16
The Marriage of True Minds
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 116
Dave Peper, our pistol-packing neighbor in Yamhill who had been homeless seven times in his life, started drinking at the age of twelve and dropped out of high school, much like the Greens and the Knapps. After being kicked out of the house at age seventeen by his disciplinarian father, he enlisted in the navy but was expelled for cocaine use. He worked for a company making dynamite, partying on the side, but soon he ran out of money and lost his car and home. One stormy night, he showed up soaking wet at his parents’ door, hungry and forlorn.
“Can I stay the night?” he asked when his mom answered the door.
His dad, hearing his voice, bellowed from the other room: “Tell the little son of a bitch no. He made his bed, and now let him lie in it!”
Before putting Dave out, his mom handed him $50 and told him to go to the YMCA, where he found a cheap bed. He continued to struggle with alcohol and drugs, including cocaine, heroin and meth. Dave married at twenty-four and had a daughter, Tara, but continued to drink too much and abuse drugs. When the marriage collapsed, he started up a new romance with April Simmons, a teenager who had some success checking his bad habits. Dave started his own dog kennel, Ramshorn Boarding Kennel, just down from the Kristof farm, and this kept him working seven days a week. Dave had a strong work ethic and an excellent way with dogs, and was equally charming with their owners, so the kennel business showed promise.
Dave Peper tends to the chores at the dog kennel he runs in Yamhill, Oregon. Dave has overcome struggles with alcohol and drugs, with the supreme help of his wife, and now runs a very successful business. (photo by Lynsey Addario)
WE GROW UP THINKING that marriage is about roses, Valentine chocolates and growing old together—but it’s also a social and economic institution that benefits not just children but also the parents themselves. There’s evidence that this is particularly important for men, and that wives sometimes act almost as probation officers, steering their husbands away from risky behaviors and toward jobs and childcare. This may seem saccharine or traditionalist, but researchers find that one of the factors that most reduces recidivism in male convicts is a solid marriage. Likewise, a 2018 study found that one of the factors correlating most strongly with success for black men was marriage: 70 percent of married black men are in the middle class, compared to 20 percent of never-married black men.
Married families turn out to be good for a community as well. A major research project called the Opportunity Atlas by Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard University, and others looked at neighborhoods and which factors were associated with upward mobility. Not surprisingly, the richer the area, the better the kids did, and the same was true of neighborhoods with more university graduates, with higher employment rates, and with better school test scores. But one of the highest correlations with upward mobility was the percentage of two-parent households in the neighborhood. That may be because areas with two-parent households have more social capital and stronger role models for boys.
DAVE AND APRIL HAD a daughter, Breanna, but April resisted marrying Dave because of his ongoing alcohol problems and her concerns that his debt would undermine her credit rating. Meanwhile, Dave struggled to balance his work with his alcoholism. He accumulated four convictions for driving under the influence and for a time had a breathalyzer on his truck, requiring him to blow (nonalcoholic) breath to start the vehicle. Dave figured out how to outwit the device: he blew through a fifteen-foot hose, pushing all the clean air into the machine so that he could start the car (the government has improved its devices so that this would no longer work today). Dave and April had all their money invested in the property and the dog kennel, were heavily in debt, and everything depended on Dave devoting himself to the dogs rather than to drink.
Then in 2003, Dave received the worst phone call any parent can get: Tara, just eighteen years old, had been killed in a car crash when her boyfriend lost control of the vehicle and swerved into oncoming traffic, killing both instantly. She had just graduated from high school and was preparing to attend college in the fall. “She had everything freaking going for her,” Dave told us, his voice cracking, as we sat in his home by the dog kennel.
Tara’s death devastated Dave. “I can’t even describe the despair, but I really went to drinking hard,” he recalled. “I just didn’t give a shit at that point really about anything.” When drunk, Dave sometimes exploded, pounding his fist through the walls. When April saw him losing control, she would take Breanna and drive to a friend’s house to stay the night, for she didn’t want the girl to see her dad drunk or violent. Three or four nights a week, April was fleeing the house, and Dave’s dog kennel was also suffering. It looked as if he might lose his business, his home, his girlfriend and his remaining daughter.
The couple underwent family counseling, but it didn’t seem to help much. Desperate to keep him from buying alcohol, April kept all the family cash with her, along with the checkbook. After Dave began returning cans and bottles to stores for cash to buy liquor, she made sure that there were no returnables in the house. She even made sure there were no odd pennies or nickels lying around.
Dave started a line of credit at the Cove Orchard grocery store to buy liquor, even though April visited the store and begged the owner not to let Dave purchase alcohol. Several times Dave dropped by our farm and asked Nick’s mom or dad if he could borrow a bit of cash; they gave him the money, guiltily, fearing it would go for liquor.
Then one day in November 2005, Dave had been drinking all day and was “stump drunk,” as he described it. After running out of alcohol, he drove into Yamhill to buy more beer at T&E, the town grocery, and then dropped by the gas station to fill up. When he tried to drive off, he hit another car. That driver called the police, who arrested Dave and took him to the county jail.
“You’re ruining my life,” Dave shouted at the police officer from the backseat of the squad car. Even in his haze, he knew that under tightened drunken driving laws, this fifth DUI could mean a felony conviction and up to eighteen months in the state penitentiary, plus lifetime loss of his driver’s license.
“Mr. Peper, your life is not ruined,” the officer responded calmly. “Everything is going to be okay, you just can’t see it right now.”
Dave screamed at the officer: “I want to bring you to my house and tie each one of your appendages to one of my horses and whip those sons of bitches until my arms fall off.”
April received a phone call from the police about Dave’s arrest. Furious, she let Dave stew in jail overnight rather than bail him out immediately. The next morning, sobered up and sitting in his blue jail uniform, Dave was terrified and remorseful. I’m going to lose everything, he thought to himself. What’s April going to do? Is she going to be gone for good this time? That was when Dave decided that he had to give up alcohol to try to save his marriage and business and keep his daughter.
The next morning, April went to the jail and bailed out Dave, and then they had a tough conversation. His lawyer had recommended that Dave enroll in an inpatient rehab program to show the court his determination to become sober, but these programs were extremely expensive and he had no health insurance. April had health coverage through her job, but because she had never married Dave, he didn’t benefit from her policy. It wasn’t clear how he would get treatment.
That’s when April did something extraordinary. Three weeks after Dave’s arrest, she married him—so that he could get on her Kaiser health insurance. Then he enrolled in a $30,000 one-month inpatient rehab program, and she took a leave of absence from work to run the dog kennel while he was away. With an act of faith in a partner who didn’t really merit it, she stepped in to save him.
By the time Dave’s court date rolled around in 2006, he had successfully graduated from rehab, was sober and had committed to never touching alcohol again. The judge put him on work release, letting him stay out of jail but keeping him on four years of probation with an ankle bracelet, plus a lifetime revocation of his driver’s license. The judge also ordered him to apologize to the police officer he had threatened with his horses.
WE’VE ARGUED THAT, in retrospect, conservatives had a point in emphasizing the importance of family structure. But conservatives in the George W. Bush years tested various strategies to strengthen marriage and families—such as marriage promotion—and they didn’t move the needle. It seems the conservatives also neglected two critical factors that have undermined families in America, particularly in low-income communities.
The first of these damaging factors is mass incarceration and the sevenfold increase in the number of people in jail or prison since 1970. The strain on families has been compounded by the prison system’s practice of sending inmates far from home where family members can’t easily visit. It then charges extortionate rates for phone calls from prisons, creating another barrier between inmates and families.
A second harmful force has been the decline of well-paying blue-collar jobs, exacerbated by the erosion of unions and the failure of the minimum wage to keep pace. Marriage is in many ways an economic institution, and when American men without a college degree experienced a decline in earnings in real terms after 1970, they became less marriageable. Indeed, the MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues found that when Chinese trade competition badly affected certain areas of the country and lowered male employment, marriage rates also fell—and out-of-wedlock children increased, as did the share of children living in poverty. The labor market shaped the marriage market. The decline in marriage is not because working-class men and women disdain marriage. It’s that social and economic policies have made low-income men less attractive as marriage partners.
Families are also undermined in America by the lack of paid parental leave, which only seven other countries worldwide do not provide. Some evidence shows that those leaves may increase breastfeeding rates, reduce infant mortality, reduce postpartum depression and get dads more involved in their kids’ lives.
Even if marriage promotion doesn’t work, a few alternate strategies have been shown to strengthen family structure. Lifting the minimum wage or providing pay subsidies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit results in men who marry at higher rates. Helping young men get jobs through the Career Academies program, which trains high-school students for vocational occupations, raises the marriage rates of participants. Programs that move low-income children to better neighborhoods also raise their marriage rates.
Perhaps the most effective strategy to promote marriage is simply family planning. When girls avoid getting pregnant at seventeen, they are more likely to marry in their twenties and raise children in a two-parent household. Some 70 percent of pregnancies among single women under thirty are unplanned, and by helping those women plan childbearing, we can improve their outcomes and their children’s.
Yet, partly because of abortion politics, family planning is toxic. Even a bipartisan program like Title X that provides contraception and has nothing to do with abortion has lost two-thirds of its inflation-adjusted funding since 1980.
DAVE PEPER’S LIFE HAS BEEN transformed since his rehab. He hasn’t touched alcohol and he also quit his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit after thirty-five years. He threw his energy into his dog kennel, even expanding it, working hard to win new customers. Dog owners, some of whom came from far away to drop off their pets, noticed. He began earning a nice income to support April and Breanna and used some of the profits to renovate their house and add a patio and hot tub in the back.
Ten years after his conviction, in 2018, Dave successfully petitioned the court to get his driver’s license back. Now he and April drive with their new boat for weekend jaunts on nearby Hagg Lake. He has added a pool in front of their home. Breanna graduated from high school and now has a good job working as a dog groomer; she is a pal of our daughter. When Breanna began dating a black man from Portland, we wondered what Dave, a conservative Trump supporter, would think. “I admit, it took a little getting used to at first,” Dave told us. “But he’s a great guy, and he’s good to Breanna. I really like him.”
Dave was lucky to get arrested, he says: “That night saved my life. Had I kept drinking I’d be dead right now.” He also deserves credit for his work ethic and great determination to overcome his alcoholism. But he was even luckier to be with April and to be embedded in a family that saved him.