The Culture Industry and "Rate-Your-Mate" Reification

I'm going to risk coming across as just another carping dullard and articulate something I have been turning over in my mind for some months now: that the Culture Industry is somehow complicit in the demise of my marriage. It's something on which I have formed no definite hypothesis, but it is something I apprehend intuitively. All typical objections aside--that marriage is a moribund, monopolistic bourgeois institution, and so on--I do believe there is a lingering attraction to the notion of marriage which defies one's self-satisfied critical sapience. I mean, how else can I explain the fact that I, who credits himself with being an informed, sensible fellow (in most respects, at least) and with having read his Foucault, went in for such a folie-á-deux as marriage? Was I delusional or deluded?

It is my sense, deluded though it may be, that, when one exchanges vows with another, he is extending a promise which exceeds those concerns related to reproduction and genitality. Specifically, I think one extends the promise of a certain financial and material stability to the other--that he and she have come together as a way of consolidating and fortifying certain material conditions, which, absent the collectivity implicit in marriage, would just be all the more uncertain, subject to the vicissitudes of fortune, and, as a result of the anxiety this situation brings, perhaps even to exploitation by others.

What I'm driving at is that marriage is, in a sense, a radically anti-consumerist gesture. When one marries with the intention of holding up his end of the bargain, he essentially suggests a sense on his part a perfect, or as nearly perfect as possible, adequation between his desire and the object of his desire. He reveals that he has entered in a relation with another in which obsolescence and disposibility, if not completely inimical to his happiness in this relation, are completely out of the question as far as he's concerned.

Thus the Culture Industry wages war on one's desire for the security only this harmonious adequation can provide through such products as Sex in the City, which I find the most execrable and pernicious of the Culture Industry's offerings, and "Rate-Your-Mate" quizzes in Cosmopolitan. Such products articulate a univocality of engineered perception in their reduction of individuals to objects by situating them in an economy of symbolic equivalence between individuals and items of consumption: buying Bruno Magli shoes will always help one get over a disappointing lover.

Perhaps I'm just trying to console myself by writing these thoughts, but I can't help believing that my ex-wife has fallen prey to this discourse, a misfortune that, if not ultimately forgivable, is certainly understandable, given how ubiquitous this discourse is. She had so thoroughly focused on what I'm not that she'd lost sight of what I am, just as one laments that her Honda Accord lacks some options offered in newer models. Again, I realize that the "blame-the-Culture-Industry" position can be reductive, and may even verge on conspiratorial paranoia. I also acknowledge how difficult it is from this position to deploy tropes to illustrate what I claim that do not themselves reify people.

Perhaps there is no discursive position anymore that allows one to retain his humanity--not even a faithful, devoted husband.