Spectator Laments Marriage Being ‘On the Way Out’
“Is marriage on the way out, after all these generations and centuries?” That is the introduction to Herbert W. Armstrong’s booklet Why Marriage—Soon Obsolete? “Is the home, and family life, to disappear from human society?”
Nearly 60 years after that was first published, last weekend’s Spectator gave a portrait of marriage “on the way out.”
2021 was a key milestone for that decline. Before 2021, most adults were married. Now marrieds are a minority. By 2050, that minority will shrink to only 30 percent.
The “new morality”—with widespread sex outside of marriage, freely available pornography and a hypersexualized culture—is killing relationships of all kinds.
“Singleness as a choice is more in vogue now than it has been since the dissolution of the monasteries,” states one article. “Britain’s young adults are among the least sexually active of all generations.”
“Vogue has declared boyfriends to be unfashionable,” declares another. “Women, it seems, are swapping engagement rings for solo travel, matcha lattes and nights spent at home with an led face mask. Is marriage suddenly uncool?”
Some on the right are turning against marriage, portraying it as a way that women strip men of their assets in unfair divorces. Those on the left have long bashed it as anti-feminist. The comment: “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” recently went viral, as leftists increasingly turn against every kind of heterosexual relationship.
But perhaps, argues the Spectator, the biggest nail in marriage’s coffin is that we’re too selfish: “The sacrificial, community aspect of marriage is unappealing to many, but it’s one of the things that makes it most worthwhile. One day society might well rediscover that the only things that are really worth doing involve sacrifice of some kind, but by then it may be too late.”
“For women raised to ‘live their best lives’, marriage feels like a hindrance because it requires compromise,” states another article.
Yet as these authors point out, we need marriage. Study after study shows how much better, in general, are the lives of children who grow up with stable, married parents.
Why does it work? That is where the Spectator fails. A third article supposedly lays out the “scientific case for marriage,” stating (with no evidence) that primitive humans evolved the tradition of marriage and concluding that “[t]he human family is the best social structure that evolution could contrive for raising children.”
Marriage is indeed the best way for human beings to live and to produce more human beings. But it is far too perfectly designed and far too beautiful to have evolved by chance. Marriage has a transcendent purpose that far excels anything in the minds of evolutionists and leads straight to the Creator of mankind. Mr. Armstrong explained this purpose in his short booklet Why Marriage—Soon Obsolete?