It Takes a Village to get Married

Hillary was Right

Back in my twenties, I was very active in a Racquetball Club with a large contingent of Indian expat members. We would meet up a couple times a week to play pick-up games, and I remember a small, shy man in his early twenties, an engineer like me, and my arch nemesis on the court. He played to the point of obsession and had formidable accuracy and intuition. Try as I did, I could rarely get a win on him.

One week I noticed he wasn’t at one of the meetups, and then missed another, which was odd for him. I asked one of the other Indian players who laughed and said he was going back to India to get married, and would be gone for the week-long wedding celebration and two weeks for the honeymoon. The groom had only met this bride a few times before marrying her, and after the honeymoon brought her back to the United States to start a family. I knew many Indian co-workers, but didn’t realize how strong this tradition was, even to this day, and the culture shock was exacerbated by how contrary it is to modern Western norms.

Full Conformity vs. Full Agency

For a simple thought experiment, say a group of high school seniors are told by a gruff, seasoned coach that in order to graduate, everyone has to complete a marathon. The coach gives everyone a year to train, after which they will have to complete it. He says that, while he’s a coach, he’s not going to give any direction on how to train, and everyone will have to find their own way to succeed.

Another coach gives the same ultimatum, but says that everyone will be required to train with him three times a week, with a strict schedule to follow on other days. The schedule would be the same for everybody and there will be no modifications.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the first group is going to have a lot more failures, even if there are go-getters who succeed through doing the proper research and cultivating a program to their needs. The second group may have students who could have succeeded more efficiently with their own protocol, but overall many more will succeed.

Simple, right? So, if this is common sense, why do we insist on following the first coach when it comes to marriage preparation?

To Western sensibilities, arranged marriages stem from foreign and strange, to outright abusive. While there is plenty of criticism that can be leveled at the practice, especially when a family demands such a marriage for selfish reasons, the underlying philosophy is solid. Two people getting married does not just impact the couple, but the vast network of people surrounding them. The idea of romance is secondary to ensuring continuing cultural, religious, and ethnic lines with their future children.

Throughout most of history in the West, paradoxically, the lower classes had more autonomy in choosing a mate that the noble classes, who often had to arrange marriages for political alliances. The lower classes would have a pool of eligible mates from the community, and in some communities moved to adjacent towns to live by themselves before settling down. Though the daughter’s father had the final say on the subject and there were strong economic incentives to marry certain people, there was still strong agency in choosing a spouse.

Just like everything in society, agency in marriage is a more a point between two extremes of total non-consent from the parties to total autonomy with zero pressure from one’s community. From what I’ve seen, arranged marriages in India are consensual, but with strong family pressure. At the extreme arranged end the elder of the family or someone picked from the community will operate so any person in good standing gets a spouse, and ensure it coincides with the needs of the community but not necessarily the wants of the individuals betrothed.

The American model has taken the opposite direction, where the needs of the family and community are totally ignored for maximum agency in choosing a spouse. Along with this, though, is the collapse of institutions that facilitate finding a mate. Since finding a spouse is no longer a concern of the community and everyone just follows their heart, the usual bedrocks that allowed couples to find each other and build a family has gone away also.

You know those Church dances where singles would meet up and mingle under the watchful eye of elders? Gone, even for the diminishing pool of young people who still go to church.

You know your aunt and uncle who would kill to set you up with that young girl they know across town? Even if you know your extended family well, a rarer and rarer thing, you are likely living across the country. Even if you aren’t, this once normal behavior is now considered weird and creepy.

You know the small, family-owned business where a man and woman might meet together through work? Now they work for mega-corps, where dating a co-worker has went from being a perilous affair to career suicide.

As the organic structures have disappeared, technology has tried to fill the gap. Why do you need all this stuff when you can just put your preferences in a computer and it will magically spit out the man or woman of your dreams? Apparently a lot, since all these apps might do a good job matching you with STATED preferences, but do an abysmal job in actually getting people hitched long-term. As much as people state they prefer to be a full-agency individual, it come with terrible drawbacks in terms of security and choice-paralysis. Without a light nudge from people you trust, it becomes petrifying choosing a life-altering decision like finding a spouse. When given infinite choices, most make the choice of never making a decision at all. This doesn’t even go into the issues of these apps filtering good men based on arbitrary whims.

At one extreme you’re going to have a lot more marriage, simply because there’s no choice in the matter, and at the other you’re going to have few marriages, as there is no organization to facilitate them. More traditional societies have strong customs a couple is expected to follow in order to marry, and while the hoops seem annoying and arbitrary, they formed organically to ensure every party understood the expectations and ramifications of what they are doing.

Whose Fault is This?

The online world if rife with men lamenting the lack of seriousness in women while women lament the lack of suitable mates. This has resulted in classic “war of the sexes” rhetoric directed to their age cohort. The truth is the failure happened before the current generation came of age, and has only gotten worse.

This isn’t to say there’s no agency. A young man who is content in a low paying, low skill grind and spending his free time watching porn is doing himself no favors. I recognize good jobs more difficult to get as in other generation and the deck is stacked against young men succeeding. Every man does have agency in ensuring he dresses well, is physically fit, and is making a good-faith effort at upward mobility.

Ditto for women who expect fancy 200-dollar dinners just for them showing up. In this low-trust age that’s not happening, and expecting a man with his own house and over six feet tall is a strong assumption you are a suitable woman for that very small pool of eligible men.

Both have expectations that are contrary to reality, and this isn’t anything new. What’s new is the dearth of elders who are nudging the girl on the shoulder and saying that while he’s only five-seven, he’s an established and kind person. It’s missing the grandpa telling his grandson that while she might be only a 6 in terms of attractiveness, she’s kind, stable, and he’s going to have fewer headaches with her than other women.

The educational system can only be described as anti-knowledge with regards to what women and men want. The egalitarian rush has led to the assumption that men and women should not be treated differently, but as much as this message is ingrained by social pressure, culture can’t beat out raw biology. Men recognize that women have implicit worth in that they can get pregnant and bear children. Because of the heavy commitments required in pregnancy and child-rearing, their value is never questioned, and they have little to prove. Elder men used to train young men to clear this hurdle by creating elaborate rites of passage and giving training and employment to become established. This has been outsourced, poorly, to colleges.

Women, in turn, rightfully understand that they are smaller, weaker, and their biological makeup gives the average woman far less agency than men, regardless of the advantages given to them. Older women used to teach less experienced women how to operate passively, working in the background through subtle means to get the advantages they want.

Because of these difference engrained into biology, instead of understanding their own strengths and the strengths of the opposite sex, it’s led to resentment at the advantages the opposite sex has that they don’t, since they have no idea how to execute their own advantages. This is exacerbated by social rules that try to channel women into acting like men and vice versa. Women are expected to be girl-bosses in ways men find repulsive while men are expected to emotionally open up in ways women justifiably find nauseating and weak. Men don’t want to compete with women because that’s what other men are for. They want a companion. Women don’t want a man who can’t keep his emotional shit together, she wants a rock she can count on to make her feel secure.

Trad Wife isn’t the Answer, and Neither is The Red Pill

My family circles include homesteaders, urban professionals, and everything else in-between. Once you get through the basic nuclear family, you will find an extensive network of interconnected parents, all of whom begin to self-select by their background and worldview. It will be an eclectic mix of old friends, friends made when kids start making friends. None of it represents the atomization of internet culture, and very few real friendships are strictly virtual. Even if a colleague lives across the country, in-person visits would be planned where they hope to catch up on life.

The Tradwives try to create a persona around their immediate home to the detriment of the larger conglomeration of dependencies that make her life possible. While it’s interesting to be able to make clothes from scratch or have a farm, to a large extent their life has only been a reality for pioneers who literally found a plot of earth and began cultivating it. Within a generation those homesteads were connected to towns that quickly turned into specialization as their settlement gets established. While this sort of aggressive self-reliance is plausible, the far more important parts of family formation such as developing a cohesive village capable of sharing the burdens of raising children, especially in their younger years, goes unheeded.

The Red Pillers also have a massive blind spot, and outside of the manosphere gurus whose sole purpose is sexual access, the focus is on particular “game” to gain the interest of a woman. As anyone married knows, she has a thousand different influences outside of here husband, including her family, friends, and co-workers. I have never seen a Red Pill e-celeb explain how to navigate an irate mother-in-law, or a toxic friend in her circle. Of course, there is “be more alpha”, but that ends up just begging the question. A man is marrying far more than the individual woman.

The lack of permanence of marriage also impacts who marries. As odd as it sounds, making marriage into a theoretically temporary union has not quelled the hesitancy in marriage, but made it worse, largely because marriages that ended amicably with no damage to the exes or children is so rare it might as well be a unicorn. Also, if it’s temporary, what’s the point?

In earlier days, divorce was stigmatized to the extent that married couples would destroy communication with the divorcees for the (correct) reason that they are afraid of social contagion. Now divorce is an accepted part of life, and it’s next to impossible to keep pure when friends and family all have divorces, on top of peculiar arrangements like living together without being married, and now even polygamy. Nothing holds a couple together better than everyone in their circle of influence also being married, and when that’s taken away the family unit becomes stranded and far more brittle.

The truth is, marriage involves marrying not only the person, but their network. This is why women get irate with a husband hanging out with guys she deems total losers, and men get nervous at the floozy co-worker who always want to take her out to party. Those outside relationships find their way into influencing the household.

Skin in the game

This isn’t to say that the elder generations just got lazy and got inundated with a bootstrap mentality that was taken to extremes. A lot of it happened because of social capital being slowly eroded, along with the dawn of technology forcing many young people far away from their roots, and the nature of the economy means they are less and less likely to stay in the same place their entire life. Even more so their children, who will likely have to travel across the country to make their way.

Back when it was given the children would stay close, worship in the same Church their parents did, and join the same clubs, there was a clear benefit in helping these kids find mates and maintain the traditions as the old guard aged out.

The general community should be seen as a super-organism spanning over generations, with older cells of the organism dying but being replaced with fresh blood. If all this effort is going to result in young people getting their spouse and moving, breaking the original connections that made the partnership possible, it’s no wonder that there is no incentive. The only way for a community to know they will benefit from fostering real marital bonds is to ensure they get what they want in return.

This means that tighter, more insular networks need to form. This is why there is no problem with reproduction in ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, or hard-line Tradcath communities. Religion isn’t even the main reason, but rather the inner cohesion and strength of these groups. There is an implicit pressure to ensure the children return the effort spent on them. This means pressure to marry in the immediate community or an aligned satellite, and ensure their children are trained in the customs and rites of the tribe. In other words, in order to create an ecosystem conducive to marriage, it’s necessary to limit possible marriage prospects.

If it sounds cultish to limit opportunities and have expectations for members of a group, then welcome to how every tribe has operated since the beginning of time. A hard-line Jewish community might not be able to stop a man from marrying a Christian woman instead of the nice Jewish woman they picked out, but expect that man to be exiled either formally or informally. No institution is going to create the cultural and logistical framework for matching couples and say “I just want them to be happy.” That might be good enough for someone’s mother, but it does not scale.

This has the added benefit of helping to eliminate choice paralysis women often have, and forces men to settle for the more mundane as opposed to exotic. There will always be the disagreeable and high-performing that can eschew pressure, carve their own way, and acquire a mate outside the standard channels, but like the runner example, if a hands-off approach to a vital step in life will result in failure with most average people, you need some scaffolding.

Generational Survival Requires Tribalism

Marriage, and the raising of children that follows, is ultimately a tribal affair. It’s a matter of survival. If a group raises children and they reject the ethnic, cultural, and religious customs of the group to find their own way, it’s a net loss to that community. They have separated themselves, and their children will see the old community as something completely foreign.

General American culture can only be described as aggressively anti-natal now, and any defection from more tribal communities to become Mass Man almost ensures that the cultural and ethnic line of a particular couple entering it will end in extinction, just as surely as an invading horde leaving no survivors in a newly conquered city.

Like everything, this is a spectrum. An Asian woman marrying a White man is not completely eschewing the old ways, though transmitting them will be far more difficult. The same for a man who leaves his small rural town for the city if he is also maintaining the religion and customs of his people. Outside of the particular case of ethnogenesis, like what happened with the disparate Anglo groups entering the United States to become something wholly unique, the dilution will make it harder for his descendants to thrive. Every disconnect brings him closer to his lineage becoming another cog of Mass Man, and becoming extinct in the process.

In short, you want your child to find a mate? Tribe up. Want to get a mate? Find a tribe and the girl will come. Good luck. No one said it would be easy.