Encouraging Marriage Begins with Telling the Hard Truth
Effective messaging must be melancholy, rather than triumphalist, chastened rather than bold. It must acknowledge that even functional families are now built among ruins. Rather than telling young people that such work is simple, we must name the truth of what such efforts really require in our times. We must tell them such work is not simple, but that it is heroic, and that those doing it are to be commended in all their imperfection.
Years ago, a photograph of Paris Hilton at a party wearing a shirt that read, “Stop Being Poor” drew public ire. Hilton now claims the picture was photoshopped, but the outrage prompted by the doctored image was not unreasonable. The idea of a billionaire heiress making riches seem simple to achieve naturally strikes a nerve, especially for people who live in unstable times.
We are in an era of transition. Many old things are falling away. Consensus beliefs are crumbling, and no new consensus has yet emerged from the ensuing melee. Neither our liberals nor our conservatives know what to do about this since the platforms and parties that once defined our politics number among the collapsing institutions.
Each has its own brand of denial. The popular right especially struggles to adapt. Instead of coming to terms with social conditions, conservative media figures continue to peddle passe perspectives. You see it everyday on Twitter. Not long ago, conservative online Influencer Benny Johnson wrote a tweet that got a fair bit of attention for highlighting the out-of-touch nature of the mainstream right.
“Conservative messaging online about marriage and family makes no room for messiness, for suffering, for failure, for trauma, for exploitation, for mistakes. Their real message is that a ‘conservative’ life is only for ‘perfect people’ and that ‘perfect people’ find such achievements simple.“
The tweet featured a photo of Johnson, his health and fitness influencer wife, and their four children barefoot on a beach in some expensive looking locale. The text said nothing but, “It’s very simple. Fall in love. Get married. Have a million kids.”
As admirable as falling in love, getting married, and having a large family may be when considered in the abstract, they are anything but simple to achieve in a time of last gasps—a time lacking the social attitudes and structures that once helped people achieve these very things. In just a few words, Johnson’s tweet betrayed an encyclopedic cluelessness. And, while ostensibly seeking to inspire, such messages inevitably discourage and drive people away from the right’s cultural cause by implying personal failure on the part of anyone who has been unsuccessful in love within a culture whose supporting structures have been demolished.
Messages like Johnson’s alienate readers by sending the message that life, including romantic and erotic life, is simple. Yet, anyone who has lived a few years knows full well that it quite obviously is, well, …not simple at all. Johnson and others subtly send the message that the formula for a happy and successful domestic life is so straightforward that anyone who fails to enact it has only himself to blame. What appears on the surface to be a message of celebration is, in its subtext, a poisonous condemnation.
Over and over again, conservative messaging online about marriage and family makes no room for messiness, for suffering, for failure, for trauma, for exploitation, for mistakes. Their real message is that a “conservative” life is only for “perfect people” and that “perfect people” find such achievements simple. The message is that people should stop playing around and get married since that is so simple to do. Perhaps Johnson could consider an image of himself in a “Stop Being Single” t-shirt for his next Instagram post.
His message is outrageous. Perfect people don’t struggle to find a partner. Perfect people aren’t driven to make bad decisions by unconscious feelings. Perfect people don’t get sick, divorced, or betrayed. Perfect people don’t get fired. Perfect people’s kids don’t die. Perfect people don’t suffer from the absence of supporting social customs and institutions in an increasingly low-trust society. Such troubles are the domain of losers, loser.
No realm of human life is simple, and conservatives who say otherwise are being dishonest. Their failure to distinguish between the simplicity of ideals and the hardships encountered when trying to manifest those ideals in a less than ideal world set young people up for resentment—resentment that easily leads to questioning and ultimately to a rejection of the right’s entire program.
Popular conservative influencers like Johnson should say instead, “Life is hard. I’ve made mistakes and suffered too. If you want, I will show you something that works better and, together, we'll redeem what we can.”
More successful pro-family messaging requires a different tack. It should begin by addressing the complete breakdown of the dating market, the hellish landscape of dating apps, the trust-eroding effects of the sexual revolution, and the devastating effects of a society foolish enough to install a free-flowing porn tap in every home.
Effective messaging must be melancholy, rather than triumphalist, chastened rather than bold. It must acknowledge that even functional families are now built among ruins. It must recognize the pain the decline of our social customs, norms, and institutions has brought into the lives of people seeking, by whatever modest or broken means, to alleviate their loneliness and to cobble together what family might be possible now.
Rather than telling young people that such work is simple, we must name the truth of what such efforts really require in our times. We must tell them such work is not simple, but that it is heroic, and that those doing it are to be commended in all their imperfection.