Dear Mom:

When an economist looks at marriage, they figure that it’s original role was to deal with a market failure: the services provided by housewives were not available on an open market. Now that this is changing (and the more that it changes, the more equal women become), the value of marriage is thrown into question. Those economists have come up with the idea that the new point of marriage is to provide consumption partners to get consumption synergies and economies of scale. But this is using an ancient institution for a very different purpose: why would it work?

In the long run I think we’ll discover that it doesn’t. Repurposing marriage in this way is an attempt to make lemonade out of lemons: the modern parts of our culture push marriage but then it also needs to work with the late modern and postmodern parts. Black people have figured it out, so it’s just a matter of time before the rest of us move on.

So stop bugging me, okay?