Oddbean

It is a complicated topic and most wives pretend like it isn't a problem, but the high female divorce rate and young womens' increasing reluctance to marry, speak for themselves. It doesn't help much, to tell young women that they will benefit in 30 or 40 years because: 1) young women live in the moment and often have trouble imagining anything beyond a few years 2) they see lots of women who made the choice and then ended up alone, anyway 3) the caveat, that the effort is worth it only if the marriage is "healthy" is very discouraging, as they know so many people who have struggled with their marriages 4) a lot of them live geographically-separated from their parents, so the concept that children will "be around later" doesn't ring true to them. People have been attempting to raise the appeal to young women with big, fancy weddings and bachelorette parties, and etc. but I don't know how effective that has been and young couples are increasingly too poor for that.

The piss poor situation today I think stems from a failure of our money and culture (which also kind of follow from each other actually). It might seem hopeless, but that’s because the larger systems that demoralize entire generations are extremely hard to both see or control. So it feels like an inevitable reality, when it is actually a definable breakdown of core incentives. Not disagreeing with your points here, btw, just pointing out how few understand how those problems become so huge as to encompass an entire society and why they arise to begin with. I know to most it would sound bonkers to say, “our money caused this,” but a much deeper investigation reveals and extremely compelling story with an eerily large set of historical examples of the very same thing occurring.

Oh, I agree with that. And I don't think it's hopeless. I'm just saying that changing the way we speak about wives and marriage, in general, could have an effect of making marriage more appealing to young women. We have to frame our arguments for the audience we are addressing, and I think we have collectively failed to do that. One of the small, but effective, things we can do, is to simply openly acknowledge and clearly state that we are asking them to sacrifice personally and do something that is difficult and challenging, and that we value their willingness to adopt that burden because it is good for all of us, in aggregate, and their family and neighborhood, in particular. Tell them the truth. No more gaslighting. No more romanticism. No more decades-long search for Mr. 6/6/6. Return to the concept of marriage as a vocation.

“One of the small, but effective, things we can do, is to simply openly acknowledge and clearly state that we are asking them to sacrifice personally and do something that is difficult and challenging, and that we value their willingness to adopt that burden because it is good for all of us, in aggregate, and their family and neighborhood, in particular. Tell them the truth. No more gaslighting. No more romanticism. No more decades-long search for Mr. 6/6/6. Return to the concept of marriage as a vocation.” 1000% this 👆🏻 Our culture has come to some belief that we should want things because they are easy and we should desire no responsibility and everything is supposed to be easy and always happy. Rather than understanding the meaning and value of those things that are explicitly hard, and accept that. Our culture has been gaslighting us into believing utter nonsense about all of our choices, pretending there are no trade offs, and that the key to happiness is to escape all responsibility… when life is nothing of the sort. The secret to life (imo) is accepting and taking head on the inescapable hard things, understanding and being open to the clear trade offs we have to make, and not deluding ourselves with nonsense and fairy tales.

I also think my own religion has a very strong frame, for promoting marriage, with the idea that our marriages are a tangible way that we can learn more about the relationship between Christ and the Church. Because we can. That means that even a difficult marriage has value to us. And it means that we enter into marriage realizing that it can be difficult, so we aren't as disappointed if it doesn't end up like something out of a romantic comedy.