Marriage Schmarriage

"Don't worry about marriage", says Julian Sanchez. Marriage adapts organically to society as it changes, he says, using those magic words "organic" and "adapt" that are sure to calm the imagination of any post-modern, scientifically sophisticated reader.

Marital Mythology
Why the new crisis in marriage isn’t
Julian Sanchez


Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz, New York: Viking, 432 pages, $29.95

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 293 pages, $24.95

The end, as usual, is nigh. “Barring a miracle,” Focus on the Family founder James Dobson writes in the April 2004 edition of his group’s newsletter, “the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.” Dobson obviously has a knack for apocalyptic hyperbole, but some version of that sentiment haunts many a conservative mind.

It was the eschatological horror of wedding cakes adorned with pairs of little plastic men in tuxedos that prompted Dobson’s prophecy. But the fear of gay marriage is only the most headline-friendly manifestation of a broader concern that the institution of marriage is in a parlous state. As conservatives look at high rates of cohabitation and divorce, especially among poor mothers, many conclude that the institution you can’t disparage requires a helping hand from the federal government to stay afloat. Indeed, it’s not just conservatives: Political scientist William Galston, a former adviser to President Clinton, has argued that marriage is a key component of poverty alleviation, and that government must “strengthen [two-parent] families by promoting their formation, assisting their efforts to cope with contemporary economic and social stress, and retarding their breakdown whenever possible.” The most prominent recent effort in this vein is President Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative, run by the Department of Health and Human Services and funded to the tune of $100 million annually, most of which goes to fund educational or mentoring programs in which couples learn “relationship skills,” often by means of grants filtered through faith-based organizations.

If the link between gay matrimony and the “crumbling” of marriage remains something of a puzzle—for all the ink and pixels expended on the issue, no one has managed a compelling explanation of precisely how allowing more people to marry will induce fewer people to marry—concerns about the state of the family aren’t groundless.

To answer Sanchez' ironically worded puzzler, you only have to point out that the semantic leap necessary to classify two men in a commited romantic relationship as a marriage will simultaneously alter the meaning that heterosexual couples invest in the institution of marriage. You cannot redefine an institution without altering the expectations that you have for that institution. To point out how silly Sanchez's statement is, compare it to this analogy: "precisely how is it that allowing more people (women) to compete with men on professional football teams will induce fewer people (men) to play professional football?".

But to give Sanchez's argument some due, the fact that gay marriage is thought about by so many people in a non-oxymoronic fasion is an indicator of how much the marriage institution has already been redefined. Gay marriage is not so much a threat to traditional marriage as it is a symptom of its decline.

A spate of studies has led to a broad consensus among social scientists that children raised by their biological parents fare significantly better than children raised by single, cohabiting, or remarried parents on a wide variety of dimensions: They’re half as likely to drop out of high school or go to prison, more likely to attend college, and less likely to have behavioral problems or encounter material hardship—differences that may be reduced but do not disappear after controlling for factors such as parental income and education. These differences are apparent even in countries like Sweden, where both social norms and public policy are more hospitable toward single-parent families.

And there’s a class chasm in family structure: Some 3 percent of births to college-educated women take place outside of marriage, compared to almost 40 percent among high school dropouts. The proportion of women between the ages of 18 and 24 who attend college doubled between 1967 and 2000, to more than 38 percent, and fertility rates are significantly lower for women of childbearing age who hold a bachelor’s degree (an average of 1.05 offspring per mom) than for those with only a high school diploma (an average of 1.46). In short, the disadvantaged children for whom the stability marriage provides would be most helpful are also the least likely to enjoy it. “That is what government neutrality has gotten us,” Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), an ardent booster of using the state to promote traditional families, told an enthusiastic audience at the 2005 Conservative Political Action Conference.

Yet two quite different recent books on marriage (and its absence) suggest there’s something seriously wrong with the popular account of the American family’s ills, which attributes them to a recent breakdown in values, caused perhaps by latte-sipping elites who scorn traditional matrimony. In Marriage, a History, Evergreen State College historian Stephanie Coontz, author of the 1992 book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, reveals that marriage has served diverse purposes through the ages, and that the really radical change in the institution was the 18th-century innovation of marrying for love. In Promises I Can Keep, sociologists Kathryn Edin of the University of Pennsylvania and Maria Kefalas of Saint Joseph’s University take a close look at the lives of poor single mothers in Philadelphia, where they found a story much more interesting and convincing than the familiar “values” narrative.

Does marriage, as some conservatives seem to suggest, have an intrinsic nature and a deep purpose that remain constant across millennia, such that changes in its form or meaning should be considered inherently suspect, as unnatural as oceans boiling and lambs shacking up with lions? Not so much, according to Coontz, who finds that when it comes to marriage, the most reliable constant is flux.

While “one man, one woman” has become the clarion call of gay-marriage opponents, Coontz observes that the most “traditional” form of marriage adhered more closely to the rule “one man, as many women as he can afford.” Many Native American groups cared about diversity of gender in marriage rather than diversity of biological sex: A couple had to comprise one person doing “man’s work” and one person doing “woman’s work,” regardless of sex. In Tibet prior to the Chinese occupation, about a quarter of marriages involved brothers sharing one wife. To this day, the unique Na people in southwestern China live not in couples but in sibling clusters, with groups of brothers and sisters collaboratively raising children conceived by the women during evening rendezvous with visitors.

Even within the category of monogamous heterosexual unions, Coontz finds a dizzying variety of motives and meanings associated with marriage. Among early hunter-gatherer bands, trading members to other bands as spouses was, above all, a means of establishing networks of trade and economic cooperation between men. Once each group had members with loyalties and ties to both, barter became a safer bet.

That’s not to say the husbands were in full control either: In ancient Rome, married sons and daughters both lived under control of the patriarch until his death, and ancient civilizations more generally regarded marital decisions as far too important to be left to the whims of the marrying couple.

In the medieval period, too, marriage might be a handy means of cementing an alliance or sealing a truce among rulers. In other times and places, marriage was seen primarily as a means of regulating inheritance or succession. Often, especially where simple market sales of land were tightly restricted, it was the primary means of transferring landed property, and that was seen as the decisive factor in marriage decisions. Such considerations were not limited to the nobility: Peasant farmers who held land in separate strips might arrange a marriage that allowed adjoining parcels to be united. And while formal state approval is regarded in America today as a sine qua non of a valid marriage, the church considered a couple married as soon as they had exchanged “words of consent,” even alone and without formal trappings.

Among the working classes in later pre-industrial Europe, though a village was apt to intervene if a wedding brought a poor worker into the fold, marriage was seen as more centrally about the married couple. This view was encouraged by a church doctrine that recognized as valid any union entered by mutual consent and, later, by an emerging post-feudal economy in which young people were increasingly apt to leave extended families to seek their fortunes in cities or to work their own small plots. But husbands and wives saw each other more as business partners than as lovers. Marriage was a way of establishing an efficient division of labor, and a new widow or widower represented a job opening.

The love marriage, in which people more or less freely chose partners based on mutual affection, was really an 18th-century invention, Coontz argues. It was partly a spillover effect of new political ideologies that saw government as arising from contractual agreements designed to promote the happiness of society’s members and partly a result of further increases in economic autonomy, especially the autonomy of women. As late as the mid-19th century, French wags were still bemused at the new fashion of “marriage by fascination.” Opponents of gay marriage such as Maggie Gallagher sometimes identify this development as the central problem: the idea that marriage is mainly about uniting a loving couple, from which the notion that it ought to be equally available to gay couples follows.

Such critics sometimes talk as though marriage based on love is a recent innovation, rather than a transformation that’s been going on for centuries. As Coontz notes, during the 1950s—the conservative’s golden age for families—it was precisely the prospect of finding personal fulfillment through marriage to your soul mate that gave married life its central place in the social imagination. The vision of domestic bliss familiar from sitcoms like Ozzie and Harriet and The Donna Reed Show found its complement in a spate of self-help manuals and newspaper columns touting a successful marriage as the key to happiness, as couples’ average age at first marriage reached its lowest point in half a century. “In a remarkable reversal of the past,” Coontz writes, “it even became the stepping-off point for adulthood rather than a sign that adulthood had already been established. Advice columnists at the Ladies’ Home Journal encouraged parents to help finance early marriages, even for teens, if their children seemed mature enough.”

What emerges from Coontz’s account is the realization that marriage has no “essence.” There is no one function or purpose it serves in every time and place. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to readers of F.A. Hayek, who in The Mirage of Social Justice spoke of evolved rules and institutions that “serve because they have become adapted to the solution of recurring problem situations.…Like a knife or a hammer they have been shaped not with a particular purpose or view but because in this form rather than some other form they have proved serviceable in a great variety of situations.” Institutional evolution, like its biological counterpart, is opportunistic: A structure that serves one function at one stage may be co-opted for a very different function at another stage.

This is all fine and good, but it assumes that all these different socially adapted expressions of marriage are equally desirable. Do we really want to return to some collectivized social paradigm? Is there something about the way that marriage is defined today that is desirable to retain? Are the social developments to which marriage is adapting itself today and in the future good developments, or is marriage simply devolving with society into some unpleasant post-modern miasma?

Coontz knows the benefits of marriage, but she’s wary of attempts to stand athwart history crying “Stop!” If marriage now seems especially fragile, she argues, that’s not a function of public policy mistakes subject to easy political correction. It reflects underlying economic, legal, and technological changes that are, in themselves, mostly desirable. While not opposed to attempts to help couples craft stable marriages, she warns that “just as we cannot organize modern political alliances through kinship ties…we can never reinstate marriage as the primary source of commitment and caregiving in the modern world. For better or worse, we must adjust our personal expectations and social support systems to this new reality.”

That conclusion may seem excessively fatalistic, especially given Coontz’s own chronicle of marriage’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances. But it does encapsulate a core piece of Hayekian wisdom. Organic social institutions grow and evolve from the bottom up, as individuals change their behavior in light of the circumstances they perceive on the ground. Attempts to freeze or correct them in accordance with a Grand Plan—a vision of how they ought to function that views change as a dangerous deviation from an ideal—are no more likely to succeed for marriages than for markets.

Where Coontz’s history gives a picture of marriage painted in broad strokes, Promises I Can Keep is a close-up, lapidary study of unmarried low-income mothers in eight of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods, culled from interviews with 162 such women over the course of five years. Several of those years were spent living in their communities. Edin and Kefalas’ account makes it clear that the growth of single motherhood among poor urban women can’t be chalked up to anything as simple or straightforward as a “breakdown of family values.”

In a sense, the problem is an excess of family values. Women who dropped out of high school are more than five times as prone as college-educated counterparts to say they think the childless lead empty lives, and also more likely to regard motherhood as one of the most fulfilling roles for women; motherhood is so highly regarded that it becomes difficult to see even a pregnancy that comes in the mid-teens as a catastrophe to be avoided. And far from having lost interest in marriage, the authors write, the women they spoke to “revere it”—so much so that some are hesitant to marry when they become pregnant because single motherhood seems less daunting than the opprobrium they fear they’d face were they to divorce.
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The growing focus on marriage in public policy owes its resonance to two distinct themes that recur in conservative thought: anxiety about unregimented sexuality, and the belief that social problems are better solved by local groups and time-tested institutions. Those tendencies make it tempting to conclude that calls for marital reform and the genuinely distressed state of some families are part of one coherent and insidious phenomenon: the collapse of marriage. Yet as Edin and Kefalas show, the biggest problems with marriage are not first or foremost problems with marriage.

Communities grappling with dim economic prospects, violence, addiction, and high rates of incarceration are going to have trouble sustaining all sorts of valuable social institutions, marriage among them. Broader changes in marriage, meanwhile, need not herald its collapse: They’re an ordinary part of the way the institution has always adapted, organically, to societies that themselves are always changing.

Okay, as long as change has always occured then we need not fear change.