A slew of pro-marriage books have been published recently, including Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege, and Brad Wilcox’s Get Married.
A book taking the other side of the debate was bound to come out soon, and Lyz Lenz has stepped up to the plate with her This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, which the Washington Post was kind enough to publish a 3,750-word essay about.
Reading just the essay and not the book, there is not a lot new here. We get an extremely unflattering view of her ex-husband, a man she makes out to be so incapable of compassion you wonder why she ever married him in the first place. He doesn’t help around the house, he doesn’t support her career, and he doesn’t make an effort to listen to her needs.
From there, Lenz makes a boilerplate feminist argument against marriage, claiming the institution only benefits men, that divorce doesn’t harm children, and that the federal government spends too much money promoting marriage and not enough money making it easier for women to raise children without fathers.
None of these assertions are true.
Yes, married men are happier and more successful than unmarried men. Living with a caring spouse who can meet your emotional and physical intimacy needs would make anyone more happy. But married men also work 30% more hours than single men. That works out to some 600 more hours of work a year. The incentive to provide for a wife clearly makes men work harder.
More importantly, marriage makes women happier too. A recent study that followed nurses over a 25-year span found that after controlling for physical health, mental health, and economic variables, women who got married over the 25 years of the study were happier than the women who never married and less likely to suffer from depression. Married women with children are also more happy than unmarried women with children.
It seems that marriage is not the zero-sum game Lenz makes it out to be and is instead a mutually beneficial relationship for both sexes.
Turning to divorce, Lenz cites one Slate article where two authors minimize the well–established adverse impact of divorce on children, basically arguing, “Kids are resilient like that.”
“Grief and anxiety fade,” the Slate authors write. “Behavior tends to return to normal within two years. … In reality, researchers have concluded that most children touched by divorce are ultimately well-adjusted.” Most children who lose a parent to death also turn out fine. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
Finally, turning to public policy, Lenz claims that “our governments sponsor and prop up the institution of marriage with tax breaks and incentives while making it nearly impossible to be a single parent.” As if marriage didn’t exist for thousands of years before Congress created the joint filing tax status.
Even then, when you look at the actual federal government policies that incentivize marriage, an interesting pattern emerges. On taxes, high-earning married couples where one spouse makes considerably more than the other do receive a marriage bonus. However, couples with more equal incomes often pay a marriage tax penalty.
The Social Security system also includes a marriage bonus, but again it only really accrues for high-income couples where one spouse worked substantially more than the other. At age 62, a married spouse who mostly did not work can claim half the benefit that his or her working spouse earned over his or her lifetime (the working spouse is most often the husband).
These are both clearly marriage subsidies. But they only benefit wealthier couples where one spouse works and one spouse does not.
For working-class couples, the federal government actually penalizes marriage.
Name any means-tested federal government benefit program: Medicaid, food stamps, Section 8 housing, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Obamacare insurance subsidies, and the earned income tax credit. Every one of these programs contains income eligibility cutoffs that penalize working parents who want to get married.
One study found that a hypothetical couple with two children where one partner earned $24,000 and the other earned $20,000 would lose $10,500 in benefits from the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Section 8 housing assistance, Medicaid, and Obamacare if they chose to get married.
$10,500 a year is a lot of money to go missing for a couple making $100,000 a year, let alone a couple making just $44,000. No wonder so many mothers choose to stay single instead of marrying the father of their children.
Lenz never mentions this.
“Maybe instead of discouraging divorce and pressuring people to marry for financial security, we should make a more equitable society,” Lenz writes.
Maybe instead of paying women to stay single we should allow them to get married and provide a father for their children.
Lenz goes on to quote Simone de Beauvoir, author of the seminal feminist book The Second Sex. “Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness,” Lenz quotes Beauvoir, “but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.”
Like Lenz, Beauvoir was no fan of marriage. “Marriage is an oppressive institution, which restricts personal freedom and perpetuates patriarchal values,” Beauvoir wrote. “I think that the family must be abolished.”
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Instead of marriage, Beauvoir preferred a “soul partnership” with her lover Jean-Paul Sartre, who also despised marriage. So enamored with Sartre was Beauvoir that she would help him seduce virgins for his wanton sexual appetites. After violating one 16-year-old student procured by Beauvoir in a hotel, Sartre told her that the maid would be surprised to see him again so soon since he had just taken a different girl’s virginity that same day.
Beauvoir clearly did not care about that 16-year-old’s self-knowledge or happiness. I wonder if Lenz does.
