Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Over the past century, marriage has steadily become more fair, more fulfilling, and more effective in fostering the well-being of both adults and children than ever before in history. It has also become more optional and more fragile. The historical record suggests that these two seemingly contradictory changes are inextricably intertwined. Even more than love and marriage, fulfilling and fragile seem to “go together like a horse and carriage.”

  Conclusion

  Better or Worse? The Future of Marriage

  Conclusion

  As I was considering how to wrap up a book that has covered so many centuries and taken me through so many changes in my own thinking, I realized that my historical studies have 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 backseat 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 eighteen-year-old I saw that when my mother finally left my dad, after nineteen years of marriage, there was a dramatic improvement in her self-confidence. She went back to college; she traveled; she regaled my friends with her adventures, including a night spent club-hopping with Frank Sinatra. Suddenly she was as interesting to me as my dad had always been. She was interesting to other people too. She founded the first women’s center in Washington state and developed an independent identity as a respected and caring English teacher.

  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. Eventually, though, my mother married again, entering a joyful relationship that outlasted her first marriage. My stepfather’s selfless devotion to her, which never flagged through easy times or hard, showed me just how great a good marriage could be.

  Even with this positive model, I long resisted the idea of marriage for myself. I worried that being married would rob me of my hard-earned independent identity, just as it had, the first time around, for my mom. When I finally tied 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 was nice to have something less cumbersome to call my partner than my “significant other” or my “live-in boyfriend.” I also came to see the word as a public signal to friends and family that I was in a committed relationship and as an invitation for them to take an interest in our well-being as a couple. Still, I am quite sure that my marriage would not be nearly as satisfying if I had gotten married in the years when I most wanted to or if I had entered marriage without knowing I had the option to leave and could therefore ask for the changes I wanted.

  The historical transformation in marriage over the ages has created a similar paradox for society as a whole. Marriage has become more joyful, more loving, and more satisfying for many couples than ever before in history. At the same time it has become optional and more brittle. These 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 its 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 two hundred 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. Once that happened, free choice became the societal norm for mate selection, love became the main reason for marriage, and a successful marriage came to be defined as one that met the needs of its members.

  But each of these 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 to such beliefs and behavior was the conviction that there were enormous and innate differences between men and women, one of which was that women had no sexual desires. This 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 people’s personal behavior and penalize nonconformity. The influence of these individuals and institutions was eroded by the growth of 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 that kept the love revolution from undermining the centrality of marriage in society 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 laborsaving consumer goods such as permanent-press fabrics, ready-made foods, and automatic dishwashers undercut men’s dependence on women’s housekeeping.

  As all these 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. People no longer needed to marry in order to construct successful lives or long-lasting sexual relationships. With that, thousands of years of tradition came to an end.
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br />   Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. Like that huge historic 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. The Industrial Revolution exacted an enormous personal toll on people who were uprooted from traditional communities and whose old ways of organizing their lives were destroyed. While some entrepreneurs thrived during the transition, there were farmers and craftsmen who lost everything. But individuals and society as a whole had to come to grips with the fact that the new system of wage labor and the free market was here to stay. We face a similar situation with the revolution in marriage.

  This is a recurring pattern in periods of massive historical change. The gains that social change produces in some areas of life are usually inseparable from the losses it produces in others. 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.

  When I make this point in talks, some people accuse me of not appreciating the advantages of marriage. That is not so. A successful marriage can be remarkably beneficial. But researching this book has convinced me that many of these benefits would disappear if we tried to reimpose the societal norm of lifelong marriage for everyone.

  When a modern marriage is stable, it is so in a more appealing way than in the past. Marriage no longer gives husbands the right to abuse wives or sacrifice their children’s education in order to benefit from their labor. Modern marriages no longer feature two standards of living, one for the man and a lower one for the wife and children. There is also no longer a rigid sexual double standard that turns a blind eye to a man’s adultery and tars a woman for life if she has sex outside marriage.

  Today married people in Western Europe and North America are generally happier, healthier, and better protected against economic setbacks and psychological depression than people in any other living arrangement.1 Some of these benefits of marriage are due to what sociologists call selection effects. That is, people who are already good-natured, healthy, socially skilled, and emotionally stable are more likely to get married and stay married than individuals with fewer of these qualities. Similarly, individuals who can make a good impression in job interviews and can manage their finances and time successfully are more likely to have stable marriages than men and women without such skills.

  But I believe marriage itself adds something extra, over and above its selection effects. It remains the highest expression of commitment in our culture and comes packaged with exacting expectations about responsibility, fidelity, and intimacy. Married couples may no longer have a clear set of rules about which partner should do what in their marriage. But they do have a clear set of rules about what each partner should not do. And society has a clear set of rules for how everyone else should and should not relate to each partner. These commonly held expectations and codes of conduct foster the predictability and security that make daily living easier.

  Arrangements other than marriage are still treated as makeshift or temporary, however long they last. There is no consensus on what rules apply to these relationships. We don’t even know what to call them. Divorced families may be labeled “broken” families, even when they actually work very well. Until recently children born to unwed parents were called illegitimate—and treated as such in law and social life. The relationship between a cohabiting couple, whether heterosexual or same sex, is unacknowledged by law and may be ignored by the friends and relatives of each partner. Marriage, in contrast, gives people a positive vocabulary and public image that set a high standard for the couple’s behavior and for the respect that outsiders ought to give to their relationship.

  If we withdrew our social acceptance of alternatives to marriage, marriage itself might suffer.2 The very things that make marriage so potentially satisfying are for the most part inseparable from the things that make unsatisfying marriages less bearable. The same personal freedoms that allow people to expect more from their married lives also allow them to get more out of staying single and give them more choice than ever before in history about whether or not to remain together.

  There are those who believe that because married people are, on average, better off than divorced or single people, society should promote lifelong marriage for everyone and lead a campaign against divorce and cohabitation. But using averages to give personal advice to individuals or to construct social policy for all is not wise. On average, marriage has substantial benefits for both husbands and wives. That’s because most marriages are pretty happy. But individuals in unhappy marriages are more psychologically distressed than people who stay single, and many of marriage’s health benefits fade if the marriage is troubled. A three-year study of married couples in which one partner had mild hypertension found that in happy marriages, the blood pressure of the at-risk partner dropped when couples spent even a couple of extra minutes together. But for those who were unhappily married, a few extra minutes of time together raised the blood pressure of the at-risk spouse. Having an argumentative or highly critical spouse can seriously damage a person’s health, raising blood pressure, lowering immune functions, and even worsening the symptoms of chronic illnesses like arthritis.3

  Women are at particular risk in a bad marriage. A man in a bad marriage still gets some health benefits compared with single men, because even a miserable wife tends to feed her husband more vegetables, schedule his medical checkups, and shoulder much of the housework and the emotional work that make life function smoothly. But there are no such compensations for an unhappily married woman. Unhappy wives have higher rates of depression and alcohol abuse than single women. A bad marriage raises a woman’s cholesterol readings and decreases her immune functioning. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that unhappily married women in their forties were more than twice as likely to have medical symptoms that put them at risk for heart attacks and strokes as happily married or never-married females. A long-term study of patients in Oregon even found that unequal decision-making power in marriage was associated with a higher risk of death for women.4

  Promoting good marriages is a worthwhile goal, and we can help many marriages work better than they currently do. I argued in the last chapter that 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 men and women now begin their relationship as friends and build it on the basis of mutual respect. You can no longer force your partner to conform to a predetermined social role or gender stereotype or browbeat someone into staying in an unsatisfying relationship. “Love, honor, and negotiate” have to replace the older rigid rules, say psychologists Betty Carter and Joan Peters.5

  But negotiation will not resolve every difference of opinion or interest. 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 me
rge all their interests and beliefs. When two grownups get together and neither has the whip hand, both must learn to live with their differences.

  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 this advice was directed only at the wife. Today acceptance in a relationship must be a two-way street. To be effective, it has to be based on real friendship and respect, not the counterfeit interest that so many 1950s marriage manuals recommended when they told the wife to pretend to be interested in his work and the husband to pretend to be interested in her day. 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, on-going 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. This 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 basis for a husband’s authority over his wife and her deference to his needs is 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. Marriage decreases free time for women, but not for men. In many cases, write researchers Marybeth Mattingly and Suzanne Bianchi, being married places women “constantly on call,” lessening the quantity and often the quality of their leisure time.6