When Marriage Becomes Therapy

Daniel Tutt offers some interesting observations about the current state of marriage. Unfortunately, he tries to fold it into a reflection on neoliberal economic policy and advanced capitalism.

Blaming capitalism for problems that were produced by those who want to end capitalism was a bit of a stretch. It does not obviate his reflections on the influence that therapy and its culture have had on marriage, but he fails to mention the way that feminism has influenced today’s marriage.

Capitalism did not declare that marriage was no longer an alliance between families. Capitalism did not undermine the traditional male roles of protector and provider. Capitalism did not teach women to despise the roles of wife and homemaker. And capitalism did not replace the traditional roles, which, incidentally are nearly universal, with non-roles that enhance feminine values.

Call it the eclipse of manhood. Call it a great victory for feminism. Call it the net result of the feminist effort to fragment patriarchal society by attacking marriage. Perhaps Tutt should have read the earliest feminist tract on these subjects, Friedrich Engels’ book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

As it happens, Tutt does not, in the article quoted, say anything about the influence of modern feminism on marriage. Call it the dog that did not bark, if you remember your Sherlock Holmes.

The family is collapsing because feminists have taken over the culture. And that has not merely caused women to reject any family structure where men protect and provide. It has caused them to see the ideal marriage as one where female values, therapy culture values, must prevail. 

The most common reasons cited for divorce now tend to be ‘emotional’ considerations, and in a study of a large, statistically representative sample of young women in the United States, both single and married, more than 80 per cent stated that they value a husband’s capacity to express his feelings over his capacity to provide as the most valuable trait of a would-be partner.

Good husbands must be properly therapied. They are being held to standards that have nothing to do with maleness. Women excel at expressing feelings, so this new cultural norm excludes men from the marital estate. Truth be told, if a woman wants to find a partner who can express feelings openly and honestly she would do better to marry another woman. 

According to author Eva Illouz, men have bought into this program and have embraced the goal of enhanced self-esteem. Tutt calls it self-worth, but clearly this drivel comes down to us from one Nathaniel Branden, a man who imagined that high self-esteem could cure all of our problems.

For men, this change in the norms of intimacy tends to mean that marriage and the possibility of starting a family is no longer about realising values of masculinity through providing for a woman and children. Rather, a new intimacy has fused with market terms so that a contractual logic centred on protecting one’s self-worth, self-esteem and dignity governs modern marriage. Illouz points out that romantic relations for couples in the US and Europe, whether they be in heterosexual, homosexual or non-normative relationships, are all set on the goal of securing each subject’s self-worth.

Tutt remarks that members of the working class have been less likely to get married and more likely to get divorced. Perhaps they simply cannot afford to engage in such an expensive folly. Besides, if women refuse to be wives, and if they have spent their adolescence and post-adolescence hooking up, they are telling the world that they do not want to marry. A good man will respect their wishes.

Since the 1970s, divorce has increased among the working class while at the same time it has significantly decreased among highly educated men and women. Marriage requires that couples pool their incomes, that both partners work full-time, and that they invest heavily in their children’s development. These economic demands weigh heavily on couples with lower education and on working-class families, and prevent the prospect of starting a family or making a family work in the long run. The benefits of marriage – from sharing income and accruing assets, to the sense of dignity and purpose that family and children bring – are growing more distant for working-class Americans.

The truth is, there are fewer and fewer stable marriages in this country and there are fewer and fewer children being brought up in two-family homes. Naturally, these fatherless children grow up socially dysfunctional, which is not a good thing.

Being as he is something of a radical leftist, Tutt considers the problem to lie in material realities.

However, the biggest force exerting directional change on the marriages of the well-to-do and the working class is not ideas about gender but simple material realities. Having to depend on another person and share legal and financial responsibilities has simply become too risky for working-class people. Of the young people Silva spoke to in her study, only a handful had decided to marry. To compensate for the greater challenges and impediments to marriage, working-class Americans are embracing therapeutic culture to prepare for relationships where strong emotional resilience is called for. Therapy culture is part and parcel of the turn to self-worth in the new norms of intimacy. It calls on individuals to cultivate deeper emotional maturity through self-help literature and constant self-improvement regimens.

But seriously, do you really believe that working class Americans are signing up for therapy? And do you believe that they are sitting around listening to female therapists-- most of today’s therapists are female-- telling them to get in touch with their feelings?

One of the effects of the turn to the therapeutic is found in the way that working-class people tend to seek out relationships that are ‘pure’ and can nurture their deepest selves and meet their personal needs. The therapeutic has become a replacement for realising the ideals of self-worth that marriage and family used to offer.

Of course, he is wrong to think that marriage was designed to promote self-worth. Marriage was designed to produce social cohesion. It did so by allotting defined roles, about which Tutt has nothing to say. Once women decided that they would no longer act as wives and mothers, marriage collapsed as an institution.

Again, when Tutt imagines that working class individuals are seeking to plumb emotional depths, he is detached from reality.

If working-class individuals are, due to economic precarity, simply abandoning the family altogether and are, in lieu of the family, seeking out deeper, emotionally fulfilling relationships, what does this tell us about the political function of the family today? Perhaps we need to assess the family from the outside, to redefine the family and what it ought to promise by revisiting ideals of the family as a shelter from wage labour. But this is a prospect that, at this point, only significant political change can make possible.

So, nice try, but Tutt has allowed political theory to undermine his arguments. Better luck next time.