Marriage Is Not a Meme

I had an essay go viral on Substack about a month ago, titled “Right Wing Luxury Beliefs,” on how conservative media figureheads have taken to promoting ideas they often do not practice, ideas whose downsides are magnified for working-class people, the very people who increasingly make up right wing audiences. One of the examples I cited was, “Get married young, and have more kids than you can afford.”

The problem is not the ideal per se; it’s the way it’s being packaged for consumption. 

Marriage As a Meme

Meme warfare is the defining feature of politics in the digital era. Jeff Giesea, writing in NATO's Stratcom COE Defense Strategic Communications journal in 2015, defines memetic warfare as:

competition over narrative, ideas, and social control in a social-media battlefield. One might think of it as a subset of 'information operations' tailored to social media. Information operations involve the collection and dissemination of information to establish a competitive advantage over an opponent. 

What does a meme do? It condenses meaning—compressing complex realities into emotionally-charged signals that can be rapidly transmitted and easily replicated. Effective memes usually contain truth, but the act of condensing necessarily strips meaningful nuance. The political arena is already a low-decoupler ideosphere, where claims are evaluated by their emotional charge and tribal usefulness rather than their fidelity to reality; meme warfare exaggerates this tendency. Emotionally-provocative memes easily find guerilla recruits, and according to Jacob Siegel, "function like the IEDs of information warfare. They are natural tools of an insurgency; great for blowing things up, but likely to sabotage the desired effects when handled by the larger actor in an asymmetric conflict." 

In 2015, when Giesea was writing the essay, meme warfare was how diffuse and anonymous online “meme warriors” understood their role in getting Donald Trump elected. Memes—from Pepe the Frog to “OWN THE LIBS” YouTube compilations—were the means by which the sacred cows blocking Trump’s entry to the White House were killed. Since then, the principle of meme warfare was taken up by formal conservative institutions, including TPUSA, the late Charlie Kirk’s equivalent of Raytheon for the meme wars. TPUSA took the principles of meme war, even ones used against the institution itself, absorbed, industrialized, and commodified them. True to his capitalist-evangelical roots, Kirk expanded the scope of meme warfare from public political battles to people’s home lives.

In the conservative media ecosystem, the idea of marriage has lately been flattened into such a memetic weapon—not just as a signaling device to differentiate “us” from “them” (emphasize the enemy, rally the base) but as a mechanistic lever, a prophylactic against depression, decadence, and civilizational decay. 

My warning to those who might take for granted that marriage is an appropriate front for the meme wars: do not forget you are a human being. You are not an avatar for ideology.

As with any effective meme, the kernel of truth is evident. Happily married parents are without a doubt the most stable arrangement for children, and marriage generally corresponds to lifetime satisfaction. 

The qualifier “happily” is key; happiness does not automatically attend marriage, and it does not occur in a vacuum. Marital happiness strongly correlates with individual psychological well-being, household income, basic attitudes of fairness and positivity, and religiosity, as well as the interdependence of familial and friendship networks.

To present domestic bliss as a linear outcome of marital union confuses correlation with causation and tacitly promotes attitudes of instrumentalization (viewing people as means to ends), which are a curse to healthy, functional relationships. Such an attitude ironically reflects the precise runaway individualism that conservatives often blame for our corroded vision of marriage in the first place.

Readiness and Support Are Key

My friend Brad Wilcox’s popular piece in Compact Magazine entitled “Get Married Young” makes a fair enough case for it precisely because he does not take for granted—and in fact encourages—the establishment of the supportive structures that allow marriage to thrive, namely: education, maturity, and friendship. But one must read the piece in its entirety, beyond the catchy headline, well past the paywall, to pick up on these key qualifications. Wilcox writes:

This is not to say there are no risks associated with twenty-something marriage or that everyone should marry their college love. The biggest risk is divorce, given that couples who marry in their early twenties are more likelyto land in divorce court, in part because they are more likely to be immature. But those risks can be minimized, I also tell my students, by focusing on finding a mate who is a good friend, as well as by embracing a common faith and avoiding cohabitation. Younger couples who are religious and do not cohabit prior to marriage are less likely to divorce… Of course, marrying in your twenties is predicated on finding the right someone.

Good outcomes in mating depend on a fragile and increasingly rare set of preconditions, which require serious personal development and community effort in order to achieve. As Patrick T. Brown, in his latest contribution to The Dispatch, notes: 

The worth of a prospective man in marriage is increasingly less about his relative earning power as a provider and more about the kind of partner and parent he might be. One in 4 young men use weed, and a good many are acting out violent scripts they learned from pornography or gambling their weekly earnings on a prop bet. College-educated men have broadly—not universally!—been able to pivot into a marriage market that selects for interpersonal skills, dependability, and emotional intelligence. Blue-collar and working-class men haven’t. 

Readiness matters—both for securing marriage in the first place and for making it work long-term. If those same blue collar and working-class people imbibe the meme without the nuance, rushing marriage without taking a realistic inventory of their life circumstances and skills, including many of the soft skills increasingly demonized in the same media ecosystems, they will be setting themselves up for failure and disappointment. As Christopher Lasch explains, “Our ideal of ’true romance‘ puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.” 

David and Amber Lapp write in their latest addition to this conversation: “Any message [on getting married] must be mediated and accompanied by real-world support, especially for couples who have not had models of stable marriages growing up.”

I couldn’t agree more.

My warning to those who might take for granted that marriage is an appropriate front for the meme wars is simply this: do not forget that you are a human being. You are not an avatar for ideology. Marriage is not a meme or lifestyle hack. You exist in a community of complicated people to whom you have obligations that will never fit neatly into the just-so prescriptions of a media class motivated by the demands of the attention economy. Evaluate your personal circumstances with rigor. Listen to the people in your life who really love you. Love them well, too. Marriage will place an exclamation point on you—your virtues AND your vices.

Prudence—right reason applied to action—simply cannot be disregarded as a casualty of the meme wars. So long as prudence factors into the analysis clearly, the proposition ceases to be a meme and becomes quality advice.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock