The Striver Marriage

Above a certain class water mark, marriage has become more of a lifestyle product than a sacred rite which makes one man and one woman ‘into one flesh.’ Charles Murray writes about this phenomenon, informed from a statistics-heavy perspective, in his recent book on the increasing class divisions in White America entitled “Coming Apart.”

What is the striver marriage? It’s seen as a capstone lifestyle good, ideally achieved after both partners earn a master’s degree and both have secure positions at golden brand name corporations in a premiere city like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, or Mordor-on-the-Potomac. Failing that, a good job in a tony suburb will do.

The idea behind this marriage is that it is a union between equals. If one or both partners cook, they cook as an obsequious passion, usually under a popular dietary trend rather than an ethnic culture. It’s much more common to hear someone who is passionate about ‘paleo’ or ‘gluten-free’ cooking than it is to meet someone who cooks within a family tradition that might have been more familiar to previous generations.

The strivers are expected to have only a few children, and those children need to go to either a good private school, or otherwise to an exclusive magnet public school. In some more daring cases, the parents may home school their children, as was normal for the middle class or better in America before the growth of mandatory government schooling.

Strivers will usually go through a set of ‘long term relationships’ lasting a couple years or so, and then they may move towards marriages, in which some portion of them will last about as long as their past relationships did.

These types of people, who make up the part of the SWPL class that actually has purchasing power, receives endless criticism and resentment from all quarters. Poorer racial minorities hate them for their patronizing attitudes and habit of bidding rents up. Leftists harry them for being bourgeois while aping some of the outward fashions and life patterns of bohemians. They hate themselves, also, because it’s the only group that they are publicly allowed to express dislike for. Conservatives dislike them for their snobbish attitudes about food, culture, and dress, along with their comparative irreligiousity. Jack Donovan dubs them ‘elves,’ and calls for their annihilation.

Striver marriages do not bear much fruit, because people have the urge to reproduce themselves as they are, and the costs for reproducing this hothouse line of people are absolutely enormous, despite none of their educations being particularly rigorous or demanding. Their educations are simply expensive, mostly ornamental, and more about being useful to state power than being useful to civilization.

The majority of these people do not achieve the ideal — their careers are unlikely to be all that successful, they get out-competed for real estate by well-heeled foreigners from more dynamic economies, and they have trouble transitioning from ‘hooking up’ to low-status monogamy.

The word that we use to describe these ‘marriages’ does not describe the same thing in reality as past versions of marriage, leading to a lot of confusion about what it means. In other more secular European countries, it’s more common to avoid the formal term, but in the US, there is still the insistence on misusing language to describe what baby boomers would have called ‘going steady,’ except with more lawyers involved in the breakup.

Considering that this is the pattern of life of the slowly rising administrative class, any relationship pattern that deviates from that will seem disgusting and perverted to them. Whereas someone more traditional will be disgusted by homosexuals and transexuals, the elf finds the fecund, patriarchal family to be an abomination that sends them into fits of rage and nausea to even think of it being legal. If anything, the rage towards the old family pattern far exceeds anything said by the ‘homophobic’ or ‘transphobic.’

This inversion is just about never remarked on, because it is a little embarrassing, but it is human nature just the same. This is also not to say that ‘both sides are equally intolerant and therefore equally bad’ — the striver-marriage is what is odd and unsustainable, and the older form is what has been successfully adopted & maintained by every great culture in human history.