The WEMP

Recently, I’ve been pondering the continued effects of what is known as the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP) on modern culture. The WEMP is at the heart of a number of cultural practices we take for granted nowadays. For example, the ability to choose a marriage partner, the high level of independence a married couple has from their family, and the expectation that the young couple will largely finance themselves—these are all centuries-old cultural practices quite specific to northern and western Europe.

The evidence suggests that the WEMP began even in medieval times, but it certainly kicked up a notch around the time of the Reformation, which makes a lot of sense since that was the era when the economic, political, and general cultural power shifted from southern Europe to the north.

The WEMP was actually born out of the relative poverty of northern Europe. It was because parents did not have the money to pay a dowry to their children that the children had to go off to work to finance themselves. Crucially, this was true even for women. Thus, the typical age of marriage for a young woman was much later than in other cultures and was usually in the late teens or 20s.

Another interesting side effect of this was that the age discrepancy between brides and grooms was much smaller than elsewhere. It seems that the norm across cultures and throughout history is that women marry shortly after puberty, while men are expected to establish themselves first and so marry later. Thus, the groom is usually quite a bit older than the bride, often much older.

The WEMP has been seen as a significant reason why capitalism took off so strongly in northern Europe, even though the city-states of Italy had already invented it. Since it was already part of the culture for young people to take paid employment before marriage, there was a ready-made workforce for capitalists to tap into.

It’s easy to see how this pattern transitioned effortlessly into the early days of industrial capitalism. But, ultimately, it was the industrial revolution that would cause major problems. Those problems began to show up towards the end of the 19^th century. Ironically, one of the main signals that things were starting to crack at the seams was something that we tell ourselves was a source of “progress”, namely, the rollout of the modern education system.

The official narrative is that education was needed because factory work was somehow more advanced and required smarter workers. In fact, what was really going on was that the number of available jobs was falling. Industrialisation started to create large surpluses. Removing young people from the labour market was a way to ensure wages remained relatively high. But that created a lot of young people hanging around with nothing to do. Many of them turned to crime and other antisocial behaviour. School was a way to keep them off the streets.

In addition, school was part of the ideological battle going on at the time between the state and the church. The church had been a provider of education for centuries. Secular reformers wanted to break its stranglehold. Thus, public schools ended up becoming tied in closely with the increasingly secular nation-state.

While times were good, none of this fundamentally challenged the WEMP. It was still the case among the general public that teenagers would go off to work and save money in order to get married. However, the problem of oversupply created by industrial capitalism created the massive boom and bust cycles, of which the Great Depression is the most notable. You had 33% unemployment in modern Western nations at that time.

When you have an economic bust that lasts several years, what that means is that a whole generation of people looking for work can’t find it. As a 15-year-old, you might be trying to get a trade. But you don’t get one until you are 18 or 19. The beginning of your adult life has not only been pushed back several years; there is now a background of uncertainty around your economic future.

If we think about it that way, then we see that what was really at stake was the way in which western nations initiated their young people. The default social script for centuries had been that you went off to work. But now you couldn’t be sure that the work would be there.

Governments tried to address this problem in a number of different ways, but the continued rollout of education was one of the main ones, since it took large numbers of young people out of the labour pool. Education really took off in the post-war years. The government was able to finance it because of the massively increased tax take that the public had been conditioned to accept during the wars.

For a while, the main effect of this on the WEMP was simply to push back the age of marriage. Once upon a time, you’d begin working in your early to mid-teens. Now, many people were finishing high school and not working until their late teens. Then university became widespread, meaning that people didn’t begin working until their early 20s. In lockstep with the rollout of mass education, the average age of marriage crept upwards. Not coincidentally, the immediate postwar years were the exception since the economic boom of that time meant everybody could find work, and people married younger, hence the baby boom.

The WEMP was still in place during this time; it had just been pushed back as people began their working lives later. The state had helped to solve the problem of oversupply by providing more and more education. This seemed like a pretty reasonable compromise, and it created the cruisy and enjoyable teenage years that most of us would have grown up with.

While the education provided by the state was free or as good as free, none of this burdened young people, and the system was relatively stable. But, of course, that changed when university had to be paid for, and then paid for some more, and then paid for even more. Fast forward to today, and we have one third of the young people going to university and accruing large debts that need to be paid off afterwards.

So, we went from a system where you’d start working in your teens and begin saving money straight away to where you don’t start working till your early 20s, and then you have to spend years and years paying off the debts accrued from a degree that you never really needed in the first place and which is really only there because of the economic oversupply problem that still exists in the background, meaning there aren’t enough jobs available. That would be grotesque enough, but especially in the United States, you now graduate into a completely toxic corporate environment where all kinds of ideological nonsense is used to again gloss over the fact that there aren’t enough jobs.

Now, of course, there’s never any single reason that explains complex social phenomena, but I think one of the main drivers for all of this is the WEMP, which is tied in with the fact that the way we initiate young people into society is through work. That system has been in place for many centuries; it created the modern world through industrial capitalism; it is the source of our success. That’s why nobody wants to get rid of it, and why we are twisting ourselves into absurd knots trying to keep it all going.