Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Husbands and Wives
Don Quixote on Jan 25 2010 at 5:15 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
It has been my experience that conservative husbands are more appreciative and respectful of their wives than liberal ones. Bookworm has made similar comments to me. I believe this is because conservatives on balance take marriage more seriously than liberals, treating it as more of a covenant than a mere relationship. What do you think?
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15 Responses to “Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Husbands and Wives”
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Interesting question.
Your point seems logical – why would a Liberal consider it more than a relationship? What kind of covenant can it be? In the discussion of same sex marriage, the approach is that it needs to be a governmentally recognized contract…and they object to a religious approach to the topic. Separation of church/state, etc. What kind of a covenant is there if there’s no recognition of God?
But then – we’re often not logical. As I said…interesting question.
Conservatives are just nicer people, period.
Conservatives have less buttons to push because there’s not this every day load maintaining the self-deception apparatus.
Conservatives don’t think right and wrong are relative, so they have consistent standards for how they treat people. Living up to those is another thing, but at least the goalposts aren’t constantly shifting depending on how you “feel” about it on a particular day.
I know political and religious conservatives that are miserable to their wives…..
Decent people are found on both sides of the divide between liberal and conservative. I haven’t tried to figure out the relevant percentages because my friends and acquaintances aren’t a proper sample of the population.
Men who treat their wives badly are crappy human beings, regardless of their political outlook — the same goes for the opposite situation, of course.
Earl, we are talking about general trends here.
I would like to propose a flip of the question onto it’s head: are there certain traits about conservative men that make them more likely to be considerate of their spouses? Let me suggest:
Conservative men are more likely to be well-adjusted in their skins with a better sense of who they are. Evidence: Conservative men are more likely to have the self confidence to believe in self-reliance and to place trust in their fellow citizens. (no nanny-staters here).
Conservative men are more likely to be religious. I know this cuts both ways, but I have found that religious people tend to be more accepting and appreciative of others’ talents while simultaneously struggling to master the deadly sins of greed and envy. Finally, more religious people tend to be more positive and celebratory of life.
Want to be around a real downer? Marry a Lefty atheist and existentialist who feels that they are owed something from their fellow citizens. Yech!
“Want to be around a real downer? Marry a Lefty atheist and existentialist who feels that they are owed something from their fellow citizens. Yech!”
Oy! Poor Obama.
Explains a lot, doesn’t it? Maybe what Obama really needs is a good, long, drawn-out primal scream. Oh…wait…
http://valley-of-the-shadow.blogspot.com/2010/01/joe-klein-and-democrats-are-not-tyler.html
Conservatives, not because of who they are, but due to cultural and societal expectations/training, respect people’s boundaries more. The Left tends to need to attack people because they are on the Eternal Crusade to bring about transformational Utopia at the expense of liberty, lives, and security. But if you don’t have this need, you are far less orientated towards narcissism and less in need of grabbing more territory. Peaceful co-existence requires that people respect their own boundaries and not go over their neighbor’s territory and claim it.
Whoa, boy! Talk about boob bait for the bubbas* — well here I am, ready to rush in, where I should fear to tread.
Once upon a time during a period of marital unhappiness I decided to sketch the situation in game-theoretic terms: you know, a matrix showing wins and losses for each party in a zero sum game, or a prisoner’s dilemma. Bad idea. Does not compute.
When in doubt, fall back on G.K. Chesterton, or at least what you think he would have said — like Yogi Berra, he collects folk wisdom like file shavings to a magnet — and in this case, I think Chesterton once said: ”No rational man marries or joins the army”. The point being that there are things and institutions transcendently greater than one’s self. DQ encapsulated the difference between the conservative and liberal worldview on marriage in one word: covenant. Marriage is, or should be, an historical covenant, not merely a transactional contract between rational utility maximizers.
*”Boob bait for bubbas” was Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase (but not about marriage). He did however have some prescient things to say about the breakdown of the nuclear family back in the sixties, for which he was pilloried as a racist.
A few additional thoughts. It appears that DQ is talking about conservatism more as a psychological disposition rather than as an articulated ideology. However, we should also consider that conservatism is not a monolithic bloc. Without splitting too many hairs, I can think of at least five distinct strains:
1. Classical liberalism, i.e. Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, Hayek –> libertarianism
2. Burkean traditionalism
3. Anti-communism
4. Neo-conservativism
5. Moral majority, mostly evangelical protestantism.
There are no doubt others that I have neglected.
It’s interesting: I think it is fair to say that within each of these five variants “conservatives on balance take marriage more seriously than liberals”, although perhaps for different reasons. The moral majority is obviously religion-based, for example, whereas neoconservatives such as Moynihan uphold marriage for reasons of social science policy, etc.
In the South and other similar areas, we can’t treat our women with too much disrespect because we either train, have trained, or wish to train women in the use of firearms, H2H, and the protection of hearth and home. It’s kind of risky to verbally or physically abuse the females when there’s a high chance they’ll blow a hole in your chest with enough provocation.
The vice a versa is also true. Females, such as Sarah Palin, that were brought up knowing the real difference between life and death, real violence and fake violence, aren’t under the mistaken impression that verbal violence is different from physical violence. They are both two sides of the same coin, the coin of violence. Thus they are less likely to use verbal violence against men based upon the false assumption that things can’t get physical. The knowledge and awareness of reality, brought about by such trainings as hunting or firearms training, has taught them that wishes don’t make fishes. Point the bullet’s trajectory at something and squeeze the trigger and it doesn’t matter what you think will happen. What will happen has happened.
An armed society is a polite society. Because otherwise, it’s just a chaotic place that is useful for piling up corpses when there are no victims and everyone has their equivalent of a nuclear weapon to use on anybody they want to. Most Americans were never taught under this cultural imperative, were never brought up under it, and never chose it once they got a choice come adulthood. That just makes Marin an even more stereotypically falafa land of wishful Utopians, because ‘most’ people aren’t even like that.
Good politics and good ethics comes mostly from an equality of power between factions. Whenever there is a power imbalance, say where Unions are favored over businesses, then injustice automatically occurs regardless of what people may wish. Add in human greed and the results are predictable. Add in mass murderers and the supporters of them, aka the Left, and things get far worse than ‘predictable’.
This, if for no other reason, is why I categorically reject DQ’s description of this place as an echo chamber. Because I reject the premises such a conclusion is based upon. Words, whether spoken or heard, has never corrected an injustice. It was always something else that happened first.
@Danny: True….but I was saying that I don’t know that there *is* a “general trend”. Perhaps, but I haven’t seen any studies on the subject, and my personal experience doesn’t support the hypothesis, so far as I can tell.
I do think that your suggestion about what we judge “ought” to be the trend, based on what we know to be the “general trends” (or maybe “known commitments”) of the two groups, holds more promise for productive discussion.
@gpc31: I’m very taken with the idea of the “covenant” aspect of marriage making a difference. I had “progressive” friends back in the ’70s who were very full of themselves about their wedding “vow” to stick it out “so long as we both shall love”……even after just three years of marriage, I knew the foolishness of that sort of vow. There are plenty of days when I don’t feel “love” for my wife – but the commitment to love her “despite” whatever, “so long as we both shall live” was a decision that I made when I asked her to marry me, so the progressive vow didn’t impress me much.
Having said all that, these two – one on his second marriage and the other on her fourth – have stuck it out over close to 40 years, despite some very tough times. I can only think that they managed to make a covenant between themselves (it certainly did not – consciously, at least – include G-d) that day when they said their vow.
Since many of my friends are liberal, I can’t agree with that statement. These are people who live like conservatives but vote like liberals. But from what I’ve seen, they have the kind of marriages you speak of – very respectful on both sides.
In my world, one of the things I see is that liberals tend to be angrier. I can’t imagine that angry people are very happy marriage partners — so I’ll go out on a limb here and say that, perhaps, some liberal wives around very nice to be around either. I’d also suggest that the victim mentality that characterizes liberals is also going to infect a marriage, with each partner feeling more like a victim than a contributor.