The Real Reason Why (Straight) Marriage Is In Decline

For decades, many commentators and pundits (usually conservatives, but even some on the political left as well) have been bemoaning the supposed decline of the institution of marriage and rise of divorce and single motherhood.  The trend is often exaggerated, and in fact divorce rates actually peaked around 1980 and have been declining since after secularly rising for nearly a century, recently reaching a 40-year low.  But it is also true nonetheless that marriage rates have indeed been declining for about half a century while cohabitation rates have been rising dramatically during that time, and the percentage of babies born out of wedlock has increased as well.  Though the latter is basically old news, as most of the increase in the percentage of nonmarital births had already occurred before Dan Quayle got on his self-righteous soapbox about Murphy Brown in the early 1990s.

So why is this happening?  Conservatives nearly always blame feminism and/or the so-called sexual revolution, while progressives tend to blame the economy and economic inequality, but there is one huge factor that both sides tend to overlook.  We need to be brutally honest about this:  men are becoming increasingly redundant thanks to a combination of technology, globalization, outsourcing/offshoring, and oligarchy, and that trend had begun decades ago.  Our labor unions have been torpedoed, many good jobs have been outsourced or automated, and our once-great manufacturing base has been hollowed out and replaced by financialization.  The rich got richer and we all got poorer--and that was the result of MEN at the top, not Women.  Thanks a lot, Ronnie Raygun (zap)!  But honestly, that's karma, fellas.  So it is no small wonder why so many Women are now choosing to "go it alone" in that regard.  And while it's true that increasing female empowerment has also undoubtedly contributed to the relative redundancy of males, as men are no longer being artificially propped up quite the way they once were, that is actually a GOOD thing that we should be celebrating.  Patriarchy is a fundamentally evil and thoroughly corrupt system, and the sooner it ends, the better.  And it is currently self-destructing as we speak, and has been for about half a century now.  As Stephanie Coontz (author of The Way We Never Were and Marriage: A History) has noted, the patriarchal nuclear family model of the 1950s and earlier inherently required a ludicrous amount of violence and coercion to prop it up and keep the "troops" (i.e. women and children) in line.  And when that violence and coercion is reduced or removed, the whole proverbial house of cards inevitably collapses sooner or later.  So good riddance, let's never go back!

Marriage is, after all, a fundamentally patriarchal institution.  At least the monogamous, heterosexual variety that the conservatives just luuurrrrve to idealize, that is.  That's not to say that marriage can't be redefined and repurposed for a Matriarchal society--indeed it has been redefined and repurposed many, many times throughout history--but the outdated idea that everybody must get married and/or have children (or that doing so is the sine qua non of "real adulthood") needs to end yesterday.  Don't get me wrong, I am NOT anti-marriage.  But we as a society nonetheless need to become more tolerant of a wide variety of lifestyles and family types, and reject the obsolete ideas of compulsory heterosexuality and/or marriage.

And soon Women will be taking over, as they have already crossed the Rubicon in that regard.  Since the 1970s, Women have been going "two steps forward, and one step back", while men have been going "one step forward, and two steps back".  The song "Not Meant to Be" by Theory of a Deadman comes to mind.  Honestly, the inevitable death of patriarchy is really quite painless.  It's fighting to keep it alive that is causing so much pain for both Women and men.  And when Women finally do take over, they will remember exactly how they were treated, so it really behooves us fellas to clean up our act yesterday.  So let's make the right choice.