Warning: This is not a political diary (well, not much).
I don’t much care for David Brooks as a rule, but for some reason the title of his NYT op-ed this morning intrigued me: To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career (ignore the dangling whatever). I was skimming along, and then I saw this line:
My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy. Please use your youthful years as a chance to have romantic relationships, so you’ll have some practice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to marry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the masters. [emphasis added]
OK, he doesn’t come right out and explicitly say we should be sexually experienced before marriage, but everyone knows what “romantic relationship” means nowadays. And not just one, either; he thinks we should have a couple, a few, several.
That sentence (and only that sentence) is actually sound advice. In every other aspect of life, we have to practice before we get it right (if we ever do), during which time we will make mistakes, and we will hurt and be hurt; that’s how life works, for better or for worse. Marriage (and sex) are somehow expected to be the exception to this; our morals proctors (self-anointed, of course) expect us to go from total ignorance to wedded bliss as soon as we say “I do.” The Talmud contains some rather explicit discussions about sex, but these are not supposed to be taught to unmarried men. Then there’s Ron DeSanctimonius (and for once, the label fits), who wants to make sure high school kids don’t learn anything about sex. (For those interested in sexuality history, the Kinsey reports and Masters and Johnson are good places to start research about the damaging effects of religious sexual repression.)
It’s all fantasy, always has been. In 1790s Massachusetts, that bastion of Puritanism, in at least one-third of all marriages the bride was already pregnant. Germany had a custom of trial nights together, first with a chaperone, and then several nights without. If it didn’t work out (and there was no pregnancy, both parties were free to try again with someone else. As one young fellow said to a minister, “You wouldn’t buy a horse without riding it first, would you?” (See Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past.) Even the Bible sends mixed messages: the Song of Songs is a definite praise of physical love between two people who are not married to each other.*
Many of the NYT comments on Brooks’s column say he is just telling women to put marriage ahead of career, though Brooks is careful to make no mention of either men or women; his advice is, shall we say, gender-neutral. (He does say he is directing his message to “young adults.”) But they do have a point; this is Brooks, after all:
Take heed, American reprobates! Your self-appointed spiritual doctor, David Brooks, is diagnosing your faults, sins, and self-serving moral evasions, and his findings are grim. In successive turns at the bully pulpits of The New York Times and The Atlantic, Brooks has detected a collective failure to grow up and lay aside the childish things that haunt our epoch: self-absorption, incivility, tribalism, and other just plain rude repudiations of character and virtue. (The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks)
And despite his paeans to marriage as a source (the main source?) of companionship, of mutual support, of intimacy, he offers marriage as the only solution, whereas many couples are getting all that without getting state or church approval for their relationship.
OK, OK, maybe Brooks wasn’t thinking clearly when he wrote that sentence. Maybe he was harking back to his un-misspent youth. But even if Brooks really does think “romantic” still means hanging out at the ice cream parlor sipping a milk shake together (not that it ever did), he can’t be so naive as to think his readers will think so. (If he does, the Times should fire him immediately for incompetence.)
In the meantime, young people (and everyone else not currently in an exclusive relationship), you should his advice in that sentence. (But only in that sentence.)
*I will be posting an article on this topic on Bart Ehrman’s blog at the end of the month, but that’s only for Platinum members. If you are on academia.edu, I hope to have an article up there shortly, though it will be a bit technical.