IS MARRIAGE
A HITTING LICENSE?
Since the eighties, the focus of our fears for women in marriage shifted from mental to physical damage. From the madeup bruises of Farrah Fawcett in The Burning Bed, to the horrifying reality of Nicole Brown Simpson, this new image of a wife—battered by the man who is supposed to love, honor, and cherish her—has become one of the public faces of marriage in America.
Domestic violence is, of course, a serious problem. But is it really true that getting married puts women at special risk for violent assault? Of course, many wives are abused. But so are many live-in lovers and even casual girlfriends. In New York, state and local officials estimate that as many as one-third of crisis cases of domestic violence they handle now involve dating couples.1 Yet even experts who know better consistently imply that the blame for domestic violence lies not at the feet of violent men but in our ideas about marriage itself.
So two eminent scholars titled their influential essay on rates of domestic violence “The Marriage License as a Hitting License.”2 In their well-regarded 1998 book When Men Batter Women, two top researchers Neil Jacobson and John Gottman ask why domestic violence continues. “Perhaps most importantly,” they conclude, “marriage as an institution is still structured in such a way as to institutionalize male dominance, and such dominance makes high rates of battering inevitable. . . .”3
Even highly respected researchers, well aware that domestic violence is not confined to wives, tend to use wife abuse and domestic violence interchangeably, a linguistic practice that in itself suggests that marriage puts women at heightened risk.” [V]iolent crime against women is largely a matter of husbands assaulting wives,” say Jacobson and Gottman flatly. They go on to clarify in the next breath “Women are virtually as likely to be killed by husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, and ex-boyfriends as by strangers.”4
Domestic violence is perhaps the only area in which social scientists casually use the term husband to mean any or all of the following: the man one is married to, the man one used to be married to, the man one lives with, the man one is merely having sex with, and/or the man one used to have sex with.
“Is spouse abuse on the increase . . . ?” a reporter asked Dr. Daniel O’Leary, author of a landmark study on marital aggression. Without missing a beat O’Leary replied, “My guess . . . is that it is more common than it was 25 or 50 years ago, partly because aggression is accepted and used so commonly by dating couples, in particular, and by engaged and young marrieds. . . .”5 In a 1996 article in Family Relations, Alfred DeMaris and Steven Swinford come straight out and announce it: “Following others’ terminology . . . we have used the terms husband and wife throughout the article to indicate an intimate partner, regardless of official marital status.”6 Researchers routinely compare rates of assault between what they call registered or de facto or common-law marital unions, blurring the profound cultural, legal, and psychological differences between cohabitation and marriage.
The less well-informed lay public, including public officials, are even more likely than experts to talk as if domestic violence and wife-battering are synonymous. So an article in a health magazine about mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence was called “Should Police Officers Be Required to Arrest Abusive Husbands?” as if abusers seldom showed up without wedding rings.7 When Mayor Giuliani launched a new program to combat domestic violence in 1994, aides described it as a new problem “to track wife-abuse cases” and to train officers “to be more aggressive in arresting violent husbands.”8 When Mario Cuomo passionately denounced domestic violence he automatically spoke with disdain about “husbands hitting wives.”9
So powerfully entrenched is the idea that marriage aids and abets domestic violence that in several states, legislators have proposed—or actually passed—legislation affixing warning labels about domestic violence to marriage licenses. In Massachusetts Barbara Gray, who drafted warning-label legislation when she was a state representative, described it as a way to warn couples “that one out of two relationships have an element of abuse in them, and that’s something they should consider before they get married.”10
One of the sponsors of warning labels, Washington state senator Margarita Prentice, put it this way: “The origin of the wedding ring represents part of a chain binding the wife to her master. I would say, simply, ‘Beware. Stop, look, listen, and be cautious.’ ”11 Good advice, perhaps, in general. But when it comes to domestic violence, is it really marriage we need to warn young women against?
No doubt, the only fail-safe method to avoid domestic violence is to avoid intimate relationships altogether. Women who have never married and don’t have a boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend—are just about completely safe from domestic violence, although most would consider the price of this “insurance” much too high. But the research clearly shows that, outside of hying thee to a nunnery, the safest place for a woman to be is inside marriage.
Wives, for example, are far less likely than single women to be crime victims overall. When it comes to all crimes of violence (including domestic violence), a 1994 Justice Department report based on the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that single and divorced women were four to five times more likely to be victimized in any given year than married women. (The widowed, however, are the least likely.) Single and divorced women were almost ten times more likely than wives to be raped and about three times more likely to be the victims of aggravated assault than wives.
Interestingly, even though men are more apt to be victims of violent crime than women, marriage protects men from violent crime as well. Bachelors were about four times as likely to be the victims of a violent crime as husbands.12
When it comes to domestic disputes, the overwhelming majority of husbands and wives resolve their conflicts peaceably. About 8 percent of wives and 6 percent of husbands in the 1994 survey reported that any of their arguments had become physical in the past year; slightly fewer said that they or their spouse hit, shoved, or threw things during a fight. Just 18 percent of these wives and 7 percent of their husbands (according to the wives’ report) were cut, bruised, or seriously injured as a result. Thus when it comes to what we commonly think of as battering—physical violence that results in injuries—only about 1.7 percent of wives and about three-quarters of 1 percent of husbands—are attacked even once each year.13
Figures such as these come from surveys that ask men and women to report on arguments that became physical. But data gathered from women’s shelters point to families terrorized by much higher levels of systematic male violence. Perhaps, as Michael Johnson argues, two kinds of domestic violence exist: “common couple violence” and “patriarchal terrorism.” Common couple violence arises when ordinary arguments get out of hand, involves aggression by both partners, happens relatively infrequently, and does not usually escalate. Patriarchal terrorism, by contrast, is a means by which a small proportion of men control “their” women; the beatings are always initiated by the men; most women do not fight back; and the violence is frequent, severe, and escalates over time. Surveys do a very poor job of catching this type of severe violence, and we know little about the role of marriage in either precipitating it or preventing it.14
While men and women are about equally likely to get physical, wives are far more likely to be injured by domestic violence. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey found that husbands are about thirteen times more likely than wives to commit acts that spouses define as criminal violence.15
The fierce academic debate on whether or not women are as likely as men to commit domestic violence probably depends on the definition used. Using the same criteria from large national surveys that lead anti–domestic violence advocates to conclude that, for example, 6 million women are assaulted by a male partner each year, one can reasonably conclude that women are as likely as men to initiate violence at home and family violence is a largely gender-neutral phenomenon.
If we confine our concern to the much smaller pool of women who report being injured by an attack from a partner, battered partners are overwhelmingly female, but there are far fewer of them—according to Murray A. Straus, probably 188,000 women each year.16 Police, hospital, and family-court records overwhelmingly confirm that while kicking, biting, and scratching one’s partner may be gender-neutral, battering is a largely male prerogative.17
When it comes to spousal killing, the odds are more equal, at least in America. In the United States, unlike in other countries, wives are almost as likely as husbands to kill their spouses, although not apparently for the same reasons. As Wilson and Daly note, research shows that “men often hunt down and kill spouses who have left them; women hardly ever behave similarly. Men kill wives as part of planned murder-suicides; analogous acts by women are almost unheard of. Men kill in response to revelation of wifely infidelity; women almost never respond similarly, although their mates are more often adulterous. . . . Moreover, it seems clear that a large proportion of the spousal killings perpetrated by wives, but almost none of those perpetrated by husbands, are acts of self-defense.”18
This is not, as many theorize, a question of guns in the hands of women “neutralizing” men’s physical advantages. Gun murders of spouses are actually more likely to be committed by males than other spousal murders.19 One theory is that historically high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing in this country mean that women in America are more likely than women in other countries to, as Wilson and Daly suggest, “feel the need to defend their children of former unions against their current mates.”
In any case, the fact that only a tiny fraction of marriages become violent doesn’t mean that marital violence is not a serious social problem. Even a tiny fraction of 53 million married couples in America adds up to hundreds of thousands of injured spouses each year. For women in particular (who are much less likely to get in bar fights or gun battles than men), domestic assaults account for a high proportion of violent crimes committed against women each year.20 But the fact that so few spouses ever hurt each other does make it implausible that the structural conditions or our ideology of marriage are to blame for domestic violence. In fact, the men and women who report physical violence in their marriage have many of the same characteristics that put people at increased risk of interpersonal violence in general.21 If marriage itself were the root cause of violence against women, we would expect to see that married women were at higher risk of interpersonal violence than other women. We would also expect to see more husbands beating up their wives. Very few do, so some other process must be at work.
In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that being unmarried puts women at special risk for domestic abuse. A large body of research shows, for example, that marriage is much less dangerous for women than cohabitation.22
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the victimization rate for women separated from their husbands was about three times higher than that of divorced women and about 25 times higher than that of married women. Two-thirds of acts of intimate violence against women were not committed by husbands (and intimate violence in this study’s definition excludes violence committed by those casual dating partners a woman considers “friends” or “acquaintances,” rather than “boyfriends”). Husbands committed about 5 percent of all rapes against women in 1992–93, compared to 21 percent that were committed by ex-spouses, boyfriends, or ex-boyfriends, and 56 percent that were committed by an acquaintance, friend, or other relative.23
Even when it comes to murder, killings are more likely to happen to unmarried cohabitors than spouses.24 As one scholar sums up the relevant research, “Regardless of methodology, the studies yielded similar results: cohabitors engage in more violence than spouses.”25
Linda Waite’s own analysis of the 1987–88 National Survey of Families and Households for this book shows that married people are much less likely than cohabiting couples to say that arguments between them and their partners had become physical in the past year (4 percent of married people compared to 13 percent of the cohabiting). When it comes to hitting, shoving, and throwing things, cohabiting couples are more than three times more likely than the married to say things get that far out of hand. One reason cohabitors are more violent is that they are, on average, younger and less well-educated than married people. But even after controlling for education, race, age, and gender, people who live together are still three times more likely to report violent arguments than married people.26
Contrary to the fears of certain state legislators, something about a marriage license seems to protect married women (and men), to a certain extent, from domestic violence. Nicky Ali Jackson’s study, which drew on interviews with more than five thousand married and cohabiting couples who participated in the National Family Violence Resurvey of 1985, found that both men and women who came from violent homes were more likely to have violent relationships. No surprise there. But surprisingly, even among these violence-prone couples, married couples were less likely to engage in violent conflict with their partners than were cohabitors. “Cohabitors with similar teenage victimization experiences,” Jackson concluded, “as spouses had higher levels of aggression in their relationships.” Even among adults who as children may have witnessed violent marriages, marriage itself provides some protection from domestic violence.27
The increased risk of domestic violence faced by unmarried partners is particularly striking because contemporary theories about the origins and nature of domestic violence often describe the problem as one of excessive commitment to traditional family values. One recent college textbook, for example, lists the following among the characteristics of a batterer: “He believes in the traditional home, family and gender-role stereotypes.” Also listed prominently under the textbook’s heading “Why Women Stay in Violent Relationships,” are these factors: “Religious pressure: She may feel that the teachings of her religion require her to keep the family together at all costs, to submit to her husband’s will, and to try harder” and “Duty and responsibility: She feels she must keep her marriage vows till death us do part.”28
Yet research shows us that men who actually are “heads of households” are less likely than mere boyfriends to become violent and that wives are less likely to be hit than are girlfriends who experience no such religious or moral pressures to stay with their sex partners.
Why are men more likely to attack girlfriends than wives? One simple answer is that boyfriends are less committed than husbands. Jan Stets, one of the researchers who referred to marriage as a hitting license, also confirmed that rates of physical aggression are much higher in cohabiting than married couples. Cohabiting couples, she speculated, are more socially isolated than married couples. They are less integrated into networks of kin and community. The roles of unmarried partners are particularly ill-defined as are social expectations about the nature and purpose of their relationship.
Stets surmised that “the very nature of being in a less committed relationship may create its own dynamic for aggression. Since cohabitors are less likely than married persons to be committed to their relationship . . . it follows that the costs associated with being aggressive are not as great for cohabitors compared to the married. When a conflict arises, cohabitors may be more likely to be aggressive because they do not have much invested in the relationship. If the relationship ends as a result of the aggression, they will not suffer as much as married people, who have a greater long-term interest and may lose more materially, socially, and psychologically if the relationship ends.”29 So boyfriends may be more violent than husbands simply because they have less to lose.
Lower levels of commitment may also raise violence, because they increase sexual jealousy. As we saw in the chapter on sex, cohabiting women are 8 times more likely to be unfaithful than married women (and cohabiting men 4 times as likely as married men to have sex with someone else). Doubts about paternity may trigger violent impulses in men, at least partly explaining the enormously high levels of violence directed at unwed pregnant women by their boyfriends.30
Even among the unmarried, the more committed a couple is the less violent they are likely to be. In Linda Waite’s analysis of a large, nationally representative sample for this book, cohabiting couples who say they have definite plans to marry are less likely to report physical violence in their relationship than cohabiting couples with no such plans. But engaged cohabiting couples are still much more likely to be violent than otherwise-similar married couples.31
Marriage seems to help men desist not just from domestic violence, but all forms of lawbreaking. A study of five hundred chronic juvenile delinquents, which was conducted by researchers who tried to figure out why some youngsters ceased criminal activities and others continued piling up arrests into their early thirties, found that a good marriage made a dramatic difference.
Men who reformed were very similar to men who did not with regard to childhood and family characteristics: They had similar rates of poverty, similar IQs, were rated as equally “difficult” and “aggressive” as children, and were arrested as teens about as frequently. But over time, those who entered a good marriage sharply reduced their criminal activity. A good marriage, the researchers estimated, over time reduced the offense rate by hardcore delinquents by about two-thirds, compared to criminals who did not marry or who did not establish good marriages.32
The researchers concluded that “some of the time, some high-rate offenders enter into circumstances like marriage that provide the potential for informal social control. When they do, and in our case when marital unions are cohesive, the investment has a significant preventive effect on offending. ‘Good’ things sometimes happen to ‘bad’ actors, and when they do desistance has a chance.”33 The social bonds created by marriage can change the way even hardened criminals behave.
Interestingly, when domestic violence does erupt, marriage makes it easier for the law to contain the behavior. When one scholar looked at the affects of mandatory-arrest policies on future domestic violence, he found striking evidence that marriage matters: Husbands who were arrested became less violent as a result. But boyfriends actually became more violent toward their partners after being arrested for “minor” violent assaults.34
Marriage integrates men into the community. Men with a stake in conforming to the social rules are more likely to be deterred from violence when they are shown (by an arrest) how seriously society frowns on domestic violence. Cohabiting men, by contrast, appear to rebel against social control by inflicting more pain on their partners. Cohabiting men have less to lose from being publicly identified as an abuser than do married men.
Similarly, abused women say that the batterer’s relatives are among the most effective sources of help in restraining partner violence.35 Perhaps married women, who are “part of the family,” have an easier time soliciting help from in-laws than do women who are more evanescent sex partners and companions. A man’s parents and siblings may be more likely to intervene if he is hitting his wife, who has a long-term role in the family and whom they are likely to know better, than if he is abusing a girlfriend.
When researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Public Health used data from a large national survey to analyze the characteristics of those who experience marital violence, they found in essence that marriage does not beget violence; violence begets violence. The same characteristics that in general put people at increased risk of interpersonal violence also increased the likelihood of violence within marriage. Overall, the young, urban dwellers, the less educated, the poor, and blacks were all more likely to report violence in marriage. Marital violence seems to be part of a larger picture of a culture of risk and aggression, not a distinct problem created by marital mores.36
For children, a marriage license may be even more crucial. One study found that a preschooler living with one biological parent and one stepparent was forty times more likely to be sexually abused than one living with two natural parents.37
In a University of Iowa study of 2,300 cases of sexual abuse, researchers discovered that nonbiological “father caretakers” were four times as likely to sexually abuse children in their care as we would expect given their numbers.38 In fact, psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson concluded, “Living with a stepparent has turned out to be the most powerful predictor of severe child abuse risk yet discovered. . . .”39
An unmarried mother’s boyfriend also appears to pose a particular danger. One study found that although boyfriends contribute less than 2 percent of nonparental child care, they commit almost half of all reported child abuse by nonparents. As researcher Leslie Margolin concluded, “[M]others’ boyfriends committed 27 times more child abuse than their hours in child care would lead us to predict . . . a young child left alone with a mother’s boyfriend experiences elevated risk of physical abuse.”40
When violent men batter women or children, the law should vigorously protect them. But blaming marriage as the problem, or seeing high rates of divorce as the solution to domestic violence, misses the point. Many women who are long since legally divorced from abusive husbands can still be, as Nicole Brown Simpson was, at grave risk. So can other women who, like Hedda Nussbaum, are not even married to their abusers. The idea that marriage, rather than violence, is the real problem perpetuates the idea that domestic violence is really a “family matter,” somehow fundamentally different in moral character from other violent crimes.
IS HER MARRIAGE REALLY WORSE THAN HIS?
The most powerful and pervasive of the contemporary postmarriage myths is this: His marriage is a lot better than hers. “Guys Wed for Better; Wives for Worse,” trumpets one USA Today headline (October 11, 1993). “Studies Show Men Do Better in Marriage Than Women,” concludes another in Jet magazine. “Does Tying the Knot Put Women in a Bind?” asks still another headline for a 1997 USA Today story: “Marriage protects men from depression and makes women more vulnerable,” one psychology professor tells this article’s reporter. “It is the best evidence that marriage is an institution that primarily benefits men.” Bowling Green University sociologist Gary Lee tells the reporter, “We have a lot of studies that show, in a variety of different ways, men benefit more from marriage than women.”1
Until a few generations ago, we viewed marriage as a burden for men and a benefit for women. In the popular legend, men avoided getting “tied down” or “trapped” into marriage by husband-hungry women. Today, in an astonishing reversal of gender stereotypes, marriage is often viewed as suppressing women’s very sense of self.
Thus women are described as “casualties of a marital subculture that crushed their emerging identities,” to quote the authors of a divorce guide.2 In the same vein, a review in the New York Review of Books approvingly notes that many embrace today’s divorce culture as promoting “more freedom for women and less control of children: [M]arriage more often than not spells subordination, while divorce for all its difficulties, brings liberation.”3 People magazine tapped into this widespread cultural phenomenon when on January 29, 1996, its editors put a smiling Sally Field on the cover with this tag line: “Free of the need to make a man happy, the newly confident single mom, 49, talks about her divorce, love life, and the hard-won joys of living solo.”
Even more remarkably, in academic circles at least, this bleak vision of marriage’s gender effects on women can be traced to the work of one woman, sociologist Jesse Bernard, who argued in her influential 1972 book The Future of Marriage that each marriage was really two marriages: “his” marriage and “her” marriage. For men, marriage brings health, power, and satisfaction. For women, marriage brings stress, dissatisfaction, and loss of self.
According to Bernard, wives are “anxious, depressed, psychologically distressed,” and their emotional health is “dismal.”4 For women, marriage is a kind of psychological torture, gradually debilitating their emotional and mental health. “The poor mental health of wives is like a low-grade infection that shows itself in a number of scattered symptoms . . . ,” Bernard wrote, sketching what she saw as the “grim mental-health picture of wives.5 A happy housewife must be a sick woman: “We do not clip wings or bind feet, but we do make girls sick,” Bernard states. “For to be happy in a relationship which imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does, a woman must be slightly ill mentally.”6
As the book jacket of the 1982 revised edition of The Future of Marriage correctly put it, “The disparity between his and her marriages, hotly debated when it was first proposed, is now a basic assumption in our thinking.” Marriage has changed a great deal since Bernard first wrote her book. Many of the changes she advocated, including greater employment opportunities for wives, have since become realities.
Nonetheless, Bernard’s basic conclusion—marriage is good for men but bad for women—is still widely repeated not only in popular culture but even in college textbooks used in marriage-and-family courses, as Norval Glenn pointed out in a recent report for the Council on Families. “We do know, for instance, that marriage has an adverse effect on women’s mental health,” asserts one recent textbook. “Bernard’s investigation showed that the psychological costs of marriage were great for women,” chimes in another. “If marriage is so difficult for wives,” asks a third college textbook, “why do a majority surveyed judge themselves as happy? . . . [S]ince they are conforming to society’s expectations, this must be happiness.”7
But is it true? Is his marriage really so different—and better—than hers? The evidence is in, at least for the ways in which marriage is practiced today: Both men and women gain a great deal from marriage. True, marriage does not affect men and women in exactly the same ways. Both men and women live longer, healthier, and wealthier lives when married, but husbands typically get greater health benefits from marriage than do wives. On the other hand, while both men and women get bigger bank accounts and a higher standard of living in marriage, wives reap even greater financial advantages than do husbands.
Overall, the portrait of marriage that emerges from two generations of increasingly sophisticated empirical research on actual husbands and wives is not one of gender bias, but gender balance: A good marriage enlarges and enriches the lives of both men and women.
How and why did we ever imagine otherwise?
In 1972 the idea that marriage cripples women resonated with feminist concerns about inequality and with promoting career opportunities for women. The arguments in The Future of Marriage fit quite neatly with those that Betty Friedan advanced in The Feminine Mystique; the two books make many of the same arguments about the destructive effects of the “housewife syndrome” on women’s well-being.
The most damning part of Bernard’s argument zeroed in on the effect of marriage on women’s mental health. For example, one article she relied upon, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1966, compared the mental health of men and women using four measures—depression, severe neurotic symptoms, phobic tendency, and passivity. Married men scored better on these four measures of mental health than did single men, while married women scored worse than single women.8 Bernard concluded from this data that marriage is good for men but “deforms” women’s mental health.
Bernard was not the only one to reach this conclusion. In a study published the year after The Future of Marriage, Walter Gove found that married women had higher rates of mental illness than did married men, while single men and women had similar rates of mental illness. Echoing Bernard’s findings, he concluded that the higher rates of mental illness for women generally were due to higher rates for married women alone.9
Almost two generations have passed since Bernard’s data were collected, a time during which the world has changed, and social scientists studying marriage have constructed ever more sophisticated models to measure the effects of marriage on men and women. How does Bernard’s thesis withstand this onslaught of new evidence?
Not very well, frankly. As we saw in chapter 5, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that marriage is good for women’s mental health. True, by some measures men’s physical health benefits are somewhat more than women’s, but that is largely because single men, as a group, are so much more prone to antisocial and unhealthy ways of living, which affects single men’s mental and physical health. In other words, the reason getting a wife boosts your health more than acquiring a husband is not that marriage warps women, but that single men lead such warped lives.10
Bernard concentrated almost exclusively on depression, while the latest research uses broader measures of emotional well-being. There are other forms of mental illness besides depression. Men and women do not necessarily express emotional distress in the same ways. When social scientists use broader measures of mental health, they typically find, as two scholars summarize the evidence, an “equalization of sex difference in overall rates of disorder.”11
But one of the biggest reasons for the discrepancy in Bernard’s findings and our own is that she made no attempt to distinguish between marriage and babies. Of course, in the sixties, the two were more nearly synonymous than they are today, when childless marriages are not uncommon and out-of-wedlock births are quite common.
There is no question that caring for children—especially babies and preschoolers—is stressful for women. Even today, when families are smaller and women are more likely to share caregiving, married mothers with children are more likely than single women to agree that they “sometimes feel overburdened” by “family demands.”12 Time-use studies confirmed that women with children at home were more likely than other women to report feeling a “time crunch,” while for men, only teenagers in the home seemed to increase the perceived time crunch.13 So when Bernard compared married and single women’s mental health, she was, to a certain extent, contrasting apples and oranges: married mothers with childless singles.
By contrast, later research that controls for the presence of children finds that marriage protects mothers from depression. For example, in an analysis of 2,300 urban adults, Ronald C. Kessler and Marilyn Essex found that “the presence of a child in the home, especially a preschooler, has a much more seriously depressing effect on single than married people.” Even when it comes to housework, married homemakers are less likely to be depressed by comparable levels of housework strains than are unmarried homemakers.14
Of course, it is also true that marriage has changed since the early seventies, in the directions Bernard recommended. Women who find staying home with children depressing get more support to keep working, full- or part-time. Working mothers may be somewhat more prone to report feeling stressed than full-time homemakers, but they are less likely to be depressed.15
Women are far more prone to depression than men. So it makes sense that married women would be more depressed, on average, than married men. Why did Bernard find that single women were less depressed than single men? The answer is not, as she assumed, that marriage is warping women. Instead, male and female marriage markets operate very differently: Women tend to marry up while men tend to marry down. That means that the unmarried women Bernard studied were, in socioeconomic terms, the cream of the crop: with higher status and high-paying jobs—all factors that protect against depression. By contrast, men who never marry are, on average, less successful than their married counterparts. So once again, without introducing controls for socioeconomic status, Bernard was comparing apples and oranges: high-status women with low-status men. Bernard simply failed to distinguish between the effects of marriage and the effects of high social status on women’s depression.
More recent research belies the notion that marriage is a depressing experience for women. Scholars at Rutgers University, for example, actually followed the mental health of almost 1,400 young men and women over a seven-year period as they entered marriages, divorced, or remained single. Marriage, the researchers discovered, boosted both men’s and women’s mental health. This was not a function of selection—of healthier people marrying while sad sacks stay on the shelf. Instead the Rutgers team found that, even after they took into account the mental health (and other characteristics) of people prior to marriage, “. . . young adults who get and stay married do have higher levels of well-being than those who remain single.”16
In another recent study, based on three large separate surveys—two national and one concerning people in Illinois—John Mirowsky finds that marriage accounts for none of the well-known “depression gap” between men and women. In fact, for both men and women, the ages at which depression rates are lowest (early forties for women, early fifties for men) are those in which marriage rates are highest.17
Social scientists measure depression by asking people questions such as “How many days last week did you feel sad, lonely, have trouble sleeping, or feel everything was an effort, that you couldn’t shake the blues?” According to measures such as this women of every age group are more likely to be depressed than men. And the gender gap in depression grows with age. It is smallest for men and women under age thirty and grows with each passing decade. By age sixty and older, women report much higher levels of depression than men the same age. Aha! Proof that marriage depresses women? Unfortunately for advocates of that theory, as women age, the positive effect of marriage on women’s mental health also increases.18
Linda Waite and Mary Elizabeth Hughes compared depression and emotional well-being in nearly thirteen thousand men and women from ages fifty-one to sixty-one in the early 1990s.19 After controlling for race, education, family structure, income, and living arrangements, Waite and Hughes determined that married people—with or without children at home—were less depressed and emotionally healthier than comparable singles.20
Older unmarried women, whether they lived alone, with their children or with others, were significantly more depressed than older married women. When these women were asked, “How do you rate your emotional health?” the advantage of being married was even clearer: Married women were about one-third more likely to rate their emotional health as “excellent” than unmarried women and only half as likely to rate their emotional health as “poor.”21
Marriage held a similar advantage for older men. Married men were about a third more likely than single men to say their emotional health was “excellent,” and almost two-thirds less likely than men who were not married to rate their own emotional health as “poor.”
Finally, when Nadine Marks and James Lambert followed the mental-health characteristics of a nationally representative sample of 13,000 men and women over five years, they too confirmed that marriage for both men and women, staying single was depressing. Overall, after controlling for initial mental-health status and using a variety of measures to gauge emotional well-being, from self-acceptance to hostility, depression, and reported happiness, Marks and Lambert found that the mental health of all categories of singles—never-married, separated, divorced, and widowed—declined over this five-year period, compared to those who remained married for the entire five-year period. Singles who failed to marry became more depressed and less happy over the period, though the declines were sharper for men than for women.
The never-married were also more hostile, had less positive relations with others, and less self-acceptance than the married. The divorced showed lower levels of happiness, personal mastery, positive relations with others, sense of purpose, self-acceptance, and environmental mastery. The widowed became more depressed but did not differ in other ways from the married. Only in two areas—a sense of autonomy and experience of personal growth—did singles outperform the married people.
And in most of these measures, marriage benefited men and women pretty much equally. Men and women who began the study divorced, and remained so, experienced similar declines in well-being over the next five years. Staying widowed had the same negative impact on the mental health of both men and women. Never-married women did somewhat better than married men on one measure of emotional health—happiness—but less well on another—self-acceptance. And both never-married men and women did less well than contemporaries who were married.22
The evidence is pretty conclusive: Marriage doesn’t boost men’s egos while deforming women’s souls. Instead, both men and women are psychologically healthier when married. And this is not a case of happy souls finding mates while the sad sacks are left on the shelf. The act of marriage itself leads to better mental health.
But What about Happiness?
When it comes to the relationship between marriage and happiness for both sexes, Bernard’s treatment of evidence was even more questionable. As Norval Glenn has pointed out, “First she finds from national surveys that married men report a much higher level of personal happiness than any category of unmarried men. . . . This fact she presents as clear evidence that marriage benefits men. In an appendix, she reports almost identical data on women taken from the same surveys. However, she does not consider these data on women to be evidence that marriage benefits women, because, she reasons, married women only say they are happy because society expects them to say so.” Glenn concluded, “To call this reasoning weak would be an understatement.”23
In fact, virtually every study of happiness that has ever been done has found that married men and women are happier than singles. The happiness advantage of married people is very large and quite similar for men and women and appears in every country on which we have information.24
“His” marriage and “her” marriage turn out to be a lot more similar than different. In the most recent surveys, both married men and married women express very high (and very similar) levels of satisfaction with their marriages. Sixty-one percent of husbands and 59 percent of wives say their marriage is “very happy.” Thirty-six percent of husbands and wives call their marriage “pretty happy.” Just 2 percent of men and 4 percent of women say their marriage is “not too happy.”25
Using more detailed measures, psychologists Scott Stanley and Howard Markman reported similar equality between the sexes when it comes to marital bliss. They created a measure of marital quality that included different dimensions, such as satisfaction, dedication, friendship, fun, sensuality. Conversely, they also created a way to measure what they call various danger signs: negative patterns of interaction, loneliness, and thoughts of divorce. Overall, it turned out that his marriage and her marriage were not from different planets. The difference between husbands and wives in marital satisfaction was too small to measure.26
Despite the conventional wisdom that women care more about and invest more in personal relationships than men do, husbands and wives also seem to be about equally committed to each other and to marriage. Stanley and Markman also developed a measure for what they call personal dedication: the desire of the spouse to maintain and improve the quality of the relationship. The highly dedicated spouse is willing to sacrifice for the relationship, to invest in it, to strive for his or her partner’s welfare, and to link personal goals to it. The dedicated spouse views her- or himself as part of a team, the married partnership as “us” rather than two separate individuals.
To measure personal dedication, Stanley and Markman asked people whether the following statements were true: “My relationship with my partner is more important to me than almost anything else in my life”; “I may not want to be with my partner a few years from now”; “I like to think of my partner and me more in terms of ‘us’ and ‘we’ than ‘me’ and ‘him/her’ ” “I want this relationship to stay strong no matter what rough times we may encounter.” Once again, his marriage and her marriage were similar: husbands and wives reported being equally dedicated to their marriages.
And when it comes to evaluating the marriage negatively, men and women also tend to see eye-to-eye. Stanley and Markman found no difference between men and women for the danger signs in marriage—thought of divorce, having little arguments escalate into ugly fights, feeling like one is on the opposite team when it comes to solving problems, and feelings of loneliness. Only one gender difference emerged: Men were far more likely to withdraw when conflict occurred.
The most sophisticated measures of husbands’ and wives’ happiness, commitment, and dissatisfaction with their spouses reveal remarkably little difference between his marriage and hers.27
The Rest of Life
But there is more to life than happiness. What about sex, safety, money, long life, and family satisfaction? How does marriage as an institution stack up for men and women in these other dimensions?
To summarize the story laid out in the previous chapters: Both married men and women live longer, healthier lives, but in this measure men need marriage more. Mortality rates were higher for the unmarried of both sexes, but 50 percent higher among women and 250 percent among men. The relatively unhealthy lives of single men, compared to those of single women, seem to explain the gender gap in marriage benefits here.
When it comes to money, marriage makes both men and women better off. Men get larger gains in earning power than do women, who get only a small marriage premium at most. But then married men, unlike single men, share their incomes with their families, raising the household income of their wives and children. So although both men and women gain from marriage, overall, women gain even more financially from marriage than men do.28
When it comes to sex and sexual satisfaction, once again both husbands and wives are better off because they dared to say, “I do.” But as for sex, contrary to the popular stereotypes, women seem to benefit even more from marriage itself than men do. Single women are far less likely to have any sex at all, and far less likely to enjoy it when they do, than married women as we saw in chapter 6.
And we saw in chapter 11 that marriage provides some protection for women from domestic violence, at least compared to women in cohabiting relationships. Both husbands and wives are less likely to be victims of criminal violence than unmarried men and women.29
So, when we tally our scorecard, on health, wealth, earnings, sex, violence, and happiness, here’s what we get: Men, 2; Women, 3; Equal 1. Both men and women get health and earnings benefits from marriage, but men benefit more in physical health and earnings. Both men and women are safer, more sexually satisfied, and wealthier, if married, but women benefit more on sexual satisfaction, financial well-being, and protection from domestic violence, and they benefit about equally on emotional well-being. If you are keeping a gender scorecard, you’d have to call contemporary marriage a pretty good deal for both sexes—both men and women benefit in important ways, sometimes in different amounts. But in most areas of life, marriage makes both men and women better off.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that marriage, as we practice it today, is equally fair to both sexes, or no longer in need of reform. In New Families, No Families Linda Waite and her coauthor Frances Goldscheider argued that “new families are being formed, in which men and women share economic responsibilities as well as the domestic tasks that ensure that family members go to work or school clean, clothed, fed, and rested, and come home to a place where they provide each other care and comfort.”30 The alternative to “new families,” they argue, is likely to be “no families,” as women decide that the new marriage bargain—in which they hold a job and remain responsible for all child care and housework—is a bad deal, and as men decide that filling all the requirements of a traditional breadwinner but getting few of the traditional prerogatives or wifely supports is just as unattractive.
The two-earner family, which rose to prominence since Bernard’s day, is clearly here to stay. The so-called traditional family is far from extinct, but it is no longer the dominant model of family life either: One child in three has a stay-at-home parent (who isn’t also running a business out of the house). The rest live in either dual-earner families (including part-time work) or in single-parent families in which their lone parent is employed.31
Two-career families come with gains as well as losses. Even when wives work full-time, they still generally do the majority of the housework; their families gain their income, the connections they make, and the skills they develop at work.32 Children in dual-worker families get less time from both their mothers and their fathers than children in traditional breadwinner/homemaker families (so do children in single-parent families).33 Men’s health seems to suffer when their wives work more than full-time.34 The income gains to the family from the wife’s income may be balanced by losses in the wage premium earned by husbands.35
But wives in new families gain some measure of economic insurance against the risk of divorce. They gain the satisfaction of providing financial support for their families. And if they make career-level incomes, they gain additional help from both their husbands and children in household tasks.36
But is the full-time employment of wives in a high-earning job, as Goldscheider and Waite seem to suggest, the only route to a “fair” marriage? Can we have equal marriages with an employed father and a mother who works only in the home or works part-time?
Steven Nock argues that coercion and inequity, not dependency, lie at the heart of the problems of traditional marriage.37 Dependency is not the enemy. In fact, marriage gets much of its power from the interdependency that allows each spouse to specialize. Marriage works best when husbands and wives need each other. But to achieve this alternative vision of the new family, dependencies must be freely chosen, not coerced. Both partners need to be protected against the risks inherent in even freely chosen dependency.38 And husband and wife must recognize themselves both as dependents in their joint project, the family—even if they have very different incomes or one has no income at all for a period.
This recognition of marriage as true partnership, an interdependent relationship rather than one of domination and subordination, has implications outside the home as well, affecting, as we shall see, how we treat married couples in the tax code as well as the divorce court.
The world has changed in the three decades since Jesse Bernard concluded that marriage helped men at women’s expense. Some of the changes Bernard called for have become a reality: Wives have far more access to higher education and to higher-paying, higher-status jobs. Education and employment give women more say in family decision-making and exert pressure toward equal sharing between husbands and wives.39 Many more couples today have the kind of marriage Bernard argued would be good for women as well as men.
But as we have acquired a much deeper and more detailed knowledge about the myriad and complex ways in which marriage affects well-being, we can also pronounce Bernard’s core thesis just plain wrong or at the very least, outdated. A closer look, a broader view, and several decades of new research show that her influential conclusion that marriage is good for men’s mental health but bad for women’s is not true. On average, his marriage and her marriage are equally committed, equally happy, and equally psychologically healthy.
If marriage is so great, why is it in so much trouble? If marriage is so wonderful, why do about half of all recent marriages now end in divorce? Why are about a third of our babies born to unmarried women? Why would anybody voluntarily dissolve (or fail to form) a relationship that helps them live longer, healthier, happier, sexier, and more affluent lives? Good questions. In social science, explanations are always more elusive than descriptions. The whys are harder, and less certain, than the whats.
But one thing we do know: the answer is not, as we have seen, that Americans no longer value marriage. Americans of all ethnic and class backgrounds place a good marriage high on their lists of personal and social ideals. So something in the larger social climate and arrangements must have changed that makes it harder for us to achieve our own self-declared goal. What might that something, or somethings, be?
No doubt, as many experts counsel, some of the trends weakening marriage are long-standing and irreversible, part of the very fabric of contemporary life. As society moves away from an agrarian economy to first an industrial and then to a postindustrial economy governed by a modern welfare state, marriage becomes less indispensable; individuals can count on others to provide what used to be strictly family matters.
We don’t produce most of our own food on small farms, with husbands doing the plowing and wives minding the chickens and milking the cows. We don’t need wives to make butter or sew our clothes, much less weave the cloth from which they are made. We have the Gap, 7-Eleven, and McDonald’s on every corner to supply our basic needs. We don’t depend as much on our children to support us in retirement. We don’t count on family members alone to take care of us if disaster strikes: We have insurance, Social Security, unemployment compensation, pensions, and 401(k)s.
Three hundred years ago, the conventional wisdom was “You can tell a bachelor by his smell.” Just maintaining the basic decencies of life was a two-person job. Today, by contrast, even single mothers with small children can usually ensure the basics: food, clean clothes, a school, a roof overhead with heat and sanitary running water underneath, and basic medical care. A market economy, combined with the rise in government programs (not just welfare and Medicaid but everything from public sanitation and building codes to guaranteed public education), along with more recent sweeping improvements in women’s job opportunities, make marriage less strictly necessary for survival than it once was. Nobody we know would want to change that, even if we could.
But does that mean a 50 percent divorce rate is inevitable? We don’t think so. For in addition to these long-term structural forces, there have been a whole range of more recent, potentially reversible social changes: some large, some small, some governmental or economic, many more strictly cultural, all tugging in the same direction—weakening public support for the marriage vow.
The forces of the market, of government, and of public opinion have all, in a wide variety of ways, shifted in the direction of parceling out to the unmarried many of the rights and benefits previously reserved to the married. Cohabitors began demanding the sexual and social rights of the married, for example, and courts became increasingly sympathetic to the view that it is unconstitutional discrimination to treat married and unmarried couples differently. Landlords and school districts, among others, are forbidden by federal law to make distinctions between married and unmarried individuals. Welfare and public-housing policy created marriage penalties for low-income and working-class couples.1
Spouses, significant others, professionals, and wider social institutions have all increased their approval of divorce dramatically. That means, though we seldom realize it, that support for the marriage commitment has concomitantly declined. A simple but, we believe, true answer to the question of why marriage is in trouble is that Americans have invested less moral, spiritual, cultural, political, and legal energy into supporting the marriage vow. This reduced support for marriage expresses itself in a wide variety of relationships and institutions that touch the lives of married couples.
Americans, for example, while no less eager for marriage, have become notably more enthusiastic about divorce and about other alternatives to marriage, from cohabitation to unwed childbearing. In 1962, 51 percent of young mothers agreed that “divorce is usually the best solution” when parents can’t seem to work out their marriage problems. When these same (now middle-aged) women were interviewed in 1977, 80 percent saw divorce as the best solution to persistent marital problems.2 By the mid-1990s, only a small minority of American women (17 percent) now think that parents should stay together even if they don’t get along.3
In 1996, when asked, “How wrong do you personally think it is when people divorce?” a quarter of Americans took the strongly permissive attitude toward divorce, going so far as to say either that divorce was right for everybody or that it was not a moral issue at all.4
The flip side of the “liberalization” of attitudes toward divorce, cohabitation, and unwed childbearing is the privatization of marriage. We are no longer certain how much marriage matters, and therefore we’ve become increasingly reluctant to help married couples stay together, since rooting for the success of the marriage has been redefined an “interference” with the personal choices of others. Besides, who is to say what is really for the best?
Most of the professional “custodians of the family”—clergy, counselors, psychologists, educators, and even family scholars—have promoted and approved of this new view of marriage as a private, even an individual decision. In particular, such experts have helped redefine how we decide whether or not to divorce. The overarching message coming from the helping professions is that the main question to ask in deciding whether or not to divorce is, What would make me happy? In this way, family experts have reinforced for struggling couples and the broader culture the idea that emotional gratification is the main purpose and benefit of marriage.
For example, here is how Richard Gardner, a respected clinical psychiatrist, a professor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and an author both of manuals for therapeutic professionals and popular guides for divorcing parents, summed up the range of professional opinion on the subject in 1982: “There are those who recommend that parents not consider the divorce’s effects on the children in making their decision. . . . They consider the children’s welfare to be a contaminant to such decision making. My own belief is that the effects on the children should be one of the considerations, albeit minor. The major determinants should be whether or not the parents feel that there is enough pain in their relationship to warrant its being broken.”5
In her popular 1996 guide for people considering divorce, psychotherapist Mira Kirshenbaum, clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute in Massachusetts, gave much the same advice when it comes to staying together for the kids’ sake: “[C]hildren aren’t glue and shotgun weddings don’t work out . . . if you want to look for a sign of life you’ve got to look beyond the children for it.”6
Like many in her profession, Kirshenbaum believes there may be too few divorces, not too many. One of her clients, she chides, stayed married for years just because “only a bad person, he thought, would walk out on a partner and all the hopes they’d had for the future, to say nothing of what this would do to their children. . . . [F]or every divorce brought about by people who should feel more responsible to themselves and their partners, there’s a relationship not ending because someone feels too responsible.”7
These types of family professionals have enormous influence not only on their own clients but on the culture at large. As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has pointed out, such experts “drawn from the ranks of sociology, psychology, and the therapeutic professions” are “treated as authoritative by media and policy elites. Even religious opinion increasingly draws upon social scientific teachings and insights. Talk of ‘roles and relationships,’ ‘singlehood,’ and ‘gender identities’ not only fills the pages of the New York Times; they are also the stuff of Sunday sermons and inspirational bestsellers.” After reading through the literature written by family experts in the seventies, Whitehead observed, “One can’t help but note the dwindling use of the word ‘marriage.’ Marriage becomes just one form of ‘coupling and uncoupling’ or one possible ‘intimate lifestyle.’ ”8
At the same time that marriage counselors and clergy were rethinking their attitudes toward divorce, another influential group of professionals was doing the same: family lawyers. No-fault divorce, a revolution in family law that swept the country over a ten-year period, was primarily the brainchild of the professional bar. In 1968 more than 60 percent of the country felt divorce should be more difficult to obtain.9 Family lawyers on the front line of the divorce courts felt otherwise, and bar associations quietly lobbied state legislatures for changes that would make divorce a cleaner, faster, and less judgmental legal process. Liberals and feminists have sometimes been blamed for the “divorce revolution,” but in reality it was the legal profession that pushed hardest for no-fault divorce, and it is family lawyers and judges who remain its most satisfied customers.10
Lawyers tend to focus on divorce law as they experience it: a mechanistic procedure for putting an official end to relationships that are already, from their point of view, dead. With the advent of no-fault, family lawyers became important cultural carriers of the new vision of marriage as a contingent relationship, no longer all that different, in the eyes of the law, from living together. Thanks to no-fault, the marriage contract is no longer enforceable. It takes two to marry but only one to divorce at any time, for any reason, as fast as the courts can sort out property and custody issues.
Under no-fault, family lawyers are the ones who explain to the wife who marches in saying, “I’m not giving him a divorce” that she has no choice in the matter. Vows of permanent obligation, they warn misguided men and women, are just hopeful words not reasonable expectations. The law will always side with the one person who wants out. The court’s job is to do the divorce as fairly, quickly, and painlessly as possible, which to many couples still may not be that fair, quick, or painless at all.
The law doesn’t care who wants a divorce or why. This is not how married couples naturally think about their shared commitment. Even today, after thirty years of no-fault, there are still spouses who express surprise at how little power they are given in the courts over the fate of their own marriage. Sometimes even lawyers skirt the issue, leaving it up to the judge to do the explaining. Maggie Gallagher recently interviewed an Iowa woman—whose husband left her after he had an affair—who testified in court that she didn’t believe the marriage was irretrievably broken down. The surprised judge flipped through the legal books to show her he had to grant the divorce, even if she objected. “I thought maybe he could delay the divorce, order counseling or something,” she related afterward.
If much of the magic that marriage works stems from its ability to give men and women a sense of security that their partnership will last, the sharp decline in the law’s willingness to enforce the terms of the marriage contract has reduced the benefits of marriage for everyone. Everyone’s marriage is profoundly affected by the presence (or absence) of social and legal supports.
Two out of three brides who married as recently as the 1960s could expect to be married until death ended the union.11 The permanent marriage contract was supported in the past by religious and moral proscriptions on divorce and by a legal system that often allowed divorce only for cause or required extensive waiting periods in the case of contested divorces. When spouses understood their contract was both enforceable and difficult to break, each could invest in the marriage with greater assurance. Women at home raising children, or putting their husbands through law school, had more confidence that they would share in the financial rewards of their husbands’ success.
But in the seventies, most states changed their divorce laws, giving one spouse the unilateral power to declare the marriage over. Many people, especially family lawyers, believe that no-fault divorce has no effect on the divorce rate. But the best new research shows that the shift to unilateral divorce by itself raised divorce rates (about 6.5 percent, accounting for 17 percent of the increase in divorce rates between 1968 and 1988).12
Under a unilateral divorce regime, even husbands and wives who are personally committed to marriage understand that they have no control at all over the ultimate outcome. Law and society will not support, and may even ridicule, efforts to keep the marriage together after one partner declares his or her desire to leave.
For many, if not most, couples, divorce now hovers at the edge of the marital consciousness, a disaster that one has to prepare for, and defend against, simply because the costs of divorce—a financial setback for men, a financial disaster for women and children, an emotional trauma for all involved—are so high.13
Unilateral divorce affects even those married couples that don’t end up in divorce court. By discouraging investments in marriage, these new divorce laws also lower the returns to marriage even in marriages that remain stable. For example, two researchers found that the move to unilateral divorce alone lowered husbands’ wage premium by three percentage points.14 Many wives are also working longer hours or having fewer children than they want in order to protect themselves from the consequences of divorce.15 In a divorce-prone society, men and women become afraid to specialize—especially women—in home and family.
There is evidence, for example, that the powerful wage premium men get from marriage declines sharply as their statistical risk of divorce rises. Jeffrey S. Gray and Michael J. Vanderhart found that “the marriage premium was nearly 26 percent for husbands who did not divorce, and whose wives specialized in home productions; the marriage wage premium is only 3 percent for husbands who subsequently divorce and whose wives worked 40 hours per week in the labor force.” Even after the researchers control for wives’ work hours, a 10 percent increase in a husband’s probability of divorce lowers his marriage wage premium by 8 percent.16
Meanwhile, in 1997, 51 percent of mothers worked full-time, even though just 30 percent agreed that full-time work was “the ideal situation for you.”17 There is considerable evidence that fear of divorce prevents many women from reaping one of the prime traditional benefits of marriage for mothers: the chance to spend more time with their kids.18
The more uncertain people are that any partnership will last, the more they act as individuals and the less they act as permanent partners. But the more spouses act as separate individuals, the less they get from the marriage partnership, and the more likely the marriage will fail. Fear of divorce can thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Married couples in the midst of interpersonal struggles experience this new detachment of significant others as a loss of support. When your clergyman, your counselor, and your lawyer all advise you that divorce is an acceptable solution, even a preferable one, to your own personal dissatisfaction with your marriage—that the only question you have to face is, What do you really want?—you will have a harder time sustaining any faith at all in the idea that the marriage vow is important for its own sake, that your marriage could be worth fighting to save. If you get the idea from the media, your therapist, or friends that staying in an unsatisfying marriage makes you a coward, or worse, a bad role model for your kids, you will have an even harder time believing that staying married makes sense.
And of course this loss of support for the marriage vow happened just as sex roles within marriage were changing, producing confusion, turmoil, and inequity within millions of American homes. As more wives entered the workplace, out of personal desire or personal fear or both, the gender balance within marriage shifted. The traditional marriage bargain was fair in the sense that it distributed family labor reasonably equally between men and women. Married men’s total work hours ( inside and outside the home) were about the same as those for married women, except when the family included children too young to go to school, when wives often put in more hours.19
During the last two generations, the terms of the traditional bargain shifted—at least temporarily—in a way that made marriage less fair for women. Married mothers moved into the labor force, but continued to perform all their traditional tasks in the home, working, as it were, a “second shift.”20 (The most recent time-use studies, though, show the gender scales are getting closer in balance once again: Women are spending less time in housework, and men are spending a bit more, making the effort each puts into the family more nearly equal.)21
But permissive divorce attitudes do more than encourage divorce. They actually make happy marriage less likely. Culture matters. Scholarly research confirms what ordinary people assume: Those of us with more favorable attitudes toward divorce are more likely to end their marriages than people with less favorable attitudes towards divorce.22 But the latest research reveals something less obvious: adopting favorable ideas about divorce actually tends to lower the quality of a person’s marriage.23
Using data from a survey of almost 1,300 married couples, two scholars found that “those who adopted less supportive attitudes toward divorce reported a decline in marital conflict between 1983 and 1988, whereas those who adopted more supportive attitudes toward divorce reported an increase in marital conflict.”24 Couples who embraced the idea of divorce also experienced larger drops in marital happiness and in marital togetherness than couples who adopted less favorable attitudes toward divorce. So even as divorce became an easier, more common, and more acceptable outlet for marital unhappiness, marriages became unhappier. Husbands and wives married in the ’80s report more problems, conflicts, and less togetherness than those married in the ’70s did.25
The dynamic that builds a happy marriage is not just, as so many in the therapeutic professions assume, a personal and individual one. Our attitude toward marriage and not just about our partners in particular, either nurture marital success or inhibit it. To put it in plain English, for many people, commitment produces contentment; uncertainty creates agony. Some couples undoubtedly move toward the closure of divorce simply to escape the emotional hell of perpetual ambivalence.
When people aren’t certain their marriage will last, they invest less time in the relationship and take fewer steps to resolve disagreements. “Ironically,” these researchers conclude, “by adopting attitudes that provide greater freedom to leave unsatisfying marriages, people may be increasing the likelihood that their marriage will become unsatisfying in the long run.”26
Ideas and ideals are powerful forces. Sociologists know this, and so do ordinary people who struggle with questions about whether and how much their marriage vows ought to constrain their behavior. Our ideas about divorce are really only the flip side of our ideals of marriage. Just as laws regulating divorce are laws shaping the marriage contract, so too, our attitudes about what is a good enough reason for divorce help define what the marriage commitment is. We cannot embrace no-fault divorce as a new social ideal without fundamentally changing the way we think about marriage in ways that turn out to be deeply hostile to our goal of building a happy marriage.
The effects of this tug-of-war between hope and fear, between the desire for marriage and the broad cultural and legal permissiveness toward divorce, are particularly on display in the attitudes of young adults, the next generation of married couples and the first raised in a divorce culture.
Marriage remains a strong, personal goal. Ninety-four percent of college freshmen in one 1997 survey said they personally hoped to get married. Just 3 percent didn’t hope to marry. And young people had very negative attitudes about divorce, with more than 70 percent of young adults, men and women, agreeing that “children do better with both parents.” And more than two out three agreed that “when parents divorce, children develop permanent emotional problems.” Only 23 percent believed that divorcing couples try hard to save their marriages. Seventy-six percent of teens believed divorce laws are too lax.27
Yet young Americans increasingly view marriage as just one of many equally acceptable relationship alternatives. At the same time, perhaps because they no longer see marriage as necessarily permanent, less than one in twenty young Americans are strongly committed to the idea that “single women should not have children, even if they want to.” A majority of teens agreed that a man and woman who decide to raise a child out of wedlock are either “doing their own thing and not affecting anyone else” or even “experimenting with a worthwhile alternative lifestyle.” They strongly endorse cohabitation, perhaps in the mistaken belief that it will provide divorce insurance. Between 1975 and 1995, the proportion of high-school seniors agreeing that “it is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married in order to find out whether they really get along” skyrocketed from 35 percent to 59 percent.28
The portrait of the next generation that emerges is one in which young men and women long for stable marriage but increasingly are worried and anxious about their ability to achieve it. As marriages become less certain and stable, alternatives to marriage appear more reasonable and attractive. When asked whether they themselves would consider having an out-of-wedlock child, only 48 percent of American girls in the high-school class of ’92 said no firmly. By the late nineties, the Census Bureau reported that 40 percent of women under thirty who became mothers for the first time were not married.29 “Generally speaking,” report two sociologists who, in 1998, conducted focus-group interviews in northern New Jersey with single, childless young adults who didn’t have college degrees, “these young women seem to trust in the permanence of two family bonds: the mother-child bond and the parent-daughter bond . . . some women say they may have children even if they cannot be married; and second, most of the women expect to take care of themselves economically but also look to their parents as a safety net.”30
Rising divorce creates its own downward social momentum. Daughters of divorced parents are more likely to divorce themselves and are three times as likely to become unmarried mothers. Meanwhile, having a child born out of wedlock reduces the chances that an unwed mother (or unwed father) will marry and increases the risk that a future marriage will fail.
Women who have an out-of-wedlock child, for example, are only about one-half to one-third as likely to marry as women who don’t. This is not because unwed mothers don’t value marriage. Three scholars using a large nationally representative sample discovered that unwed mothers were not any less likely to plan to marry in the near future than women who did not have out-of-wedlock births. But having a baby outside of marriage did reduce a young woman’s chances of achieving her dream: 45 percent of single women who expected to marry within five years did so; but only 28 percent of unwed mothers who expected to marry within five years achieved their goal.31
And when women with children do marry, as Linda Waite put it in an essay with Lee Lillard, “a feedback effect” can be seen “in which divorces increase the number of marriages that include stepchildren, and in which the presence of these stepchildren, in turn, both heightens the risk that the new marriage will end and lowers the chances that the couple will have a child of their own—a birth that would have made their marriage more stable.”32
The divorce culture thus sets in motion changes that affect even those spouses who don’t split up. When people perceive their own divorce risk as high, they become afraid to invest in their own marriage; they hedge their bets, financially and emotionally. They think and act more like singles than spouses who have confidence in the institution of marriage. Divorce anxiety not only produces more divorce, but it creates less happiness in marriage, even in those unions that do survive. Marriage can become just a piece of paper if you are always wondering in the back of your mind whether or not your partner might walk.
Why is marriage in trouble? We want marriage, but we are afraid to discourage divorce or unwed childbearing. The marriage vow thus receives less support from families, society, experts, government, and the law. Important changes in sex roles have challenged married couples to make new adjustments at the very time the social prestige of marriage as a uniquely favored union has declined, and divorce as a solution to emotional difficulties is more widely approved than ever before. Marriage is more often described as just one of an array of personal lifestyles, no one of which is intrinsically preferable to any other, one “style” of intimate relationship about which others important to you, from your lawyer to your therapist to your own best friend, are obliged to remain agnostic.
But the more we treat marriage just like other relationships, the more ghostly and insubstantial the marriage relation becomes. In order to have the option to marry, to make a permanent, public commitment to one other human being, we have to first, as a society, create the marriage option—to make it something different, bigger, and firmer than merely living together. The alternative is to allow marriage to wither into a mere piece of paper, which changes or adds nothing to the way a couple is viewed or treated.
In such a society, the choice to cohabit might become even easier than it is today. But the choice to marry would be stripped from us. If we cannot “go back” to the ways of the past, how do we move forward to a better future? How do we restore young Americans’ faith in their capacity to create lasting love? What can we do to renew marriage so that not only we but our children and our children’s children can continue to experience the transforming power of the marriage vow?
The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: Marriage is not just one of a wide variety of alternate family forms or intimate relations, each of which are equally good at promoting the well-being of children or adults. Marriage is not merely a private taste or a private relation; it is an important public good. As marriage weakens, the costs are borne not only by individual children or families but by all of us taxpayers, citizens, and neighbors. We all incur the costs of higher crime, welfare, education and health-care expenditures, and in reduced security for our own marriage investments. Simply as a matter of public health alone, to take just one public consequence of marriage’s decline, a new campaign to reduce marriage failure is as important as the campaign to reduce smoking.
As Linda Waite put it to her fellow scholars in her presidential address to the Population Association of America, “Social scientists have a responsibility to weigh the evidence on the consequences of social behaviors in the same way as medical researchers evaluate the evidence of the consequences of, say, cigarette smoking or exercise. . . . I think social scientists have an obligation to point out the benefits of marriage beyond the mostly emotional ones, which tend to push people toward marriage but may not sustain them when the honeymoon is over. We have an equally strong obligation to make policymakers aware of the stakes when they pull the policy levers that discourage marriage.”1
When society as a whole helps support marriage as an institution, we are all better off. Cohabitation is something that individuals can create for themselves, by themselves. The decision to marry, as we have seen, is a choice to enter into a larger, more durable bond, which requires social, moral, and legal support. By recognizing the public union of men and women, the larger society helps individuals achieve the goals and gains marriage represents: a supportive partner one can trust, a safe place for raising children.
These profound benefits of marriage do not come only with a traditional division of labor, in which the wife takes primary responsibility for home and family and the husband takes responsibility for supporting them. Couples may decide on a wide variety of ways to divide family labor, to assign household tasks, to share responsibility for earning what the family needs to live on, and to care for children. They may change their bargain as their situation changes. They should still get substantial benefits from marriage, with its long-term commitment and teamwork, provided society supports the essence of the marital vow: permanence, mutual support, sexual fidelity.
But because marriage is not merely a private, emotional relationship, strengthening marriage requires more than private, emotional efforts. If the private inner meaning of marriage—a lifelong commitment to form a new family—is to be maintained, then its larger public role must be acknowledged and supported by the larger society and its institutions, including (but not limited to) the government.
A roughly 50 percent divorce rate and a 33 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate are not inevitabilities. In fact, the United States stands alone even among industrialized nations in the rate at which we change partners and form families that consist of one adult and children. Our fragile families are at least partly the consequence of a certain set of interrelated cultural ideas—about the importance of fathers, the nature of sex and commitment, the obligations of parents to each other and to their children—that are relatively recent and hardly inevitable. We can change our minds if we choose.
And our high rates of divorce and unwed childbearing also respond to the public policies our governments promote in divorce law, welfare reform, family-tax policy, and even statements from leaders—cumulative decisions that can (at the margin) make it easier or more difficult for people to form lasting, satisfying marriages.
Already there are signs that the new public respect for marriage and fatherhood are changing people’s behavior. A recent Census Bureau report concluded that, after tumultuous rises for two decades, our rates of family fragmentation may finally be bottoming out. Since 1990, for the first time in two generations, the divorce rates appear to have declined slightly; the out-of-wedlock childbirth rate has stopped rising; teen pregnancies are falling.2
How can we build on such recent, modest, but encouraging success? What more can we do to restore marriage as the normal, stable context for raising children? How can we help more men and women succeed in their quest for enduring, loving marriages?
There are no magic bullets that will renew marriage overnight. But there are steps that we can and should take to support marriage as a public promise, a moral ideal, and as a social institution. Here are nine steps to building a marriage-friendly America:3
1. Get the Message Out
We need to place marriage in a prominent place on the public agenda. We need to discuss the foundational importance of marriage to family life, its importance to society as a whole, and its importance to individuals. We need to debate and discuss the ways that we as a nation support—or undermine—marriage as an institution, through tax policy, government assistance, legislation and the courts, school policies and programs, the messages sent by the media, as well as state and local programs and policies.
Social scientists and other experts in academia and government—whose views reverberate throughout the culture—have a particular responsibility to let the public know about the large and compelling body of scientific evidence that marriage matters. This is not just an issue of morality but of public health.
Among most first-rate family scholars, the “Murphy Brown debate” is over. The research has been done; the results are in: Our extraordinarily high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing are damaging too many of our children. And as Linda Waite’s and others’ research detailed in this book has shown, the rates threaten the health, wealth, and well-being of adults as well.
This does not mean, of course, that divorce or separation is never justified. But individuals who make the decision to divorce need to be well-informed about its potential costs to themselves, their partners, and their children. When spouses are preoccupied with their own immediate frustrations and disappointment, family experts have a responsibility to remind them of the long-term investment they have in each other and in their children. People struggling in their marriage also need to know that feelings change: Troubled marriages can and probably will get better.
Family experts, in other words, have an obligation to let the public know: Sure smoking kills, but so does divorce. Yes, a college education boosts a man’s earnings, but so does getting and keeping a wife. Of course children need parental attention, but they do best if they get it from both a mother and a father.
The academics who are the professional custodians of the family—who train the next generation of social workers, reporters, women’s-magazine editors, teachers, marriage counselors, psychiatrists, family lawyers, and even the clergy—have a particular obligation to call their students’ attention to the research pointing to the powerful importance of enduring marriage for both adults and children. As Professor Norval Glenn pointed out, “[W]hat good scholars do is for naught . . . if their findings, theories, and insights are not relayed accurately to those who may base decisions upon them.”4
So, too, family experts in academia and elsewhere should put a high priority on improving the training of counselors, social workers, judges, teachers, religious workers—including priests, ministers, and rabbis—and other professional service providers of the family, making them aware of the importance of marriage not only to children but to adults and the wider society.
Children of single parents need to know that they, too, can succeed. But they also need teachers, schools, counselors, and other caring adults to acknowledge, rather than deny, their suffering. As future fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, they, too, need to know that marriage is an important and achievable goal. There is help available for building the intact family they were denied as children; we suspect that children of single parents would be especially interested in new training in couples and relationship skills offered in many cities through a variety of marriage-preparation, education, and encounter programs.5 And adult authority figures need to give young people, especially boys, the motivation to grow up to become responsible, committed fathers and husbands and to help them develop the skills to carry through with this commitment. It would be a grave mistake, arising out of a misguided sense of compassion, to give boys or girls the impression that marriage doesn’t matter.
Divinity schools and other institutes that train clergy should incorporate the latest research news into their training programs, reassuring clergy and lay counselors that a renewed emphasis on marriage is not old-fashioned or overly moralistic but simple common sense, ratified by the best scientific research.
As sociology teaches us, parents, family, and friends have an even more important role in getting the message out, for you are the true custodians of what really counts as a “social norm.” What parents and other family members and close friends say to couples living together without commitment or to married couples tempted to break their vows has an even more powerful impact on how people act.
If we value marriage, there are two key values to communicate as well as live by. If marriage matters, we need to make a distinction between marriage and other forms of relationships. This does not mean branding anyone with a scarlet letter. But it does mean, at least, gently resisting demands to treat cohabiting couples exactly like married couples.
Parents, in particular, should urge their adult children to make the commitment of marriage to the loves of their lives—assuming that the partners are mature and responsible. Despite what popular culture (or rebellious teens) may tell you, as a parent, you have an enormous influence over even your adult child. One study found that adult children whose mothers are strongly opposed to cohabitation marry at a rate nearly five times higher than young adults whose mothers strongly approve of cohabitation.6
If you want your kids to value marriage, do not treat girlfriends or boyfriends exactly the same as spouses. And do offer to help support your children while they get settled if they get married. Encourage pregnant couples who love each other to marry before the child is born, and help them form a strong foundation for a new family as well.
If your children, siblings, or friends are struggling in a marriage, lend them your faith as well as your ear. Tell them the marriage bond is worth fighting for. Remind them that divorce brings as many problems as it solves. Offer them the gift of hope: Tell them that almost nine out of ten very unhappy couples who do stick it out manage to make their marriage happier, and most are very happy indeed. Point them toward promarriage resources—books, clergy, marriage-education courses, and counselors—so they don’t have to fight the good fight alone. Buy them a copy of this book and highlight the parts on sex, health, wealth, or children, depending on the situation. There are many new resources to help unhappy couples stay together and love each other better. (See the appendix for a list of community resources and organizations offering couple-skills training.)
2. Get the Facts
Part of getting the message out is getting the facts straight. The low priority that federal and state governments place on gathering information on marriage and divorce is a national disgrace. Can we imagine the response if we suggested cutting the monthly government survey of unemployment or the number of jobs added to the economy? Our society can no more afford to ignore basic statistics on marriage and divorce than to ignore basic statistics on employment or job creation.
If we don’t know the characteristics of people who are marrying or divorcing, we can’t know, for instance, if long-running marriages are breaking up at an increasing rate or if more children are seeing their parents divorce. We can’t know if black and white people show the same rates of marriage or find out the divorce rate of highly educated or less-educated men or women.
National data on marriage and divorce come from marriage licenses and divorce registration certificates collected by county officials and reported to state vital statistics offices in state health departments. We get information on births and deaths in much the same way—from certificates collected by county officials, which they report to state governments, which then report them on a voluntary basis to the federal government. The National Center for Health Statistics then compiles these figures for the nation as a whole. But state governments do a much better job of collecting information on births and deaths than they do of keeping track of marriages and divorces that occur in their jurisdiction.
In fact, information from states got so bad that in 1995 the federal government discontinued its contractual arrangement to obtain any data on marriage and divorce of individuals from state health departments. State health departments continue to count the number of marriages and divorces but no longer report any information about the kinds of people getting married or divorced; they now just tell the federal government how many marriages and divorces occurred in their state during a given period. Since 1990, the federal government has produced no detailed information on marriages and divorces for the nation. According to officials at the National Center for Health Statistics, states give information on marriage and divorce “very, very low priority.”7 And many states report only some of the information requested by the federal government, making it difficult to compare information for different states or to combine these numbers into information on the whole country. A lack of resources at the federal and state level has precluded any effort to rebuild and invest in the collection of marriage-and-divorce data.
The increasingly dismal state of our marriage statistics results in part from the fact that the state health departments responsible for collecting marriage and divorce data don’t see marriage and divorce as “health” issues. The federal government has also abdicated its responsibility in this regard, allowing our national statistical system to fall into disrepair. We hope that this book will help responsible officials get the message: marriage is not just a moral issue; it’s a public-health issue.
Fortunately, incentives for states to improve their handling of marriage-and-divorce statistics may be changing. Recent federal legislation that mandates welfare reform contains a provision that states should reduce childbearing by unmarried women. States that show the largest reduction in the percentage of births to unmarried women will receive a “bonus” from the federal government of up to $25 million per year. Although the information that states need is already available on birth certificates, this incentive makes marriage itself much more relevant to states and may make states more willing to collect data on marriage and di- vorce.8 If not, Congress should provide new incentives for states to collect accurate family data.
The lack of information on people who get married or divorced keeps us from understanding much at all about what is happening to families. All future research into the benefits of marriage—or the effects of efforts to stem divorce—will be hampered by the government’s failure to take marriage data seriously. The neglect of marriage by the states has been more than matched by the federal government under Democrats and Republicans alike. No federal agency or research office has the general responsibility for the data on marriage and divorce. Perhaps as a result, there are no government-sponsored reports that synthesize available information about marriage, cohabitation, and divorce, which are comparable to the recent report To Have and To Hold: Strategies to Strengthen Marriage and Relationships authorized by the Australian parliament.
We urge both federal and state governments to put a renewed emphasis on the collection and dissemination of timely information on marriage and divorce. This effort should include both complete vital registration of marriages and divorces by all states—using a common reporting format—and compilation and dissemination of family-related facts and figures for the nation as a whole. Congress or the president should direct all government-funded and government-administered surveys of individuals to include detailed information about marital and cohabitation status. More research should be directed at estimating the true public costs of marital failure in taxpayer dollars spent on welfare, child-support collections, juvenile delinquency and other crime prevention, mental health and other medical costs in order to help put the public costs of supporting marriage in perspective.
Similarly, when reporting on issues ranging from teen pregnancy to domestic violence, government agencies should routinely gather and present data on trends for married and unmarried couples (or single women and men) separately.
Especially as more states experiment with ways to discourage divorce, an accurate picture of marriage, divorce, and out-of-wedlock birth trends is important. Moreover, if we as a society fail to monitor these crucial indicators of family life, we may be blinded to important trends and asleep to developing dangers.
3. Create a Tax and Welfare Policy That Is Promarriage
Over time, largely through neglect, the tax code has become significantly less supportive of both marriage and family. Restoring the value of the dependent allowance for children, eliminating penalties for marriage in the tax code, and structuring child-care benefits so that they do not punish specialization in home and family are just a few examples of how federal tax policy can support or undermine marriage. We should, for instance, increase the new “child credit,” so that it more adequately reflects the true out-of-pocket costs of raising children and protects more of the income families need to raise children.9 Married couples, in particular (because the majority of single mothers do not make enough money to pay income taxes, and even receive tax subsidies through the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC), feel the bite of increased taxation and have economized by drastically cutting back on childbearing to the point that the average married woman has significantly less than two children during marriage. One way to ensure that more of our children are born inside marriage is to stop the tax raid on family income.
Other penalties for marriage appear in the tax code and in public-assistance programs such as public housing and food stamps that serve the economically disadvantaged. Supporting marriage among the poor and working class, without punishing single parents (who are already under enormous economic stress), can be tricky. Early efforts in Congress to eliminate the marriage penalty for two-income couples, for example, would have inadvertently created a “homemaker penalty” for one-earner married couples.
Perhaps the best way to repair the middle-class marriage penalties in the tax code is to reinstate “income-splitting.” But the middle-class marriage penalty pales beside the huge marriage penalty federal policy imposes on low-income workers, especially through the Earned Income Tax Credit. Most poverty benefits have an income limit—and the limit for married couples is seldom twice the limit for single parents. Thus, when two low-income workers marry, their new joint income often disqualifies them for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other benefits, so marriage often makes them significantly poorer—perhaps one reason that marriage is so relatively uncommon in poor neighborhoods. For example, if a single mother of two children, working full-time at the minimum wage, marries a single man earning $8 an hour, the couple could lose as much as $8,000 per year in reduced benefits and higher taxes.10
One way to eliminate this enormous, unintended marriage penalty, would be to allow low-income married couples to “split” their income for the purposes of qualifying for welfare, child care, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. We could make subsidies for children available to parents without regard to their income. And we could take a complete and thorough review of the tax code and government benefits that carry marriage penalties.11
4. Change Laws to Strengthen Marriage
Let’s begin by reforming no-fault divorce, especially for couples with children who are minors. The legal story of marriage is now directly at odds with social purposes and cultural meaning of the marriage vow. Thanks to pure no-fault statutes, the law now sends the message to couples that marriage is a temporary commitment that can be abrogated unilaterally by either partner at any time and for any reason. All people who marry are seeking to do something other than merely live together until one of them spots a better deal elsewhere. The law should find new ways to support and affirm the importance of a permanent, binding marriage commitment.
And the law is a power tool. A recent study found that the move to no-fault divorce by itself caused a 6 percent increase in divorce when it was implemented by states; the move to unilateral divorce accounted for 17 percent of the overall increase in divorce rates between 1968 and 1988.12
We are not advocating a return to the same fault-based system that used to exist. We do think it is important to slow the rush to divorce and to restore some power to the spouse who wants to keep the marriage together. One option worth considering is to place long waiting periods on contested no-fault divorces, especially for couples with children who are minors or establish long-term financial dependency of one spouse, usually the wife. Before no-fault, waiting periods of two to three years were common in the United States and five- to seven-year waiting periods were typical in Europe. Now, a few states, such as Pennsylvania and Utah, have a three-year separation requirement for no-fault divorces, but most states have no waiting period at all.13 Amazingly, the New Jersey state legislature actually voted last summer to slash that state’s eighteen-month waiting period for divorce.
Such waiting periods accomplish a number of useful goals: First, they give some weight to the marriage vow, acknowledging that divorce is not a simple individual “right.” Second, they slow the rush to divorce, giving some spouses a chance to fully consider counseling and reconciliation before becoming entangled in new relationships. Third, they give the spouse who is being left a “breathing spell” in which to emotionally recover before facing the extensive and complicated legal decision that divorce entails.
The Louisiana Covenant Marriage Act, passed into law in August 1997, includes a number of ideas for reform, including restricting allowable grounds for divorce, lengthening waiting periods, and requiring counseling before a divorce is granted. But the Covenant Marriage Act is best known for providing couples who wish to marry with a choice between the existing law, permitting unilateral divorce, or the new covenant contract, which allows divorce on a limited number of serious grounds. Arizona passed a similar law in May 1998.
We should reinstate long-run financial support of spouses who have put the needs of their families over the demands of their own career. The current, shockingly poor financial situation facing women and children after divorce effectively pushes many wives away from investments in their families and toward investments in their own earning power—as a kind of insurance against divorce. Some of these spouses—usually but not exclusively women—would choose to work less if they were insured somehow so that they would not bear all the financial costs of a divorce. Both spouses in such marriages should share the costs—if there are any—of the lower earning power of the spouse who cared for home and family at the expense of her or his own career.
5. Restore the Special Legal Status of Marriage
Our courts and legal system need to develop a new model of the rights and responsibilities that come with marriage—and those that don’t come without it. This new model of marriage as a distinct social and legal status should be based on shared norms of responsibility. It should recognize that individuals do not pass into and out of a marriage unaltered. It should recognize that the longer people have been married, the more interdependent their lives have become and the more damage is done by separating those lives legally. And it should recognize that rights and responsibilities in marriage change in fundamental ways when the couple has children who have not reached adulthood.
Considering what steps to take in this direction, family law scholar Milton Regan Jr. argues that we should consider reinstating fault grounds for divorce alongside no-fault divorce. Fault, in Regan’s conception, would be limited to behavior that violates general and strongly held norms about appropriate behavior of spouses. Misconduct of this type might include abuse or promiscuous sexual infidelity. Regan thinks that fault should be considered in financial and custody determinations, even in states that offer only no-fault divorce, because ignoring serious misconduct “sends the message that those who abuse the marital relationship ought to share in its fruits equally with those whom they have abused.”14
A few states, such as Michigan and Florida, are experimenting with new approaches, focused less on preventing divorce than on strengthening new marriages. In May 1998, Florida passed the Marriage Preparation and Preservation Act of 1998. Under the Florida law, engaged couples who complete a marriage-preparation course pay reduced marriage-license fees. Each courthouse will have listings of approved courses sponsored by religious and secular organizations. This law also mandates that high-school students complete a course in marriage and relationship skills. Couples applying for a marriage license will receive a handbook prepared by the Florida Bar Association that lays out their legal rights and responsibilities to each other and to their children both during the marriage and in the event of dissolution. Finally, like many other states, Florida will require couples who have children and file for divorce to take a course specifically designed for such families.
6. Enlist Religious and Other Community Support
The vast majority of people in America marry in a religious ceremony. This gives religious leaders and institutions both a privileged role in and special responsibilities toward marriage. The Community Marriage Policy (CMP) builds on this special relationship in a program to strengthen marriage. The Community Marriage Policy has been developed and promoted by Michael McManus, a syndicated religious journalist and the author of Marriage Savers.
In a CMP initiative, clergy and congregations in a community get together and decide on guidelines for requiring marriage preparation and community support for all marriages that take place in their congregation. This includes, at a minimum, that the couple take a premarital inventory and discuss the results with a trained mentoring couple or counselor. The couple also attends several weeks of educational group sessions. Churches and synagogues are encouraged to offer a larger set of marriage services, including ministries to troubled marriages and marriage enrichment. The Community Marriage Policy has been adopted by eighty cities to date, with much anticipation but little information on the impact to date.15
A few communities have broadened the ideas in the Community Marriage Policy to include secular leaders and organizations. Among these, the Greater Grand Rapids Community Marriage Policy is the best known. In 1996 Grand Rapids (Michigan) launched an ambitious community-wide mobilization of religious and civic leaders as well as health professionals and their organizations to facilitate a program designed to support children through strengthening marriage. This effort has some core funding, an able executive leader, and institutional support from a prominent Christian community mental-health center. This effort has enlisted a wide range and sizable number of community leaders who have made tremendous efforts to be inclusive of many different views on marriage.
As part of the Greater Grand Rapids Community Marriage Policy, the business sector, health and legal professions, and many other organizations are being asked to find ways that they can strengthen and support marriages at all ages and stages. After more than a year of careful planning, the initiative began offering training to ministers and courses to couples. It has set a goal of reducing the divorce rate by 25 percent by the year 2010 and will measure interim benchmarks of progress toward this goal.
7. Scrutinize Other Policies for Unintended Antimarriage Consequences
Governments should consider, when drafting policies on health insurance, the potential effect on unwed childbearing. Couples who expect a birth but don’t have health insurance may delay or forgo marriage to become eligible for Medicaid funding of the costs of delivery or because private-insurance plans refuse to cover pregnancy as a “pre-existing condition.” Consider the case of one real-life couple: Debbie and George had been planning to marry and have children eventually, when Debbie became pregnant. She works part-time and does not have health insurance. George is a highly paid state employee with good health benefits. If they marry now, George’s insurance won’t cover the birth because the pregnancy is a “pre-existing condition.” If they don’t get married, Medicaid will pay the costs of prenatal care and delivery. So, they won’t marry until after the birth. And what happens if the baby is born with health problems that require extensive and expensive treatment? Probably no marriage then, either, with costs of health care for mother and child shifted to the state. Clearly, we need to look at the incentives for unmarried childbearing and divorce embedded within a variety of public policies.
8. Discourage Unmarried Pregnancy and Childbearing
Schools, media, sports figures, magazines, and models should stop glorifying and supporting unmarried pregnancy and childbearing. The consequences of single parenthood for teens are especially worrisome.
Having a baby outside marriage makes getting married later much more difficult and much less likely.16 Having a baby before finishing high school makes both parenthood and education a bigger challenge. Although many children raised by a single parent do well, the chances that children will have happy, successful lives are substantially higher if they grow up with two married parents. Television programs and movies that make unmarried pregnancy and childbearing seem like a morally superior choice, sex-education programs focused on the “mechanics” to the exclusion of the social and moral implications of various choices, and parents and friends who fail to point out the costs to all involved if parents don’t marry and don’t do their best to build a successful happy marriage all undermine marriage.
The challenge for our society lies in encouraging and supporting marriage without punishing those—especially children—who might be affected by our actions. We have to walk this delicate line in designing programs for pregnant teens and in altering the tax code or public-assistance programs.
9. Rethink Domestic-Partnership Legislation
What about other contentious issues, such as gay marriage or domestic-partnership legislation? As private citizens, the authors have reached different conclusions, with Linda Waite tending to favor and Maggie Gallagher tending to oppose extending marriage to same-sex couples. The state of social-science research, as it now stands, sheds little light on the question: Would gay couples (and their children) reap the same benefits from legal marriage that men and women who marry do? As social scientists, the most we can conclude is, Maybe, maybe not.
The answer depends in part on the extent to which gender matters. A family consisting of two mothers would undoubtedly be better off financially than the average single-mother family. But would one of the two women reap the breadwinner’s bonus married men get? Or would they both be “married mothers,” cutting back on earnings to care for kids? Would two bachelors who “married” settle down to an orderly life together, reaping the health advantages men get from marriage? Or would they barhop in tandem? Again, we suspect, but do not know, that adults in such same-sex couples would reap some, but not all, the benefits of marriage. The benefits afforded same-sex couples by marriage would also depend on the extent to which family, friends, and other social institutions supported these unions.
As for children, the intergenerational effects of deciding, in effect, that gender is irrelevant to the public project of marriage are, frankly, unknown and unknowable—to us or anyone else as social scientists, unless and until some jurisdiction permits gay marriages and we start following the development of children of same-sex couples to see how they do. We, as a society, have to decide whether to take the leap of faith required to legalize gay marriage, but we need to make that decision based on other discourses—on religious and moral views about social justice and sexual morality—but not on the basis of scientific knowledge about the consequences for individuals of these unions.
We can say, however, that the recent public arguments made for extending “domestic partnership” benefits to all cohabiting couples are based on a myth. Extending marriage benefits to cohabiting men and women who have refused to marry sends a message social scientists now know to be dangerously false—that cohabitation is the functional equivalent of marriage. Cohabitation is not just like marriage. On average, cohabiting couples are less sexually faithful, lead less settled lives, are less likely to have children, are more likely to be violent, make less money, and are less happy—and less committed—than married couples. Ironically, this negative characterization applies primarily to cohabiting couples who have no definite plans to get married, those who live with children of only one of the partners, and those who have been married before. Engaged cohabiting couples without children seem more like married couples in their attitudes and behaviors.17
If, out of a sense of fairness to gays, local governments or businesses do choose to create domestic-partnership benefits, they should (also out of fairness) restrict the benefits to couples who are not legally able to marry. Domestic partners who want partnership benefits have only to marry to get them. Giving the benefits of marriage to people who have refused its responsibilities is neither fair nor wise.
Bring Men Back In
As Frances Goldscheider said in a letter to The Nation, “If men come to realize the economic and sexual bargain they are getting from marriage and family, they might be prepared to offer more to their potential or actual spouses to encourage them to join with them or stay with them.” Many women find a marriage bargain unappealing if it requires them to share in supporting the family financially and to run the house and take primary responsibility for children. Goldscheider argues that a “new bargain” should be struck, one that calls on men whose wives work to share the responsibility for caring for a home and family. In that case, the advantages of marriage could flow at least as readily from an egalitarian family as a traditional one, and certainly beat living alone.18
The social changes that have led to declines in marriage, increases in cohabitation, divorce, and childbearing by unmarried women are inextricably intertwined. They are part of a wider web of social change that include shifts in our views of appropriate roles for men and women, increasing and increasingly prolonged education, the rush of women toward demanding and rewarding careers, and changing views of sex outside of marriage. These changes are powerful, pervasive, popular, and probably permanent, leading many to simply counsel despair: “[T]he changes in the structure of the family are probably the result of some sizeable and largely unstoppable changes in social and economic patterns,” concludes David Ellwood in Poor Support. “[T]here is no way of going back to where we were before,” agrees family scholar Arlene Skolnick.19
By contrast, we think that the fact that there is no going backward makes it doubly important to move forward. We think that moving forward requires that all of us—parents, clergy, educators, experts, policymakers, and concerned Americans—put the problem of marriage on the front burner and come up with new strategies to reward and strengthen the marital commitment.
For although marriage as an institution has been weakened by societal change, broad and compelling evidence suggests that it is vitally important: Adults no less than children require rooted relationships to flourish. No social institution other than marriage consistently and dependably provides them.
In spite of the breakneck pace of social and economic transformation, the basic human needs for trust, love, loyalty, fidelity, commitment, and meaning are part of our nature as Homo sapiens. As a species, we have developed social institutions over eons to get the most out of these creatures that we are. The family, focused around the married couple, forms the keystone of these universal social institutions.
As the traditional Protestant marriage ceremony puts it: “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” This is the extraordinary vow that ordinary men and women dare to take every day.
Decades of social-science research have confirmed the deepest intuitions of the human heart: As frightening, exhilarating, and improbable as this wild vow of constancy may seem, there is no substitute. When love seeks permanence, a safe home for children who long for both parents, when men and women look for someone they can count on, there are no substitutes. The word for what we want is marriage.