I had a great deal of respect for Dr. Keith Ablow, whose book The 7: Seven Wonders that Will Change Your Life, co-authored with Glenn Beck, has positive transformative power, until I read his opinion column revealing his views on marriage. For all the good he's written in defense of morality and honesty, this attack on the very idea of marriage from a psychiatrist makes me wonder how in the world, with a brain capable of such blatantly fallacious logic, such a man could make it through medical school (psych classes I CAN understand, by contrast--illogic reigns there in many cases).
The column in question, DR. KEITH ABLOW: Cameron Diaz Is Right -- 4 Reasons Why Marriage IS a Dying Institution - FoxNews.com, begins by citing a Hollywood starlet as representative of his own opinion on a moral issue, and devolves from there.
The very next paragraph, containing his thesis, deserves full citation and decortication.
"Well, I’m not certain marriage ever did suit most people who tried it. From what I hear in my psychiatry office, and from what I hear from other psychiatrists and psychologists, and from what my friends and relatives tell me and show me through their behavior, and from the fact that most marriages end either in divorce or acrimony, marriage is (as it has been for decades now) a source of real suffering for the vast majority of married people."
Marriage is ill-suited to MOST people? And just where have you gathered the evidence for this sweeping generalization? Your psychiatry office, psychiatric academic circles, and anecdotal sources, you say? No wonder, you've got such a negative image. Did it occur to you that most of the people who come to your office, or into your peers' offices with stressors in their lives are not healthy examples? I can't speak to your kinship and friendship circles, sir, but I suspect you may be a little too close for objectivity with this.
Now there IS the stubborn and sad fact that most marriages in the US end in divorce. Or is there? Dan Hurley of the New York Times (yeah, I cited THAT newspaper!) has shown that the math used to obtain the 50% divorce rate result is simplistic and flawed. Basically, if you divide divorce rate into marriage rate, you have assumed that the individuals doing the marrying are the same ones who are doing the divorcing. Instead, Hurley writes
"the method preferred by social scientists in determining the divorce rate is to calculate how many people who have ever married subsequently divorced. Counted that way, the rate has never exceeded about 41 percent, researchers say."
The problem is not the institution, as Ablow would have it, because otherwise you would expect more people who try it and fail, never to try again. Tell me, Dr. Keith, why do such high percentages of people people who divorce, then go back and re-marry? The answer is that marriage is an institution which most people view as the ultimate religious and/or civil sanction on their committed relationship. It's a pervasive ideal, even though other models have been allowed to become more mainstream.
But all of that is really only the surface of the argument. The heart of Dr. Ablow's fallacious beef is the idea that marriage is a "source" of suffering. And I assume that because he assumes that at least temporary suffering exists even in healthy marriages, he can widen his assertion that the suffering whose source is the institution of marriage afflicts the "vast majority of married people".
Sir, marriage is not the cause of suffering, it is the framework within which suffering can be overcome. It is not the stressor, it is the framework within which the stresses can be overcome. As a doctor, sir, you have the responsibility to convert the perceptions people may have of their ills into the kinds of rigorous descriptions of symptoms that will enable you to diagnose correctly and prescribe a correct remedy. But if you blindly accept the testimony of those perceptions at face value, you will mistake symptoms for causes, or even ignore causes altogether. If people REPORT their marriages as stress-causing, your failure to find out WHAT ABOUT their own BEHAVIOR or their spouse's behavior IN the marriage stresses them, only creates a tautology--a self-fulfilling prophecy--in which divorce becomes all but self-evident, and healthy relationships with people becomes all but impossible.
You want governmental sanction out of the institution? Then you've brushed aside the governmental sanction on commitment in relationships, and dis-incentivized honest efforts to overcome difficulties within relationships (hmm...I bet your OWN business would benefit immensely from such an arrangement, eh?).
You think oral contraception makes children less inevitable as a part of the marital relationship, thereby increasing the power of the idea of sex as ultimate expression of love and commitment? Well, you're right that sex has changed its nature since contraception has become widely available, but if you think humankind hasn't been having sex for pleasure (yes, WITHIN marriage!) since the dawn of time, you're a terrible student of human history. Why is prostitution considered the oldest profession? Why all the ancient poetry on love and sex?
"Very few normal people who live together for long enough want to keep on doing it," you say? But when did the discussion of a marital commitment become a matter of "wants" rather than "will", a matter of temporary, fleeting whims, instead of a matter of choice and holding to that choice for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, etc. ? Even momentarily leaving aside the huge elephant in the room of what's best for the children (yes a mom AND a dad, is the proven best scenario for all aspects of child development), in what other relationship can individuals best overcome their basically selfish natures, if it's not marriage? Marriage puts together a yin and a yang, and the commitment that binds them also transforms them, constantly challenging them to go beyond their ego and allow love to make more of them than they could make of themselves.
Does marriage really "inherently deprive men and women of the joy of being 'chosen' on a daily basis"? Marriage IS a voluntary institution, is it not? On what basis can anyone claim that an inherent and inescapable quality of the institution is NOT continual refreshing of the choice of spouse. Now granted, it's easy to take one's spouse for granted. But that's not an example of the failure of the institution, but rather of a failure of the individuals within the institution to live up to their own ideal. Jettisoning marriage on these grounds would be rather like wanting to do away with rubber because most tires end up worn and can easily puncture (a metaphor I'm finding increasingly useful as I debunk faulty logic on many fronts).
Yes, divorce rates, and easy divorce, have made it much more the norm, have cheapened the meaning of vows overall. But society does better when it holds up ideals, even when arriving at them becomes a rarity, because people can change. And despite all the trivialization, marriage rates have been steadily up for 3 decades, divorce rates are decreasing or holding steady in most nations where statistics are available, and almost no one enters a marriage planning ahead for their divorce.
Human beings were meant to form relationships with individuals of the opposite sex. The religious and civil authorities sanctioning them are necessary reinforcements on conscience and on property so that all but the most egregious acts of selfishness on the part of one conjoint or the other come with the incentive to change for the better, to forgive and forget, and to grow in love ad infinitum. This is the backbone of society as much for the individuals married as it is for the children who may come as the fruit of it.
Dr. Ablow, based on the symptoms your opinion reveals, I prescribe for you the reading of the entire Focus on the Family website, as well as Dr. Diane Medved's book, The Case Against Divorce, plus 1 year of listening to the national conservative talk radio show of her wonderful husband Michael Medved.
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