by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
All of the responses to your post about the stigma of cheap weddings pretty much underline the point Noah Millman was making in his response to Ross Douthat’s column. Douthat asked proponents of marriage equality to own up to the fact that the rise in interest in same-sex marriage has coincided on a timeline with the “decline” of marriage in our society and to admit that there might be some connection, whether it is apparent or not.
I believe the exact opposite. At a time when so many societal factors, including economics are making marriage less and less popular, the fight for marriage equality is one of the few things that actually promotes the benefits of marital bliss.
Two of your commenters point out that the typical wedding doesn’t cost $27,000, but actually costs $15,000. And what does that say to the larger point? That marriage is so inconsequential to so many heterosexuals that a price tag of $15,000 (not $27,000) is enough to dissuade them from tying the knot. And keep in mind that’s not the minimum cost of getting married… that’s just the cost of having a wedding that keeps up with the Joneses. And again, that price tag isn’t just dissuading people from having a big wedding… it’s keeping them from getting married altogether, something you could do at City Hall for a minimal cost.
That’s part of the bigger point. For a lot of people, getting married is as much about the wedding as it is about declaring your eternal love. It’s about dieting down to your best weight ever, buying an expensive outfit you’ll never wear again and inviting all your friends to witness it in the hopes they’ll talk about, tweet about it, envy you for it and shower you with enough gifts to offset the cost of throwing the party in the first place.
Weddings and marriage are all about stigmas, and once large parts of society removed the stigma of living together and raising children without the party and without the paper, similarly large segments of society just opted out of the whole thing. Once we stopped stigmatizing divorce and went from a society that wouldn’t elect a divorced President to one that doesn’t blink at having morality preached to it by a thrice-divorced man, divorce rates shot up too.
At a time when the sanctity and status of marriage appear to be at an all time low, the fight for marriage equality is reminding us that marriage can still be a beautiful and treasured institution. Suggesting that it is part of the problem is akin to noting that every time there is a fire, fire trucks show up and maybe if we got rid of the trucks, we’d have a lot fewer fires.
Andrew Sprung recently made related points:
Gay activists, or simply the rising visibility of gay couples, have made marriage cool again. They’ve raised its value in my eyes, or rather made me a little more conscious of its value, which is pretty much the same thing. And I think that the drive for gay marriage has raised the institution’s value materially by making the whole society think hard about what it’s really about.
The west has valorized marriage for true love, as the free choice of two people who decide they’re right for each other, for more than a century. That ideal was getting a little worn around the edges, pecked at by perspectives from biology, and psychology, and probability, and economics, and political ideology — and by postmodern skepticism generally. In real terms, too, the institution as we knew it has eroded, thanks first to divorce and then by advancing tide of out-of-wedlock births.
Gay marriage is not going to change that, or arrest change in this ever-changing but indestructible human institution. But it has made the enduring reality of individual choice and the eternal viability of lifelong commitment and the value and utility of two-parent families a bit clearer.
The Dish 