be a father by the time they’re, say, 30. Fatherhood induces many changes of behavior in men, and not just random fatherhood—fathering children and never seeing them again—but married fatherhood. That induces more mature and economically productive behavior. If a man doesn’t see that coming at him until he’s 30 or 35, then his incentive to get educated goes down. We’ve put a lot of things into this equation that are really skewing things and making it harder for relationships to work farther down the line.

 

So we have many more single moms. So what?

 

Many questions are involved: While mom’s attaching to the baby, who’s taking care of mom? In the natural family, there is another person taking care of mom, and that’s dad. Why is dad doing that? Because that child’s as much his as it is hers, physiologically. Could the mom do it by herself? The answer is, not very well. We have a lot of data on that point, that mom by herself does not do nearly so well as mom with dad. There are a number of reasons: first of all, someone has to earn a living. There’s a whole body of things that she doesn’t have to think about. Even if she does have a job, she doesn’t have to face it alone. It’s pretty decisive that kids benefit from two parents.

 

And what about a same-sex couple?

 

The assumption and premise is that they’re committed to each other. We have some preliminary data that says that actually these relationships aren’t as stable as heterosexual married couples. And data actually shows that lesbian relationships break up sooner than gay male relationships.

 

Here’s a little sociological fact: between two-thirds to three-fourths of divorces are initiated by women. Why is that? Because women are looking for emotional fulfillment. When you get two women together looking for that from one another, you can get an element of instability ratcheted up rather than your partner being someone who calms things down. The preliminary data show that the least stable relationship is the lesbian couple.

 

Those who care more about pocketbooks than people should be concerned?

 

A person who does anything they can get away with is scary to their family members, and they have to be controlled by the state. And they have to be controlled in very expensive ways: The California Youth Authority spends enough on each child in its care to send three people to [the University of California at] Berkeley. The Institute for American Values recently did a study that looked at the taxpayer cost of out-of-wedlock childbearing. They came up with an annual figure of $112 billion per year. That is the GDP of New Zealand—not chump change.

 

Since most of the counseling I provide is to married couples, it only seems sensible for me to blog my way through a marriage book. I’ve decided to go through the newly released, What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage, by Paul Tripp. I have found Paul to be a reliable source in the past, and I expect no less from this resource.

It’s actually quite a challenge to find good books on marriage: good meaning that it’s primarily grounded in Scripture (not with Scripture simply tacked on to make it “Christian”), that it clearly connects the work of Christ to our daily lives (answers what His life, death, and resurrection have to do with my stuff today), and that it provides plenty of application points for couples to process together (a lot more needs to happen than simply reading a book, and a book that provides good application questions serves as a catalyst for something bigger to happen beyond the reading stage). Two very good books on marriage that do this are Love That Lasts, (app questions in the back of the book) by Gary & Betsy Ricucci, and When Sinner’s Say “I Do”, (app questions provided in a separate study guide—an exasperating separate purchase that could have been spared by including it in the back of the book) by Dave Harvey.

For a brief start on What Did You Expect?, let me make some initial observations and overview of the book before jumping in with chapter 1. My copy is a hardback edition that is 287 pages, which will make this book a challenge for most men to read (by contrast, Love That Lasts is 168 pages—including 12 pages of app questions, and When Sinner’s Say “I Do” is 183 pages in length). From the table of contents, What Did You Expect? is organized around 6 commitments:

Commitment 1: We will give ourselves to a regular lifestyle of confession and forgiveness.

Commitment 2: We will make growth and change our daily agenda.

Commitment 3: We will work together to build a sturdy bond of trust.

Commitment 4: We will commit to building a relationship of love.

Commitment 5: We will deal with our differences with appreciation and grace.

Commitment 6: We will work to protect our marriage.

I note that with my initial scan of the book, I see only an occasional application question at the end of some of the chapters. I haven’t heard if this book will one day have a companion study guide, but if not then that is a disappointment (for the reasons I stated earlier on why a good “working book” will provide application questions).

For a taste of where this book intends to go, here is a section from the preface:

As long as we are two sinners living in a fallen world, there will be work to do. Sometimes that means being willing to serve when it’s the last thing we want to do. Sometimes it means being willing to listen when our instinct is to argue. Sometimes it means being willing to love, even in those moments when the other doesn’t seem deserving. Sometimes it means humbly asking for forgiveness when we are tempted to argue that we were right. Sometimes it means being willing to go through a moment of tension so that truth can get on the table. Sometimes it means being willing to overlook a minor offense. But there is one thing that we know for sure: as we rest in God’s grace, we are called to give grace to one another. And as we celebrate God’s wisdom, we must be willing to let that wisdom be our moment-by-moment guide as we relate and respond to each other.

Despite the absence of an abundance of application questions, I’m looking forward to getting into this book. Next up: chapter 1.