Love & Money 101

Dr. Carrie Miles, organizational psychologist and professor at George Mason University, addresses the ever-changing relationships and roles that these issues have in modern society in her new book, The Redemption of Love: Rescuing Marriage and Sexuality from the Economics of a Fallen World.

On Thursday, June 22, Miles spoke to a young audience at The Heritage Foundation about her book, focusing on a specific chapter entitled, “Love in an Age of Wealth.” Recently returned from a two-week speaking tour in Campala, Uganda, Miles began her presentation by stating that “in this world, love is pretty much beside the point” and that sexual attraction is the driving force behind most marriages.

Miles explained the former economic importance of having children in our old society and the needed labor and security that they provided for their families. “Now children are items of consumption—luxury goods,” Miles said of the different role that children play in society and the economy today. When kids started going to school, and thus could not work to support their family, they became an expense instead of a necessity to the survival of the family, according to Miles. “Having children became an ‘expensive hobby,’” she said. “The opportunity cost of caring for a child is the driving force of the lower birth rate today.”

Miles proposed that “we should purposefully reintroduce the former care and self-sacrifice into the [modern] family” that used to be the standard. She discussed the concept that children were the original social safety net when there was no social security—that people often had more children than they enjoyed to ensure economic stability and provide additional free labor on family farms and businesses.

“Whether a man loved a woman or not, he could not afford to leave her and his family,” Miles said about the old family structure that was more reliant on the collective contributions of all family members.

Now, it is gradually becoming more common for Westerners to decide against marriage, according to Miles, who said that many women claim that having a man around just adds to their work load. “As children fulfill emotional rather than economic needs, there is no reason for marriage as a prerequisite for childbearing,” Miles said. “Having a child meets women’s need of having someone to love,” therefore eradicating the emotional void that husbands often fill.

Though such shifting family ideals have become a reality for many Americans, Miles maintained that traditional family values should be restored to promote unity between husband and wife. “Both old and new systems see love as a means of personal satisfaction,” Miles observed, “which threatens the welfare of children and the future of our entire culture.”

“What is personally satisfying is not always morally right,” Miles said, emphasizing her belief that an overriding value system is necessary to reinstate former family roles in our current materialistic environment. “Such transcendent morality can only be found in religion,” Miles enthused.

She balked at the ethically descending spiral that seems to plague contemporary American families. “It’s not appropriate to leave your wife just because you have a roving eye,” Miles said in an exasperated tone.

The impact of an absent father in a child’s life is significant, according to Miles, who said that these kids often grow up to be emotionally needy, which is just one among a host of other problems. “Children are a blessing that need to be nurtured by their father, as well as their mother,” she said.

A working mother herself, Miles is no stranger to the burdensome challenges that come along with raising children. “Taking care of children is often an arduous task,” she said. “You have to balance self-needs and your children’s needs.”

While she knows that the family structure cannot return exactly to its former economically-centric nature, Miles advocated a conservative reform of today’s disparate, morally downtrodden family and attitudes surrounding marriage, love and the like. “The conservative response is ‘let’s go back to the way things were,’ but we can’t go back,” she said.

Katherine Duncan is an intern at Accuracy in Media, Accuracy in Academia’s parent group.