Brief#39 Why Marriage Matters So Much

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Welcome to a brief history of power.

This is Dr. Koons coming to you with a solo episode answering a listener question that

I think a lot of you will be interested in.

Just make sure to check out memento70.com.

I have found a lot of guys really being helped with this.

Just recommended it to a inquirer into the faith yesterday.

I think it will be and has been helpful to very many men.

So check out memento and see if it's helpful to you to look into those ancient disciplines.

We're going to be talking today about this kind of fraught, large question and what I'm

going to do is just read the entirety of the listener's question and then take it piece

by piece with my own little introduction to the answer.

So let me read at least most of the listener's question.

He addresses this one to Sensei Grills and Adam, since I know that's how both of you prefer

to be addressed.

Yes, one of us is an extremely formal Japanese veteran of the Second World War and the other

one of us is an American.

Let me read the question.

You've mentioned in an aside of a previous episode how you've heard from young men about

their struggles and finding a wife even though they earnestly desire to marry and raise

a family.

I'm still in that boat myself after the better part of a decade of actively seeking

after marriage and I know others who have been waiting longer.

What should us young men, we young men, who desire marriage, do on a practical level

to make ourselves desirable for marriage and also to actually find a woman to marry?

What can or should local congregations, families and society as a whole do to encourage

and facilitate marriage, does a church or society have an obligation to help those

desiring marriage, or is it supposed to be entirely upon the individual?

Many thanks for every episode.

Well, thank you.

This is a wonderful question and it has a lot of parts to it.

I suspect that I could probably break this up into five episodes if we wanted to, but

I want to address it in a simple way and as the listener's desire is to expand upon

it, let us know.

Let us know your best ideas.

I know some of you out there are actively trying to do something about this, but let us know

how much you'd like us to go on about it.

I want to answer each of the component parts of his questions, but I want to start out

in this way by saying that this question has enormous baggage to it because of a phenomenon

I see absolutely everywhere, not just in the church, but also in the church, not just

in families, but also in families.

And that is the incomprehension and even disgust expressed by older men for younger men.

They describe their problems as stupid or, you know, you're just an in-sell.

I mean, they kind of use the same insults that women who don't like those young men would

use against those young men when they are themselves not interested in them.

And that kind of disgust or dismay or whatever, really anything else you could say about

it, it's completely useless.

It's not going to help anyone.

I mean, with whom are you trying to curry favor by talking about how much better you are

than a man in his 20s when you are yourself personally and financially secure in your

50s?

How good is it doing you or him for you to express your superiority to him, both at his age

hand now?

So that this attitude of not wanting to help younger generations or telling them to pull

themselves up by their bootstraps really is not a fatherly attitude.

Even if the young man needs to change drastically, and I'm going to address some of that in

a few minutes, even if he has to change drastically, do not despise him.

If you despise people, you really can't help them.

So, you know, it's almost Saint Patrick's Day.

Patrick is an Anglo-Saxon captive of the Irish, comes back to Ireland to evangelize them.

If Patrick would, from a humanly reasonable point of view, say, you know what I hate

the Irish?

I just hate them.

They tried to ruin my life.

They're not my people.

It's not my native language.

I just despise them for which most people wouldn't blame him.

Then no one is going to ask him to be a missionary to the Irish.

You do have to love people to help them, and you're not going to help anybody by despising

him.

So, any kind of despising or looking down upon or insulting younger generations as much

as any other group you could arrange human beings into across whatever set of demographic

categories you wanted to, if you despise them, you're not going to help them.

So, you really cannot, not even for points online or points in a group discussion where

there are no young men, so you can feel free to say whatever you want about them.

If you're doing that, then don't pretend to help them.

You're not actually helping them.

Your advice is just going to be at best missing the point, if not actively misleading them.

So in the spirit of wanting to help, I want to answer these questions.

I want to say, I've never had this problem.

I didn't have this problem when I was a young man, and so my heart goes out to them, and

they have all the sympathy I can offer in the world, also to women looking for someone.

But the question is from a man, so that will be the lion's share of the answer.

I want to take his questions.

One by one, he says, what should we young men who desire marriage do on a practical level

to make ourselves desirable for marriage and also to actually find a woman to marry?

Those are two different things, and he separates them in the clauses and the sentence, but they

really are two different things.

So being desirable for a woman has to do with having those qualities of confidence, stability,

ambition.

We don't have to be beautiful the way they do, but not being physically repulsive does

help on our part.

But those personal qualities and characteristics that are going to say, I can take care of

you, I have a future for you, I will care for our children, I will stay with you.

This will be safe, this will be steady.

In addition to whatever her wildest dreams may be, let's just talk about kind of bedrock,

perennial concerns women have, that you're going to be able to meet those with interest

in a loving way, in an understanding way.

I can't prescribe that for anybody, but some basics that you might take to heart would

be that you are an interesting person socially, that you're not boring, you're not awkward.

Also that you are physically fit, that's going to help, obviously, that you have interesting

things to say and interesting things to do.

Keeping her guessing, not in a creepy way, but in a fun way, is always going to be helpful.

There's a lot more that you could say about that, but I would say that perennial things

women are looking for are going to be the perennial way to make yourself desirable.

That doesn't have to do with being a bodybuilder specifically, but it does have to do with being

physically fit, well-presenting, all the rest of it.

Things that really are not rocket science, but on which most of us have not been made

to work, because their society is generally lacking in a desire for discipline or formality.

Formality in any realm, whether you're talking about manners or personal presentation

or speech, or anything, is just requiring that you be a certain way.

We are required to be absolutely nothing except slabs, the easiest thing for us to

be in our society is slabs, and no one is really attracted to a self-deprecating

slab.

The opposite of that, and you don't have to be brash, my cheesemo is not necessary in

a social way, particularly outside of Latin societies, but someone who is doing things going

places, knows his own mind, and is happy to have someone with him as he goes to those

places.

I think that's going to be very helpful to anybody.

You can find lots of other advice online, but I think that's a good place to start.

That's kind of separate from the question of finding a woman to marry.

This is where I want to be very humble about this, because I had never dated online, or

even had to look online, a lot of people have, it's worked out for a lot of people, more

power to them.

What you're probably going to want to just stop if you're trying right now are dating

apps because they are algorithmically set up to incentivize most of the wrong things,

and to be honest with you, to make women feel much better about themselves because of

the giant pool of men looking than for men to be encouraged or to feel better about

themselves.

Unless it's specific to Christians, I would just start with something like that, I would

stay away from anything that's not specific to Christians.

Otherwise, if you're going to find a girl and you're not going to find her online through

some kind of Christian service, you're going to need to look in certain places that you

think someone who is relatively pleasant, relatively intelligent, relatively whatever characteristics

you're looking for, is going to be, obviously the best place is going to be in church.

She may not be there.

We all know that.

I understand that.

She may not be in that congregation.

We all know that.

I know that.

Here is where some of the rest of the questions about larger groups, responsibilities, come

into play.

If it's helpful to you and you can go to something and you think you're going to meet some

girls there, go there, go to that conference or that meetup or that social event or whatever

it is that's going to be helpful to you.

What we do know is if men are incentivized to be slabs today, men generally, not just

in church, women are incentivized to be kind of bitter, unpleasant, to despise men even

when they quote, need them.

That's the euphemism used for a lot of different things about women's lives that may be naturally

inbuilt like the desire to be protected and kept safe by someone who will love them.

What you're going to find generally is great bitterness towards men and an attitude that

if you have any acquaintance with women from different countries, an American woman

is almost, it seems like worse than anywhere else that they are encouraged most to talk

like guys, most to talk about sexual matters like men, to be most borish, grossest, to

wear sweatpants most of the time, none of which is attractive to any man, really, anywhere

in the world.

But this makes America, I think particularly difficult for this problem.

Listeners abroad, I'm sure, have their own problems and they probably have some version

of what the listener is asking, but I know that the listener isn't American and I believe

that this problem is actually kind of worst.

America is one of the most androgynous places in the world in that regard, partly because

we are obese and obesity generally makes men have female body shapes and women have male

body shapes, none of which is going to encourage marriage.

And the reason I'm not talking about money and being able to have a down payment and have

a house ready so that she has a house to move into the day you get married or something

like that is because I don't see this as primarily an economic problem.

I see the inability to find one another and then to build a fruitful life as primarily

a spiritual problem, it's a personal problem.

There are economic aspects to it, there's no question to that.

But I see this primarily a personal and a spiritual problem and therefore the listener's

last question I'm just going to take right now and then build through the middle questions.

But his last question is, is a church or society have an obligation to help those

desiring marriage or is it supposed to be entirely upon the individual?

Just to take that question in a broad way because I'll answer the church and society

portions separately in the middle is to say it is in every society's interest to have

men and women attracted to each other and forming families.

And the fact that at least in the United States we increasingly do not, increasingly do

not is maybe the worst harbinger for our future apart from a nuclear war because it makes

the future unthinkable and undueable apart from any of the other political or economic

effects of having massive numbers of lonely miserable people running around the American

population.

Nobody wants that, it creates enormous instability, any kind of society that has vast numbers

of unmarried women will be very leftist politically, so be ready for that and any society

that has vast numbers of unmarried men will be turbulent, violent, maybe worse.

So that's what we're going to have, okay, if this is something that our society are,

you could say our civilization, finds no solution to.

And one of the reasons that I don't think this is primarily an economic problem, primarily

meaning first of all, not meaning not, okay, it might be secondarily an economic problem

or somewhere else down the line, but the reason it is primarily a personal spiritual problem

is because there are places in central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northeast Asia that have

very much financially incentivized marriage, families, I mean, I should probably move

to Eastern Europe for the tax benefits of having a large family, Northeast Asia, South

Korea and Japan both have, if you're willing to live in certain places, relatively cheap

housing prices in rural areas because they've been hollowed out by demographic winter and

both of those societies in the case of South Korea and Japan have fairly what you may

describe as traditional family arrangements that are still normative, once the woman begins

to have a family she generally is just supposed to take care of that family.

So you would think that lots of things socially and economically would be set up particularly

in Northeast Asia, but also economically into some extent socially in central and Eastern

Europe still hasn't really changed the birth rate.

I don't think that these things are primarily economic problems, so they are not something

that's going to be solved by some kind of market mechanism.

That is why the listener is central question or middle set of questions I think will require

the most time.

So let's go into those now and I hope those are helpful to you, but this is something

that if you can't meet a girl, you want to set aside things, take time off work to

go to something to go somewhere, to meet somebody in ways that the different groups I'm about

to talk about should incentivize for you because this should not be, this should not be

and it never was an individual's achievement.

There are obviously individual aspects to getting to know somebody and marrying her or

marrying him obviously and that's why I answered that first question about what kind of a person

should you be like, he's asking specifically as a man, so I'm answering about men in order

to be desirable for marriage, okay, obviously duh.

If you can't make eye contact, if you can hold a conversation with a woman, if you're

boring, if you're not funny, fix as much as you can, okay, make it as easy once you have

that individual contact for things to happen in a good way for you and for her.

But no, it's never supposed to have been reliant upon a single individual and it never was.

So if your grandpa's like, well, just go up and talk to her like that's what I did to

grandma. Well, grandma was in that place because she and grandpa both had to go to church

every week because it was 1959 and that was normal and that's what people did.

And so that's what their families were doing and they were also told that they shouldn't

just like waste their lives on a variety of people before they finally get around to

getting married. There was a specific shape to how life was supposed to be and men were

like this and women were like that. And none of it was perfect, but it was set up to encourage

marriage. And I think what a lot of older generations, members do not understand is that

all of that has fallen away. There are no prescriptions. You don't have to do anything.

You don't have to be anything. In fact, maybe if you are something really weird, it's actually

more incentivized than being a normal man or a normal woman. So no, it never was just

a single individual's responsibility. You didn't set out. You didn't have to embark on

trying to get married in the same sense that like someone, you know, trying to get to

California to find gold in 1849 more or less could have and probably by virtue of his

poverty had to travel on his own all the way there and then look for something and most

of them failed. It's not supposed to be like that marriage shouldn't be as hard as striking

the mother load in a gold rush. Okay, it's not supposed to be that smaller percentage

of the human population. It's supposed to be normal for basically every human population.

Therefore, since it's not and when it's not, that's a general problem. That's not just

an individual's problem. So let's read the middle or the central questions that he had.

He says this, what can or should, and I'll take him in this order, local congregations,

and society as a whole due to encourage and facilitate marriage. Okay, local congregations

and in this regard, whatever your version of Christianity is, dear listener, however

your churches are connected to each other, those are going to be the connections that

need to be fostered to make sure that the two young guys in this congregation meet the

two young girls, it spread out one per congregation over these other two congregations 15 miles

away. If you don't bring them together and no one's going to bring them together. Okay.

And if we don't have a mechanism for that, we need to develop one. It's really not in

any church's interest for people not to get married and form families in that congregation

or in nearby congregations. You could think of two different motives among others. One

motive is you love your members and you want to help them. When someone is trying to get

a job in my congregation and I can help him, I always do. Okay. It doesn't specifically

say in Matthew 28, 19 and 20, you know, baptizing the name of the Father, Son of Holy Spirit

and teaching to observe all things whatsoever. I have commanded you, but I'm deriving

from the fact that I love them that I want to help them. And getting married when they're

trying to get married is the better part of love. Now, you can't fix everything. You can't

do it for them. You can introduce them. They may not like each other. No control over that,

but you can try to help. It's in any congregation's interest to try to help. It's in all congregation's

interests together to try to help not just because you love them, but also because it's better for

you when you have functioning Christian families in your congregation, rather than families split

between professions of faith, families where the parents don't really care, families where there

are no children because no one has told them they should love and have children. None of that is

in a congregation's interest. So the fact that we're not thinking of this as a priority, but we are

thinking of let's do all this stuff we've always done that doesn't really bring anybody into the

church like for the vast majority of us pretty much all the time, vacation Bible school doesn't

bring anybody in the church. Is it a nice thing to do? Sure. Great. Let's do it. I'm doing it this

year. Great. But does it matter as much as family formation? No, not at all. Not at all.

So we focus on and we do those things that we actually know are actually helping our members and

helping them to form families to form Christian families is very important both out of love for

them and out of interest for a congregation's future. That's usually going to be fostered by

introducing people to one another on an individual scale on a collective scale. It's fostered by

organizations that are not prohibitively difficult or expensive to join of which the Missouri

Senate had the Walter League. And in my first parish, for example, I had I don't know how many

couples. I mean, I would say almost the majority of couples above a certain age met in Walter League,

which trained you to be a Missouri Senate Lutheran the rest of your life and do things like run

committee meetings. And you would get to know other young Lutherans and you didn't have to pay

to go to college and you didn't have to have some kind of burning life ambition to be a missionary

or pastor in order to meet someone. But you you met them at Walter League and that was an

environment that was created and it was helpful to people. If something like that doesn't come back

into existence, it either will or we're just going to really struggle to form families.

And I think we're already really struggling. So it needs to come back into existence.

Families really should have it as their goal to form solid Christian families going forward. So

anyone that you as a father or mother or even an aunt or uncle or something like that know of

might be a good person to marry someone else, you know, introduce them like make it your job.

It's much more important that you pay for a plane ticket for two people who like each other and

have been talking to each other to mean than that you send one of those people for thousands of

dollars to Spain for a semester where she's not really going to learn how to speak Spanish fluently.

Anyway, let's be honest. Look at the, you know, she's there to like eat really good food and like

see some cool art or whatever, which is fine. But it matters a lot more that she meet this guy too.

So anything that families can do to think not about what kind of a job are you going to have or

how big is the house you're going to live in? How big will that be? Will it be nicer than the house

that you grew up in? Instead like will there be a family? Will there be grandchildren? These

are things that everyone eventually realizes matter a lot. Sometimes after they haven't occurred,

they realize how much it matters that the family goes on. But any family's basic reality should

be to perpetuate the Christian faith down through the generations. And that involves both passing

on the faith and they're being new generations. So that's kind of a prime concern you have much more

important than whether your son becomes a plumber or an engineer specifically. So anything that

the family can plan for anything that the family can do, the family should plan for and should do

to foster all of that. The last question that he has or the last component of it is society as a

whole. What should it do to encourage and facilitate marriage? Lots of answers to this. And this is where

economic solutions are easiest. It may be partly here that governments tend to be

longer-range planners than individuals and families in most of our particularly developed societies,

which are the ones where family formation is weakest. And that governments therefore are the ones

doing things and like I mentioned in Central Eastern Europe, East Asia, to try to foster

family formation because they're actually thinking ahead and thinking, okay, China has this

incredible economy right now. But what is it going to be 30 years from now under the demographic

conditions that the Chinese government can obviously see happening? Individuals, congregations,

families need to plan on a similar timeline at least as well as the Chinese Communist Party.

But what should a ruling party, a government agency do, society, maybe you could include non-profits,

you could include corporations, which obviously want people to be functional employees. I mean,

everyone has a deep interest down to the level of the police not wanting there to be

lots of discontented and raged males. Everybody's interested in this question. If he stops and

thinks about it for about three seconds. So what can societies do? I would suggest on this level

particularly that our law surrounding the family is severely disordered. It's a weird

mishmash of old traditional assumptions that it is the man's job to support the family even where

the family breaks up. That's the basis for in most places rulings about custody and alimony.

They really don't reflect economic reality where the woman may be able to support herself

in the kids. She may in fact have a much higher paying job than the man that may be part of the

reason why she filed for divorce. But one thing to consider here is that our society may in fact

be in lots of ways, disincentivizing marriage, chiefly through the way that our law and our

economic incentives are set up to make it relatively easy to be a woman if you kind of fail at your

career and even divorce your husband, he probably still has to pay for you. And a man really

only has everything to lose. So it may be that if you're going to have such a structure for

family law where the man has everything to lose that you also make marriage and incentive

for a woman to enter into and to remain in in the same way that it is for a man,

that speaking economically and legally on a personal level, this has to do I think mostly with

our educational system. And I'm not speaking here about church educational systems or Christian

homeschoolers or something like that because those are obviously choices made by congregations and

made by families. I'm speaking about our public educational system and I'm not talking about it

because I'm personally extremely invested in it for myself, but simply because you want

whatever is teaching the vast majority of people, you want whatever is teaching the vast

majority of people to actually teach them something of some value. And if it teaches them

nothing of any value or it teaches them that the sexes naturally should hate each other or that

there are many, many sexes and therefore family formation or any concept of nature is just out the

window. That's going to be destructive for the whole society. So even if you have nothing to do with

a public educational system, you're not even paying property taxes in your municipality,

you should care what they're teaching because it affects almost everybody, almost everybody.

Okay? Smaller percentages all the time, no question, but still easily a majority of American

children are learning in a public school. So whatever that public school teaches about American

history or health or if it teaches the math or it can't, that matters. Okay? So whatever they're

being taught and that rolls into as a subset of what they're taught, what they are permitted to see

by way of entertainment, but also by way of internet regulation. A society that allows people

to see pornography is a society that despises marriage and will either prevent people from entering

into marriage because they feel like their needs are satisfied as it were by unnatural vices or

they will destroy marriage through desire for unnatural vices even inside the marriage

thereby alienating husband from wife. So I don't really think it's going to be possible to have

people behave relatively normally. And this is where I see this as a personal and a spiritual

problem, not just an economic one. It's going to be really hard to have any kind of

collective call it what you want. Traditional, normal, I guess I just call it functional

society of men relating to women in a natural way, forming families, while we allow pornography

to exist. I just, I have a lot of trouble seeing that. And I think that the way that pornography

is connected to both transgenderism and thereby to mass shooters, but also to a lot of dysfunction

inside apparently heterosexual marriages. And I say apparently because of what is going on with

the pornography usage by people inside those marriages is massively destructive. It obviously also

hurts young men because it really saps their life force, their drive, their want to improve

themselves or achieve anything in the world. Pornography is kind of an analog to video games this

way, right? It's it's achievement of a goal without doing it by a legitimate means and with no

lasting effect. So I'm not really sure that we're going to get anywhere until we start talking

about abolishing it. Just my guess, just my two cents from my perspective where I hear frequently

about and try to help people whose lives it either has ruined or is ruining and they're trying

to stop that. But it's hard to see where a society that permits that to exist can really continue on

because of the way that sins like that harm you in a personal way as as Paul talks about in

1 Corinthians 7. So when you are not able to live in a normal natural way as man and wife

after you know the age when you're ready to get married, that's just going to harm everything

and lead to massive dysfunction. So to me on a social level legal reform, especially of the

arrangement surrounding marriage, permission of divorce, the majority of which are initiated

at least in the United States by women at this point as well as the permission of pornographic

material to be ubiquitous, easily accessible free and so on. Those things have to change socially

in order for our society to allow people to kind of function normally again in a way that in

previous generations I think was unfortunately taken for granted. I hope these answers have been

not necessarily the the rosiest or sunniest that I've ever delivered to any question but I hope

they've been realistic. I hope they've been helpful and if you have more questions or more

thoughts along these lines, please don't hesitate to write in. You can find us at a briefhistorypower.com

or on social media. God love you and God bless.