Some people will see a contradiction between these two passages. One talks about if you live rightly, your life will be of ease. The other is quite clear that the world will hate you: some would be stronger. They would say that if you are being praised by the rulers and elite of the world, you are doing it wrong.

I used to think that but I no longer do so. I find that those who attempt to live for Christ have a peace that does not exist when we are driven by our lusts and desires. I also find that if you live that way, you are considered freaking weird. Because we obey, even imperfectly the law.

The classic example here is cohabitation. I am considered weird because I did not sleep with the GF, nor live with her. Most people in tne Antipodes shack up and get married when they want a party or to make it OK with the family — they often have been a couple for years.

DUBNER: So does this mean that marriage is more popular than ever in the U.S.? It most definitely does not! We’ll get into that later. For now, let me note that Wolfers himself is, importantly, not married – technically at least.

WOLFERS: It could be my essential Australian-ness. There is actually quite seriously in countries, in many other countries, there is a competing institution to marriage, cohabitation. And it’s a huge competitor to marriage in countries like Sweden. And increasingly in Australia as well. Many of my high school friends are not formally married but they live as husband and wife.

DUBNER: So Wolfers, an Australian who’s lived for many years in the U.S., is one of those cohabitors, with children. The person he cohabits with happens to also be an economist, Betsey Stevenson, who’s currently serving on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

WOLFERS: So I met Betsey while I was in graduate school. You know, it’s a very standard thing that happens in economics, you see that cute girl across the room at the labor economics seminar. That’s how many great relationships form.

DUBNER: Just the way they draw it up in all the great romantic novels.

WOLFERS: Exactly. And later that week was Halloween. There was a Halloween party. So I brought a six-pack of Newcastle Brown, which at the time took a big chunk of my student budget. And this rather brazen lass came and took one of them and struck up a conversation. And I knew she was an economist, which sets anyone’s blood racing straight away.

For those who do not know, I better warn you: Newcastle Red is not good beer.

Id you do not do this in the Antipodes, you are weird. The second you tell people you have a GF they assume that it is a sexual relationship. But, as someone who has just seen a relationship end (The Engineering Diva and I split a month or so ago) I can tell you the pain was not made worse by guilt.

For I consider that the ALmighty was wise in the way he designed us, and that includes the way we fall in love.

Proverbs 3:11-20

¹¹My child, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, ¹²for the Lord reproves the one he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.

¹³Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding, ¹⁴for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold. ¹⁵She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. ¹⁶Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. ¹⁷Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. ¹⁸She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy.

¹⁹The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; ²⁰by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew.

1 John 3:18-4:6

¹⁸Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. ¹⁹And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him ²⁰whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. ²¹Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; ²²and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

²³And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. ²⁴All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

4:1Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. ²By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, ³and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it i already in the world. ⁴Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. ⁵They are from the world; therefore what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them. ⁶We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

What is the discipline of God?

It is struggle, pain, tears and shame. For shame leads to repentance, and repentance to reconciliation with Christ. Pain is a signal — it tells us we have done something wrong: do not move that part again for a while. Worry and Fear are also signals — they should stop us walking down the alley or parking an exotic in a progressive area (it will be scratched if you are lucky: torched if the natives are restless. And by natives I generally mean ecology students, regressing to tribalism).

What is our discipline?

It is getting up each morning and going to the eight a.m. lecture (which means you leave home before seven-thirty. It means that your father the blog author is making breakfast when the alarm goes off an hour before that although he would much rather have another hours sleep.

A lot of what we call duty is love, for it is putting the needs of the other person before your own. And we are told to love our brethren and believe that the work of Christ on the Cross is sufficient to our needs. That love is going to hurt us at times. That love is going to feel like work, for a large amount of the time it is work.

WOLFERS: This was the style of marriage that Gary Becker first described, the idea of marriage as sort of like a factory. And the point is you get married because you can do more together than you can apart and it’s just like Adam Smith’s pin factory. The way you do more together is by specializing. And specialization was Dad would go and work in the market and Mom would stay at home and do the enormously complex part of running a household. And she would be really, really good at it, because she’s got a lot of practice. She would be much better at it than Dad. And as a result, the pie is bigger for both or them. So marriage is productive and it makes both Mom and Dad better off.

DUBNER: So marriage used to create, in economist-speak, “productive complementarities.” This meant that a man – the CEO of the household – wanted a spouse who could do the things he didn’t do, most of which involved running the household. But as we all know, a lot has changed in the past few decades, especially for women. Better birth control, more labor-saving devices in the home, and a lot more work outside the home. So the share of married women who are employed has risen from 6 percent in 1900 to 30 percent in 1960 to nearly 70 percent today.

WOLFERS: We’ve moved to what economists would call consumption complementarities. We have more time, more money, and so you want to spend it with someone that you’ll enjoy. So similar interests and passions. We call this the model of hedonic marriage. But really it’s a lot more familiar than that. This is just economists giving a jargon name to love. So you want someone who’s actually remarkably similar to you or has similar passions that you do. So it fundamentally changes who marries who.

DUBNER: But that’s not the only change it produces.

WOLFERS: And the question is why does anyone get married anymore if these productive complementarities have gone away?

DUBNER: Yes, that is the question: why do we still get married? We live in a country where people don’t want to be locked into a two-year cell-phone contract – so why opt for a 30- or 40- or 50-year monogamous partnership? One reason is a belief that marriage makes us … happy. We hear that a lot – that married people are, on average, happier than the non-marrieds. True?

WOLFERS: Most people get this wrong. It turns out at any point in time the people who are married are happier than the people who are not married. People then infer from that, Oh boy, marriage must make you happy. But the alternative explanation is reverse causation — that if you’re grumpy who the hell wants to marry you? So this is selection effects. I think this is really important, because selection effects, that people who are married are selected, they’re not a random group of the population, are something that economists and statisticians talk about all the time. and so it seems to be completely obvious that the grumpy, the hard to employ, the selfish would all be far less likely to be marriageable and therefore be less likely to be married than others. And we actually say that married people look better on almost all measures, life expectancy as well, they’re healthier, than non-married people. But I think that’s because spouses are looking for happy, healthy, functional people.

Well, I think Wolfers and Stevenson (yes, it’s the same freakenonmics show: the analysis is useful for fisking) have given us the current assumption son which marriage is defended and seen as breaking from the point of view of the elite. That marriage is now for pleasure, for love.

We see it in our advertisements: in the things that appear from disqus in the comboxes, in the google ads — and in the manosphere. That marriage is about pleasure, and if you want to make sure that it lasts keep the fires of passion running. Otherwise it’s over.

However, I am not sure.

Firstly, the song I’ve just embedded makes me weep. I hear the pain within it. The slutgoddess Tori is playing (she makes up personae for performance) says that if she has lost the tingles, it’s time to walk, and it is ripping her apart. We may be able to control our fertility, but we cannot control our hearts.

secondly, it takes a lot of money to keep a family in a big city: locally you need to gross around 100k outside Auckland and 150K inside to live in a nice neighbourhood (where the house will cost close to a million dollars in Auckland, and if the mortgage rates increase by a half percent your budget will go red). The average salary is 30K: do the math. You both have to work. All the jobs that were specialized still need to be done, but occur on the second shift. Ask any football team about getting coaches for kids: most men are not available because they need to work overtime.

Thirdly, we forget that love is not about the tingles. Love is a hard master: harder that the law, for the law can be completed. Love never is. It never gives up. Love drives us to perfection: and our new command is to love, putting the needs of our brothers and sisters first and serving them.

And if the world does not consider you weird, you are not obeying this command. If this does not hurt, you are doing it wrong.