Waves can cleanse. They carve beauty into stone. They carry away rot. They reshape a coastline that needed reshaping. The first waves of feminism did just that. They corrected the injustice. They gave women a voice in public life. They challenged genuine wrongs. Some erosion was necessary.[1]
But not all waves are equal.
A swell can restore a shoreline.
A tsunami erases it.
The question before us is whether the fourth wave of feminism has become something more destructive than reformative.
A tsunami does not discriminate. It overwhelms. It pulls foundations from beneath homes. It tears children from structures meant to shelter them. It empties villages and leaves a vacuum where order once stood. Cultural movements can operate the same way.
Fourth-wave feminism, emerging in the early 2010s and amplified by social media and movements such as #MeToo, is characterized by digital activism, identity politics, and an intensified emphasis on personal autonomy and subjective experience.[2] Its language is empowerment. Its engine is individual sovereignty. Its moral grammar often reduces to emotional authenticity: if I feel it, it must be true; if I experience constraint, it must be oppression.[3]
But marriage — particularly Christian marriage — is not built on emotional weather.
Marriage is not biology alone. It is not chemistry. It is not mood. It is a covenant. It is sacred architecture. It is an order binding two wills beyond instinct and beyond passing psychological climate.[4]
Here is where the erosion begins.
The first unspoken catechism of our age is this: You do not need the other.
Not cooperation. Not interdependence. Not complementary reliance. The ideal self is autonomous, self-defining, self-protective, and self-actualizing. Yet the human person is not designed for sovereign isolation. From Aristotle’s understanding of man as zoon politikon to the Christian vision of the person as relational and communional, the great anthropological traditions agree: we are not self-originating units negotiating contracts but beings constituted in relationship.[5]
Men and women are not interchangeable, solitary actors. The most ancient human story is not independence but bonding — covenant, kinship, and shared obligation. Civilizations were not built on emotional assertion but on families holding structure under pressure.[6]
To suggest that men and women can flourish indefinitely without mutual reliance is not liberation; it is anthropological fiction.
This does not mean women are weak. Nor does it mean men are unnecessary. It means both are incomplete alone in ways deeper than economic independence can solve. Even modern sociological data suggests that durable marital bonds correlate strongly with economic stability, mental health, and child well-being.[7]
The second catechism is more subtle: Freedom equals exit.
If emotional climate shifts, the structure may be abandoned. If fulfillment declines, departure is justified. If dissatisfaction lingers, the covenant becomes negotiable.
Nearly half of American marriages end in divorce.[8] While some separations are tragically necessary due to abuse or grave injustice, the normalization of dissolution as therapeutic self-actualization has reshaped cultural imagination.[9] The language is empowerment. The aftermath is often fragmentation, financial strain, loneliness, and quiet relational exhaustion on both sides.[10]
Men rarely admit the dislocation. Women rarely confess the solitude. Both carry private grief.
The tragedy is this: the culture that promised liberation frequently offers autonomy without restoration. Reinvention without reconciliation. Validation without repair.
A tsunami pulls more than structures. It pulls people into the undertow.
When erosion is gradual, we reinforce foundations. We build sea walls. We fortify the structure. But when acceleration becomes the movement itself — amplified through digital outrage cycles, legal immediacy, and peer affirmation — erosion becomes exponential.[11]
Conflict increasingly moves first toward litigation rather than mediation. Sacred vows translate into procedural filings. Emotional storms are treated as legal emergencies. Courtrooms replace sanctuaries.[12]
Storms are real. Abuse is real. Injustice is real. Protection is necessary.
But emotion is not governance.
Civilization survives not because storms cease but because structures withstand storms. Because walls are reinforced. Because sandbags are prepared before the water rises. Because people believe some things are worth preserving even when desire shifts.
Fourth-wave feminism did not invent emotionalism. But it elevated subjective feeling to moral authority.[13] It often equates constraint with oppression, endurance with weakness, and departure with courage.
Yet perhaps the deeper courage is the opposite:
The courage to remain.
The courage to repair.
The courage to humble oneself publicly.
The courage to resist peer-driven escalation.
The courage to rediscover sacred boundaries.
This is not a call for women to submit to injustice. Nor is it a defense of male negligence. It is a call for both men and women to recover moral architecture — a recognition that marriage is not sustained by mood but by covenantal commitment.[14]
A tsunami leaves a vacuum. Water recedes, dragging debris and memory with it. Shorelines flatten. Villages disappear. What remains is not freedom but emptiness.
Restoration takes years.
You do not restore a coastline by shouting at the sea. You restore it by rebuilding foundations, replanting roots, reinforcing breakwaters, and refusing to rebuild on sand without structure.
If cultural stability is to return, men must recover responsibility. Women must recover sacred vision. Both must reject the lie that autonomy is the highest good.[15]
Marriage is not left to wind.
It is not governed by the weather.
It is not sustained by the emotional climate.
It is sustained by covenant — by a sacred order transcending instinct and appetite.[16]
If we fail to rebuild that order, erosion will continue quietly. Homes will thin. Families will fracture. Children will inherit instability as normalcy.
But if we return — not to nostalgia, not to domination, not to caricature — but to sacred mutuality, something stronger than the storm can emerge.
Waves can cleanse.
Tsunamis can destroy.
The question is whether we will keep mistaking one for the other.
Footnotes:
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963).
Prudence Chamberlain, The Feminist Fourth Wave: Affective Temporality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), 46–78.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1601–1605.
Aristotle, Politics, I.2; John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (1981), §11.
Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008 [1947]).
W. Bradford Wilcox, Get Married (New York: HarperCollins, 2024).
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Marriage and Divorce Rate Trends (latest available data).
Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round (New York: Knopf, 2009).
Lyman Stone, “Divorce, Family Instability, and Child Outcomes,” Institute for Family Studies, 2020.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (New York: Pantheon, 2012).
Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (2005), §11.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
Ephesians 5:25–33 (NRSV).