The War You Didn’t Know You Were Losing
I once had a boss who told an employee: “If I could do better, you wouldn’t be here. If you could do better, you wouldn’t be here.”[1]
He was talking about a job. But say it again slowly and listen to what it sounds like when you apply it to a marriage. If I could do better, you wouldn’t be here. If you could do better, you wouldn’t be here. That is how an entire civilization now thinks about love. That the person across the table is a position you filled because the market hadn’t offered anything better yet. That loyalty is inefficiency. That staying is settling. That the moment someone more aligned, more exciting, more compatible appears on the screen, the rational move is to upgrade.
No wonder more people in America are getting divorced than getting married. They can do better. They can always do better. The promise never expires and the upgrade never arrives and the person in front of them was never given a chance because the person in front of them was never the point. The point was the next one.
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This did not happen by accident.
Robert Owen called the family part of a “triumvirate of evil.”[2] Gloria Steinem said the institution of marriage must be abolished.[3] Linda Gordon said the nuclear family must be destroyed.[4] Vivian Gornick said the choice to be a family-maker is a choice that shouldn’t exist.[5] These are not fringe voices from mimeographed pamphlets nobody read. These are the women and men whose ideas became syllabi, whose syllabi became policies, whose policies became the air. Herbert Armstrong saw it in 1976 and wrote that every subtle method was being employed to capture the minds of those of pre-marriage age.[6] In 1976 that sounded paranoid. The minds were captured.
Twenty years ago, 60% of American tax returns were filed as married. Today it is 40%. The majority of people in America are not married. Among Jews the trajectory is the same. Marrying later. Divorcing more. And increasingly not marrying at all.
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Harvard ran the longest study on happiness ever conducted. Seventy-five years. Multiple generations. Thousands of lives tracked from youth to death.[7] The finding: only those who had a loving relationship—almost invariably in a marriage—found happiness. Not wealth. Not achievement. Not freedom. A relationship. One person who stayed. That is what the data says. Seventy-five years of data. And the culture that was supposed to liberate people from the burden of commitment made them incapable of forming the one thing that would have made them happy.
The revolution did not free anyone. It made them lonely. You can be alone in a crowd. You can be alone in a marriage. But you cannot be happy alone. Harvard says so. The data is not ambiguous. And loneliness is not a feeling. It is a health condition. It shortens life. It impairs cognition. It corrodes the body from the inside. The revolution promised liberation and delivered isolation and called it empowerment.
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When someone asks you for your net worth, you answer with a number. How much money you have. How much your assets are worth. You do not notice that the word worth has been detached from the human being and attached to the bank account. Your worth is your balance sheet. Your value is your market position. People talk this way about themselves without flinching. And then they enter the dating market—and it is a market, the language insists on it—and they discover that the same logic applies to them. They are a product. The resume is the packaging. The shadchan is the sales rep. The date is the pitch. And the rejection—the silence, the “not for me,” the phone that stops ringing—is the market telling them their price.
The apps made this explicit. A photograph and a line of text. Two seconds to decide. Swipe left, swipe right. A human being compressed into the smallest possible unit of information, evaluated on the only dimension the format can transmit—how you look—and discarded at a speed that does not permit a second thought. The resume does the same thing with better manners. Height. Age. Background. Hashkafa reduced to a word. A lifetime of becoming a person compressed into four lines that will be read to someone’s mother over the phone in sixty seconds. You came in as a person. You left as a paragraph. And the paragraph got forwarded. And the silence came back.
The large singles event does the same thing with better lighting. Two hundred people in a room. Conversations that last ninety seconds before someone’s eyes drift. The few people who are universally attractive become the center of gravity. Everyone else orbits. You walk out feeling invisible. Not because there is something wrong with you. Because the room could not see you. The room was never designed to see you.
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The tools that build a lasting relationship are not complicated. Unconditional acceptance. Mutual respect. The capacity to forgive—not once, not dramatically, but as a daily practice so quiet that nobody notices it happening. And the willingness to be vulnerable with another human being, which is the hardest thing any person ever does and the thing the culture has spent fifty years teaching people never to do.
The revolution replaced every one of them.
Instead of acceptance—optimization. There is always someone better. Instead of commitment—optionality. Keep your options open. Instead of forgiveness—vigilance. Red flags. The phrase itself tells you everything. You are entering a danger zone. Scan for threats. Protect yourself. Instead of vulnerability—armor. Never need anyone too much. Never be the one who cares more. Never let them see that you are afraid.
The result is a generation that is extraordinarily good at screening and cannot stay in a room. That can identify a red flag at forty paces and cannot sit with discomfort for forty minutes. That has been trained to find what is wrong with every person they meet and has lost the ability to see what is right. They walk into a date already armed. Already scanning. Already building the case for why this won’t work. And then it doesn’t work. And they call it intuition. And they go home. And the cycle starts again. And the phone stops ringing. And the silence confirms what the system always implied: that they were measured and found wanting.
The system never tells them that the measurement is broken. That the instrument cannot see them. That the silence was never about them. It was about the bandwidth of a system that was only ever designed to transmit one dimension of a human being, and that dimension is not the one that matters.
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As religious Jews, we live in a bubble. But the bubble is permeable.
When a single person sits down with a shadchan and says “I need someone who”—they are speaking the market’s language without knowing it. I need. The sentence begins with taking. The entire orientation is consumption. What can this person provide me. How do they meet my requirements. Whether they check the boxes. This is not the language of someone preparing to build a life with another person. This is the language of someone hiring.
The red-flag obsession is the same contamination wearing different clothes. Instead of looking at another person and asking what is good here—what is true, what is real, what might grow if given room—the system trains people to audit. To scan for deficiency. To treat every imperfection as a prediction of future catastrophe. A person who has been taught to look for what is wrong will always find it. A person who has been taught to look for what is right might find something worth building. The revolution made the first person seem wise and the second person seem naive. It is the other way around.
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Marriage is not a constraint. It is not a burden. It is not a limitation on your freedom or your growth or your potential. It is the structure inside which love becomes durable enough to survive the person you are on your worst day. And the person who stays on your worst day is not settling. They are building something that the revolution said was impossible and that Harvard—after seventy-five years of watching—says is the only thing that works.
The answer was never to become more marketable. The answer was never to optimize your profile or lower your standards or widen your search radius. The answer is to reject the premise that got you here. The premise that people are commodities. That love is found rather than built. That the right relationship requires no friction and no forgiveness and no work. That vulnerability is weakness. That independence is strength. That the person who needs no one has won.
The person who needs no one has not won. The person who needs no one is alone. And the longest study on human happiness ever conducted says that alone is where happiness goes to die.
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Sources
[1] Personal account of the author.
[2] Robert Owen, as cited in multiple historical accounts of early socialist thought on family structure.
[3] Gloria Steinem, Saturday Review of Education (March 1973).
[4] Linda Gordon, Functions of the Family, WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation (Fall 1969).
[5] Vivian Gornick, The Daily Illini (April 25, 1981).
[6] Herbert W. Armstrong, Plain Truth (July 1976).
[7] Waldinger, R. & Schulz, M., The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (2023), Simon & Schuster. Based on the Harvard Study of Adult Development, ongoing since 1938.