When your relationship is just a series of transactions

The spirit of our age elevates autonomy over all other goods, so it rejects commitment. We are increasingly transactional rather than relational.

Marriage and parenthood are on the decline because marriage and parenthood involve giving up autonomy and entering into lifelong committed relationships. In a lifelong committed relationship, you make yourself vulnerable to the other person. It’s better and cleaner to make everything contractual and arm’s length, the modern mind reasons.

As author Christine Emba describes the late-20th century feminism that helped build this spirit, “Dependency was pathologized as weakness, and connection was seen as a risk.”

You see this spirit in op-eds arguing that all married couples should have legally enforceable 50/50 custody agreements. “There is a lot of very tidy and businesslike communication,” one writer describes her new life, which is better than marriage. “Divide the tasks and responsibilities evenly, and commit to completing your share without having to be reminded.”

You can see hints of it in the efforts to flatten the language we use to describe relationships. “Partner,” a business term, replaces “husband,” “wife,” “girlfriend,” or “boyfriend.”

You can see this spirit in how couples handle finances and are told to handle finances by experts. “Having joint bank accounts can lead to power imbalances and a loss of autonomy,” is the argument made by Suze Orman, who calls herself “the Money Lady.”

In this video, Orman gets philosophical about marriage or the “partner”-ships she lumps in with marriage: “You all should be autonomous human beings. You’ve come into this relationship as an autonomous human being.”

Orman advises couples to pay joint expenses proportional to their income: from each according to her means.

Now check out this letter to Slate’s financial advice columnist, forced to become a relationship advice columnist:

“My partner and I have been together for eight years. We are committed to one another but neither of us wants to get married. We keep our finances separate and pay housing expenses based on a ratio of who makes more,” the letter said.

The autonomous humans in this “committed” partnership do not blend their finances, and they don’t even tell each other their finances, apparently. He only learns what her income is when their accountant accidentally sends her finances to him.

He gets upset because she’s making more than he is and more than he thought she was making — and yet he’s paying most of the shared expenses. She considers it an invasion of privacy that he even knows.

Slate’s columnist includes this apt comment:

“It sounds like there were already some much deeper issues in your relationship that you needed to work through: issues with resentment, commitment, and trust.”

Exactly. He thinks the problem is simply that she didn’t inform him of her raises. I would suggest the problem might be that they tried to set up a zero-trust relationship. They tried to be “committed” without making themselves vulnerable to one another and without cultivating a mutual spirit of sacrifice.

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This isn’t just about this couple, though. They had bought into the Suze Orman way of reasoning. It’s the modern, smart, individualistic way of seeing other people. Sure, it’s materialistic and instrumentalist, but at least everyone’s autonomy is kept untouched.

If this sounds miserable, that’s because it is. If young people today are sadder, it’s because too many of them thoughtlessly submit to this alienated spirit of the age.