Noli Irritare Leones

I’ve been trying to think how to phrase my thoughts on a heated discussion of shotgun marriage that has been taking place on at least two blogs. While I was waiting, two comments were made at Amanda Marcotte’s blog that, between them, cover my view – but you need both of them.

The opening salvo in this particular debate comes from Hector, commenting at Hugo Schwyzer’s blog.

While I think any man who gets a woman pregnant has the obligation to offer a marriage proposal, it seems as though Bristol didn’t want to get married in this case, and that’s her decision. I think that the link between marriage and procreation should be more emphasized _before the fact_: i.e., you shouldn’t sleep with anyone who you would not be willing to marry in the event of a pregnancy.

Predictably, Hector gets some flack for this sentiment. Amanda Marcotte thinks he makes “proposing sound as fun as getting a cavity drilled. You do realize some men want to get married because they’re in love?” MsAnon quotes the proposal of Mr. Collins to Elizabeth Bennett, in Pride and Prejudice, as an example of how terribly unappealing a prospect it would be, to be married out of a sense of obligation. LisaKS writes from experience of marring Mr. Really Really Wrong because she got pregnant at 18.

The problem I have is that I actually do see some merit to the “don’t sleep with someone you wouldn’t be willing to marry” idea (up front, ahead of time, that is – not that you should be obliged to form a really bad marriage because you already made the mistake of sleeping together – sometimes skipping ahead to the shotgun divorce settlement is wiser), and at the same time see some limitations to it.

Why there’s actually some merit to the idea is explained by encephelopath, commenting at Pandagon:

“i.e., you shouldn’t sleep with anyone who you would not be willing to marry in the event of a pregnancy.”

I think there might be some merit to the framing of this idea, though his version of things sounds horribly oppressive.

There are lots of situations where we prepare for the low probability, worst case senario even though most of the time the prepared for event never happens. Every time you get in a get in a car you put on a seatbelt in case you get in an accident. Make a living will so you don’t spend decades on life support. Stuff like that. It’s not likely that you’ll end up in a persistent vegetative state, but the possibility makes you prepare for it anyway.

A better way to phrase his precaution might be, “Never sleep with anyone you wouldn’t be willing to share 20 years of child custody with.” Still not very romantic…

The only input men have into whether prenancy ends up happening is the sex part. After that they don’t get any say. That’s as it should be because all things are not equal. Men never carry the pregnancy to term. After the sex it out of men’s hands.

Women have a different set of decision making points. The stakes are higher for women, but they can opt out after the prenancy occurs and say, “Nope, I’m not doing this.”

To push the car wreck analogy too far, when the accident happens women have the opportunity to stop things, step away and let the car get wrecked on its own. OK that is does push the analogy too far.

And, later in the same thread, Amanda Marcotte makes a comment that gets at the limitations:

Jha, the problem with that advice is most people sleep with people that aren’t long term prospects, but you can’t know that until you’ve hung around for awhile. But if you believe that every sexual partner has to be marriage material, you won’t admit that you were wrong, and you’ll stay in bad relationships longer than you should.

Deliberately sleeping with someone you don’t want to be with more than a week is sometimes a way to buy yourself freedom by getting over that ridiculous social expectation.

Now, to my mind, an unplanned pregnancy is not that unlikely and rare of a worst case scenario, definitely common enough to be worth bearing in mind in deciding with whom you should sleep. For which reason I totally disagree with Amanda’s second paragraph. Birth control fails, many such failures are not followed by abortion, men have no right to expect or demand that the woman get an abortion – and shouldn’t – and it’s wrong to walk away from a baby. Therefore, the common attitude that the use of birth control, and legal availability of abortion, can just be assumed to take care of the problem of pregnancy, so that you can now sleep with someone that you absolutely couldn’t tolerate sharing a child with – someone that you really truly don’t want to see for more than a week – is, to my mind, dead wrong.

If your likely reaction to an unplanned pregnancy would be to be at each other’s throats – don’t sleep together. If you absolutely couldn’t stand having this woman be the mother of your child, don’t sleep with her. If your reaction to finding out she was pregnant would be to be angry and resentful and think that she tricked you, don’t sleep with her. If you wouldn’t be able to get your act together to cooperate with her, don’t sleep with her.

And, yes, vice versa, if an unplanned pregnancy would put them at each other’s throats she shouldn’t be sleeping with him, but I think it works better giving the admonitions from the point of view of the guy, because you can see why legal abortion doesn’t settle the question. He doesn’t, and shouldn’t, have the right to expect her to get an abortion. So we don’t even need to get into how moral a choice abortion is or isn’t – it’s enough that it’s something to which a man does not have an entitlement, just because he’d have prefered no strings. He has no business, ethically, assuming away the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy, by figuring that she’s using birth control, and figuring that, of course she’d abort if the birth control fails.

To my mind, this does mean, to at least some degree, just in terms of ordinary human consequentialist reasoning and setting religious strictures aside, that you shouldn’t be sleeping with people you know darn well you’d never want to marry, just because for the moment you find them hot.

On the other hand, that said – look, to some approximation, every guy I ever had between my legs was someone I’d consider marriageable. Not because I was a good girl who waited till marriage, or even till an engagement ring, or even till I had someone who had actively talked about marriage. Not that I was actually expecting to marry every guy I slept with. Just – if we started to make out, and you were enough not what I wanted, I’d have broken things off before we got to any act that would involve the least risk of pregnancy. A couple of times, frankly, I was unkind – it felt like necessary self-preservation. And then I learned not to even get started in those cases. But in any case, whether I was kind or cruel in how I managed it, if I thought you were going overboard with alcohol and drugs, if I thought you bossed me too much, if I didn’t respect your goals, if you had any of a number of deal breakers, or even if I couldn’t name the reason I knew I didn’t want you over the long haul, never for a minute did I even attempt sexual intercourse with you. If I did, I had at least some respect for your brains and character, as well as fondness for your body, and I’m not pitying your wife now.

But still – reality is, there are more places that a pregnancy can find you than simply “I was using this person for sex” or “I know that I’d absolutely love to marry this person.” There’s “part of me would jump for joy at the thought of marrying, and another part says, hey, you’ve only known each other a couple of months.” There’s “we really loved each other once, but now our relationship is on the rocks, and I’ve been trying to make up my mind whether to stick it out or break up.” There’s “we thought we really loved each other, but as we talk about the reality of a child, suddenly we realize that we’re not on the same page about a whole lot of things we had been taking for granted.”

If the only reason not to get married is that you’re young (but legally adults!) and the pregnancy came first – if you otherwise love each other, and work well together, and want to stay together and raise this kid together – I’m not convinced that a shotgun marriage is such a bad idea. Sure, statistically, your odds of lasting are worse than they would be for an older couple. But, to borrow a phrase from Run, Fat Boy, Run, the toothpaste is already out of the tube. You’re already having the kid, you’re already planning to stay together, and your odds of making it work aren’t going to get worse because you also marry.

At the same time, I’ve talked to people who were in shotgun marriages where, by their account, the red flags were plain to see even before the wedding day. Where there were reasons the young people wanted to ignore their elders’ advice to marry and make the best of it, and, sure enough, those reasons did come back and bite them. Sometimes, sharing parenting as best you can without getting married may be the best you can do. Sometimes, this particular shotgun marriage would even make your child’s future less secure.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 8:11 am and is filed under Marriage, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.