When someone gets engaged, it’s generally bad form to use the happy news as an opportunity to air personal grievances about your own marriage. But that obvious bit of etiquette didn’t deter MSNBC opinion writer Christina Wyman from using the news of the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce betrothal to write an entire piece on Monday bemoaning all the “problems” marriage has created for her.
I highly doubt Taylor Swift, leftist though she may be, is among the dozen or so people who both remember that MSNBC exists and labor under the delusion that it’s a relevant source of opinion journalism. But just in case, Wyman is here to warn her of the pitfalls of holy matrimony, with all the bitterness you might expect from Ms. Magazine. (In her defense, perhaps she was confused by the network’s recent name change and social transition.)
The ominous headline of Wyman’s piece is “Taylor Swift’s about to find out what a lot of married women already know.” Even more bizarre is the alternate, SEO-optimized headline — “Taylor Swift’s engagement news comes with this sobering reality” — which beckons childless cat ladies everywhere to click and find out what that “sobering reality” might be.
According to Wyman, it’s this: “There’s nothing magical about marriage. Nothing. Not one thing.”
“In many ways, marriage creates more problems than it solves,” Wyman continues. She warns Taylor that “men stand to benefit much more than women do from marriage.” For her part, Wyman says she “wasn’t overjoyed” when she got engaged after six years of dating because “who has the energy for that?”
Marriage brings “unpleasant realities,” she explains, like “the suffocation of sharing a home when sometimes a girl just wants to be alone for a week, a month, or a year.” (Because it’s totally normal for “happily married” people, as Wyman insists she is, to crave a yearlong hiatus from their spouse.) How humiliating for her poor husband to have his wife publicly air her gripes to the internet!
Wyman claims “it is widely known that single women are thought to be happier than their married counterparts,” a common misconception that’s contradicted by the findings of a recent Institute for Family Studies/Wheatley Institute study. Writing for The Atlantic on Wednesday, study author Jean Twenge explained how her team’s findings disprove the “common narrative” that “commitment and motherhood make women unhappy.”
According to the survey, 43 percent of married women without children reported that their lives were enjoyable, compared to only 34 percent of unmarried, childless women. For married mothers, the number was even higher, at 47 percent. Married mothers were nearly twice as likely to report being “very happy” as their single, childless counterparts.
And yet, behind all the thinly-veiled bitterness, Wyman bumps into something profound. When she says she wishes “someone would have been brave enough to sit me down” and tell her marriage isn’t “magical,” it reads like a plea for a deeper, richer philosophy of marriage than the one our shallow culture has offered her.
“Expecting an eternal, fiery, breathtaking love to sustain much beyond the vows is an exercise in delusion,” Wyman says, and she’s onto something. The feeling that someone else is making us happy, which we have been taught to mistake for love, is an insufficient foundation on which to build a marriage. That feeling, as Wyman candidly admits, is fleeting. She’s right that no spouse has the superhuman ability to make you perfectly happy 100 percent of the time.
But that reality is hardly a flaw of marriage. To the contrary, marriage is a wonderful solution to that reality; because of marriage, your spouse’s commitment to you doesn’t have to fluctuate based on whether you are sufficient to fill him with feelings of happiness on a particular day. Marriage provides a haven in which to fully love and know another embodied soul, and to be fully known and loved. It reflects the holy covenant between Christ and His bride, the church.
Wyman is right that there’s a lot more to marriage than the bustle of wedding planning. Marriage itself is richer, more meaningful, and more satisfying. But it requires you to actually love the other person enough to submit your own wants to theirs, and to view your spouse as the object of your affection rather than as a mere vehicle for your self-satisfaction.
Marriage won’t miraculously dissolve the selfishness, pride, and other sinful tendencies that inevitably clash when two imperfect people interact. In fact, it will probably make those shortcomings more obvious. But it will also provide a beautifully ordained partnership in which a man and woman can lovingly participate in each other’s sanctification. It establishes a framework within which a husband and wife can joyfully build a family and bring children into the world. It enables us to practice an active, tangible, self-sacrificing kind of love toward our spouses. Just because those things are sometimes hard does not make them drawbacks or “unpleasant realities” to which we must regretfully resign ourselves; they are by design, and wonderfully so. Not to mention — besides being the most fulfilling human relationship in existence, marriage is fun!
If all of that isn’t magical, what is?