Covenant or Contract? Rethinking Marriage in a Red‑Pill Age

The internet’s story about marriage

When I look at how marriage is talked about in the United States right now — at least from where I sit — it feels like the whole thing is being framed as a bad business deal for men. Especially if you have any kind of net worth. The way the internet and social media present it, marriage looks like an extremely negative, risky, dangerous, and unsmart proposition. I keep seeing example after example of rich, successful men — or men everyone assumes are rich and successful — getting tricked, suckered, simped, hoodwinked, and bamboozled into relationships with women who seem to be playing a much longer, colder game.

The story goes like this: she gets him to commit, they get married, and then she waits. She waits for him to slip up, make a mistake, or just get tired. Then she uses the court system to seize his fortune or leverages the children as direct pipelines into his money. She bleeds him financially for years. From the outside, it looks like an extremely profitable business model. It looks commonplace. It looks widely accepted. In certain corners of the internet, it even looks like the goal an increasing number of young women are openly chasing.

You see people cheering that behavior on. You see clips of women bragging about “getting the bag.” You see young men sounding the alarm, warning each other not to enter into the institution of marriage at all. And when a man does step into a marriage that looks questionable from the outside, they dogpile him. They ridicule him, call him a fool, shame him publicly for “falling into the trap” again, like he hasn’t studied the cautionary tales of all the men who came before him.

It’s easy to plug these public stories into that script. I think about what unfolded between Iman Shumpert and Teyana Taylor and how much he reportedly lost. I think about the wedding that never happened between Stephen Jackson and his ex, and how he tells that story as a narrow escape. I think about Dak Prescott calling off his engagement when his fiancée refused to sign a prenup and then turned around and filed for child support, likely locking him into fifteen or twenty thousand dollars a month for the next couple of decades. Those are the headlines. Those are the clips that get passed around as proof that women are using marriage and children as monetization pieces.

But when I step back and look at what I’ve lived, and not just what I’ve watched, it gets more complicated.

My divorce didn’t look like the meme

When I went through my own divorce, I suffered a tremendous financial loss. It was a serious setback. But it wasn’t the cartoon version of loss I see online, where a man just writes a giant check to a woman who never helped him earn the money. In my case, I bought our home solely in my name. I signed the mortgage. But when we got married, I did what I thought any decent husband would do: I put her on the deed. I gave her rights to the home, but she had no financial obligation attached to it. When things went bad, and she chose to stay in that house without paying the mortgage, the bank didn’t come looking for her. They came looking for me. They called me, not her. They ruined my credit, not hers, because she was never on the hook to begin with.

That situation hurt me financially, but it didn’t feel like she “won” and I “lost” in the simple way the internet likes to frame these things. Life did not get easier for me after the divorce, and I’m sure it didn’t get easier for her either. We both paid for the breakup. We just paid in different ways. There wasn’t a clean winner. There wasn’t some glorious payday. From inside the experience, it looked a lot more like two people stumbling away from an accident than one person walking away with a suitcase full of cash.

That’s what I’ve learned most about this phenomenon we’re watching in the United States. There is the spectacle of marriage and divorce that we are exposed to in the media and online, and then there is the quieter, messier reality that most people live. And between those two worlds, there is a deep disconnect.

Losing the covenant, keeping only the contract

From where I stand now, I believe much of that disconnect stems from something deeper than money or the law. A lot of people have lost their spiritual grounding. Because of that, they are confused about marriage itself — the institution, what it means, where it comes from, why it even exists. When we lose sight of marriage as a covenant we make before God, we open the door for all kinds of confusion to rush into that space we used to call holy matrimony. Once the covenant is gone, all that’s left to argue about is the contract.

When we forget that, the waters get muddied fast. People who, in another time or in another culture, would never have been considered ready or eligible for marriage are stepping into it simply because they were told it’s the next step. It’s what you do after enough time together. It’s the natural progression of life. They chase it because tradition or social pressure says it’s “time,” but they don’t understand the responsibilities that come with it, the reasoning behind it, or the weight of the promise they’re making.

Because we’ve started treating this institution so lightly and flippantly, people are increasingly comfortable jumping in and out of it. Marriage becomes about what there is to gain: status, security, lifestyle, money. The conversation gets boiled down to “Who’s winning?” and “Who’s losing?” “What makes me happy?” and “What’s not making me happy anymore?” It stops being about covenant, sacrifice, and service, and becomes a scoreboard.

To me, that points to a larger unraveling of our foundational beliefs. Marriage used to sit at the bedrock of our understanding of family, community, and responsibility. When you watch people mock it, exploit it, or treat it like a temporary arrangement, it feels like watching cracks spread across the foundation of the society itself. It is a scary thing to witness. It is a hard time to exist if you are trying to hold on to historic, faith‑rooted ways of viewing partnership and marriage.

My red‑pill phase and why I outgrew it

In the years after my marriage ended, I went through my own version of this confusion. For a while, I cast off the idea of marriage as something holy and started to buy into the narrative that marriage itself is a scam. I let a lot of that rhetoric dig in. Red‑pill culture, men’s forums, reaction videos — all the voices telling me the game was fixed, that the laws were stacked against men, that women as a group were not to be trusted. It was comforting in a dark way. It gave me someone and something to blame.

But the longer I stayed there, the more I realized how incomplete and hollow that framework really was. That way of thinking may be good at pointing out certain real problems — double standards, legal risks, manipulative behavior — but it is almost completely devoid of context that actually helps young men grow. It talks endlessly about what women do, what “society” does, what “the system” does, but it rarely turns around and asks, “What am I choosing? What am I responsible for? How did I participate in this outcome?”

At some point, I had to be honest: we as men affect and influence society far more than society should be allowed to affect and influence us. We are not helpless. We are not children. We are called to be aware enough, mature enough, and knowledgeable enough to enter into partnerships — and ultimately marriages — that will serve our families and honor God. If we decide to marry someone who does not share our faith, who does not share our values, or who does not share our vision of what a household should be, that is not something we can lay entirely at the feet of “culture.”

If we fail to express what we truly desire from partnership — how we see roles, how we see money, how we see parenting, how we see God’s place in the home — and we just assume the other person is on the same page, we can’t be shocked when they reveal a different script later. If we haven’t done our due diligence, if we made weak choices, if we selected our partners based mainly on shallow criteria — how she looks, how she walks, how she makes us feel in the moment — rather than on deeper, eternal values, then we can’t blame society for the crumbling of the institution. It starts with us. It starts with individual choices.

A second chance, chosen differently

I know that’s true because I’ve been given the chance to make that choice again. I’ve been fortunate enough to step into marriage a second time. This time, I chose differently. I moved with more wisdom. I leaned harder on spiritual guidance. I paid attention to character and calling, not just chemistry. I looked for alignment in faith, in purpose, in how we define love and loyalty. I slowed myself down. I took the covenant seriously. And the results have been tremendous compared to my first attempt. Not perfect, not pain‑free, but deeply different.

That experience has made it impossible for me to keep saying “marriage is a scam” with a straight face. What I can say, honestly, is that treating marriage casually is a scam. Treating it as a shortcut, a hustle, a lifestyle upgrade, or a mood is a scam. Marrying without spiritual grounding is a scam. Ignoring red flags, ignoring God, ignoring wise counsel — those are the scams we run on ourselves.

We have to get away from casting all the blame outward — on women, on courts, on culture — and put personal accountability back in the front seat. We need to slow down, examine ourselves, and start making decisions that shape the kind of society we actually want to live in, instead of just complaining about the one we’ve created. If we want a world where marriage is respected, stable, and holy again, that won’t come from algorithms or outrage. It will come from men and women who refuse to treat marriage as a game, who choose their partners wisely, who honor their covenants, and who are willing to take responsibility for the vows they make and the homes they build.