Marriage, a History (51 page)

In the 1950s married couples represented 80 percent all households in the United States. By the beginning of the twenty-first century they were less than 51 percent, and married couples with children were just 25 percent of all households. For the first time ever, there were more single-person households than those with a married couple and children. Married persons were still a majority of the workforce and of the home buyers in 2001, but unmarried individuals were gaining fast, accounting for 42 percent of the workforce and 40 percent of home buyers.
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Single men and women today also exercise much more personal discretion about whether and when to get married. In the 1950s the average age of marriage was also the age at which most people actually married. Today the average age of marriage is the product of some very early marriages, some very late ones, and lots of variations in between. European demographer Anton Kuijsten comments that rather than ordering from “the standard life course menu, as people used to do,” an individual now “composes his or her history
à la carte.
” And marriage, “the obligatory entrée” during the 1950s, “has become the optional dessert.”
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Marriage was once part of the credentialing process that people had to go through to gain adult responsibility and respectability. It was like completing high school today. Few young people go to high school because they expect it to be a deeply fulfilling experience. They go because they need that piece of paper to get entry-level jobs or gain admittance to the more selective and prestigious credentials provided by college.

Marriage used to be like that. It was the gateway to adulthood and respectability and the best way for people to maximize their resources and pool labor. This is no longer the case. Marriage still allows two people to merge resources, divide tasks, and accumulate more capital than they could as singles. But it is not the only way they can invest in their future. In fact, it’s a riskier investment than it was in the past. The potential gains of getting married need to be weighed against the possibilities offered by staying single to pursue higher education or follow a better job. And the greater likelihood of eventual divorce reinforces the appeal of leaving your options open while investing in your own personal skills and experience.

Moving lockstep through a series of predictable transitions is no longer a route to personal security. Each man and woman must put together a highly individualized sequence of transitions in and out of school, work, and marriage in order to take advantage of shifting opportunities and respond to unexpected setbacks—a “do-it-yourself biography.”
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All these changes have profoundly and irreversibly transformed modern marriage. This revolution is not confined to the United States. Despite cultural variations, almost all industrial countries have experienced similar changes. Divorce rates tripled in France and Holland and quadrupled in Britain between 1970 and 1990. As in the United States, divorce rates began to fall in Western Europe in the 1990s, but rates of marriage fell even faster. By the late 1990s 40 percent of all births in France and Britain were to unmarried women. In Iceland, in 1999, more than 60 percent of all births were to unwed parents.
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The trend toward solitary living is likewise widespread. In 1950 just 10 percent of all households in Europe contained only one person. Five decades later one-person households made up a third of all British households and 40 percent of Swedish households. Even in Greece, which had the lowest percentage of one-person households in Europe at the end of the twentieth century, such households represented almost 20 percent of the total, twice the 1950 average for Europe as a whole.
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Changes in marital norms are spreading even to countries that were hold-outs in the 1980s and early 1990s. In Spain, Italy, and Japan, the number of two-earner marriages has soared since the mid-1990s. Although divorce is still stigmatized, there has also been a huge fall in the rate of marriage, suggesting we are looking at a massive historical tide that, when blocked in one direction, simply seeks another place to flow. More than half of Spanish women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single. The rate of marriage in Italy is much lower than in the United States. Japan shares with Scandinavia the distinction of having the highest percentage of unmarried women between age twenty and forty of anywhere in the world.
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Recognition of same-sex unions is another global trend. Between 2000 and 2004 same-sex marriage was legalized in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada. Countries as diverse as Spain, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, South Africa, Portugal, Taiwan, and Argentina gave same-sex couples many of the same legal rights as married heterosexuals.
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Finally, the role of women has been transformed in the past thirty years. Between 1970 and 1997 women’s representation in the total labor force increased in every sector of the globe.
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About the only place where it was rolled back during the 1990s was in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime forced women out of the schools and jobs they had entered under the previous Soviet-backed governments.

The change in women’s work patterns has been both a cause and an effect of the revolution in fertility, not only in the industrialized countries but in the developing world as well. In the late 1960s a woman in the poorer countries of the world typically had six children. Today the average is fewer than three. In fact, demographers now project that the world’s population will begin to decline before 2050.
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Despite all these changes, marriage is not doomed. In most countries, heterosexual marriage still has a privileged legal status. In the United States, for example, it confers more than a thousand legal and tax benefits unavailable to single people. And for most Americans, marriage is the highest expression of commitment they can imagine. Americans are more likely than Europeans or Japanese to tell pollsters they value marriage highly, and they still marry at higher rates than most other industrial countries.

Nor have people lost respect for the marriage vows. Even as divorce and nonmarriage have increased, our standards for what constitutes a “good” marriage have risen steadily. The percentage of people who believe it is okay to cheat, lie, or keep secrets in a marriage has fallen over the past forty years. Many couples work hard to enrich their relationship and deepen their intimacy, with a dedication that would astonish most couples of the past. Marriage as a relationship between two individuals is taken more seriously and comes with higher emotional expectations than ever before.
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But marriage as an institution exerts less power over people’s lives than it once did. In the 1930s Mae West quipped: “Marriage is a great institution. But I ain’t ready for an institution.” My grandmother was profoundly shocked by that comment. Most people today would not be. Now people want to live in a relationship, not an institution.

And unlike my grandmother’s generation, they no longer
have
to live in an institution. In most Western countries there has been a blurring of the distinctions between the legal responsibilities and rights of married and unmarried individuals. Domestic partnership laws have been adopted by governments or employers in most Western countries, and in some non-Western ones as well. These grant unmarried couples the same insurance benefits, inheritances, and other legal privileges as married partners.

Nearly half the five hundred largest companies in America now extend benefits to unmarried partners who live together. My husband works for an airline that allows unmarried employees to designate one individual as their domestic travel partner, with the same rights to free travel as a spouse. That person can be a boyfriend, girlfriend, nephew, or neighbor. Some of the most tradition-bound golf clubs now offer family memberships to unmarried men and women.

In France and Canada, an individual can establish a legally recognized caregiving or resource-pooling relationship with any other person and receive many legal and financial benefits that used to be reserved for married couples. Two sexual partners can take advantage of this arrangement. So can two sisters, two army buddies, or a celibate priest and his housekeeper. The United States has resisted extending marriage’s legal benefits this far. But it has joined the international trend giving children the right to support and recognition from both parents, whether or not they were ever married. Marriage has lost its legal monopoly over the rules organizing people’s personal rights and obligations.

Few of these changes in the rights and privileges of marriage were imposed by “activist judges.” In some cases, extending marriagelike rights was a legislative response to pressure from unmarried heterosexual partners or gays and lesbians. In other cases, businesses had to respond to the 42 percent of their employees who were unmarried. The courts generally stepped in only when faced with urgent new problems posed by the already existing changes in living habits—for example, when an unmarried man walked away from a long-term relationship, refusing to help support his children or the woman who sacrificed her career to do the child rearing and housekeeping in the partnership.

In response to such problems, courts in the United States and some Western European countries began to rule that cohabiting heterosexual partners who built up substantial assets over the years must divide them fairly, even if all the assets were in one person’s name. And many attorneys and judges have come to support legal recognition for same-sex unions because they are already having to deal with the division of assets and similar issues in de facto gay and lesbian
divorces.

The breakdown of the wall separating marriage from nonmarriage has been described by some legal historians and sociologists as the deinstitutionalization or delegalization of marriage or even, with a French twist, as
demariage.
I like historian Nancy Cott’s observation that it is akin to what happened in Europe and America when legislators disestablished their state religion.
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With disestablishment, the state no longer conferred a whole set of special rights and privileges on one particular denomination while denying those rights to others. When this happened, religion itself did not disappear. But many different churches and new religious groups proliferated. Similarly, once the state stopped insisting that everyone needed a government-sanctioned marriage license to enjoy the privileges and duties of parenthood or other long-term commitments, other forms of intimate relationships and childrearing arrangements came out from underground. And just as people’s motives for joining a church changed when there was no longer one official religion, so people began deciding whether or not to marry on a new basis.

We may personally like or dislike all these changes. But there is a certain inevitability about most of them. For better or worse, marriage has been displaced from its pivotal position in personal and social life. No matter how much society values marriage, it cannot afford to ignore the fact that many children are being raised and many obligations are being incurred in alternative settings. A perfect storm has reshaped the landscape of married life, and few things about marriage will ever be the same.

I
n the 1950s the rules for “making marriage work” were clear-cut. Psychologist Clifford Adams wrote that “the bride who wants to do her full job will plan from the start to create the kind of home her husband wants, and to do it with no more assistance from him than he willingly offers.” Adams, whose “Making Marriage Work” columns appeared in the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
believed with most marital counselors of the day that the husband’s job came first, “not only because of its importance but also because it occupies most of his waking hours, leaving only a narrow margin for other duties and pleasures.” Therefore, he warned wives, don’t treat your husband “as a kitchen helper, errand boy or handy man.”And if hubby “offers to dry the dishes, thank him for the favor, rather than regard it as your right.”
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The rules for catching and keeping a mate were equally simple—and all directed at women. Advice books told teenage girls to keep a list of a boy’s likes and dislikes in food, movies, and recreation. As a pop song put it in the early 1960s, “wear your hair just for him; do the things he likes to do.” Wives were urged to get up early enough to do their hair and makeup before serving breakfast. “Indulge his whims when possible, even when they strike you as foolish,” said Adams.

In one of his columns in the
Journal,
Adams recounted how one wife was able to save her marriage. “She encouraged him to try a new card game, then played poorly herself so his score would look good.” She also “pretended ineptitude” at such household tasks as balancing the checkbook. “Occasionally she even invented troubles for him to cope with (replacing a good fuse with a dud, fraying a lamp cord to produce a short) so he would feel needed.”
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