Tag: Marriage

An Interesting Lesson From A Woman Who Complains About Her Husband

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting Finds, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I ran across an interesting TikTok on Twitter which I think is a useful jumping-off point to some practical aspects of how to interpret low-context things on the internet:

@sheisapaigeturner

I am not alone in this experience. Many women have been in this exact same position. The work required to manage a home and a family is not something that one person should ever have to carry alone. It is possible to change these dynamics. It is hard but with the right tools and support it’s possible and it’s so much better on the other side. #marriageadvice #mentalload #mentalloadofmotherhood #divorced #divorcedmom #parentingadvice #default

♬ original sound – Paige

The first question you need to ask about anyone making almost any kind of argument is who are they and why are they making this argument. In theory this shouldn’t be necessary because arguments are supposed to stand on their own. And some in fact do. It doesn’t matter who is making the argument for God from contingency and necessity because that argument actually does stand on its own. You can simply examine its premises and the logical links in it and that’s sufficient. But for most arguments that people make, when you examine the argument, you will see that people use themselves as an authority in their argument. In technical language, their argument uses premises whose truth value can only be known by themselves, so you can only know it by trusting them when they vouch for it. The TikTok above is exactly such a thing; the premises in her argument are very much things no viewer can evaluate apart from her trustworthiness.

So the first question is: who is this woman? Of course, I’ve no idea who this particular woman is, but we do know a few things about her just from the video. First, we know that she is publicly complaining about her spouse, so we know that she has bad judgement. Second, if you’re familiar with human beings, you don’t even need the sound on to see that she is neurotic, but if you do turn the sound on, you can tell with near-certainty that she is highly neurotic. (You can also tell from how she’s dressed and the house that she filmed this in that she’s upper middle class and very concerned with status.) All of which means that she is not to be trusted on any premises she offers which require good judgement, stability, courage, or humility to be correct about.

She begins by talking about how she does all of the household work, and while I don’t necessarily doubt that she does almost all of the work that she notices, what I don’t trust her in the slightest about is that most of this work needs to be done.

Don’t get me wrong, kids are a lot of work. I’ve got three so I’m quite familiar with this. What I’m also quite familiar with is that it’s easy to multiply the work that needs to be done if you set up rules for yourself that don’t match reality. And this is where her bad judgement and neuroticism come in. It is not even a little plausible that her workflow is streamlined and matches reality. Indeed, her evident desire for status and suspiciously immaculate kitchen very strongly suggest that much of her workload in the morning is about conforming to rules that, in her mind, gives her the status she craves.

A very strong indication that what she wants is not, in fact, help with the labor is the that she complains that, when she told her husband she was overwhelmed, that he asked her what she wanted him to do (i.e. how he could help). If her actual problem was more work than she can do, the last thing in the world she would want would be someone just starting to do things without coordinating with her. No rational person wants someone to take over randomly selected jobs from them without coordinating first. Equally, no rational person thinks that another person magically knows, without communication, everything he does and how he does it and how all of the details fit into each other. Moreover, any even slightly competent adult who is overwhelmed by work and who wants help will identify which tasks they can offload with less work than doing them themselves and directly ask for help with those. The woman in this video may be unpleasant, but she’s clearly an adult and not a complete idiot, so the obvious conclusion is that what she wants is not, in fact, help with some of the household work.

(Some additional evidence of this is the particular example she cites of when she considered divorcing her husband: a particular time he didn’t take out the trash in the morning because he was running late and so she took it out and ended up being late to work as a result. Now, the odds that she was late to work because she took out the trash are, in themselves, tiny, unless their garbage cans are a quarter mile hike over difficult terrain away. But even more to the point is that she can’t possibly have needed to take out the trash in order to do anything necessary in the morning. In a reasonable worst-case scenario if she needed to throw something out that couldn’t just be left on a counter she could have just pulled out another garbage bag and left it on the floor. If they didn’t have a spare garbage bag, she could have put it in a spare plastic grocery bag. Or in a ziplock bag. Nothing irreparable or unsanitary will happen to garbage left in a bag on the floor of an empty house for eight hours. She can only have been forced to take out the trash and therefore be late to work by some unnecessary rule she has imposed on herself.)

Given that she’s got bad judgement and is almost certainly neurotic and status-seeking, what she almost certainly actually wants is someone to force her to calm down. That is, she wants someone to override her worrying so she doesn’t worry so much.

In theory this could be her husband, if he’s sufficiently manly and confident and she’s willing to trust him. Far more likely to be successful, though, is another woman that she respects. A good friend might work, but an older female relative that she respects would probably be the most effective at it. She needs to feel like she has permission from the society whose status she craves to not do these things, such that she won’t lose status for doing them. So it needs to be someone who, in her mind, can grant her that permission.

There are, of course, almost certainly some other things going on too. She’s going to want to feel valued and appreciated, but she probably can’t feel those things as long as her life and her interactions with others are dominated by status-seeking unnecessary work because very few people are any good at thanking somebody for them wasting their time, in theory on your behalf but in reality for their own sake. But this is only probable based on how human beings behave; it is less in evidence from the video.

But, to bring it back to the general: when you’re not dealing with someone wise, the problem is almost never the stated problem. As a Lindy Hop instructor of mine once put it: when you see something go wrong, the problem is usually two steps earlier.

The Science of Test Driving a Potential Spouse

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently saw someone try to support the idea of “test driving” a potential marriage partner prior to getting married in order to ensure that they are “sexually compatible”, and then in the ensuing discussion I was told to look up the research on “the wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”. My understanding is that what research in this “field” exists doesn’t support the importance of “test driving” a potential marriage partner, but that’s irrelevant because there simply can’t be any good science on this subject. We can tell that by the simple expedient of asking what kinds of experiments could get us the data we want, and discovering that it’s not possible to do them.

So, what kind of experiment would show us that “there’s a wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”? Clearly, we’ll need to have a large number of females copulate with a wide variety of partners and measure their responsiveness during each copulation, then compare the things to which each female maximally responded to in order to see how big the range is. You can’t leave off any of these things; if you only study a few women, you won’t have the statistical power to conclude anything. If you leave off the wide variety of partners, then you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to versus there simply being a wide variety in the degree to which women respond at all. If you leave off measuring, instead relying on surveys, you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to and there being a wide variety in how women describe their response.

This experiment is both impractical and impossible; let’s discuss the impracticality of it first. One obvious problem is recruitment: there are very few people willing to copulate with a large number of strangers in a laboratory, covered in probes to measure responsiveness, and observed by experts, on command. Also, since you will have to pay the participants and this amounts to prostitution, there are relatively few places you can legally conduct this experiment, especially since bringing in the variety of women you want may well count as sex trafficking, doubly so because of the use of blindfolds to eliminate attractiveness as a confounding factor when measuring the effect of physical variations of anatomy. Moreover, getting this approved by an IRB (ethics committee) is pretty dicey. Never say never, of course.

But supposing one were to manage to work all of these practicalities out and conduct the experiment, it would not produce any data relevant to real life because people’s enjoyment and satisfaction in copulation is largely determined by their relationship to the person with whom they are copulating. Married people frequently report greater enjoyment of sex after five or ten years of marriage than right at the beginning, and it is impossible to have your experimental subjects form real relationships for years to each of the many subjects with whom they will be paired. If nothing else human beings don’t live that long, but repeated pair bonding is also well known to weaken subsequent bonds, especially without time between them. Plus people don’t form real bonds on command.

It is thus impossible, even in theory, to scientifically study the kinds of things which might support the idiotic idea of “test driving” a potential spouse. And bad science is worse than no science.

I should probably mention that the idea of test driving a spouse, in addition to being immoral, is also idiotic because it’s predicated on two premises, both of which are false:

  1. people can’t learn
  2. people don’t change

Young people are told to not pay too much attention to the looks of a potential husband or wife because looks are only skin deep and virtue, character, and personality matter far more. This is all quite true, but it’s also the case that selecting a husband or wife based on their looks is futile anyway because their looks will change as they age. You can find this with any celebrity who is in their sixties—just look at pictures of them from the various decades and while they are recognizable, they will be quite different. And celebrities tend to be selected for being people who change the least as they age.

In the same way, people’s tastes and preferences change. Women’s bodies change after pregnancy and childbirth. Quite apart from the immorality of the thing, the idea that finding who people who happen to match each other in their sexual enjoyments will be conducive to lasting happiness is simply unrelated to reality. Everyone must learn and adapt. There are no exceptions to that in this world.

When Libertines Advocate Self Control

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Several years ago, a British feminist by the name of Louise Perry wrote a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve read a bunch of things Ms. Perry has written, including her own description of the book. She is careful to explain that she does not want to return to the sexual morality of before the sexual revolution, just to avoid the excesses of the sexual revolution. And I recently read an essay (originally published in 2022) which discusses the book, by libertine writer Bridget Phetasy, titled I Regret Being a Slut. She, too, does not want to return to traditional sexual morality, she just doesn’t like the results of the sexual revolution either. And neither of these women is at all unique.

In both cases, their writing is a bit like a man who talks about how it’s exhilarating to jump off a building, but not to hit the ground, so it’s best to continually fall past the seventh floor. That might be the point in one’s fall which is the most fun, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.

The problem with this kind of thinking—it applies to all libertines who want the benefits of self-control without the downsides of self-control—is that it is, at its core, utilitarianism. There are many problems with utilitarianism (see Why Consequentialism Doesn’t Work), but the relevant problem is that it has no power to motivate people. Forgoing certain short-term benefit for the sake of uncertain long-term gain is very tricky to justify. And even if you can, a justification which is best done in a complicated Excel spreadsheet will, at best, be lifeless and dull, even if it does manage to convince someone in the abstract. And that’s ignoring the problem that, since we can’t know the probabilities with any certainty, you can always doubt the conclusion by quibbling with some of the numbers.

To put it more concretely, forgoing certain short-term benefit for uncertain long-term benefit only makes sense under one of two conditions:

  1. Extreme optimism
  2. A principle which says that you should even if it doesn’t benefit you

Very few people are extremely optimistic, for the simple reason that, in a secular sense, it’s stupid to be that optimistic. Lots of people are unlucky. And there’s a further problem: if you’re this optimistic, you might just as easily be optimistic that you can have both the short-term and long-term benefits.

That only leaves option #2: principle. But principles are exactly the thing that the libertines don’t want.

To take it back to the example from which this started: the libertine feminist advocating for sexual restraint is in the awkward position of saying that people should be free to have as much sex as they want before marriage, if they even want to get married, but they shouldn’t want sex before marriage and should want to get married because that works out better in the long run. The problem is that, if something actually does work out better in the long run, it means that you’re wise to do it and foolish to not do it. And it’s bad to be foolish.

That’s the thing which always sabotages this kind of quasi-libertine in the end: they want people to make good decisions about everything except for who to associate with. Because the only people who willingly associate with fools are other fools1. Deciding who we depend on is very nearly the most important decision we can make; asking people to exercise good judgement except for in their associations is nonsensical. Doubly so when it’s a particular kind of association that you want them to exercise good judgement on.

If a person has been sexually promiscuous, and it is accepted that sexual promiscuity is bad judgement, it means that the person has bad judgement. This is, by the way, as true of men as of women. If you read old literature instead of modern pornography set in older times, you will find that a male being sexually continent was praiseworthy and expected, while being sexually promiscuous was something he was quite desirous of hiding. The only difference was that a male was, typically, not dependent on forming a marriage to pay for his upkeep because there was a great deal of difficult work to be done in the world (soldiering, sailing, and the like) and so even as an outcast from polite society he could at least feed himself on his own. Also, people just didn’t care as much what happened to males. (You can find stories where a male who does need to make a good marriage will go to great lengths to hide his promiscuity, such as the King of Bohemia in the Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia.)

Anyway, the point is that you can’t have a society in which it is accepted that only fools with poor self control are sexually promiscuous and it’s also considered just fine to be sexually promiscuous if a person wants to be. You can see this exact problem with alcohol. No one wants to associate with a drunkard (except for other drunkards2) and anyone considering marriage with a drunkard will be warned off of it by all of their friends and family. The same is true of gambling addictions, or narcotic addictions. In fact, you will be very hard pressed to find any behavior that is generally regarded as extremely foolish where only low-self-control people engage in it that people would not try to dissuade someone from marrying into.

Which is why a libertine cannot make an effective case for self-control. If they manage to make it, the world will cease to be one in which people can freely do whatever the libertine is trying to discourage.

I don’t have much patience for people who discuss sex and marriage without relation to children and child-rearing, but there is something especially tiresome about people trying to do so in order to promote things which are much better argued in reference to children and child-rearing. Perhaps this is done in order to soothe the reader; to lull her into a false sense of security so she’ll actually hear the authoress out. I have my doubts that any such deception will work, and I gravely doubt that it will work in the long-term, because it will damage the trust placed in the authoress.

Though perhaps, for the intended audience, this is one of those “white lies” like the stereotypical answer to the stereotypical woman asking her stereotypical husband whether a stereotypical hideous dress she is going to wear anyway looks good. Perhaps no one believes it, so no one will be deceived, but the willingness to tell the superficial lie signifies that the person is on the other’s side. “I’m only telling you to exercise a bit of self control. I’m not telling you that you have to believe in God or listen to your grandma or do anything for anyone else.”

Well, there are a lot of very weak and timid people in the world.

1. And saints who are trying to help them. But there aren’t many saints to go around, and they don’t associate in the same way anyway. A saint may well take on the company of a young fool and advise them, but the saint doesn’t marry the young fool or depend on them in any other way.

2. See 1.

Secular People Still Need to Explain Religious Truths

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There are a lot of stupid secular theories abounding today, such as red pill dating advice or mimetic-rivalry-hoe-phase-theory, which receive a lot of criticism from people who are sane. But this criticism usually has no effect because, to believers in these theories, it amounts to nitpicking. This is because they are secular people trying to explain religious truths. Their theories are (necessarily) secular and when you try to explain religious truths with secular theories, the theories have to be idiotic, for the same reason that if you jam a square peg into a round hole, it will end up as a very funny looking square.

The religious truths that people are trying to explain are the necessity of having ideals and the impossibility of achieving the ideals, or to give them their proper names, everything has a nature and it is a fallen world. God created the world to be perfect, but the world chose sin over perfection, but God has not abandoned the world and is working to save it. Within this religious framing, it’s easy to explain why it is that we must strive to achieve perfection and also why we must accept quite a bit of imperfection. You do not need to throw out the ideal for one which seems achievable, and you do not need to worry (overmuch) about not achieving it.

This framework is not available to secular people. Secular people can, of course, have lofty ideals and, in pure pragmatism, accept that no one achieves it and keep going anyway. Most people want some kind of rational relationship between their thoughts and actions, even if they are completely incapable of expressing that rational relationship in words. So for the vast majority who can’t just hold incompatible beliefs with no explanation, they either come up with an explanation (which doesn’t make sense if you look at it too closely) or alter the beliefs.

Red pill dating and hoe-phase-theory are the same basic philosophical move of throwing out the ideal and substituting one that they think is achievable. The benefit to this is that trying to achieve the ideal is actually a rational activity since the ideal is achievable. The downside, of course, is that it’s an evil ideal.

Modern ideas about marriage are the opposite, though with a bit of a twist. Modern ideas of marriage demand the perfect realization of the ideal, which is no small part of why so many people aren’t marrying (though by no means the only cause). The twist is that the ideal is modified to one which makes sense within the secular worldview, so we get marriage not as a covenental relationship or as the mutual self-sacrifice of the parents for the sake of their children, but as a thing which is supposed to be mutually fulfilling. That is, marriage is supposed to fill both parties up so that they are happy. And this happiness is increasingly demanded; where it is lacking this is taken as a sign that the marriage isn’t real and so divorce is just recognizing the reality of the failure to form a real marriage. This is not particularly more sane than the red pill dating ideas, though its insanity is less spectacular.

I am reminded of a wonderful section of G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive, about being happy in marriage:

“But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!” cried the girl earnestly. “You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith’s, they– they do attract women, I don’t deny it. As you say, we’re all telling the truth to-night. They’ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment– you’ve got used to your drinks and things–I shan’t be pretty much longer–“

“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you’ll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we’ll be disappointed. I, for one, don’t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute– a tower with all the trumpets shouting.”

“You see all this,” said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, “and do you really want to marry me?”

“My darling, what else is there to do?” reasoned the Irishman. “What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man–that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself– yourself, yourself, yourself–the only companion that is never satisfied– and never satisfactory.”

(It must be born in mind that Michael Moon is his own character and not a mouthpiece for Chesterton; Michael does have some good points among his mad ramblings, even if he doesn’t have the fullness of appreciation of the committed single vocation.)

But his fundamental point is quite sound: it is a mistake to try, as one’s primary goal, to be happy in that earthly sense of the word happiness. There will always be pain and sorrow and trials, and worst of all we will let ourselves and each other down. The big thing is whether we always pick ourselves up again. But happiness is a terrible goal in marriage, because marriage exists to accomplish wonderful things—making new people and teaching them how to be human—and trying to be happy gets in the way of accomplishing things. There’s so much more to aim for in this life than happiness.

Happiness in the sense of smiling and having a good time and enjoying yourself, that is. Happiness in the sense of the Greek makarios, which can also be translated as “blessed”—that’s quite a different thing. But in that sense, it’s important to remember that this is a painting of the happiest man alive:

I’m sure that Chesterton has said it before me, but the problem with reasonable goals is that they always end up being completely unreasonable. And that’s because this world is about God, and so doesn’t make sense on its own. And every attempt to make sense of it in itself, without reference to God, will fail in one of only a few ways.

G.K. Chesterton on Marriage

On By Christopher LansdownIn Chesterton, Interesting Finds, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was recently trying to find a quote from G.K. Chesterton on how the point of a wedding is the marriage vow, and the point of the marriage vow is that it’s daring. I wasn’t able to find the original, what I did find was a newspaper called The Holy Name Journal which seems to have been from Michigan. In the August 1921 edition, someone quotes Chesterton’s article almost in full. Since it was only available as a photograph (though, thanks to Google, a text-searchable photograph), I transcribed it for easier quoting:

A writer of the Westminster Gazett recently made the proposal to alter the marriage formula: “As to the vow at the altar, it seems conceivable that under other conditions the form of words ordained by the Prayer Book might be revised.” And the writer adds that may have omitted the words “to obey”, others might omit the words “til death do us part.” The following is Mr. G.K. Chesterton’s rejoined to The New Witness:

It never seems to occur to him that others might omit the wedding. What is the point of the ceremony except that it involves the vow? What is the point of the vow except that it involves vowing something dramatic and final? Why walk all the way to a church in order to say that you will retain a connection as long as you find it convenient? Why stand in front of an altar to announce that you will enjoy somebody’s society as long as you find it enjoyable? The writer talks of the reason for omitting some of the words, without realizing that it is an even better reason for omitting all the words. In fact, the proof that the vow is what I describe, and what Mr. Hocking apparently cannot even manage, a unique thing not to be confounded with a contract, can be found in the very form and terminology of the vow itself. It can be found in the very fact that the vow becomes verbally ridiculous when it is thus verbally amended. The daring dogmatic terms of the promise become ludicrous in face of the timidity and triviality, of the thing promised. To say “I swear to God, in the face of this congregation as I shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, that Maria and I will be friends until we quarrel” is a thing of which the very diction implies the derision. It is like saying, “In the name of the angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven, I think I prefer Turkish to Egyptian cigarettes,” or “Crying aloud on the everlasting mercy, I confess I have grave doubts about whether sardines are good for me.” Obviously nobody would ever have invented such a ceremony, or invented any ceremony, to celebrate such a promise. Men would merely have done what they liked, as millions of healthy men have done, without any ceremony at all.

Divorce and re-marriage are simply a heavy and hypocritical masquerade for free love and no marriage; and I have far more respect for the revolutionists who from the first have described their free love as free. But of the marriage service obviously refers to a totally different order of ideas; the rather unfashionable [stuff?] that may be called heroic ideas. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect the fatigued fatalist of this school and period to understand these ideas; and I only ask here that they should understand their own ideas. Every one of their own arguments leads direct to promiscuity; and leaves no kind of use or meaning in marriage of any kind. But the idea of the vow is perhaps a little too bold and bracing for them at present, and is too strong for their heads, like sea air.

God’s Blessings on January 29, 2017

On By Christopher LansdownIn Rambles, UncategorizedLeave a comment

God’s blessings to you on this the twenty ninth day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

Today’s a super busy day so I don’t really have time to write much. So I wanted to share a fun quote with you:

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two. –Ambrose Bierce

Though I will say that my preferred metaphor for marriage is a two-person military unit. Two people bound together to accomplish great things under very harsh conditions. No metaphor is ever perfect, though.

Glory to God in the highest.

There are Four Vocations

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy1 Comment

In Star Trek: The Next Generation there is an episode where Captain Picard has been captured and is being tortured. In order to break his will, he is shown four bright lights, told that there are five lights, and severely punished every time he says the correct number. American culture sometimes feels like that with vocations, though instead of insisting that there are five it insists that there is only one: marriage.

One is an especially unfortunate number of vocations for our culture to have settled on since a single choice is no choice at all. Marriage thus becomes prescriptive and considering the very idea of vocation appears strange, if not outright mentally ill. Shoehorning all people into marriage also damages marriage, which might fairly be said to be splitting at the seams. The high rate of divorces generally and annulments within catholic culture testify to a great many people whose vocation was not marriage—or if it was, having thoroughly misunderstood what marriage was—going through the motions of marriage mostly because they thought that they were supposed to in order to be human. (Fornication carries so few consequences in American culture that going through the motions of marriage cannot be for gratification of sexual desires.)

There are four vocations—marriage, committed single, consecrated religious, and holy orders (priesthood/diaconate)—because people are not all the same. In America we tend to look at this backwards: the person first, then the vocation to fit the person, just like you pick a job based on whether you like horses more than bridges, or cooking food more than both, etc. A more accurate way to look at it is that the vocation is part of the person, and therefore their personality is suited to their vocation. (It is more accurate because the “being” in “human being” is really a verb, like “running” or “swimming”, though really the only distinction between verbs and nouns is that verbs are relatively short-lived actions and nouns are very long lived actions. God’s name is not “The Thing” but “I am”, and so far as we exist we are all made in the image of God.)

Trying to cram people into the wrong vocation will necessarily hurt the people thus crammed. The proper definition of sin is “privation of form”, or slightly more intelligibly to those not familiar with scholastic philosophy, “diminishment of being”. We can all see what is meant if you consider the loss to a pianist of having his hands mangled in an accident. He simply ceases to be a pianist at all. He might be or become many other good things, of course. He might become a great piano teacher. He might fall back on the degree he got in college of astrophysics and do excellent work examining the stars. He might concentrate on managing investments for family and friends which he had been doing in his spare time. He may become a much better man than ever he would have been as a pianist, but none the less he who once was a pianist is no longer; in that regard he is now less than he once was. His being has been diminished.

By analogy, sin diminishes a person too. Human beings were given language to enable us to tell the truth. To use language to tell a lie makes us less, because now we cannot be trusted and all our words convey less truth than they used to. So it goes with all sin; it is to make ourselves less than the fullness of what we are supposed to be. That God saves us means that this diminishment may not always be permanent, and it may not always be catastrophic, certainly it will not destroy us if we turn away from it and embrace God’s gift of salvation.

I think this analysis makes it obvious why a person being crammed into the wrong vocation diminishes them; it doesn’t destroy them and it certainly will provide many opportunities to practice the virtue of patience, but it will result in their life not being all that it could have been. But we must be clear that this does not mean that a person so crammed will grow new abilities and personality traits; they will have to make do as best they can with a personality which was adapted to something else. Swimming might here be a good analogy; the human body can swim, and some people can swim much better than others, but the human body is not made for swimming, and the fastest of us are slow compared to very average fish. A man who should have been a celibate priest might make a good husband and father, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have made a better priest. The reverse is of course true, too, but that mistake is well understood within our current culture.

To some degree I think that part of the problem in understanding this is the degree to which catholics have acculturated to the predominantly protestant culture of America. In the aftermath of JFK, catholics went from being distrusted and hated to being accepted, and this caused many of the problems which are always associated with comfort. Chief among those problems is laziness. Comfortable people become very reluctant to hold onto difficult truths, and that people are not all the same is a difficult truth to hold onto.

Now, it is easy to be misled because “tolerance” is a common catchword, and we’re asked to be tolerant of seemingly everything. But these are all superficial differences which are accepted, and they are accepted precisely because they are superficial. Pretending that everyone is basically the same is much easier than loving people who are different, which is why one of the immediate actions of “tolerance” is to angrily call all discussion of difference bigotry. It may possible be that much of the “tolerance” we see is the overcompensation of self-loathing bigots, but much of it is that this “toleration” consists primarily of pretending that there are no differences. To discuss real differences is to shatter this illusion, and since they have no metaphysical system in which (real) difference is not defect, this has no other interpretation to them.

There is another problem which our culture has that tends to deny any of the celibate vocations, and (unsurprisingly) it is derived from an essentially secular origin. The basic principle is that a person must have a committed sexual partner in order to be a full human being. It’s a crazy idea, and one might be tempted to think that it comes from watching far too many romantic comedies, but in fact I think it derives from the belief in an imminent soul made up of the accumulation of a person’s experiences, rather than a transcendent soul which pre-exists but changes with experiences. The former is the only real metaphysical possibility absent an intelligent creator, hence its prevalence in our largely secular culture. An imminent soul has no inherent value, however. It can only be valued if known, and it can only be known with a very great investment in time, and that very great investment in time will only be made if a person is loved, but they can’t be loved before they are known and so something must attract another person prior to knowledge and the only two candidates are desperation which would take anybody, and sexual attraction which is at least a little selective. Desperation is of no value because it is entirely focused on the self, not the other, which is why it will take anyone. Hence sexual attraction is the only option for a worthwhile life. And hence celibate vocations are a form of suicide, and why parents might discourage their children from throwing their lives away in that manner. In the best case, these might be noble sacrifices, like being an organ donor or the soldier who jumps on a grenade to save his fellows, but still, one hopes that the noble soul who sacrifices himself will be someone else’s child.

Accordingly, I think that the first thing we must do to help everyone get into their proper vocations is to attack the idea of homogeneity. Sex is nice and all, but massively overvalued, so to get it into its right proportion in human life, I think that we need to undermine the idea that sex is something which makes a human life whole. It’s a powerful and very animating idea, which is why I think relatively little headway will be made while it is still dominant. It’s not a very sensible idea of stated directly, however, so I think it is vulnerable to mockery. And I think that there is merit to Saint Thomas More’s saying that the devil, being a proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.

I think that this is also very important for recovering an authentic understanding of the vocation of marriage. Far too many people go into marriage looking to get something out of it, rather than looking at it as a way to pour themselves out like a libation. Marriage and raising children have their enjoyable parts, to be sure, but the idea that marriage is some sort of odd hybrid between entertainment and psychotherapy is very destructive to human happiness. Children are wonderful to watch and play with, but it is proper they will take a great deal from one that they will never give back, and they will in their youthful ignorance cause a great deal of suffering which will form a heavy cross to carry. Pretending that marriage is something which will help to carry crosses, rather than something which will fashion them and load them onto one’s back, is to set people up for disappointment and misery. It is true that husband and wife will help each other, but they will also be one of the biggest sources of the other one’s problems. This does not mean that husband and wife will inevitably quarrel—though so far I’ve never heard of husband and wife who haven’t—but that the two are signing up to do something very difficult together, and the magnitude of problems are always proportional to the magnitude of the undertaking from which they arise. Marriage is a thing which should be viewed like enlisting in the army during a war, not like booking a Caribbean vacation.

Though it should be noted that most soldiers survive going to war, whereas marriage has a 50% mortality rate.