A Much Needed Adjustment To My Factory Settings On Marriage and Children

An update on the ongoing project of opening my mind.

Being closed-minded is often synonymous with projecting your beliefs onto everyone else regardless of their different circumstances. You can call that type of thinking judgmental. You could also call it lazy and smug. I’ve called it my factory settings. ¹

I’ve discovered that on many subjects, including marriage and children, I’ve needed to adjust my settings, sometimes with a violent shove as some of them have been there so long they’ve rusted in place. These settings are what logicians would call my “priors,” my ingrained views of the world.

This is not self-flagellation, quite the opposite. Only someone whose mind has been opened can recognize that their mind had once been closed.

So I’m claiming a heightened level of self-awareness, a level that would have been unrecognizable to my past self even a few years ago. And my intent is to keep going, to make today’s open mind seem relatively closed to my future self.

What’s led to this change in me is the deep thinking required to write and to read widely, critically, carefully, and slowly. To pause and linger long enough to understand other writers’ points of view.

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I’ve written about my personal myth and the price to be paid for my candor writing about wealth. The theme in these essays and others is a reckoning with my life as a person of generational privilege, especially today in this gilded age of heightened economic inequality, a condition which I’ve come to believe is immoral.

Opening my mind has been harder, however, about my long held view that a marriage and having children are the two indispensable things to living a meaningful life. I know that statement sounds naive enough to confound belief. But it’s the way I was raised, and it’s what I had always assumed.

In confirmation of my bias, my roles as spouse and parent have always been essential to my identity and to my self-esteem. So if I met people who were unmarried or childless, I assumed it was not a choice, but rather that they’d encountered obstacles of unfortunate circumstance that had prevented them from achieving the two life-defining goals to which I thought everyone should aspire.

(Is the word “should” the most seemingly innocent and thus the most insidious word in the English language?)

I started reading the work of some writers on Substack who held views very different than mine. On marriage, I encountered

lyz

Lenz’s

Men Yell at Me

Lyz’s theme is that marriage as an institution is a bad deal for many if not most women.

My marriage is the source of almost everything I hold dear so I took Lyz’s attack on the institution of marriage personally. In a comment, I informed her (such was my tone) that a few bad marriages should not lead her to condemn the entire institution. I implied that her extrapolation and the enthusiastic agreement of her readers with lyz’s opinions were based on their own anecdotal, dissatisfied experiences with marriage.

And yes, now I see the irony.

Lyz’s measured reply to me yielded not an inch:

“…marriage is a political institution designed not for liberation and happiness but specifically for maintaining social order and has its roots in the oppression of women. My book makes this case.” 

Then a subscriber threw this comment at me:

“It seems like you took [the post] personally. I invite you to think about why it concerns you that a different person from you might feel that way about a different man than you.”

We’re never so mad and defensive as when someone nails us with such precision. I was angry as I went to sleep that night. Didn’t I have the better point of view, having had a successful marriage of almost four decades? What could people with marriages that hadn’t worked teach me about marriage?

I woke up feeling foolish and contrite. So I wrote a new comment conceding I had been intemperate and apologized. Then I bought Lyz’s book, This American Ex-Wife, which uses her divorce as a paradigm for the problems with the institution of marriage.

The book changed my point of view. Statistics, surveys, and anecdotes bear out that there are a great many marriages that are soul crushing for a woman based on the traditional marriage roles that still dominate.

There’s an inequality of sharing household chores and childcare and an inequality of who sacrifices their desired careers, especially poignant at a time when women are ascendant in their educational attainment and career opportunities. ²

Lyz’s book gave me a clear picture of how in many “normal” seeming marriages––no infidelity, no physical or cruel emotional abuse, no addictions or criminal behavior–––a woman might live a far happier and more fulfilling life if she got a divorce or had never married.

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A related and recent smug “truth” I’ve relinquished is that, if at all possible, everyone should have children.

I grew up in the late ‘60s and early 70’s playing the board game of Life, where you start out in your little plastic car as a single peg in the driver’s seat. Then you get married and add a peg next to you, and then you fill the backseat rows with your child pegs (note the room for four kids). The player with the most money at the end wins. It was my favorite game.

The game of Life must have had some role in my factory settings, but it was mimetic desire that led to our wanting a child. ³

In 1986, my wife Debbie and I, ages 23 and 24, were on vacation in Paris. We spent time with Debbie’s childhood girlfriend Colette who already had a one year-old son. Olivier was a miniature version of his dashing blond father, a handsome actor at the Comedie Francaise. Olivier had dimples and never seemed to cry. We loved the four syllable melody of his French name. He was overwhelmingly cute.

We wanted some cute kids of our own. So, spaced over the seven years after that trip, we had three children. It worked out well for us. As with marriage, since we were happy, I assumed that everyone would be happy to have children.

Jill Filipovic

’s recent post Theory vs. Practice points out how the recent generation of young women can compare increasingly attractive, non-traditional life choices against the strong possibility of bearing the brunt of childcare and the potential sacrifice of their careers. For many women, it’s no longer acceptable to have an unequal share of the work of running a household and caring for children. Jill’s summation:

“I suspect that the number of women interested in having children with men will continue to decline as long as women continue to gain power and men continue to not step up.”

This must be one of the reasons that birth rates have fallen sharply across the developed world. The OECD fertility rate was about 3.0 in 1970 but has plunged to 1.58 in 2021. This compares to the replacement rate of 2.1. ⁴

Laura Kennedy

is another writer I admire who describes her personal ambivalence about the decision she faces whether to have children as she reaches her mid-thirties. Ambivalence does not mean being disinterested; it means having strong opinions on both sides of a matter. And Laura writes about how she feels caught between two different vociferous ”teams” of women, those with and those without children.

A generation ago, Laura might have seen herself as stigmatized if she chose to remain childless. Today, she would have plenty of company if that’s what she decides.

Laura’s essay The Window Closes, is too personally brave, sharp, and smart to resist quoting a few passages.

“As a woman in her thirties who does not have children (and probably won’t) but refuses to carve a final decision into my palm with a rusty blade and a clenched jaw, I’m not quite sure where to put myself.”

“Sometimes people – interestingly, almost always women who are older than I am – ask me whether I’m aware that I don’t have forever to have a baby. To these women I say this: “We’ve just met, and this is a dinner party. I’m unbelievably uncomfortable right now. Could you just pass the salad please?”

“Regret is an interesting concept. Often, it involves retroactively considering a decision we made under one set of circumstances and judging it unfairly by our current ones.”

As to Laura’s last point, she neatly expresses the main obstacle to thinking with analytical clarity about life decisions made in the past. It takes great effort to look back and try to recreate who we were and what was known to us when we made a particular decision. Mostly, it’s just impossible.

One of the blessings in life is to be ignorant of counterfactuals. Whatever Laura ends up deciding, she will never know where the other path would have led. She will become accustomed to the path she’s on, and it will likely seem to her that whatever she chose was right. Because that’s how human nature tends to work best. To think in terms of counterfactuals and regrets leads to bitterness and potentially to madness.

I’m certain I’d be horrified if a more twisted version of the ghost of Marley showed me my own counterfactual life. Horrified because I’ve lived this life and loved these people. To see myself in a a different life with different people would wreck me. ⁵

Some people are terrified of artificial intelligence, but the idea of time travel is far scarier to me. I’ve seen enough time travel and split reality movies to understand how the slightest change, the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wing, can change everything.

If someone invented a time travel machine (and if Elon Musk announced he was working on one, could we be certain it was a joke?) I’d place myself at the head of a Luddite mob, cudgel in hand, and lead the march to smash that machine to smithereens.

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Below, Carly Simon performs this beautiful, sad song live in Grand Central Station. It speaks to generalized assumptions about marriage and family.

1. When I think of factory settings I think of mechanical objects not digital ones.

2. I linked to this survey from the Bureau of labor Statistics via

Jill Filipovic

‘s post “Theory vs. Practice.”

3. It’s a Substack law that whenever you mention Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, you must mention

Luke Burgis

who owns the “mimetic desire Subsatck franchise,” a privilege of which I’m very envious.

4. Fertility rates per the OECD.

5. Scrooge’s ghost showed him scenes from his past, present, and future. My imagined ghost would be closer to Clarence in A Wonderful Life, showing Jimmy Stewart what the town of Bedford Falls would be like if he’d never existed.