David Brooks is Perplexed. Again.

Poor David Brooks. As he continues to wage his internal war between the forces of market conservatism and the forces of decent liberalism, he just can't look deeply enough to figure out what makes him uncomfortable about the world.

Today, he plunges into the not so hot-button social issue of personal finance within marriage.

I'll overlook the fact that the phrase "personal accounts" is the new GOP mantra, but I'll smile as I do it.

Hold on, Brooks is saying. Half of all couples now have separate checking accounts. He states that while having individual financial interests and resources shouldn't be used as an indicator of marital health,

I'm saying we should pause before this becomes the social norm. Private property is the basis for our market democracy. But private property in the home is an altogether trickier proposition.

For one thing, separate accounts can easily turn into secret accounts.

But here's the rub: Couples find it easier to have personal accounts in part because women are not only in the work force, but thriving there. Brooks'consternation is not that there are separately controlled accounts, but the fact that, by definition, these accounts increasingly belong to women.

In previous centuries, men owned the homes that they shared with their wives and children. Wealthier families often had a study or an office in the home that was the exclusive domain of the man of the house.

In the not-to-distant past, which Brooks undoubtedly romanticizes, husbands were expected to excel in the public sphere (of which Brooks says, "Public life is individualistic. It's oriented around goals like self-development, self-advancement and personal happiness." A very good summary of mens' roles in previous generations) while wives were expected to maintain, and thrive in, the realm of the private. Men earned money, and while women tended to spend it, they were spending their husbands' incomes on household maintenance.

In effect, wives were employed by their husbands as managers of their houses.

He points to a Texas woman who says, "It's so freeing to be your own person, and not feel like someone is looking over your shoulder," and replies, "It's not clear whether she's talking about a marriage or a real estate partnership." How odd that Brooks should compare modern marriage to business dealings when half a century ago, the foundation of Women's Liberation was solidified with the same complaint. The difference? Women now have sufficient financial and social equality to blur that line themselves.

Brooks also plunges straight off of the conservative playbook in this piece. It's an interesting, idealistic sentiment that he expresses about marriage. According to David, "The goal of family life...does not revolve around individual choices but around the unconditional union of souls." This is beautiful and poetic.

And according to his ideological friends, it is false. Marriage and family life, in the view of the right, are about procreation. If it's about procreation, then there is in fact a strong reason to join finances and every other aspect of two lives in order to create a strong and united foundation to provide for and raise children.

If family life is actually about the "unconditional union of souls", and not solely about having children, then the discussion changes radically. First of all, those souls may in fact find it more reasonable within their unions to maintain a degree of separation in their finances. Secondly, there is every reason to think that the souls of gays and lesbians can create these unions just as readily as heterosexual men and women do.

But Brooks is not a Christian conservative. He's an idealist who happens to live on the difficult ideological ground of contemporary Republicanism. What he's saying about marriage and family is basically right, but it also exposes his sudden surprise at the fact that individuals with an income might prefer discretion in the spending of that income. No, not just "individuals", but women with incomes would, all by themselves, decide not to subjugate the entirety of their financial productivity to the joint purview of their relationships. In other words, when it comes to money, women and men are very similar. But Brooks is unable to dig deep enough to say outright, "Since when are women interested in providing for themselves?"