The New Fragility of Marriage, for Better or for Worse

Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Stephanie Coontz, a historian at Evergreen State College and the director of research and public education for the nonprofit Council on Contemporary Families, about the changing definition of marriage and the implications for society at large. Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Studying marriage over the last several years has been a lot like adjusting to marriage itself. No matter how well you think you know your partner beforehand, the first years are full of surprises, not only about your spouse but also about yourself.

I have been studying family history for 30 years, but I began focusing on marriage only in the mid-1990s, when reporters and audiences started asking me if the institution of marriage was falling apart. Many of their questions seemed to assume that there had been some Golden Age of Marriage in the past.

My initial response was that marriage is not undergoing an unprecedented crisis, but has always been in flux. For thousands of years, people have been proclaiming a crisis in marriage and pointing backward to better days. The ancient Greeks complained bitterly about the declining morals of wives. The Romans bemoaned high divorce rates. The European settlers in America began lamenting the decline of the family and the disobedience of women and children almost as soon as they stepped off the boats.

Furthermore, many of the things people think are unprecedented in family life today are not actually new. Almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before. There have been societies and times when nonmarital sex and out-of-wedlock births were more common and widely accepted than they are today. Stepfamilies were much more numerous in the past, the result of high death rates and frequent remarriages. Even divorce rates have been higher in some regions and periods than they are in Europe and North America today. And same-sex marriage, though rare, has been sanctioned in some cultures under certain conditions.

On the other hand, some things that people believe to be traditional are actually relatively recent innovations. That is the case for the "tradition" that marriage has to be licensed by the state or sanctified by the church. In ancient Rome, the difference between cohabitation and legal marriage depended solely upon the partners' intent. Even the Roman Catholic Church long held that if a man and woman said they had privately agreed to marry, whether they said those words in the kitchen or out by the haystack, they were, in fact, married. But in practice, there were many more ways to get out of a marriage in the early Middle Ages than in the early modern era.

However, the current rearrangement of both married and single life is without historical precedent. When it comes to any particular marital practice or behavior, there may be nothing new under the sun. But when it comes to the overall place of marriage in society and the relationship between husbands and wives, nothing in the past is anything like what we have today, even if it may look similar at first glance.

The forms, values, and arrangements of marriage are indeed changing dramatically all around the globe. Almost everywhere people worry that marriage is in crisis. But I have been intrigued to discover that people's sense of what "the marriage crisis" involves differs drastically from place to place. In the United States, policy makers worry about the large numbers of children born out of wedlock. In Germany and Japan, by contrast, many planners are more interested in increasing the total number of births, regardless of the form of the family in which the children will be raised. So while federal policy in the United States encourages abstinence-only sex-education classes, Japanese pundits lament the drop in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour "love hotels."

There are some common themes, however, under all the bewildering differences. Everywhere marriage is becoming more optional and more fragile. Everywhere the once-predictable link between marriage and child rearing is fraying. And everywhere relations between men and women are undergoing rapid and at times traumatic transformation. In fact the relations between men and women have changed more in the past 30 years than they did in the previous 3,000, and a similar transformation is occurring in the role of marriage.

My effort to understand the origins and nature of that transformation forced me to change many other ideas I once had about the history of marriage. For example, like numerous historians and sociologists, I used to think that the male-breadwinner/full-time-housewife marriages depicted in 1950s and 1960s television shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, the kinds of marriages that actually predominated in North America and Western Europe during those decades, were a short-lived historical fluke. I changed my mind.

It is true that 1950s marriages were exceptional in many ways. Until that decade, relying on a single breadwinner had been rare. For thousands of years, most women and children had shared the tasks of breadwinning with men. It was not unusual for wives to "bring home the bacon" -- or at least to raise and slaughter the pig, then take it to the market to sell. In the 1950s, however, for the first time, a majority of marriages in Western Europe and North America consisted of a full-time homemaker supported by a male earner. Also new in the 1950s was the cultural consensus that everyone should marry, and that people should do so at a young age. The baby boom of the 1950s was likewise a departure from the past, because birthrates in Western Europe and North America had fallen steadily during the previous 100 years.

I became convinced, however, that the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet family was not just a postwar aberration. Instead it was the culmination of a new marriage system that had been evolving for more than 150 years. I now think that there was a basic continuity from the late 18th century through the 1950s and 1960s. In the 18th century, people began to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage, and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners on that basis. The sentimentalization of the love-based marriage in the 19th century and its sexualization in the 20th each represented a logical step in the evolution of that new approach.

Until the late 18th century, most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved, especially if they were going to base their decision on something as unreasoning and transitory as love. The more I learned about the ancient history of marriage, the more I realized what a gigantic marital revolution had occurred in Western Europe and North America during the Enlightenment.

That led me to another surprising finding: From the moment of its inception, that revolutionary new marriage system already showed signs of the instability that was to plague it at the end of the 20th century. As soon as the idea that love should be the central reason for marriage was first raised, observers of the day warned that the same values that increased people's satisfaction with marriage as a relationship had an inherent tendency to undermine the stability of marriage as an institution. The skeptics were right to worry about the dangers of the love match.

After examining the gains and losses associated with the destabilization of marriage, I realized that my historical studies had taken me to the very place I have ended up in my personal life. Like many women who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I went through a number of stages in my attitude toward marriage. As a teenager, I thought getting married meant living happily ever after. During boring classes in junior high school, I doodled hearts in my notebook, coupling my initials with those of whatever boy I currently had a crush on. I would write out my first name in front of his last, trying to see how they looked when prefixed with the magical title "Mrs."

But in college, my interest in getting married took a back seat to the excitement of campus life and my involvement in the outside world. Around that time I also became more critical of my parents' marriage. My dad, whom I loved dearly and who was a wonderful father, was not a wonderful husband. He could be impatient, demanding, and occasionally condescending toward my mother (though never to his daughters). Even as a self-centered 18-year-old, I saw that when my mother finally left my father, after 19 years of marriage, there was a dramatic improvement in her self-confidence. My mother's experience, combined with a few heartbreaks of my own, made me wonder if I might be better off staying single, and my ambivalence about marriage was reinforced by the historical and anthropological research on male-female relations that I was encountering in my studies.

I worried that being married would rob me of my hard-earned independent identity. When I finally decided to tie the knot, it was with enough trepidation that my husband-to-be announced to our assembled friends and families, only half in jest, that his sister would stand beside me throughout the wedding ceremony to prevent me from bolting. For the first year of marriage, the word "husband" came out of my mouth in a self-conscious stutter, as in "My huh-huh-husband will be over later."

With time, however, the word began to roll easily and frequently off my tongue. For one thing, it is nice to have something less cumbersome to call my partner than my "significant other" or my "live-in boyfriend." I have also come to see the word as a public signal to friends and family that I am in a committed relationship, and as an invitation for them to take an interest in our well-being as a couple. But I doubt that I'd be as satisfied with being married if my friends and family had veto power over our parting.

The historical transformation in marriage over the ages has created a similar paradox for society as a whole. Marriage has become more joyful, loving, and satisfying for many couples than ever before in history. At the same time, it has become optional and more brittle. Those two strands of change cannot be disentangled.

For thousands of years, marriage served so many economic, political, and social functions that the individual needs and wishes of family members (especially women and children) took second place. Marriage was not about bringing two individuals together for love and intimacy, although that was sometimes a welcome side effect. Rather, the aim of marriage was to acquire useful in-laws and gain political or economic advantage. Only in the last 200 years, as other economic and political institutions began to take over many of the roles once played by marriage, did Europeans and Americans begin to see marriage as a personal and private relationship that should fulfill their emotional and sexual desires.

But those changes had negative as well as positive implications for the stability of marriage as an institution. No sooner did the ideal of marrying for love triumph than its most enthusiastic supporters started demanding the right to divorce if love died. Once people came to believe that families should nurture children rather than exploit their labor, many began to feel that the legal consequences of illegitimacy for children were inhumane. And when people started thinking that the quality of the relationship was more important than the economic functions of the institution, some men and women argued that the committed love of two unmarried individuals, including those of the same sex, deserved at least as much social respect as a formal marriage entered into for mercenary reasons.

For 150 years, four things kept people from pushing the new values about love and self-fulfillment to their ultimate conclusion that people could construct meaningful lives outside marriage, and that not everything in society had to be organized through and around married couples. The first impediment was the conviction that there were enormous and innate differences between men and women, one of which was that women had no sexual desires. That crumbled in the 1920s, as people rejected the notion of separate spheres and emphasized the importance of sexual satisfaction for women as well as men.

The second thing that held back the subversive potential of the love revolution was the ability of relatives, neighbors, employers, and government to regulate personal behavior and penalize nonconformity. The influence of those individuals and institutions was eroded by urbanization, which allowed more anonymity in personal life, and the development of national corporations, banks, and other impersonal institutions that cared more about people's educational credentials and financial assets than their marital status and sexual histories.

The third factor was the combination of unreliable birth control and harsh penalties for illegitimacy. Then, in the 1960s, birth control became reliable enough that the fear of pregnancy no longer constrained women's sexual conduct. And, in the 1970s, reformers abolished the legal category of illegitimacy, successfully arguing that it was unfair to penalize a child whose mother was unable or unwilling to wed.

Women's legal and economic dependence on men, and men's domestic dependence on women, was the fourth factor that had long driven people to get and stay married. But during the 1970s and 1980s, women won legal autonomy and made huge strides toward economic self-sufficiency. At the same time, the proliferation of labor-saving consumer goods like permanent-press fabrics, ready-made foods, and automatic dishwashers undercut men's dependence on women's housekeeping.

As those barriers to single living and personal autonomy gradually eroded, society's ability to pressure people into marrying, or keep them in a marriage against their wishes, was drastically curtailed. Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. Like that huge turning point, the revolution in marriage has transformed how people organize their work and interpersonal commitments, use their leisure time, understand their sexuality, and take care of children and the elderly. It has liberated some people from restrictive, inherited roles in society. But it has stripped others of traditional support systems and rules of behavior without establishing new ones.

The marriage revolution has brought personal turmoil in its wake. But we cannot turn the clock back in our personal lives any more than we can go back to small-scale farming and artisan production in our economic life. It would be wonderful if we could pick and choose what historical changes we will and won't accept, but we are not that lucky. Just as many people found new sources of employment in the industrial world even after the factories had displaced old ones, many people will be able to carve out satisfying and stable marriages on a new basis. But many others will live their lives and construct their personal commitments outside marriage.

Promoting good marriages is a worthwhile goal, and we can help many marriages work better than they currently do. In today's changing world, one-size-fits-all advice books and glib formulas for marital success are of little value. But sociologists and psychologists have found a few general principles that seem to help most kinds of modern marriage flourish. Because men and women no longer face the same economic and social compulsions to get or stay married as in the past, it is especially important that they begin their relationship as friends and build it on the basis of mutual respect. As men and women marry later, they come to marriage with a lot of life experience and many previously formed interests and skills. It's no longer possible to assume that two people can merge all of their interests and beliefs.

Accepting differences does not mean putting up with everything a partner dishes out. It is certainly not the same thing that psychologists meant in the 1950s, when that advice was directed only at the wife. Today acceptance in a relationship must be a two-way street. And in a world where marriages are no longer held together by the compulsion of in-laws and society or the mutual dependence of two individuals who cannot do each other's jobs, continuing emotional investments in a marriage have to replace external constraints in providing ballast for the relationship.

Another important principle that flows from the historical changes in marriage is that husbands have to respond positively to their wives' requests for change. That is not female favoritism or male bashing. For thousands of years, marriage was organized in ways that reinforced female subservience. Today, even though most of the legal and economic bases for a husband's authority over his wife and her deference to his needs are gone, we all have inherited unconscious habits and emotional expectations that perpetuate female disadvantage in marriage. For example, it is still true that when women marry, they typically do more housework than they did before marriage. When men marry, they do less. Women are more likely to bring up marital issues for discussion because they have more to gain from changing the traditional dynamics of marriage.

In the 30 years I have been studying family life, I have read many women's diaries, written over the past 400 years. I have been struck by how often entries focused not on the joy of marriages but on wives' struggle to accept their lot. Many women did write about their love and respect for their husbands, of course, but many others filled their diaries with reminders to themselves to cultivate patience, self-restraint, and forgiveness. One woman's refrain was that her husband's behavior was "the cross I have to bear," another's, the reminder that her husband had never beaten her, and that she should "be more grateful for what I have." Men's journals dwelled less on the need to accommodate wives' shortcomings, but they, too, reflected the frustration of living in a fixed institution in which there was no sense that problems could be worked through and relationships renegotiated.

What might I write if I had time to keep a daily diary? It would undoubtedly be infused by the greater sense of choice that my husband and I now have in comparison with the past. As with any marriage, there are times we have to search for patience and forbearance. But the choice to stay and work things out is a conscious one and a mutual process, not a unilateral resignation to accept the inevitable. My diary would record a lot more active delight in my daily married life than most journals of the past and a lot less talk about "resigning myself to my lot." Yet as a modern woman, I live with an undercurrent of anxiety that is absent from the diaries of earlier days. I know that if my husband and I stop negotiating, if too much time passes without any joy, or if a conflict drags on too long, neither of us has to stay with the other.

What is true for individual marriages is also true for society. As a result of centuries of social change, most people in the Western world have a choice about whether or not to enter marriage and, if they do, whether or not to stay in it for the rest of their lives. Married people may be able to reach out to friends and counselors for help, and our employers and political leaders could make it easier for us to sustain our relationships by instituting family-friendly work policies and social programs to help us juggle our many roles. But the most effective support systems for married couples, like subsidized parental leaves, flexible work schedules, high-quality child care, and access to counseling when a relationship is troubled, would also make things easier for those people who are constructing relationships outside marriage. Conversely, any measures that significantly limited social support or freedom of choice for the unmarried would probably backfire on the quality of life for the married as well.

We can certainly create more healthy marriages than we currently do, and we can save more marriages that are in trouble. But just as we cannot organize modern political alliances through kinship ties or put the farmers' and skilled craftsmen's households back as the centerpiece of the modern economy, we can never reinstate marriage as the primary source of commitment and caregiving in the modern world. For better or worse, we must adjust our personal expectations and social support systems to this new reality.

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and is director of research and public education for the nonprofit Council on Contemporary Families. This essay has been adapted from Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, published this month by Viking. Copyright © 2005 by Stephanie Coontz.