You know that dorky guy from the eHarmony TV ads who blathers something like, "We at eHarmony think that you are incredibly complex"? Every time I hear that, I think of the scene from Annie Hall in which a couple is asked how they account for their happiness. The woman says, "Uh, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say." The guy adds, "And I'm exactly the same way."
Anyway, the eHarmony guy is its founder, Neil Clark Warren. He has likely made a small fortune persuading singles to use his service to find the perfect match for their incredibly complex selves. The title of his recent post at the Huffington Post is, "On second thought, don't get married." For real? Let's take a look.
The first paragraph is promising. Warren advises that "several hundred thousand" of the 2 million couples who will marry this year should reconsider. Then in the next paragraph, he acknowledges that married couple households are in the minority, and that lots of Americans now think marriage is becoming obsolete.
I hope you've enjoyed what you've read so far because the rest of Mr. eHarmony's post is a long way of saying, "just kidding."
The proselytizing begins in the third paragraph where we are admonished that to see marriage as obsolete is "a dangerous conclusion." Because according to Warren, "marriage can still serve a vital purpose for a vast majority of adults."
Next comes Warren's "evidence" for the vital significance of marriage, in the form of a parade of matrimaniacal people and institutions. Here are his sources:
- The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Their go-to person, W. Bradford Wilcox, is the one I described here and here who has "called on society to do a better job of pointing out the advantages of marriage" and who believes that marriage civilizes men.
- David Brooks, the endless font of matrimania. (Here's an example.)
- The Institute for American Values. (Guess which values they deem "American"?) Warren draws from their materials to buttress his claim that children of single parents are screwed. I took apart the "evidence" for that claim, plank by plank, in Chapter 9 of Singled Out. I reviewed some of the key arguments, and added some new studies, in this post.
Now, having stoked the usual stereotypes and myths about single people and their children, Warren is ready to reveal his true agenda. You know what you really need for a successful marriage? Hard work? Yeah, OK, but it's not Warren's primary recommendation. Commitment? Warren is just "meh" about that, too. What you really need, he declares, is "broad-based compatibility." A marriage based on that, says Warren, "has virtually no chance of becoming 'obsolete.'"
Guess how you find a partner with "broad-based compatibility"? eHarmony!
I think I'm going to write a post titled, "On second thought, let's all get married."
[Thanks to Jay, Justin, and to Susan Hurt for the heads-up about the Warren post.]
