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The Case Against Marriage
A Book in Progress by Glenn Campbell “Read it or weep!” Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Production Notes This is a ROUGH DRAFT of a book that still needs a lot of work. I have set it aside for now but expect to come back to it later Your feedback is encouraged, but I recognize that the chapters don't yet flow together as they should. FamilyCourtGuy<at>gmail.com |
"I love this place and wouldn't want to live anywhere else."
You hear this from established middle-aged people in every part of the world. From the lochs of Scotland to the deserts of Arizona, as long as someone is feeling no pain in their habitat, they will probably claim to love it there. On the coast of British Columbia, local residents say they love the ocean, forests and mountains. In Manhattan, they love their hypothetical cultural life and how their city "never sleeps." In Massachusetts, people say they love their four seasons and their rich variety of weather.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and I say the weather sucks. It is a burden on the quality of life and makes everything harder. I find Massachusetts pleasant to visit in June, but I would never want to move back there.
What makes me different from the people who live there and say they love the place? I am no longer invested there.
If you have bought real estate in a certain place and established a life there, of course you are going to love it. But which comes first: Are you living there because you love it, or do you love this place because you live there and not claiming to love it would be too painful?
Whenever people extol the virtues of something they have already invested in and try to convince you to join them, you ought to be suspicious. By selling the same lifestyle to you, they are justifying their own past decisions. Their love for this lifestyle may be real to them, but it is also self-serving.
Who would you trust more: a restaurant critic who visits 50 restaurants a month and who has no personal connection to any of them, or a critic who visits only one restaurant that he happens to be part owner of? Of course an investor is going to love the restaurant he has invested in. He has a financial incentive to lure customers there, but he also has to believe in it himself to convince himself that he made the right choice.
Investing personally in something automatically creates emotional pressure to believe in that choice. To not believe would create internal conflict. You would have to acknowledge that you made the wrong choice and squandered your limited resources. Such an admission can be profoundly stressful. Most people avoid this kind of stress by letting their current loves and preferences be dictated by their currently active investments.
If you come to a fork in the road at an early stage of your life and you choose one path over another, then the farther down that path you go, the more you will probably declare your love for it. "This path is the best!" you say, even if you have no experience with any other. "I wouldn't want to have made any other choice!" If you don't loudly declare your love—stridently enough that you yourself believe it—then you might have consider that back there at the fork you made the wrong choice.
If, after high school, you choose to go to Yale instead of Harvard, of course you are going to believe in Yale from then on. You'll be rooting for the Yale team in the pathetic Harvard-Yale football game, and you will scoff at your friends who went to that other Ivy League school. After you graduate, you'll probably contribute to Yale's endowment, not Harvard's, and probably not to some lesser known school in the midwest that needs your money more. Declaring your love for Yale is essential to your emotional stability because you made a fateful decision back at the fork and you can't afford at this point to think it was wrong.
You are especially going to believe in your choice if it was very costly one. If you had to wade through swamps and wrestle alligators to get where you are today, that just increases your love for your current path. The greater the sacrifice you have already made, the more you have to believe in your current itinerary to avoid suffering painful regrets.
If you invest in one path and are less than successful at it, your natural inclination is to invest even more rather than turning back. Why? Because you need to justify the expensive investment you have already made. It is like sitting in front of a slot machine and losing $1000. The more you have lost, the more you feel compelled to keep gambling to try to recoup those losses.
In fact, every spin of the reels on a slot machine is entirely random. The fact that you have already lost $1000 has no bearing at all on the next spin. The machine doesn't "owe" you anything, but gamblers instinctively believe that it does. The more they sacrifice, the more they believe in their machine and that a big win is just around the corner.
I call this phenomenon the "Investment Effect." This is the tendency of a prior investment to increase your emotional attachment to the path you have chosen. Your prior investment encourages you to select and distort the available evidence to favor that belief.
Some religions are very clever about how they use this mechanism. They send their young people on difficult "missions" in faraway lands. If you survive the mission, then of course you believe twice as fervently in the religion upon your return. How else can you justify the enormous price you paid for your expedition and the big hunk of your life it took away?
Marines who have to pass through a grueling boot camp may hate it at the time, but once they've surmounted all the barriers and graduated, by Golly they're Marines! They fully believe in the requisite worldview and way of life. They talk the talk and walk the walk. Otherwise, they would have to acknowledge that their sacrifice was worthless.
What do married couples say on their 25th wedding anniversary? "Dear, if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't want to change a thing!"
Well, Duh! Of course they're going to say that! They've invested 25 years in this arrangement—probably most of their adult lives. They're not going to say, "Oops, made a mistake!"
I'm not saying their love isn't genuinely felt on both sides, but unless they are truly free to leave each other, it is mandatory love, not quite the same as the free-will kind.
The fact that a man and woman married 25 years still say they love each other shouldn't be taken as evidence in support of the institution of marriage. A young person might say, "Look at how happy they are!" and claim this as justification for their own marriage. Unfortunately, "love" and "happiness" aren't really the issue, because any reasonably adaptive person can pull off those sentiments. The real question is how productive the relationship has been compared to the alternatives.
How do you define "productivity"? That's something for you to decide. Surely, there must be things you want to accomplish before you die. Your life must have some purpose other than just procreating and being "happy." Is you only purpose on Earth to repeat the lives of your elders?
If you expect to accomplish something more, than your relationship is "productive" if it serves that mission better than any other road.
Continued in Chapter 20
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