Who to Marry and Contextualization of Marriage
Growing up I, Malcolm, was reminded over and over that the most important decision I would ever make came down to who I married. It was strongly emphasized to me that by far the most meaningful thing I could accomplish in life was to craft myself into someone worthy of joining the life of a great person. We will be telling our kids the same thing because it is the single truest and most impactful lesson anyone has ever imparted on me. The lesson taught in this way seems to be quite effective in that my brother also has a very strong and happy marriage, a wife with whom he works, and ambitions to have lots of kids.
While the most prevalent pop cultures have very dismissive views of marriage, claiming that most marriages fail, the stats don’t back this up. The famous studies most marriage naysayers cite were collected during a rash of divorces in the 1980s, and even those studies manipulated data to create shocking-sounding statistics like, “50% of marriages end in divorce” by including individuals who had been divorced multiple times (e.g., If you had six couples get married and only one got divorced but this person had divorced and remarried five times, you would see 50% of marriages ending in divorce even though only 16% of people actually experienced divorce).[[92]](#_ftn92) It appears that our parents’ generation was just uniquely bad at marriages (when was the last time you heard a millennial comedian complaining about “married life”?). Divorces are incredibly rare in some cultivars while common in others.
When you choose the cultivar that is governing your marriage, you are also choosing the probability of your divorce—as well as your probability of loving your spouse in the future (more on that shortly).
We often meet people who treat dating like a hobby in their teens and end up confused when, upon hitting their thirties, they find themselves in some sort of manic game of musical chairs to find a partner, throwing other people to the ground to grab that last seat. One of the most critical elements of an effective cultivar is that it impresses upon an individual that marriage and kids are not “side projects” in life. Creating your family is the main event in every effective culture.
Soft cultures create a moral infrastructure that justifies a life of personal indulgence. As cultures soften, they increasingly begin to imply that spouses exist primarily for personal enjoyment—that spouses and kids should be considered only if they would make you feel happier, more fulfilled, and more loved. In addition to lowering birth rates, approaching relationships with this mindset ironically places these positive emotional states even more out of reach. Love, happiness, and fulfillment are the rewards our biology imparts on us when we have created an efficacious and fruitful partnership, which requires intentionality, planning, strategy, and a value set that extends beyond pure hedonism. One of the core goals of an effective culture is that it imparts this truth through its framing and rituals around partnership.
As many cultures have done before, our House’s cultivar will primarily teach its values around relationships through the way it contextualizes identity. Specifically, our House cultivar holds that individuals on their own are not full beings and that the family a person builds for themselves (not their parents’ family) is ultimately their core unit of identity. We frame one of life’s great goals as finding and building this family—essentially completing oneself. **It is not just each person must find their “other half” but that alone, they are less than half a unit. The unit is not just a set of partners, but the family they create.** Many of our traditions do not consider an individual an adult until they are married and have kids and even then, we only allow them to participate in said activities as a family unit.
More specifically, we see life as a transition away from the self—with one’s “self” being the lowest and most trivial order of identity. When an individual is young, they are atomic but meaningless. With time, successful people (by our standards) become part of something bigger, first finding a partner with whom they grow as a unit, then becoming a parent, leading and nurturing a new generation of kids, and ultimately becoming a part of their family’s story and value set after death.
As such, the core unit of identity transitions from: Individual → Married Couple → Family → Tradition/Example/Story