Last night, a friend and I were talking about my recent trip to Vegas and the practice of gambling. I was (obviously) on the pro side, and he was, to my surprise, against it. I say I was surprised because he’s an adrenaline junkie, and so I thought he’d love the thrill. But he said that he’d played blackjack in Vegas and found that losing 5 hands in a row and watching his money disappear in a puff of smoke made him sick, so he walked away and never returned. What’s interesting about this is what happened next—-both of us tried to employ “rational” arguments for why our tastes were different, to determine who was “right”. He said, quite rationally, that you’re just handing the casino your money and getting nothing in return. I said, with the help of someone listening in, that you get hours of entertainment in return. Since we didn’t really give a shit about the topic, we dropped it, but reading this thread this morning, I found myself reflecting on the fetish for rationality that dominates our culture. Or the fetish for trying to quantify everything into cost/benefit analysis, with the only acceptable reasons for doing something being that it makes/saves money or improves basic physical health. (In my case, I argued gambling was “rational” by leaning on the fact that people do spend money to entertain themselves, so the expenditure was not outlandish.)
I wrote the post because I was amused at the negative tone that I perceived in an article about cohabitation, and the research that indicates that people live together for emotional, non-mercenary reasons—-because they’re in love and want to spend more time together. But in the thread, as is usual with threads about decisions to live together or marry, people dwelt upon and often insisted that the reasons are mainly rational, and mainly to save money. In marriage discussions, the invocation of health insurance has become an inevitability, even though I have yet to go to a wedding where they say, “Do you promise to love, honor, cherish, and always make sure to have adequate coverage until death do you get put into an actuary table?”
I fear I offended some people—-okay, I know I offended some people—-by dismissing the idea that people marry for reasons of economic rationality, to improve the bottom line. I think a very small minority of married couples were pushed over the line because they wanted a tax break or health insurance, but I pointed out that these privileges are unfair and should be made available to all, and, more to the point, I doubt very seriously that if you took away all financial and legal privileges that you get with marriage that it would do much to the actual rate of marriage. Because people don’t get married for health insurance, to avoid writing a will, or for the tax breaks. Like the vast majority of human decisions, the decision to marry is based on a combination of expectations and emotional reasons. Expectations dictate a whole lot of human behavior, which is why there’s a not-unreasonable obsession with role models in our culture. Most of the time, people don’t need to be bullied into behaving in certain ways. They look around, see what other people are doing, and do that. On top of that, people do things for emotional reasons, mainly maintaining social status, ego, avoidance of fear, and pleasure. After all that influences your choices, strict fiscal analysis of health and wealth benefits barely has any room to change anything.
Take the above gambling discussion. We both tried it because it was what’s expected you do in Vegas. I kept at it because it gave me pleasure. He avoided it because it tripped up some fears he has about loss. Admitting this outright causes a great deal of shame, however, so instead we just start coughing up rationalizations. It’s nothing to sweat, because it was a discussion that had no consequences, but if it did have consequences, there might be a serious problem with squelching our understanding of why we really do things and insisting that we’re strictly mercenary, rational people. For instance, take the entire bullshit discourse about free market economics, that falsely assumes both that people are capable of knowing everything they need to to make strictly rational decisions, and that they mostly will make strictly rational decisions, and if they don’t do that, they are bad people who deserve what they get. Well, strictly rational decisions are .0001% of decisions, so building our entire economic system, cultural mores, and merit assessments on that model is a stupid idea.
I won’t lie; I enjoy needling people on the question of why get married when cohabitation fills the need to be with your lover just as well. I’m probably being a little sadistic in doing so, but mostly I’m fascinated by how much the real reasons that I see that people get married are ignored in these discussions. Here’s what I see really informs the decision to get married: