The more I listen to debates over whether we should promote marriage, the more I am reminded of one of my father's favorite sayings: "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride." Yes, kids raised by married parents do better, on average, than kids raised in divorced- or single-parent homes. Yes, the long-term commitment of marriage confers economic, emotional, and even health benefits on adults as well. Certainly, we should remove marriage disincentives from government programs -- 16 states, for instance, still discriminate against married couples in welfare policy. We should expand health coverage to include "couples counseling" for all who wish it. With better support systems, we may be able to save more potentially healthy marriages and further reduce rates of unwed childbearing among teenagers.
But there is no way to re-establish marriage as the main site of childrearing, dependent care, income pooling, or interpersonal commitments in themodern world. Any movement that sets this as a goal misunderstands howirreversibly family life and marriage have changed, and it will inevitably bedominated by powerful "allies" who are not interested in supporting the fullrange of families that exist today and are likely to in the future.
For more than 1,000 years, marriage was the main way that societytransferred property, forged political alliances, raised capital, organizedchildren's rights, redistributed resources to dependents, and coordinated thedivision of labor by age and gender. Precisely because marriage served so manypolitical, social, and economic functions, not everyone had access to it. Thosewho did almost never had free choice regarding partners and rarely could affordto hold high expectations of their relationships.
During the last 200 years, the growth of bureaucracies, banks, schools,hospitals, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and pension plans slowly butsurely eroded the political and economic roles that marriage traditionally hadplayed. It increasingly became an individual decision that could be madeindependently of family and community pressures. By the early 1900s, love andcompanionship had become not just the wistful hope of a husband or wife but thelegitimate goal of marriage in the eyes of society. But this meant that peoplebegan expecting more of married life than ever before in history -- at the exacttime that older methods of organizing and stabilizing marriages were ceasing towork. The very things that made marriage more satisfying, and increasingly morefair to women, are the same things that have made marriage less stable.
The outlines of the problem were clear by the early twentieth century. Themore that people saw marriage as their main source of intimacy and commitment,the less they were prepared to enter or stay in a marriage they foundunsatisfying. Divorce rates shot up so quickly that by the 1920s many observersfeared that marriage was headed for extinction. Books warned of "The MarriageCrisis." Magazines asked, "Is Marriage on the Skids?"
During the 1930s and 1940s, these fears took abackseat to more immediatesurvival issues, but abandonment rates rose during the Great Depression,out-of-wedlock sex shot up during the war, and by 1946 one in three marriages wasending in divorce. At the end of the 1940s, politicians and other concernedAmericans began a campaign to reverse these trends. For a while it looked as ifthey would succeed. During the 1950s, the divorce rate dipped, the age at whichpeople initially married plummeted, and fertility rates soared. But mosthistorians agree that this decade was an aberration stimulated by the mostmassive government subsidization of young families in American history. And belowthe surface, the underpinnings of traditional marital stability continued toerode. Rates of unwed motherhood tripled between 1940 and 1948. The number ofworking mothers grew by 400 percent in the 1950s.
By the late 1960s, divorce rates were rising again, and the age of firstmarriage began to rise, too. The divorce rate peaked in the late 1970s and early1980s, and has fallen by 26 percent since then. But the marriage rate has droppedat the same time, while the incidence of unmarried couples cohabiting, singles living alone, delayed marriage, and same-sex partnerships continued to increasethroughout the 1990s.
Though welfare-state policies diverge, these trends are occurring in every industrial country in the world. Where divorce remains hard to get andout-of-wedlock birth is stigmatized, as in Italy and Japan, rates of marriagehave plunged, suggesting that the historical trends undermining the universalityof marriage will, if blocked in one area, simply spill over into another.
There is no way to reverse this trend short of a repressiveness that would notlong be tolerated even in today's patriotic climate (and that would soon wipe outmany of the benefits people now gain from marriage). Divorced families,stepfamilies, single parents, gay and lesbian families, lone householders, andunmarried cohabiting couples will never again become such a minor part of thefamily terrain that we can afford to count on marriage as our main institutionfor allocating income or caring for dependents.
I don't believe that marriage is on the verge of extinction -- nor that itshould become extinct. Most cohabiting couples eventually do get married, eitherto each other or to someone else. Gay men and lesbians are now demanding accessto marriage -- a demand that many marriage advocates perversely interpret as anattack on the institution. And marriage continues to be an effective foundationfor interpersonal commitments and economic stability. Of course we must find waysto make marriage more possible for couples who want it and to strengthen themarriages they contract. But there's a big difference between supporting concretemeasures to help marriages succeed and supporting an organized marriage movement.
Despite the benefits associated with marriage for most couples, unhappilymarried individuals are more distressed than people who are not married. Women inbad marriages lose their self-confidence, become depressed, develop loweredimmune functions, and are more likely to abuse alcohol than women who get out ofsuch marriages. A recent study of marriages where one spouse had mildhypertension found that in happy couples, time spent together lowered the bloodpressure of the at-risk spouse. In unhappily married couples, however, even smallamounts of extra togetherness led to increases in blood pressure for the at-riskspouse.
For children, living with two cooperating parents is better than living with asingle parent. But high conflict in a marriage, or even silent withdrawal coupledwith contempt, is often more damaging to children than divorce or growing up in asingle-parent family. According to the National Center on Addiction and SubstanceAbuse at Columbia University, teens who live in two-parent households are lesslikely, on average, to abuse drugs and alcohol than teens in one-parent families;but teens in two-parent families who have a fair to poor relationship with theirfather are more likely to do so than teens who live with a single mother.
The most constructive way to support modern marriages is to improve work-lifepolicies so that couples can spend more time with each other and their kids, toincrease social-support systems for children, and to provide counseling for allcouples who seek it. But many in the center-right marriage movement resist suchreforms, complaining that single parents and unmarried couples -- whetherheterosexual or of the same sex -- could "take advantage" of them. If we grantother relationships the same benefits as marriage, they argue, we weaken people'sincentives to get married.
But that is a bullet we simply have to bite. I am in favor of making it easierfor couples to marry and to sustain that commitment. But that cannot substitutefor a more far-reaching, inclusive program to support the full range ofrelationships in which our children are raised and our dependents cared for.