Today In NYT Op-Eds: David Brooks Wouldn’t Trade His Husband For An Oscar

New York Times columnist David Brooks is kicking Sandra Bullock when she’s down. In his op-ed today, he asks whether winning an Oscar but losing a husband was a worthy trade. Surprise: Brooks argues Bullock, and most Americans, made the wrong choice. And yes, by creating a false rivalry between career and social life, he implies that Bullock consciously made that decision. But even if she did, isn’t it a great trade-off?

Using Bullock’s recent life happenings, Brooks frames his argument like this: is giving up a happy married life worth extraordinary professional success? Here’s why, for Bullock, it wasn’t:

On the one hand, an Academy Award is nothing to sneeze at. Bullock has earned the admiration of her peers in a way very few experience. She’ll make more money for years to come. She may even live longer… Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

Ignoring the fact that an Academy Award, significant amounts of money, and critical acclaim are all palpable measures of success much more valuable than the intangible feeling of being “reasonably happy,” Brooks argues that career triumphs are worthless in the face of an unsuccessful marriage. So then why have a marriage at all? Brooks’ reasons why seem to indicate he has an incredibly unconventional view of marriage or is lucky enough to be in the happiest marriage in human history. At no point in the piece does Brooks cite any real, traceable studies, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his statistics are correct– he is still incredibly wide of the mark.

First up is the age argument: “people are happy in their 20’s, dip in middle age and then, on average, hit peak happiness just after retirement at age 65.” Apparently the fact that people seem to bottom out in happiness during the years they are most likely to be married– in between being single and being widowed– proves that marriage makes people happier. Removing the stress of an unsuccessful marriage– even the drama of successful one– would seem to have some positive effect on middle age, since there’s nowhere to go but up.

Then there are the activities most positively related to happiness, which according to Brooks are “sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others,” he explains– none of which are associated with a married lifestyle. Well, ok, maybe sex. But “socializing after work,” really? Wouldn’t the spouse get jealous, or the kids get hungry if you don’t feed them?

Brooks’ most ridiculous line of defense, however, is that social trust makes people happier. “Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).” Since Brooks doesn’t cite a specific study, it is unclear whether he is comparing Manhattan to suburban Connecticut or Sierra Leone to Greece. But even trusting him so far as to believe this statistic blindly, Brooks doesn’t offer a correlation between marriage and social trust. If anything, one could argue that the nuclear nature of a marriage isolates neighborhoods into tiny, self-sufficient habitats that interact little aside from waving hello while picking up the mail, but certainly the opposite argument is difficult to construct, and Brooks doesn’t even try.

At some point down this long road of uncited statistics Brooks left Sandra Bullock far behind, never to return, because she only served as a launch pad for his fictional trade-off, assuming she made the choice of trading a cheating husband for a Oscar– which sounds like a great deal! But it wasn’t, as much as it would fit seamlessly into Brooks’ narrative, so her losing the Oscar would not have kept him faithful, nor did the Oscar lead deliberately to his extramarital activities.

[Photo via HuffPo]

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