According to Nick Fuentes, we have an epidemic of “Christian simps.”
“I don’t feel like we have an abundance of affection from women,” the far-right influencer said. “Women are not providing too much. They expect so much from the men.”
In his now-viral Oct. 27 interview with Tucker Carlson, Fuentes criticized men who respect their wives as best friends and equals while bemoaning the scarcity of marriageable women, as if his attitude toward the former had nothing to do with his perception of the latter. For someone who regularly defends traditional marriage, Fuentes is profoundly pessimistic about the institution. Even Carlson, in an otherwise cozy interview, pushed back against Fuentes’s claims.
“All I would say is that, in a happy marriage, all of that goes away,” Carlson said to Fuentes’s juvenile litany of complaints.
It’s tempting to dismiss Fuentes’ take as just one drop in an ocean of crazy. Yet the political commentator, at only 27, has gained a massive parasocial following of young men, many of whom respect and adopt his views. It ought to concern followers of Fuentes that he gets such a fundamental institution of human society terribly wrong.
Fuentes sees marriage as a business merger, not a covenant, which allows him to reduce the union to a scornful calculation of give and get. All the best and happiest fruits of marriage — children, intimacy, fidelity — are predicated on both spouses’ complete and total surrender of self. “What am I getting out of this?” is a question that never even enters the picture.
Don’t take it from me — my wedding is still eight months away. Take it from Leo Tolstoy, who was married for 48 years when he died in 1910. In the first epilogue to his masterpiece, “War and Peace,” Tolstoy presented a vision of incredible marital happiness. The former socialite Natasha and prince Pierre have wed and become dedicated parents, leaving their old selves behind.
Natasha, Tolstoy tells us, is uninterested in matters of petty justice between spouses, the sort Fuentes cannot shake.
“These questions, then as now, existed only for those people who see in marriage nothing but the pleasure the spouses get from each other, that is, nothing but the beginnings of marriage, and not its whole significance, which consists in the family,” Tolstoy writes.
Pierre, we learn, is what Fuentes would label a “Christian simp” — and Natasha the female equivalent. Pierre’s many years of Fuentes-esque bachelorhood did not make him a great man. Natasha did.
“After seven years of married life, Pierre felt a joyful, firm consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt it because he saw himself reflected in his wife,” Tolstoy writes. “Only what was truly good was reflected in his wife; all that was not entirely good was rejected. And this reflection came … as a mysterious, unmediated reflection.”
Can we imagine such happiness in a union in which the husband constantly asks himself whether his wife is “expecting too much from him”? Complete self-sacrifice makes marriage marriage.
We should pity Fuentes. If he sincerely believes what he says, he is one of the many Americans who have seen too few examples of strong, happy marriages, and thus cannot imagine what one would be like.
But we do not have to live by his bitter logic. If young men adopt Fuentes’ attitudes toward dating, they will never attract the kind of women worth marrying. Better to trust Tolstoy over Fuentes and give yourself away.
Caroline Kurt is a senior studying English.
