So the reasons for a young man marrying young, as outlined elsewhere, seem fairly compelling. So why are so few young men doing this? What is the hold up? Why can’t they get with the program?
The short answer is that people respond to incentives and they respond to disincentives also. These incentives and disincentives can be economic, they can be social, they can be moral, and so on. And as we are seeing, they can have a big impact in the sexual realm as well. In the current sexual “marketplace,” one of the behaviors that is being disincentivized is early marriage. People not only sneer at it, they also levy fines on it, as well as providing free workarounds for those who just want to skip it.
It is all very well to say that singleness is an affliction, as it most certainly is, but what sort of affliction is it? We can easily begin by noticing that it is an affliction to those who are unmarried and who earnestly want to get married. That is correct. It is a personal affliction. But it is not just that. This is also a widespread cultural affliction, and one that circles back around in order to increase the misery of those individuals who have been caught in the machinery of our cultural stupidity.
There have been eras when the people were marrying young, and the fertility rates were high, and the culture at large had a robust and healthy view of the whole thing. And it is quite obviously true that in those times there were unfortunate individuals who were unwillingly unmarried. This should be regarded as a personal or individual misfortune. Just about everybody has two legs, but because of a tragic car accident, one particular person might be an amputee and has only one. That would not be a cultural affliction, but rather a personal affliction.
But in a time like ours, when the average age for those marrying is approaching thirty, and that is for the people who do get married, something else is going on. All of this is the result of a culture-wide failure of nerve. This is what happens to a people who have lost their sense of identity, and who no longer know who they are or where they are going. Such a people have lost their sense of the future. It is a widespread malaise, not just an individual problem.
As long as we treat this as an individual thing, we are not going to be able to address the problem at the root. This entire mess is the result of a cultural sea change, and it is not going to be addressed effectively unless and until there is a sea change in the opposite direction. We need to go back, and all of us need to go back. And when we come to this realization, we will understand that we have all been complicit.
The culprit is feminism, and the arch villains are of course the rabid feminists, but the ring of complicity still goes out pretty wide. At the center would be the lesbian avengers, but at the outer ring of compromise we find the conservative politicos who say things like, “we should run this cute blonde for the Senate because she could address the abortion issue in a way that the men can’t.” Oh? And why can’t the men address it? Men can’t be opposed to the dismemberment of babies?
The feminists began by saying that they were as good as men. Then they said they didn’t need men. And now they are claiming that they can actually be men. But throughout this entire insane trajectory, modest and sane people refused to call them out on it. And as a result the conservative sectors of the church are now thought to be the great firewall because they have only bought into about a third of such egalitarian assumptions.
As a result, all of our background assumptions about men and women are skewed. We have adopted an egalitarian paradigm, and even those conservative Christians who believe themselves to be complementarian, or even patriarchal, can still buy into some of those egalitarian assumptions. If you doubt what I say, let me apply a little epistemic pressure to the part of your brain where your internal library lady lives, the one telling me to shush and telling you not to listen.
Men were created by God to lead and dominate—and the fact that I feel a need to say immediately, ‘no, no, not domineering’ is an example of the influence of that egalitarian paradigm. I make this qualification because it is still October. But this is what men are for. Men are called by God to exercise dominion, and to do so in a way that encompasses their wives and children, bringing them along with them. Men were created to be the heads of their wives and, as a result, to be the heads of their households. I would point to all the verses here that say that the husband is the head of his wife, but I am afraid that someone might shut me down by citing the groundbreaking study of Elma P. Throckmitten, PhD, M.Div. which shows conclusively that Paul’s use of kephale means that it would best be rendered as toaster oven. And because I fear being shut down more than just about anything, and especially by Elma, we will just glide silently on to the next point.
The soft evangelical world has tried to make this inescapable headship palatable to the outside world by emphasizing something that they call “servant leadership.” Now there is a sense in which this phrasing could be okay, but it almost never is. The Lord Jesus did tell His followers to wash one another’s feet, and He did set the example for them (John 13:14). But we have, in a very muddled way, turned the whole thing inside out. Men have been taught to lead by serving when what they actually needed to do was serve by leading. We have forgotten that the one who washed His disciples’ feet is also the one who said this:’
“Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am” (John 13:13).
This might seem radical, but servants are a class of people who are supposed to do what they are told. That would include servant leaders, would it not? And in Scripture, men are told to protect their households (Gen. 2:15). They are told to provide for their households (Gen. 2:15; 1 Tim. 5:8). They are required to keep their wife provisioned with food, clothing, and marital relations (Ex. 21:10). They are told to be jealous for the integrity of their households (2 Cor. 11:2). In order to do these things, and all such like, they need to be the kind of men who know how to step to the front. They need to shoulder responsibility.
And this is why I have taught for years that authority flows to those who take responsibility. When a man does this, in response to the requirements of Scripture, he is not being “bossy.” He is being obedient. He is being a faithful servant leader. He is being a good servant in that he is doing what he was told to do, which was to provide and protect.
And this connects to another point. The relationship between a husband and a wife is a hierarchical one. The husband is the head, and the wife is the body (Eph. 5:23). She is called to be obedient (1 Pet. 3:1), and this is why the marriage vows require the wife to obey. Sarah is commended by the apostle Peter for calling her husband her lord. And so this leads to a question that is hard for the soft complementarians to answer. Why aren’t men being called to servant lordship? That is biblical language. This thing called “leadership” is not in Scripture. The terminology is very modern, and is the kind of thing CEOs learn about from books they buy in airport bookstores. It would be fine if people would fit this “leadership” into biblical categories, but they are doing the opposite. They are trying to fit biblical terms into modern notions of leadership. And they don’t fit.
So I am still building up to my central point. Men are largely useless if they are barred from authoritative roles in their marriages and families. And feminism has in effect outlawed men serving in such authoritative roles. So then when we get a bunch of men sitting around being useless, we wonder what happened. We outlawed initiative in men, and then wonder why everything went so slack.
Men are inescapably dominant. The only choice we have is whether or not that dominance will be constructive or destructive, and what feminism has done is to outlaw all forms of constructive dominance. The only alternative then is destructive dominance. And men dominate destructively in two major ways. One is by going limp, and the other is by becoming a criminal. The pursuit of marriage and all the sex that it contains is something that happens, like it or not, in a sexual marketplace. The guys who went limp just stay home. The men who go the criminal route are those who become pick-up artists, or bullies, or rapists, or suffocating husbands.
So by “sexual marketplace,” I mean this. Picture an entering freshman class at a Christian college somewhere, and let us assume that half of them will pair off with each other during their four years there. The guys generally have a certain value or ranking placed on them by the girls generally. The girls have a certain value placed on them by the guys generally. On top of all this, the guys and girls both have a value placed on them by the teaching of the evangelical subculture that they are all a part of. But this teaching includes, most unfortunately, the idea that singleness is a gift, that to make any decisions based on attractiveness is crass, that women can too be career minded, that a man who wants the responsibility of being the head of his home is a budding tyrant, that a woman should be just as marriageable in her thirties as earlier, and all this nonsense is from the Christians. In addition to this, they are all living in a broader culture that simply assumes that a guy and a girl are sleeping together if they have dated more than a couple times, in which porn is ubiquitous, and in which our no fault divorce laws has made marriage a much higher risk for the guy.
The net effect of this has been to drastically lower the value of women as potential wives in the sexual marketplace. In addition, it has radically lowered the value of men as potential husbands in that same marketplace. And at the same time it has increased the availability of all of them as potential sin partners, thus reducing their spousal value still further.
Perhaps you remember the outrage that ensued a few years ago when a woman online wrote an article saying that men preferred debt-free virgins without tattoos? Remember that one? The outrage erupted because we live in a time when we want absolutely all of our choices in the sexual arena to be entirely free of consequences. We still understand the “blue book valuation” for things like cars, and we get the fact that dented fenders lower the value, but we are nevertheless hostile to the idea of accountability for past sexual behavior when it comes to our right to future sexual happiness.
As a result we have gotten to the absurd point where a man can choose to become a woman, tranny surgery and all, and then complain that none of the guys want to date him. This is more than a dented fender . . . he totaled his car, and wants to act like it is this year’s model, still sitting on the lot in pristine condition. Delusional is a mild way of expressing it.
So suppose we have located a decent fellow who wants to get married, and he enters the sexual marketplace. We see our problem immediately. How do people react to a term like “sexual marketplace?” Sir, how dare you? is the general sentiment. Getting into a relationship, or getting engaged, or getting married, is assumed to be a high-minded endeavor, in which people are simply lofted up into the arms of “the one,” without any regard to the hard realities of all the transactions involved.
What is marriage? It is a covenanted union, with a sexual consummation at the center of it. The covenant extends to every aspect of the husband’s life and to every aspect of the wife’s life. If a sexual union has occurred, but there is no covenant, then there is no marriage. The apostle Paul teaches us that when a man has sex with a prostitute, a one-flesh union occurs (1 Cor. 6:16), but that is not sufficient to create a marriage. And we see the same thing if we flip it around. If there is a covenant made, but no sexual consummation, then there is no marriage either. If we were to allow for sexless “marriage,” for the sake of the companionship only, then there would be no basis for refusing to allow homosexuals to marry.
So the wedding day has arrived, and the nuptials will be concluded that evening when the couple make love. The covenant is made before “God and these witnesses,” and the covenant is consummated before God alone. The covenant encompasses everything that they have and are.
Not only is this a transaction, but it should actually be considered the mother of all transactions. What is involved exactly? The legitimacy of the children, the custody of children, the provision of basic necessities to the wife, their community property, the exclusivity of their sexual relationship, and a host of other issues, large and small—from curtains to cars.