Though the family unit isn’t at risk of becoming obsolete, it’s certainly undergoing a period of transition. Premarital cohabitation has risen steadily since the 1970s; more than 65 per cent of young adult couples in the US will live together before the exchange of ‘I do,’ and nearly four out of ten will never get to the proverbial altar at all. Statistics Canada opted in 2011 to stop collecting data on marriage and divorce rates altogether, citing the changing nature of relationship definitions as motivation for the cost-saving move.
In a single generation, partnership configurations that were considered transgressive not that long ago have become dully commonplace. I feel like a relic when recounting the acronym POSSLQ, for ‘person of opposite sex sharing living quarters,’ which was coined by the US Census Bureau at the end of the 1970s and used with regularity through my 1990s childhood. Within my own lifetime, introducing one’s POSSLQ at a party signified a kind of vanguard status, a self-conscious deviation from the prescribed path. It was even a little pretentious, as exemplified by the character of Frasier Crane on the early-nineties sitcom Cheers, who used the term to describe his relationship to future wife Lilith. Now the word is all but forgotten.
No longer a census subcategory, cohabitating couples are merely – boringly – becoming a new norm. The number of unmarried couples living together has increased by a staggering 900 per cent in the last fifty years. Some 8 million American couples are living together unmarried, well over double the figure from twenty years ago. About half of those cohabiting adults are under thirty-five. ‘Nowadays, more young people are opting for the pleasure of listening to their significant others’ sleep and bathroom noises each and every glorious day without the burden of tax benefits or a party where people buy you new sheets,’ muses writer Christina Cauterucci in Slate, as though halved housing expenses and the thousands of dollars not spent on a wedding (not to mention a legally uncomplicated exit option) aren’t incentive enough.
Most of my friends who have been in long-term relationships have lived with their partners at some point, even those who, like me, were raised with some religious affiliation that discouraged the practice. All of my married friends ‘lived in sin’ before the wedding, and most before they decided to become engaged. Many have also dabbled to varying degrees in non-monogamy, creating space for consensual sexual dalliances outside of their primary romantic relationships.
It’s now been twenty years since the publication of Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy’s The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, a third-wave feminist Non-Monogamy for Dummies of sorts. In the interim, the question of non-monogamy has become fodder for magazine trend pieces and cautiously affirmative academic journal articles that suggest that the social stigma against ‘alternative’ relationships is likely more harmful than these relationships’ inherent structures. When the New York Times Magazine released a long-form investigation into open marriages in May 2017, over three hundred readers replied to share their own stories of non-monogamous partnership.
After the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of extending legal marriage rights to same-sex couples in June 2015, an anchor on the conservative Fox News network proposed that gay marriage could pave the way for polyamorous marriage (despite there having been no precedent to support that presumption in any of the other twenty-one countries that had legalized gay marriage prior to the United States). Though posed as a nightmare scenario, there might be something to the suggestion.
There are some polyamory advocacy groups that argue that marriage equality be extended to include relationships of more than two people. Though that possibility doesn’t appear to be on the immediate horizon, attitudes are changing. A 2015 Gallup poll found that tolerance for ‘polygamy’ had climbed to 16 per cent in the United States, up from 7 per cent in 2001. The number of polyamorous couples in the US is estimated to be in the millions, and at least one survey – conducted in 2012 by the polyamory advocacy organization Loving More – suggests that a majority of poly-identified individuals identify as female.
Despite all of this, marriage still reigns supreme in the imaginations and pocketbooks of a majority of my millennial peers. While demographers marvel at the possibility that a quarter of us may never marry at all, according to a 2014 Pew report, it might be more surprising that three-quarters of us still will. We no longer need marriage – not to form families, and not to live with our partners. A majority of Americans surveyed in 2010 were unbothered with the rise in cohabitation without marriage, and equally unfazed by the growing number of unmarried couples having children.
An institution established as a political and economic contract, marriage has strayed so far from its strictly business origins that we’ve all but forgotten they were once in place. It persists as a ritual most of us are undertaking because we want to, the biggest and most expensive party many of us will ever have. In 2016, wedding-related services amassed an estimated $72 billion in revenue in the US alone.
Ever since the ceremony between Diana Spencer and Charles, Prince of Wales, was broadcast to an international audience nearly four decades ago, getting married has become an opportunity to indulge in a massive amount of lifestyle spectacle. The TV show Say Yes to the Dress is premised entirely on future brides’ selection of a bridal gown priced in the five figures; one of the most successful, long-running reality franchises on network TV ends with the ‘winner’ getting handpicked for marriage by an eligible bachelor or bachelorette.
Where a few centuries ago, our ancestors were warning against the perils of love within marriage, it’s now the biggest reason people cite for getting hitched. A recent survey showed that love and ‘making a lifelong commitment’ outweighed having children and even religious recognition of a relationship as motives for marrying – a radical departure in priority from as recently as our grandparents’ generation. And even lower on the list of marriage priorities, according to the survey, was money: only 28 per cent of respondents cited financial stability as a very important reason to get married, as opposed to the 88 per cent who said the same of love.
Still, marriage remains a major long-term determinant of financial security. It is also a reflection of economic security. In the US, middle- and lower-income men – that is, the demographic hit hardest by the decline in domestic manufacturing – have experienced the steepest decline in marriage rates since 1970, a slope that neatly parallels that group’s drop in earning power.
At the same time, women on the lower- and middle-earning rungs of the economic ladder have fared much better over the past four decades than their male counterparts. Dual-income households are financially better off regardless of the gender configuration or who earns what.
As our domestic lives become – practically speaking – less dictated by old mores about men’s and women’s spheres and the contracts that bind them, our material circumstances leave women better equipped than ever to bounce back from a rupture in the nuclear family unit. But, despite ostensibly ample licence to leave a relationship when it no longer feels like the right place to be, we are maybe more predisposed than ever to make clumsy sense of our own romantic ambivalence.
Pummelled by a lifetime of social conditioning, we absorb messages that remain at odds with the practical realities of our humdrum day-to-days. We weigh a set of contradictory stakes when considering our love lives. This measuring of considerations and needs – physical, emotional, intellectual, psychological, financial, reproductive – can be crazy-making. The dissolution of a romantic relationship can become like a riddle with no clear solution.
In her 1995 novel The End of the Story, author Lydia Davis narrows in on the mythologizing tendency of recent romantic hindsight. Beginning the book with ‘the end’ of the affair, Davis’s narrator endeavours on the project of retracing her broken relationship’s steps to find the answer to the riddle, in reverse.
‘How strange it is to realize now that although I was frightened of the emptiness between us, that emptiness was not his fault but mine: I was waiting to see what he would give me, how he would entertain me,’ the female narrator observes. ‘And yet I was incapable of being profoundly interested in him, or, maybe, in anyone. Just the reverse of what I thought at the time, when it seemed so simple: he was too callow, or too cautious, or just too young, not complex enough yet, and so he did not entertain me, and it was his fault.’
The regret Davis’s narrator describes is the absolute most dreaded outcome of a breakup, the lingering hell-no that keeps people in unhappy relationships for months and years without pulling the trigger: recognizing, after the fact, that the self-preservation instincts urging you to get out were wrong. A less scary analysis might chalk the anecdote up to a present self gaslighting her past self’s interpretation of reality – but it’s less scary only because it allows for a margin of error. Either way, it’s unlikely that any immediate relationship postmortem, fictional or otherwise, would serve as a ringing endorsement for breaking up. If the ordeal were easy, well, this book would have a different title.
Women in particular are set up to doubt our instincts. We are sold independence as a virtue, yet we are reminded since birth that our value is measured in relation to the nuclear, patriarchal families we are destined to help create. You might say this duality is what causes us as a culture to celebrate the Beyoncé who outs her philandering husband, Jay Z, in her album Lemonade, then lose our collective shit when she announces less than a year later that she’s carrying his twins.
Culturally, the home remains the woman’s domain. The first toys many of us receive as children are baby dolls and tiny plastic kitchens, miniature model vacuums and brooms. We are weaned on Disney-sanitized rewrites of dark Northern European allegories, where a happy ending means securing the affections of a handsome – if largely forgettable – prince instead of, say, dying in a forest or becoming a statue for eternity. Maybe they’re called ‘fairy tales’ because only an act of magic, conjured in a literal whirl of pixie dust, could spin such a pat outcome as satisfying in even our superficially liberated world.
By now, these examples of gender-role indoctrination have become total clichés with entire cottage industries established to subvert them. The outcry among educated, progressive parent circles over the gendering of children’s toys and clothing has been a pet preoccupation for years. I don’t, in fact, know a single mother-of-sons who hasn’t tried foisting some version of a baby doll upon her offspring as soon as they were old enough to wrap their chubby fingers around a cloth limb and either perform, or not, some semblance of nurturing.
I regret to announce that the patriarchy has not been dismantled by parents who decide to dress their daughters in blue instead of pink, or what have you. (My own mother pierced my ears at three weeks of age and dressed me like an overfrosted pastry until I was old enough to decide otherwise, which didn’t exactly render me a deferential überfemme.) The way we socialize children isn’t the cause of our stubborn adherence to gender binarism and the divisions it informs, but rather a symptom of how we haven’t totally shaken our adherence to separate spheres.
The market economy has, to some extent, liberated cisgender women from the dual constraints of biology and culture by allowing our participation in the world outside the home – but only to a point. Access to independent means of amassing capital has given us the ability to delay partnership, or opt out altogether. The sexual revolution and mass proliferation of contraceptives further distanced sex from reproductive duty, simultaneously opening the door for queer relationships in public life. Late capitalism has set the conditions for our relative autonomy, while also ensuring that we play by its rules. And therein lies the rub.
By now, most mainstream feminists will, at the very least, pay lip service to the idea that capitalism is a paradoxical boon to our liberty and a pain in the ass – at once a potential tool for personal autonomy and the chain around our necks that systemically reinforces our reliance on the brokers of power. (Spoiler: white men!) ‘Pink think’ isn’t the problem, though it might be dressing the window.
Yet, there’s not total agreement on exactly how patriarchy and the market economy feed into one another. The prevailing thesis is, more or less, that capitalism relies on patriarchy and, by extension, a nuclear family wherein (traditionally) female-performed domestic labour is both necessary and monetarily unvalued. Patriarchy doesn’t need capitalism, the argument goes, but capitalism does need patriarchy.
Prominent 1970s feminists like Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone positioned patriarchy as a catch-all for male dominance in society, and capitalism as its squirrelly bedfellow. ‘To make both women and children totally independent would be to eliminate not just the patriarchal nuclear family, but the biological family itself,’ wrote Firestone in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Firestone would also echo Marx’s theory that the nuclear family formed the basis for the broader ‘antagonisms’ established within the state.
Yet others, like British academic Michèle Barrett, have argued that the ‘needs’ of capitalism don’t fully account for women’s oppression in contemporary society, in part because women’s experiences are so varied and, also, because simple correlates between the two can gloss over women’s oppression in pre-capitalist history, in socialist societies, and within different classes today.
At any rate, there’s a demonstrable relationship between patriarchy and the current distribution of world power, which is also aligned with access to wealth. Wealth and power: the ultimate bedfellows. That white men are disproportionately in possession of both is a statistic reflected in places like Western legislative bodies and corporate boardrooms and, as you may have observed, just about everywhere else.
It’s safe to propose that patriarchy is at least propped up by the current distribution of wealth and power, if not necessarily a product of it. I tend to side with Barrett: patriarchy as an ideology doesn’t necessarily rely on capitalism – they just happen to be very complementary means of consolidating resource control in the hands of a select few.
Resources can, as much as anything, discourage the dissolution of a domestic partnership, particularly for the party with the most to lose. In a majority of couples, that means women. Roughly three-quarters of American households report a male breadwinner. Women in the US earn an average of 20 per cent less than men for full-time work, and even in countries like Canada and the UK, where women fare slightly better, they still earn an average of 13 per cent and 9.4 per cent less, respectively, than their male counterparts. Because women in all three countries are likelier than men to work part-time or contract jobs, the composite wage gap between all men and women workers is even wider. With age and child-rearing, the gap tends to widen still further.
Narrowing the gender pay gap is broadly cited as a key priority by mainstream feminists, a stance echoed by left-of-centre politicians and reflected in policy measures to support equal pay for equal work. Social conservatives, on the other hand, are likelier to argue that the disparity is overstated and that, furthermore, women are simply more inclined to enter into lower-paying professions.
Whatever its root causes, the gender wage gap is almost certainly informed – and maintained – by social biases. Some women may prefer to steer clear of testosterone-driven occupations like trading for cultural reasons, just as some employers may, consciously or otherwise, decide that a new male hire is worth a higher starting salary than his equally qualified female counterpart. In any event, there remains a lingering belief that one of the most important roles a man can serve is as his family’s provider. In the US, a 2013 report from the Pew Research Center found that while 41 per cent of respondents agreed that providing income for his children was one of a father’s top responsibilities, only 25 per cent felt the same of mothers.
Queer women aren’t exempt from the combined ambiguity of cultural expectation and economic reality, different though their specific challenges may be. Ruth Schwartz, relationship counsellor, co-founder of the dating site Conscious Girlfriend, and co-author of two books on lesbian relationships, told me, ‘Biologically, our brains are crammed full of ideas about how to do partner selection that have to do with survival of the species and nothing to do with what most of us psychologically want and prefer and need at this point in our evolution as human beings, in this privileged culture.’
Schwartz and partner/co-author Michelle Murrain launched Conscious Girlfriend to help queer women identify the conflicting signals between biological impulses and emotional needs – something that straight-leaning women might have a leg up on, thanks to a lifetime of expecting to conflate the two. These are the mixed internal signals that lead queer women to enter into relationships with the wrong partners, or to find themselves poorly equipped to adjust to the demands of a relationship after the initial period of limerence – the borderline-psychotic period of biochemical fuckery commonly known as ‘the honeymoon phase’ – wears off.
I asked Schwartz whether some version of the ‘rare good man’ exists in queer communities, some self-sabotaging mythos that has just enough basis in reality to persist (and make life difficult). Is queer love the way to dodge the sticky effects of patriarchy in partnership? Does the trauma of being part of a marginalized community defined by the nature of your sexuality establish a different, yet comparably toxic, set of pitfalls?
She replied with a joke: ‘What does a lesbian bring on the second date? A U-Haul!’ I’d heard it before, of course, and seen versions of it in advice-column headlines: ‘How Soon Is Too Soon to U-Haul, Get Married, Have Ten Babies, Be Together Forever and Ever and Ever and Ever?’; ‘To Be a U-Haul Lesbian or Not to Be a U-Haul Lesbian: Almost Definitely Not.’ Most accounts trace the joke to comic Lea DeLaria, who inscribed the punchline into popular culture on The Arsenio Hall Show in the early 1990s. ‘U-Haul lesbian’ even has its own Wikipedia entry.
‘This “urge to merge” had a basis in practicality in the 50s and early 60s, when gay couples had to remain in the shadows,’ wrote Shauna Miller in the Atlantic. ‘Back then, if you had the good fortune to make a family, you held onto it. It was a marriage. In the lesbian world, serial monogamy was safe, and also fulfilling. Women can have kids, too, so sometimes lesbians had those.’
The pattern stuck, or so the story goes. Where men stereotypically resist romantic commitment, women in same-sex relationships have long retained the reputation for getting too serious too fast, diving headfirst into domestic partnerships before they’ve established mutual compatibility.
‘Lesbians have not had the benefit of cultural models telling them how [dating] is supposed to happen,’ says Schwartz. As a result, she observes that many queer women find themselves in the romantic predicament of becoming deeply emotionally entwined with a partner who isn’t a good long-term match. As members of a minority group where prospective partners may be scarce, this makes the prospect of breaking up – and staying broken up – incredibly daunting.
Maybe gender is a part of it, too. ‘Women by nature try to maintain relational connections where they can,’ offers a Curve magazine relationship advice columnist in an article titled ‘How to Break Up with a Lesbian … Once.’ Still, it seems that every few years a new study or argument is released that should, in theory, debunk our played-out preconceptions of how any gender experiences love.
The 2012 book The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction, written by neuroscientist Larry Young and science journalist Brian Alexander, put forth the argument that breakups are more difficult for men than they are for women. And a 2010 study published in the Journal of Social Psychology suggests that men fall in love faster and harder than women, even though both men and women are predisposed to believe the opposite is true. Its findings have resurfaced around Valentine’s Day nearly every year since, easy clickbait for lovelorn singletons and flummoxed gender essentialists alike.
Same-sex couples may be at an advantage where it comes to processing their relationships’ dissolutions, unencumbered by some of the weight of heteronormative baggage. ‘Some straight women in my observation seem to have this kind of cynicism about men, where their breaking up becomes “Oh, he really was a jerk after all, just like the rest of them,”’ says Schwartz. ‘If you’re a female with a female partner, it’s harder to become cynical about women and write off the whole gender.’
Maybe writing off a whole gender is the easy way out of our conundrum, the purest act of agency in a mating ritual that positions women who partner with men as equal actors in a world that does not, in fact, materially reflect the values we uphold. I joke that heterosexuality is the karmic price I pay for my past life’s sins, and I suspect I’m not alone in that sentiment. It’s draining enough to do the work of loving without accounting for those unwieldy injustices beyond our control.