When you say ＂I do,＂ do you know what you're really doing？
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Summary
Andrea Morozik and Peter J. Mitchell discuss their new book, The Question Mark: A New Look at Marriage in Canada. They talk about the history of marriage in Canada, why it s important, what it means for children, and how it affects us as a society.
Transcript
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Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show.
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Joining me tonight is somebody who may be familiar to Western Standard readers from the days when the Standard was a print product.
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That would be Andrea Morozik, who is very much still writing with her colleague Peter John Mitchell, who has just published a book.
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Andrea, I've always recalled you as the investigative reporter who broke the story in the Western Standard that sex-selective abortion was widely practiced in B.C. among...
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Yes, it was widely practiced in B.C. among immigrant communities who wanted sons, not daughters.
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I'm making light of it in this interview, but of course it was an extremely serious story.
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I think one of the landmark pieces of journalism in 2006.
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Anyway, these days you're doing great work with the Christian think tank, CARDIS, in Ottawa.
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And that's a wonderful project for you as well, isn't it?
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You made it sound like I got married as a research experiment, but yes, indeed.
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Ten years of research into my own personal marriage, I suppose.
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Got married quite late in life, actually, in keeping with today's Canadian statistics.
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In a few moments, I'm going to give you a chance to tell viewers where to get your book.
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But first, marriage has been around for a while, hasn't it?
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And yet you've called your book, I dot, dot, dot, do, question mark.
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I mean, the question mark, I'm glad you picked up on that.
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It's an important part of the title because today we have a culture and a younger generation
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who view marriage as maybe nice, but unnecessary and certainly not, it's something that's met
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with, I think, a fair amount of ambivalence as well.
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And so we put the question mark in to reflect that cultural trend, but at the same time to
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indicate that we would like people to start asking questions afresh about the institution
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of marriage, which over time and research I've come to see as far more critically important,
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not just for ourselves, but for the culture and the communities that we live in.
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So the question mark reflects that ambivalence and the fact that we view marriage as kind
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And also the fact that we are encouraging readers, young and old, to reconsider or reimagine
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Well, to me, there's always seemed to be a contractual element to marriage.
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And, you know, the one partner does something for the other partner and the other partner
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And to that point, we've just published a story from BC.
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We have a reporter in BC, young Jared Jaeger, and he reports that a child advocacy group says
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nearly half the children living in poverty, as they define it, are actually in single parent
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And that's likely to be single mothers, far more likely than to be single fathers.
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So when the man-woman contract breaks down, the one where a man basically promises to support
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a woman and his family, and in return, she looks after him and his needs.
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And then, and honestly, authors of the poverty study we're talking about do this, there's
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So women end up looking to the state for what they should be looking for from a husband.
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So I think that you've just said a lot, of course, but one angle of that that I'll immediately
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comment on is that, yes, we do see less income, less financial resources in single parenting
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And marriage remains a source of stability for longevity, and that's good for the kids
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But when you see stories like that arise, and they will often talk about many aspects
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of poverty eradication that are very valuable, whether it's turning to the state or to the
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But the one thing no one ever talks about is the obvious family angle, which is foundational
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So I come to this question of marriage also with an eye to helping those who are poor,
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And what we see in marriage culture today is that there's a marriage divide and wealthier
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We're less wealthy, lower income people, the marriage rates are dropping off even more than
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I think that that speaks to the idea of luxury beliefs, which is a term coined by a scholar,
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He was raised virtually without family in the foster care system in the United States.
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So when we're thinking about some of the pressing social issues that we face as a society, be
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it child poverty, be it rising rates of social isolation or loneliness, the family angle often
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And so part of the book's effort is to bring the family angle back in, not as a form of judgment or saying
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everybody must be married, but as a simple research question that we see benefits from this.
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So why not talk about the institution of marriage?
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So Andrea, look, you said just a moment ago that for wealthier people, they tend to carry
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on, get married and have families, but that marriage rates are dropping off among the less
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And I think there is different theories on that and you can see factors coming together
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in a circular way and that it's not, it's a complex issue.
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And so you might have, you know, simple choices amongst people who are wealthier towards getting
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You have the education factor mixed in there, but ultimately we want to see a society where
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we treat people equally, regardless of education level, regardless of income level, that they,
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everybody sees marriage as an opportunity for their own family stability, regardless of
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how we get into the place of seeing less educated or lower income North Americans, really.
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It says across North America, we see that trend line.
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We want marriage to be an accessible option to everybody.
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I'm not sure if your viewers are aware, but there's something called the success sequence
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The success sequence, which virtually eliminates the probability that you're ever going to live
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You finish your schooling first, you get married next, then you have kids after that in that
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And so that, I guess, gets the poverty angle again, as well as some of the differences between
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But really, we want marriage to be there for everybody and not just a certain segment of
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So in the course of your researches, you must have observed that in this day and age, unlike
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maybe 20 or 50 years ago, often you have the wife earning or has the ability to earn more
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So if the woman is earning more than the man, does that tend to make men less anxious to
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Is it kind of a little power thing going on there that deters them?
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I don't know about that, Nigel, but I do think there is the sense today that we have, which
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I would argue is wrongheaded, that we just don't need marriage as much anymore.
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And that may have something to do with income generation on the part of women and rising opportunities
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in the workforce, whether we're in the 2000s or back in the 50s, I think the same thing
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is at play, which is to say that marriage acts as a future-oriented institution in your
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life, and it contains the love of partners in it.
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And that means that we can view marriage more as like an adventure, a Tolkien-style adventure,
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And you can have a lot of variation in the ways that people live out their marriages.
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But it is still something that is future-oriented and holding families together, maintaining
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stability at a greater rate than, say, merely living together.
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And it remains important regardless of the ways in which people negotiate particular aspects
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I do know there's research available to suggest that women still, even today, with all of our
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earning potential and all of the career opportunities available, which are a good thing, but even
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today, women would like men who also earn as much or more than they do.
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I don't think this is a deal breaker for marriage as an institution.
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Really, we're getting at that foundational idea of marriage and how it undergirds our social
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stability and helps us in raising our families and having a source of long-term, like thinking
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about the long-term in our lives, looking towards the future.
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I think what you just talked about there is something you refer to in the book as a life
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script, this sequential, I think you said you finish school and then you get married and
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then you have children, do it in that order and things go better.
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Now, I guess one of the questions would be is if you are wanting to do that, do you have
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You could still finish school, start a relationship and have children and I know there's a whole
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lot of people who are out there living in that situation who would say, well, and it works
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fine for us, but you're saying marriage is better.
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Yeah, and the answer there is going to be a bit dry and certainly we all have those examples
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in our lives and perhaps living them ourselves, but the data on the nature of cohabitation just
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shows that it works itself in the aggregate in spite of the wonderful examples of people
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who look exactly as if they're married, raising children happily and the data is just not the
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And so I think we can intuitively understand that both can coexist, both can be true, but
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in the aggregate, people who end up living together have come into that relationship for
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And some of them are very intentional and others slide into a living together arrangement
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The intentionality, the purposeful nature of it may not be the same.
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If you want to get in and out quickly, it's really not the same type of commitment as marriage
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might be in spite of many beautiful examples that we might see around us.
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So the answer's a bit dry there, simply say that the data doesn't bear out, but they're
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And so on heated issues and family and marriage can be quite heated because they are so personal.
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Oftentimes I'm just like, what does the data, what did the data show us?
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Well, being pretty ancient as I am, I grew up in an era when the joke was that men didn't
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And it seems to me that just to take that seriously for a moment, for cohabitation without
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marriage seems, whatever the law says, but seems to a man a kind of lower level of commitment.
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Now, is that perhaps at the root of why the data, and where are the data you're talking
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about, it's very clear, the cohabitation, the less successful outcome.
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But is it the fact that men go into this thing thinking they can get out of it a bit easier?
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Yeah, the law says otherwise, but men often think stupid things.
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You know, as you were talking, I thought of some of the feminist literature on marriage,
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You know, second wave feminism and beyond has almost, without exception, said that marriage
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is terrible for women, a bit of a prison for women, and that it constrains women.
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But that conversation is pushed out the side, saying that what actually marriage can do
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is constrain men and limit their options in such a way that is beneficial to the woman
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and perhaps mother of a child and family, also beneficial to men.
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But I often like to bring up that point of marriage as a constraint on men acting as a constraint
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in a way that we haven't had that conversation, because we're, you know, immersed very much
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in this, in a lot of the feminist literature on marriage, declaring that it's bad, it's bad
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So we have a section in the book talking about the ways in which marriage is beneficial to
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men alone, and then to women alone, then to children, as if they were separate.
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But really, that amounts to benefits for everybody, even if it comes through constraints.
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So endless choices don't always amount to greater happiness.
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So, you know, hence all the jokes about marriage.
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Everybody grumbles, and yet so many of us still do it.
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Look, putting this together, Andrea, you're saying that society at large has an interest
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in not only marriage, but in stable marriage, and yet that can sound pretty harsh to people
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who have never been married, but wish to, and to those for whom it's not even something
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The question mark remains at the beginning, and we hope that this book is a soft entry point
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into discussing the ways in which marriage matters without compelling anyone to a particular
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But because family is so personal, and it's a place of great joy, but also our deepest wounds,
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oftentimes we can't even have the conversations that engender, you know, thinking on the subject
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So we haven't even begun to touch on how we consider marriage today as a largely romantic
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Our hope is to return to a bit of a more robust model, which is more institutional, and
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yet at the same time, to return to your question, this is not to say that those who are not married
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I myself got married very, very late in life and feel that the 40 years leading up to that
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were quite meaningful and fruitful, as it were.
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And if I may toot our own horn just a little bit, we were concerned about the judgment factor
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And one person who's read it is a divorced mother of a 14-year-old, and her own marriage
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had ended for good reason, and it had been very traumatic for the family.
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And this divorced mother was going to be giving her 14-year-old daughter a book so that she
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could encounter some of these more academic arguments around marriage with a lot of the
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So I felt quite proud of that to understand that it was a book that spoke to people who
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And, you know, if anybody could actually take the subject of marriage and set it on one
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side and look at it from all angles and come up with a good read, that would be you.
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So really, really good to hear your comments about it.
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I work for Cardus, and so it's up at cardus.ca as well.
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Okay, well, you know, for all the times that I've talked to people who've written books,
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We really should be tapping up Amazon for some advertising, but there it is.
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Speaking as a taxpayer, I sure hope that marriages will last, because when marriages last, they
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don't go back and become a charge to the state.
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And that's when I go back into that contractual argument.
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But anyway, you have done a wonderful job here in taking this subject apart and putting it back
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Bless your heart, and it's great to see you, Andrea.
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It's good to reconnect with the Western Standard.
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We've been privileged to have with us Western Standard viewers, Andrea Morozek.
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She works for Cardus in Ottawa, and it is her job to study and be well-informed about marriage.
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And she has put it out in a book, and she tells us you can get it via Amazon.
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It's called I...do question mark, and by Andrea Morozek.
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And for the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Henneford.