Is there any institution the New York Times hates more than marriage? The way it pumps out articles spreading doubt and misinformation about the custom seems to suggest not.
Take a “guest essay” published last week by novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge celebrating her life trapped in a pandemic “compound” with her mother, siblings, and all their children. “The compound is a noisy place,” Greenidge writes. “Sometimes, when everyone is talking and laughing and joking at once, my daughter, who is young enough that language is still new to her, will raise her voice in a keening screech to try to join in the cacophony.”
Sounds lovely. To each their own, at least when it comes to noise preferences in living arrangements.
Greenidge steps onto much thinner ice when she writes that “it seemed obvious to me then, having lived in a two-parent home that was deeply unhappy and dysfunctional, that the number of parents around to make a working family was arbitrary, that people beholden to the rigid mathematics of mother and father and children equals stability were shortsighted, ignoring all we know of human interactions and ways we make family throughout human history.”
Greenidge is technically correct about the “two-parent home” being arbitrary compared to “all we know of human interactions and ways we make family throughout human history,” but she’s probably not correct in the way she intended.
The two-parent marriage is actually a much more recent development than Greenidge realizes. Since the dawn of agriculture, all major civilizations have been polygamous, as are many West African countries today. Monogamy only recently became standard throughout the majority of the world.
When wealthy men can choose how many wives to cram into their home, a monogamous two-parent family can seem quite arbitrary.
But we also have data on which types of families produce the best outcomes from children, and on average, the monogamous married household always comes out on top.
Polygamous households are shark tanks of competing wives constantly undercutting each other and each other’s children for resources from the family patriarch. Single-parent households are merry-go-rounds of romantic relationships, with men constantly coming into and out of children’s lives, denying them the stability they need and deserve to grow and thrive.
Greenidge is hopeful that “we are living through a time when all the stories the larger culture tells us about ourselves are being rewritten: the story of what the United States is: what it means to be a man or a woman … what it means to love oneself or other people. We are imagining all of this again so that these stories can guide and comfort us rather than control us.”
Problem is, from the 1619 Project to Greenidge’s reimagination of marriage, these stories are all built on lies and will only deliver us pain, not comfort.
