The Wedding Cargo Cult
I wanted to highlight one of the arguments that inspired the column in the first place: This essay from Steve Randy Waldman (the brother, I believe, of the novelist Adelle Waldman, familiar to my readers from an earlier round of kulturdebating), which makes the case that “marriage promotion” as social conservatives often describe it is “a destructive cargo cult,” with altars and rings standing in for the runways and tarmacs that World War II-era South Sea Islanders allegedly built in the hopes of attracting military airplanes.
In both cases, Waldman argues, any causal arrow runs entirely in the other direction. Just as the airstrips don’t actually attract planes that weren’t already headed there to begin with, rings and vows and weddings and cakes are the fruits of stable lives rather than their seed: “Marriage is an effect of other things that facilitate good social outcomes rather than a cause of its own.” And urging people who don’t have access to those “other things” – a steady job; a solid, dependable potential mate – to just get married anyway, as though some kind of magic will follow from the vows, isn’t just a bad idea; it’s a cruel one, which will likely consign them to worse outcomes when the marriage falls apart.