Western Standard - HANNAFORD： When you say ＂I do,＂ do you know what you're really doing？

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show.

00:00:22.140 Joining me tonight is somebody who may be familiar to Western Standard readers from the days when

00:00:27.040 the standard was a print product that would be andrea morosik who is very much still writing

00:00:32.120 with her colleague peter john mitchell has just published a book good to see you again andrea

00:00:37.020 thanks so much for having me on nigel oh it's a pleasure andrea i've always recalled you as

00:00:42.260 the investigative reporter who broke the story in the western standard that sex selective abortion

00:00:47.920 was widely practiced in bc among you remember this i do i do yeah we have it framed on the wall

00:00:56.660 Yes, it was widely practiced in B.C. among immigrant communities

00:01:00.580 who wanted sons, not daughters.

00:01:03.460 I'm making light of it in this interview,

00:01:05.320 but of course it was an extremely serious story,

00:01:08.720 I think one of the landmark pieces of journalism in 2006.

00:01:13.920 Anyway, these days you're doing great work

00:01:15.680 with the Christian think tank, Cardis, in Ottawa,

00:01:17.840 and in fact, your job is to research marriage.

00:01:22.620 And that's a personal project for you as well, isn't it?

00:01:25.740 You made it sound like I got married as a research experiment, but yes, indeed.

00:01:30.620 Ten years of research into my own personal marriage, I suppose.

00:01:34.580 Got married quite late in life, actually, in keeping with today's Canadian statistics.

00:01:39.040 So I'm part of that cohort.

00:01:41.960 Way to go, Andrea.

00:01:43.280 In a few moments, I'm going to give you a chance to tell viewers where to get your book.

00:01:47.180 But first, marriage has been around for a while, hasn't it?

00:01:51.000 and yet you've called your book I dot dot dot do question mark um that sounds like it might be a

00:01:58.220 new angle what is it really I mean the question mark I'm glad you picked up on that it's an

00:02:04.120 important part of the title because today we have a culture and a younger generation who

00:02:09.640 view marriage as maybe nice but unnecessary and certainly not um it's something that's met with

00:02:18.540 think a fair amount of ambivalence as well and so we put the question mark in to reflect that

00:02:24.700 cultural trend but at the same time to indicate that we would like people to start asking questions

00:02:30.700 afresh about the institution of marriage which over time and research have come to see as far

00:02:36.140 more critically important not just for ourselves but for the culture and the communities that we

00:02:41.180 live in so the question mark reflects that ambivalence and the fact that we view marriage

00:02:46.540 as kind of negotiable, not necessary.

00:02:50.260 And also the fact that we are encouraging readers,

00:02:53.760 young and old, to reconsider or reimagine

00:02:57.320 what they think they know about marriage.

00:03:00.180 Really? Okay.

00:03:01.400 Well, to me, there's always seemed to be a contractual element to marriage.

00:03:06.720 And, you know, the one partner does something for the other partner

00:03:10.540 and the other partner does something back.

00:03:12.540 And to that point, we've just published a story from B.C.

00:03:16.800 We have a reporter in B.C., young Jared Jaeger, and he reports that a child advocacy group says nearly half the children living in poverty, as they define it, are actually in single-parent households.

00:03:29.460 And that's likely to be single mothers, far more likely than to be single fathers.

00:03:34.880 So when the man-woman contract breaks down, the one where a man basically promises to support a woman and his family,

00:03:44.180 and in return, she looks after him and his needs, when that breaks down, the children suffer.

00:03:49.940 And then, and obviously authors of the poverty study we're talking about do this, there's an appeal to the state to help.

00:03:58.640 So women end up looking to the state for what they should be looking for from a husband. 1.00

00:04:03.180 As a society, where does that take us?

00:04:06.460 So I think you've just said a lot, of course, but one angle of that that I'll immediately comment on is that, yes, we do see less income, less financial resources in single parenting families.

00:04:19.800 And marriage remains a source of stability for longevity.

00:04:22.220 And that's good for the kids as it is for the parents.

00:04:25.260 But when you see stories like that arise, and they will often talk about many aspects of poverty eradication that are very valuable, whether it's turning to the state or to the charitable sector.

00:04:39.380 But the one thing no one ever talks about is the obvious family angle, which is foundational to poverty eradication.

00:04:48.840 So I come to this question of marriage also with an eye to helping those who are poor, helping those who are living on the margin.

00:04:57.800 And what we see in marriage culture today is that there's a marriage divide and wealthier people continue to get married.

00:05:05.000 We're less wealthy, lower income people.

00:05:08.340 The marriage rates are dropping off even more than the population as a whole.

00:05:12.640 I think that that speaks to the idea of luxury beliefs, which is a term coined by a scholar, Robert Henderson.

00:05:19.400 He was raised virtually without family in the foster care system in the United States, but those stories also exist here in Canada.

00:05:25.660 So when we're thinking about some of the pressing social issues that we face as a society, be it child poverty, be it rising rates of social isolation or loneliness,

00:05:34.860 the family angle often, most often goes totally unmentioned.

00:05:38.940 And so part of the book's effort is to bring the family angle back in, not as a form of judgment or saying everybody must be married, but as a simple research question that we see benefits from this.

00:05:49.300 So why not talk about the institution of marriage?

00:05:52.620 So, Andrea, look, you said just a moment ago that for wealthier people, they tend to carry on, get married and have families, but that marriage rates are dropping off among the less prosperous.

00:06:08.940 mm-hmm is which is the cause and which is the effect is yeah go ahead i think you know what

00:06:16.780 i'm getting at yeah which is cause and effect and i think there is um different theories on that and

00:06:22.300 you can see um uh factors coming together in a circular way and that it's not it's a complex

00:06:27.980 issue and so you might have um you know simple choices amongst people who are wealthier towards

00:06:33.660 getting married or they're more marriageable um you have the education factor mixed in there but

00:06:38.940 ultimately we want to see a society where we treat people equally regardless of education level

00:06:43.660 regardless of income level that they everybody sees marriage as an opportunity for their own

00:06:48.940 family stability regardless of how we get into the place of seeing uh less educated or lower income

00:06:55.180 uh north americans really this is across north america we see that trend line we want marriage

00:06:59.900 to be an accessible option to everybody um i'm not sure if your viewers are aware but there's

00:07:04.460 something called the success sequence and that in the research points to the idea what is it

00:07:09.580 what did you just say there's nothing called a what the the success sequence um which virtually

00:07:16.380 eliminates the probability that you're ever going to live in poverty and that is the the sequence is

00:07:21.260 a simple one you finish your schooling first you get married next and you have kids after that in

00:07:27.020 that order and so um that i guess gets the poverty angle again as well as some of the differences

00:07:33.900 between high income and low income um in marriage rates but really we want marriage to be there for

00:07:39.100 everybody and um not just a certain segment of society so in the course of your researches

00:07:46.380 you must have observed that in this day and age unlike maybe 20 or 50 years ago

00:07:52.140 So often you have the wife earning or has the ability to earn more than the husband. 0.80

00:08:02.180 So if the woman is earning more than the man, does that tend to make men less anxious to be married?

00:08:09.580 Is it kind of a little power thing going on there that deters them?

00:08:13.740 I don't know about that, Nigel, but I do think there is the sense today that we have,

00:08:18.240 which I would argue is wrongheaded, that we just don't need marriage as much anymore.

00:08:23.700 And that may have something to do with income generation on the part of women and rising 1.00

00:08:28.840 opportunities in the workforce. Whether we're in the 2000s or back in the 50s, I think the same

00:08:36.840 thing is at play, which is to say that marriage acts as a future-oriented institution in your

00:08:44.560 life and it contains the love of partners in it and that means that we can view marriage more as

00:08:51.360 like an adventure tolkien style adventure rather than a rom-com and you can have a lot of variation

00:08:58.240 in the ways that people live out their marriages but it is still something that is future oriented

00:09:04.480 and holding families together maintaining stability at a greater rate than say merely

00:09:09.520 merely living together and it remains important regardless of the ways in which people negotiate

00:09:15.920 particular aspects of their married lives. I do know there's research available to suggest that

00:09:20.880 women still even today with all of our earning potential and all of the career opportunities 1.00

00:09:26.720 available which are a good thing but even today women would like men who also earn as much or 0.91

00:09:32.400 more than they do. I don't think this is a deal breaker for marriage as an institution really

00:09:37.280 we're getting at that foundational idea of marriage and how it undergirds our social stability and

00:09:42.640 helps us um in raising our families and having a source of long term like thinking about the long

00:09:51.040 term in our lives looking towards the future i think what you just talked about there is something

00:09:56.080 you refer to in the book as a life script this sequential uh you know i think you said you

00:10:02.160 finish school and and then you you get married and then you have children do it in that order

00:10:07.520 and things go better now i guess one of the questions would be is if you are wanting to

00:10:18.160 to do that do you have to be married you could still finish school start a relationship and have

00:10:25.920 children and i know there's a whole lot of people who are out there living in that situation who

00:10:32.820 would say well and it works fine for us but you're saying marriage is better what's the difference

00:10:39.600 yeah and the answer there is going to be a bit dry and certainly we all have those examples in

00:10:44.280 our lives and perhaps living them ourselves but the data on the nature of cohabitation just shows

00:10:51.300 that it works itself in the aggregate in spite of the wonderful examples of people who look

00:10:58.080 exactly as if they're married raising children happily and the data is just just not the same

00:11:04.500 and so I think we can intuitively understand that both can coexist both can be true but in the

00:11:10.240 aggregate people who end up living together have come into that relationship for different reasons

00:11:16.540 and some of them are very intentional and others slide into a living together arrangement by

00:11:22.320 accident. Maybe they have a child by accident. The intention there is not quite the same. The

00:11:27.800 intentionality, the purposeful nature of it may not be the same. That's actually an advantage of

00:11:32.540 cohabitation. If you want to get in and out quickly, it's really not the same type of commitment

00:11:40.340 as marriage might be in spite of many beautiful examples that we might see around us. So the

00:11:45.200 answers a bit dry there simply say that the data doesn't bear out but they're exactly the same

00:11:49.520 and so on heated issues and family and marriage can be quite heated because they are so personal

00:11:56.800 oftentimes i'm just like what does the data what did the data show us and the data tells us it's

00:12:01.440 not the same thing well being pretty ancient as i am i grew up in an arrow and the joke was that

00:12:09.600 men didn't want to get married but women did and it seems to me that just to take that seriously 0.97

00:12:16.560 for a moment for cohabitation without marriage seems whatever the law says but seems to a man

00:12:27.200 a kind of lower level of commitment and i think that's what you just said and so it makes it more

00:12:32.640 attractive now is that perhaps at the root of why the data and i where the data you're talking about

00:12:41.440 it's it's very clear the cohabitation the less successful outcome but is it the fact that men

00:12:49.280 go into this thing thinking they can get out of it a bit easier in the cohabitation side of the thing 0.94

00:12:55.760 the law says otherwise but what men often think stupid things you know as you were talking i 0.98

00:13:01.760 thought of some of the feminist literature on marriage which has really panned marriage you 0.99

00:13:06.640 know second wave feminism and beyond has has almost without exception said that marriage is 1.00

00:13:11.920 terrible for women a bit of a prison for women and that it constrains women but that conversation is 0.77

00:13:17.840 pushed out the side saying that what actually marriage can do is constrain men and limit their

00:13:23.440 options in such a way that is beneficial to the woman and perhaps mother of a child and family

00:13:29.520 also beneficial to men, but I often like to bring up that point of marriage as a constraint on men,

00:13:38.260 acting as a constraint in a way that we haven't had that conversation, because we're, you know,

00:13:43.820 immersed very much in this, in a lot of the feminist literature on marriage, declaring that

00:13:48.820 it's bad, it's bad for women. So we have a section in the book talking about the ways in which 1.00

00:13:53.340 marriage is beneficial to men alone, and then to women alone, then to children, as if they were 0.94

00:13:58.480 separate but really that amounts to benefits for everybody even if it comes through constraints so

00:14:04.220 endless choices don't always amount to greater happiness so you know hence all the jokes about

00:14:10.240 marriage everybody everybody grumbles and yet so many of us still still do it look putting this

00:14:16.020 together andrea you're saying that society at large has an interest in not only marriage but

00:14:22.320 in stable marriage and yet that can sound pretty harsh to people who have never been married but

00:14:27.820 wish to and to those for whom it's not even something they want should everybody be married

00:14:36.000 no absolutely not it's not a book that compels forced marriage the question mark remains at

00:14:43.540 the beginning and we hope that this book is a soft entry point into discussing the ways in which

00:14:48.040 marriage matters without compelling anyone to a particular course of action but because family is

00:14:53.080 so personal, and it's a place of great joy, but also our deepest wounds, oftentimes we can't even

00:14:57.940 have the conversations that engender, you know, thinking on the subject of marriage. So we haven't

00:15:04.280 even begun to touch on how we consider marriage today as a largely romantic expression. There's

00:15:09.420 a lot of emotion invested in it. We call it the soulmate model of marriage. Our hope is to return

00:15:14.800 to a bit of a more robust model, which is more institutional, and yet at the same time to return

00:15:19.620 to your question this is not to say that those who are not married are living lesser lives

00:15:24.740 i myself got married very very late in life and uh feel that the uh the uh 40 years leading up to

00:15:31.700 that were were quite uh meaningful and fruitful as it were so um it's a book written without

00:15:37.140 judgment and if i may toot our own horn just a little bit we were concerned about the judgment

00:15:41.940 factor in writing it um and one person who's read it is a divorced mother of a 14 year old

00:15:47.860 And her own marriage had ended for good reason, and it had been very traumatic for the family.

00:15:54.120 And this divorced mother was going to be giving her 14-year-old daughter a book so that she could encounter some of these more academic arguments around marriage with a lot of the heat taken out. 1.00

00:16:04.780 So I felt quite proud of that to understand that it was a book that spoke to people who have themselves suffered in their marriages.

00:16:11.380 Well, I bet you did feel proud of that. Well done. That's a great compliment.

00:16:15.080 And, you know, if anybody could actually take the subject of marriage and set it on one side and look at it from all angles and come up with a good read, that would be you.

00:16:25.880 So really, really good to hear your comments about it.

00:16:30.120 And how do people get a copy and can they get it in time for Christmas?

00:16:34.280 Oh, they can indeed. Yes, just through Amazon is the easiest way.

00:16:37.600 I work for Cardist and so it's up at cardist.ca as well.

00:16:40.460 But the easiest way is Amazon.

00:16:42.480 Yeah.

00:16:42.800 Okay.

00:16:43.240 Well, you know, for all the times that I've talked to people who've written books,

00:16:46.800 oh, get it on Amazon.

00:16:47.780 We really should be tapping up Amazon for some advertising, but there it is.

00:16:52.440 And what a great thing.

00:16:54.640 Speaking as a taxpayer, I sure hope that marriages will last because when marriages last,

00:17:00.940 they don't go back and become a charge to the state.

00:17:04.220 And that's when I go back into that contractual argument.

00:17:06.660 But anyway, you have done a wonderful job here in taking this subject apart

00:17:12.880 and putting it back together again.

00:17:14.760 Bless your heart, and it's great to see you, Andrea.

00:17:18.140 Thanks so much.

00:17:19.160 It's good to reconnect with the Western Standard.

00:17:21.420 What's your next project?

00:17:23.400 Oh, gosh, promoting this one.

00:17:25.960 Okay.

00:17:26.700 Well, consider it well done.

00:17:30.400 We've been privileged to have with us Western Standard viewers,

00:17:35.200 Andrea Morozik.

00:17:35.660 Morozik she works for Cardos in Ottawa and it is her job to study and be well

00:17:41.840 informed about marriage and she has put it out in a book and she tells us you

00:17:45.860 can get it via Amazon it's called I dot dot dot do question mark and by Andrea

00:17:53.720 Morozik thanks again for coming on Andrea and for the Western Standard I'm

00:17:59.000 and Nigel Hannaford.

Western Standard - December 10, 2024

HANNAFORD： When you say ＂I do,＂ do you know what you're really doing？

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