“If you want to do something differently, you’re automatically swimming upstream.”
—Judith Stacey, author of Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China
When the sixteenth century astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the planets revolved around the sun rather than the other way around, his peers promptly ridiculed and ostracized him. Yet his theory eventually proved correct.
Changing deeply imbedded beliefs is hard for most people, even us, and while we don’t imagine ourselves to be anywhere near the stature of Copernicus, by writing The New I Do, we are asking you to rethink what you know about marriage. We acknowledge that it might feel a bit like heresy to suggest it. Since you have gotten to this point in the book, you have seen that many others have attempted to change marriage, too—from anthropologist Margaret Mead, who championed trial marriages, to Ben B. Lindsey, who lost his judgeship when he suggested young adults could have a “companionate marriage,” from the progressives who dabbled in alternative marriages in their quest to make monogamy voluntary instead of compulsory, to Ryan and Lisa, who married not with a promise to be together forever, but just until they had done what they set out to do—have a child together and commit to being the best co-parents they can be for eighteen years.
Maybe that all sounds blasphemous to you, but, when you look at how people are already choosing to structure their romantic relationships, we think it’s smart to question why society continues to hold onto one model of marriage when the people have already spoken—they just will not be bound by those rules anymore. While arrangements like Ryan and Lisa’s may seem unusual, they actually have a lot in common with the “traditional” reason to get married—to bring children into the world in a supportive, loving, and stable environment. Their purpose-driven coming together is one of the most rational and grounded reasons we have ever heard of for two people to tie the knot, and trust us—we have been to a lot of weddings.
Your marriage license, or the one you plan to get one day, doesn’t require you to do anything or be anything either. It just is a legal document that says, yes, you’re married, and because of that, you and your beloved are entitled to a lot of government perks (while also finally being relieved of ever having to hear your Aunt Ethel ask, “So, when are you finally going to get married?”). While busybody aunts will always feel entitled to ask you about your love life (they most likely baby-sat you, burped you, and changed your diapers, so it might be payback time), many wonder why the government needs to know about it.
Why indeed. Why should the state have any say in your romantic partnership? Why should the government give benefits to you because you got hitched and others haven’t—even if they tried really hard to make it happen? Why should the state decide that some relationships are “worthy” and valuable and others aren’t? How does the state even know that a couple is entering into a union with the best possible intentions and therefore deserves all those perks? And why should the government care? Since people are already successfully fashioning all sorts of consensual and committed relationships that embrace a multitude of ways to live, love, and caregive, it appears that they are fully capable of defining their own marital rules and how they might want to dissolve their marriage. Why can’t two people make their own decisions about how to be in a relationship? And why should those arrangements miss out on government benefits just because they may not be based on romantic love?
Many of us are pondering these questions lately. What about you? Do you really care if the state validates your marriage license? Would you still have the same love, devotion, respect, and commitment to your spouse or potential spouse if your marriage weren’t sanctioned by the state? Would you still want to be with your sweetie if the government didn’t offer you financial incentives to be together?
While state laws define who may marry and what happens when a marriage ends, whether by divorce or death, the laws have little say about what occurs within a marriage. Spouses truly are on their own when it comes to their day-to-day interactions, the way they define their roles and share responsibilities, and how they behave toward each other and their children (except, obviously, in instances of domestic violence, marital rape, or child abuse or neglect).
DO WE REALLY NEED MARRIAGE?
Some scholars and academics argue that marriage should no longer have legal status, thereby removing the state from all things marital. That doesn’t mean marriage would necessarily go away; the uniting of two people still has incredible symbolic significance, as this book has illustrated. Instead, marriage might continue as a social, cultural, or religious institution, or some combination of the three. But government would no longer have a say in it.
Despite the various forms of family nowadays and despite the high divorce rate, many believe that the relative stability, commitment, and mutual dependency marriage creates is still the best environment for raising kids, and many people marry because they wish to raise a family. Laws were set up to help spouses do just that. Society has an interest and a duty to protect its most vulnerable—the young, the old, the ill, and the disabled—yet current marriage laws leave a lot of other kinds of people in need of care unprotected.
What about the people who, for whatever reason, are unmarried but have children? They are unprotected. Same-sex couples have long been denied the right to marry, yet about 6 million children of all ages have parents who are LBGT. They are unprotected. More than 5 million children live in a household headed by a grandparent. They are unprotected.
Do those children and caregivers not count? Don’t they deserve legal safeguards, too? We say they do. Can society do better? We believe it can.
Emory University law professor Martha Albertson Fineman says the economic and social privileges marriage offers should instead be given to a different family form than the nuclear family—that of caretaker and dependent. Society has historically relied on married couples to “manage dependency,” she writes, both of children and unemployed wives who stayed home and cared for the children. But women have more economic freedom nowadays and don’t need marriage to protect them, as we discussed in previous chapters. Expectations and desires for marriage today are far removed from what couples expected and wanted years ago. Instead of promoting marriage, many say the state should be doing its best to encourage and support responsible, stable, and committed caregiving, no matter what form it takes.
“The most compelling reason to end legal interest in marital status is the simple ethical obligation to treat the wide variety of caretaking relationships fairly,” write Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller, founders of Alternatives to Marriage Project, now called Unmarried Equality.
Among the ideas being proposed are state-recognized Intimate Care-Giving Union (ICGU) statutes, which recognize that those who caregive are often economically vulnerable and offer protections to reduce their risks. Others suggest the idea of a “minimal marriage,” which also acknowledges and protects caregiving relationships and sets up some legal restrictions on who can have marital rights. It doesn’t, however, require that those rights be exchanged with just one person, since adults have all sorts of caring relationships with a variety of people—whether nonexclusive sexual relationships as practiced by polyamorists; or those offering financial or emotional support, such as adult children who look after an aging parent or a friend; or people who share a household and finances but not necessarily sex. Others suggest expanding traditional nuclear families to become “combination families” or “combos”—three to eight adult members who gather for the purpose of co-parenting and sharing domestic and economic responsibilities, whether in one household or several nearby (sounding somewhat like a more modern take on the communes of the 1960s and ’70s). Like so many of the models presented in this book, those sorts of “combo” arrangements already exist to various degrees.
Still others suggest a pluralistic model of marriage. Instead of directing people toward one social institution, traditional marriage, the state would help create numerous institutions with various “package deals” of benefits that would give couples the freedom to choose the model that works best for them, similar to the three levels of marriage the Greeks and Romans had. Again, that’s already happening—Covenant Marriages, as you’ve seen in a previous chapter, while not widespread, are an alternative model to traditional marriage. Why not offer other models as well?
At the heart of each of these proposals is the idea that society should be more equitable while also protecting its most vulnerable. By extending benefits to those who caregive, the definition of family would be broadened to reflect all the nontraditional families that already exist and ones that may develop in the future. Single parents would get the support they need, as would whoever cares for the elderly, disabled, or sick—from childfree couples to singletons. Children would benefit greatly, whether they have one, two, or multiple parents; whether they have gay or straight parents; or whether they are being raised by grandparents or other relatives, friends, or caregivers. In other words, society as a whole would be much better served if it created safety nets that have nothing to do with partnerships based on love, gender, intimacy, and dependency.
Although we only addressed changing marriage in these pages, it’s clear that there is lots of room for growth and transformation when it comes to family. We believe strongly that, if marriage as it is doesn’t evolve, the downward trend of partakers will continue—even with the added gay and lesbian populations increasing the numbers. Our current version of marriage keeps us stuck in the status quo, and it shames people regardless of which side of the vows they are on.
“A society without marriage is one with no divorce and with no spinsters or bachelors, widows or widowers, or unmarried solitary individuals of any sort,” author and sociologist Judith Stacey notes. “Nobody’s social status or fate hinges on the success or failure of their love life or marriage.”
So what’s our incentive to keep this outdated model? Rather than do away with state-sanctioned marriage, law professor Martha M. Ertman proposes that business models be extended to intimate relationships through domestic relations law. “An understanding of marriage as akin to corporations, cohabitation as akin to partnerships, and polyamory as akin to limited liability companies would enable us to avoid attaching moral judgments to the differences among those relationships. Regulation would turn on the functional needs of particular arrangements rather than moralistic reasoning and ideas about naturalistic hierarchy.”
It also would alleviate inequalities, not only within relationships (such as between the homemaker and the breadwinner), but also among the many flavors of relationships people have today. And, it would provide a safety net for those who don’t have rights and protections under current laws, such as couples that cohabit.
While it won’t solve every problem, Ertman believes it offers “the unique promise of providing new ways of understanding basic financial issues that family law, hampered by outdated notions of status, has failed to resolve.”
IT’S TIME TO QUESTION OUR ASSUMPTIONS
Whether you agree with these kinds of radical reinventions of partnerships or not, it’s clear that many have begun to question the assumptions society has about intimate relationships, marriage, and family. We don’t see a downside to that; in fact, we believe that examining what society has accepted—and often insisted—as “the norm” is a step forward. We believe it should move from being a private conversation between a couple contemplating how they want to spend time together in a committed relationship and for what purpose to a broader, open, and honest societal discussion about coupling.
Marriage has already shifted from an institutional model, in which husbands ruled the roost and there was a clear division of gendered labor, to a companionate model, in which love, friendship, and partnership are emphasized, to an individualistic model, in which personal choice, happiness, and self-development determine whether a marriage is successful or not. Family law has slowly morphed to address those shifts, including the adoption of no-fault divorce.
If nothing else, the dramatic changes in the marital landscape over the decades has proven that marriage can be an incredibly adaptable and inclusive institution—if it’s called on to be so.
Early in this book, we proposed an Occupy Marriage movement because we believe that marriage will work better and be more successful if people like you start taking ownership of it. That means you will have to think consciously about what you want to get from your marriage.
If you are already married and believe that you have played out your current marital model for all it is worth (a traditional marriage, we presume), why not reinvent and reinvigorate it—not by “working harder” at it, as so-called “experts” will advise, but by starting from scratch with a new way of experiencing it. Consider it a new job description; you used to be in charge of making sure X happened. Now, you are responsible for the success of Y and Z. It’s a new challenge that requires you to be innovative, open-minded, and flexible to make sure it works. Enthusiasm helps.
We are encouraged that more men and women are increasingly accepting the idea of nontraditional families—same-sex marriage, unmarried couples with children, and poly-families among them—and favor egalitarian marriages in which paid work, housework, and childcare duties are shared. We are encouraged that people increasingly question whether tying the knot is something they really want to do or whether they feel pressured into it. Even with the changes we lay out, marriage may not be right for everyone, and that’s okay. The goal isn’t to get everyone to marry, but rather to help those who choose to marry have successful unions by their definition of success. That’s why we wrote this book. And we are especially encouraged that many more people—like you—are interested in exploring ways to do that.
Whether you are marrying to become parents or for companionship, whether you are hoping to improve your longtime marriage or deciding to live apart, you now know from the stories we have shared with you that these models work. The couples we interviewed have the marriages they want because they married or tweaked their partnerships with intention. That is what we consider a happy, successful marriage.
And now it’s your turn to figure out what you consider a happy, successful marriage, even—and especially—if it goes against the one-size-fits-all model. This is your marriage, no one else’s. You can make it happen.
We’ll be behind you, rooting you on.