Marriage is a natural institution. But that doesn’t mean it comes easily. It involves sacrificing for others.
That’s a problem in this age where our elites hold individual autonomy as a lodestar, which makes things tricky for a liberal media advice columnist.
At Vox, a site that tells progressive millennial and Generation Z elites how to think and live, a recent letter writer fretted about letting her high-earning soon-to-be husband “pay for more of our shared expenses, like rent.”
Forget about the guy picking up the tab on a date — the modern woman apparently wants to go Dutch till death do us part. Anything else, the writer fretted, would make her “a bad feminist.”
Why? Because feminism, in this reading, requires every woman to be an island.
“I value my independence and don’t want my partner to end up controlling me,” the writer said.
Vox‘s advice columnist tried to reassure the worried feminist, saying, “You’re not actually financially dependent on your boyfriend, even if he’s covering more than half the rent.”
There’s an unstated premise here. Expenses for the family home need to be divided two ways: his money and her money, and not their money. A joint checking account is as dated as a dowry.
Independence, you see, must reign supreme, and matrimony doesn’t change that. As a personal finance guru put it in her case against conjoined finances, “You all should be autonomous human beings. You’ve come into this relationship as an autonomous human being.”
But why limit this to money? Shouldn’t sex be just as individualistic and transactional, even with marriage?
That’s taken for granted by the New York Times’s ethicist.
The headline in the April 24 subscriber-only advice column was “My Boyfriend Has a Husband. Should I Tell Him About Us?” The letter writer was in an open gay marriage, and his current extramarital “boyfriend” was also married. The ethical question wasn’t about monogamy — faithfulness wasn’t even on the table. The question was whether the two-timing man should mind that his paramour was also two-timing, but secretly so, because consent is the only moral law after all.
But the ethicist leaned on a moral law that apparently looms even larger than consent, Gov. Tim Walz’s (D-MN) golden rule: Mind your own damn business.
“Meddling in their marriage would be crossing a line,” the New York Times writer said.
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The line that wasn’t crossed by having sex with this cuckold’s gay husband would be crossed by talking to the cuckold without the paramour’s consent.
This ethical system and this anthropology reject the idea of monogamy and replace all relationships with transactions. In such a moral milieu, you may ask, What’s the point of marriage? The elite media doesn’t have a great answer to that question, which may explain why marriage is increasingly becoming outré among the smart set.