Letter From Montreal

Thinking About Families

My daughter has had only a glancing experience of what has come to be known as the heteronormative nuclear family. She has one cousin, begotten of a surrogate contracted to my elder brother and his male partner. Her closest friend is the daughter of a single mother conceived with sperm from a donor. She says that her father is the North Star. Her next closest friend was for years the daughter of a single mother (recently remarried) who chose to keep the accidental product of a one-night stand and move back in with her mother in Montreal to raise her. As long as she has known about parenthood, my daughter has known that some children have two fathers and others have two mothers, and that some have only a mother and not a father, and others only a father and not a mother. Her own experience of the heteronormative nuclear family was brief. By the time she was six her parents were living separately.

This is all unexceptional in today's urban environment. My daughter does not bear a stigma as a child from what would once have been referred to as a broken home. The prejudices of the very recent past simply never existed for her in the past place. The force of the moral injunction against divorce drained away long before her birth, leaving an institution irrevocably changed in its essence. People repeat the solemn vows still written into the texts of the ceremony with all the gravity they can muster in a world that will not hold them to a solemn vow. The finality asserted in those words can only be notional in the absence of a community serving to enforce it. I am grateful that my daughter does not bear a stigma for the choices of her parents. I am glad that we were free to choose to exit from an arrangement that had ceased to be satisfactory for us. I am grateful for a world so forgiving and rely on it to give me second chances along the path to healing and self-discovery that is the narrative of my life. And yet when I consider the depopulated familial world we pass on to my daughter -- an only child with just one other only child as a cousin, two estranged parents who can scarcely be in a room together without low-level conflict -- I can't help but feel that our liberation from stigma or entrapment within constraining commitments was also purchased at a cost that we did not perceive until the bill came due.

All the married people I knew a decade ago are divorced. Some went on to remarry. This cluster is anomalous amidst the demographic group from which my social cohort was drawn. A supermajority of the college educated still raise their children in intact nuclear families, in sharp contrast to the non-college-educated for whom the nuclear family has, in effect, withered entirely away as the basis of the social order — an event that happened with little notice. I lived in a somewhat liminal pocket of bourgeois America: in New York City, amid writers and other minor toilers in the culture industries who never thought of money, either because we fashioned ourselves as aristocrats of the spirit who were beyond such base concerns, or because (so it turned out) some were in possession of large trust funds that underwrote their status as aristocrats of the spirit beyond such base concerns. Unsurprisingly, it tended to be the latter group, and those who married into it, that proved able to make marriage work.

It has long been observed that inasmuch as college educated America is the setting in which marriage is most likely to be practiced, it is also the setting in which it is least likely to be preached. Indeed our little corner of it was a setting in which the full spectrum of au courant attitudes -- from casual denigration to programmatic denunciation (tote bags boasting of one’s abortion; tote bags portraying the carcass of a man impaled on a knife blade) — were on offer to those securely ensconced within it. No one risks stigma for having tried and failed to make a marriage work, in no small part because the force of community as such has been so attenuated. The community neither provides much in the way of succor nor constrains the choices of its members, which is to say that it is no community at all. For part of what constitutes a community as such is the ability for the collective will to establish a boundary that is the flipside of providing a sense of belonging to those who adhere to its limits. How this force of compulsion that was absent from our lives came to be reconstituted into what I will call an "astroturfed pseudo-morality" -- manufactured by activists and orchestrated as a series of disciplinary spectacles on social media -- is one of the central stories of our time that we have been telling here and will continue to tell, moving beyond the schematic and taxonomic with which this Substack began, to the realm of the personal and the lived. The subject is more than occasion for talk of an ideological turn. We underwent it ourselves.