Selfishness in Marriage

Marriage is an institute of stability. Why then, are American marriages in the last few decades so catastrophically unstable?

In Rabbi Michael Lerner's book, 'The Left Hand of God,' he describes a spiritual crisis evolving in the United States. While the book is a call for social justice, social progression, and an acknowledgment of our intrinsic need for spiritual meaning in our lives, there is a passage in the book where he describes the divorce rate in connection to this problem:

"Even in the most stable relationship, if you know that your partner has chosen you because he or she believes that you will satisfy his or her needs better than anyone else, you can never be certain that at some point your partner won't encounter someone who would satisfy even more needs. And if that person is available and interested, then, as a maximizer of self-interest, your partner would be foolish not to break with you and start a new relationship with this other person."

America is built on this notion of self-interest. The fuel for the economic marketplace is the competition among businesses and other ventures. The people who run companies and businesses rely on their own self-interest and their employees' self-interest to keep the business afloat. Since the majority of Americans spend the majority of their hours at work, these values tend to trickle into the home.

With a divorce rate above 50%, America leads the charge to a dysfunctional generation. It is hard to have a network of friends in which all the parents (or friends themselves) are happily married. The problem, as Rabbi Lerner clearly explains, is this notion of self-interest. It begins early in relationships and gets more and more entrenched as the relationship develops. Ultimately, the answer to the question, 'Will You Marry Me?' hinges upon a number of self-reflection questions. For example: 'will this person support me financially?' or 'can I raise my social status by marrying this person? or, more simply, 'how much does this person love me?' The answers to these questions often determines the answer to the ultimate question that decides a marriage.

Is it possible to enter into a marriage without self-interest guiding your decision? Of course not. In fact, it is quite irresponsible to enter into this personal, emotional, and yes, legal contract without considering the consequences of your decision on your life. However, what Rabbi Lerner and, subsequently I, are seeking to deconstruct is the dog-eat-dog mentality that pervades our culture. In business, it isn't rare for fellow employees to cut corners, stab one another in the back, and compromise futures in order to increase their standing in the company. The notion of 'climbing the corporate ladder' has, for the most part, saturated the markets and blinded working Americans to their own sense of duty to one another. The troubling aspect of this change in the workplace dynamic is that people are finding it harder and harder to switch roles once they arrive at home.

In a certain sense, people are adapting the values promoted by their employers to their relationships. For example, as Rabbi Lerner suggests, people seem to be on the lookout for a better situation, even when committed legally and spiritually by marriage to another person. In effect, many marriages are doomed to fail before they even get their footing. By separating one's self-interest from a couple's interest, individuals enter into relationships with an all-too-clear idea of what's best for him or her, and not for each other. Solving this problem involves a number of individual commitments, but fundamentally what needs to be addressed is the pervading culture of 'get more, get more,' and the reigning priority of, as Rabbi Lerner describes, 'me-firstism.'