4
First Comes Love, Then Comes …?
No other milestone along the path to adulthood has changed more dramatically in recent decades than marriage and child bearing. Young people are delaying marriage for longer than at any other time in history. The number of singles has never been higher. More couples are living together before marriage and sometimes instead of marriage. Interracial marriages, once taboo, are increasingly common and will no doubt become more so as this generation of young people, more diverse than any other before it, begins to couple up. Gay marriage has been ratified in several states, with more surely to come. For many, these are worrisome cracks in, or outright assaults on, the institution of marriage. For others, these changes represent the loosening of an oppressive and outdated institution. Young adults today experience an even wider range of options than their predecessors, and these shifts are both welcome and enormously confusing.
As is the case with any change that happens quickly, confusion (not to mention fear) reigns. In many respects, young adults are, like their counterparts from the late 1960s and early 1970s, canaries in the coal mine as they carve out new paths that seem better suited to their lives and times. Although earlier generations broke new ground—particularly in the civil rights, counterculture, and women’s movements—this is the first generation to fully feel the effects of the actions of those early pioneers. Our interviews revealed that young people feel both a sense of relief that they have more options before them and a sense of uncertainty as they begin to break the mold, no longer fitting the “traditional” image of coupledom.
As men and women turn thirty and are still single, they begin to wonder if they’re normal or if somehow they’ve been left behind. They look to their parents, but only find more confusion. Their parents are often either divorced or nearing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, given that in 1975 when their parents were age twenty-three, the majority were married and had often started a family. As Lela, a twenty-seven-year-old in Atlanta we interviewed, put it, “My parents got married when they were twenty-four and had me when they were twenty-nine, which puts me three years behind marriage and two years prior to having kids. No way am I ready for either of those milestones, so what do I do? Where is my road map now?”
Meanwhile, the cultural conversation swirling about is equally confusing. While many people on the left think marriage is meaningless and outmoded, many on the right see it as a sacred covenant—the moral pillar of society. And yet gay couples on the left battle vociferously for the right to marry, and some of the most conservative politicians are caught in sex scandals when they cheat on their spouses. No wonder very few young adults feel ready to marry. It makes sense that they’re confused.
Today’s dating scene—step one on the road to marriage—reflects the confusion and exhilaration that these seismic changes have wrought. To today’s parents, the ways their children “date” are nearly unrecognizable and sometimes shocking. To today’s young adults, the old ways of dating and partnering up just don’t make sense.
Hooking Up
Twenty-one-year-old Joel Walkowski captures his generation’s take on dating in his winning essay in The New York Times’ Modern Love contest:
A few months ago I liked a girl—a fairly common occurrence. But being slightly ambitious and drunk, I decided to ask her out on a date. This was a weird choice, as I’m not sure I know anyone who has ever had a real date. Most elect to hang out, hook up, or Skype long-distance relations. The idea of a date (asking in advance, spending rent money on dinner and dealing with the initial awkwardness) is far too concrete and unnecessary … Riding my bike home later, I realized I didn’t even know what a real date was, beyond some vague Hollywood notion.
Clearly, the time-honored tradition of calling a girl to ask her out a week in advance for dinner and a movie has taken a hit. On many high school and college campuses, the formality of dating has given way to casual and convenient hooking up. Surveys now show that nearly 30 percent of high school seniors say they don’t “date” anymore, up from just 12 percent in 1980.1 Joel goes on to describe the (non)dating and relationships of his generation as studies in practiced, feigned nonchalance. Those who try too hard risk looking vulnerable or, worse, naïve. “Casual is sexy. Caring is creepy,” he says. “An encounter is best when unsullied by intentions.
“Hardly anyone I know,” Joel continues, “aspires to be ‘that guy’ or ‘that girl,’ those once-dynamic individuals who ‘found someone’ and suddenly weren’t so cool. On some level, we envy the scope of their feelings, but we certainly don’t want to become them.”
Instead, young people today hook up for one-night stands and then go back to being just friends. No fuss, no muss, and NSA, no strings attached. They are, as the saying goes, “friends with benefits.” Others might call it attention-deficit dating. Whatever the tagline, the significant difference in today’s dating world is this: In the past, dating eventually led to sex. Today, sex eventually leads to dating.
The practice of hooking up is not a fantasy perpetrated by young men. Many young women are the ones initiating the hookups and skulking out the next morning.2 For some young women, who are generally excelling more than young men in college, “hooking up and casual relationships are a way of not locking down options too early,” says Indiana University sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong. Armstrong and her colleague Laura Hamilton immersed themselves, like Jane Goodall in the jungles of Gombe, in the dorms of Indiana University in 2005 to study the college lives and relationships of thirty-three young women for five years. “Exclusive, all-consuming relationships in women’s eyes,” says Armstrong, “are greedy and devouring. They cause you to lower your sights on education and a career. They get in the way of friendships and getting course work done.”
Not all women are as upbeat about hooking up. According to Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus, women are more likely to find these relationships lacking. They are less enamored than men with the casualness of hooking up and more often disappointed in how often hooking up leads to nowhere. And some things never change. Women who hook up too frequently on college campuses are likely to be tagged sluts, whereas promiscuous men are considered (with some pride) to be players.
Bogle also finds that the hookup culture fades after college, and traditional dating reasserts itself somewhat. However, given that for many, dating is a “new” thing, they are not certain how to proceed or what to expect, all of which can lead to serious confusion. Are we hanging out and hooking up or are we on an official date?
It is unclear whether hooking up is here to stay, or whether these trends will shift and fade as the norms about when (or whether) to marry settle into place. Traditionalism has forever butted up against modernism, with a period of upheaval, fear, and finger wagging in between. This tussle does not mean that the old ideas and behaviors are being completely discarded in favor of something new. What instead emerges is a third way, one that incorporates the lessons learned from the past with the demands of the present. To be at the corner of such profound change and without a road map is both scary and exhilarating. We may simply be at that moment in history where the standard-bearers of the “new” family are making their mark.
We examine some of these changes in this chapter and hear from young people who are grappling with and making a new order. Throughout, we noticed a distinct pattern. While the majority of young people are delaying marriage, sometimes well into their thirties, a small group is doing just the opposite: They are following the old script and marrying early. The young people in this group are very often from religious, rural, or disadvantaged backgrounds. And as we have discovered, the costs of marrying early are high—couples who do so are likely to be divorced in ten years. These couples also often have children early, interrupting or cutting off their education, which is so critical to having a secure life today. The paths and choices of these fast-starters are influenced by their circumstances, and they of
ten further exacerbate their already precarious life positions.
We also find that many young people are living together as couples before marriage. Here again, we see some stark divisions. While some young people are test-driving marriage by living with a partner, others are embarking on a string of live-in relationships, often with children in tow. These latter relationships are much different from those of couples who move in together post-college to “give it a try.” They are more fragile, more combustible, and indicative once again of the difficult circumstances in which too many young people find themselves.
So how did we get here? The answer to that question could take up an entire book. We won’t delve into all of the factors that explain these social changes, but we do want to pause briefly in the middle of the last century—the anchor point for the “model family” in the public’s imagination. The road from there to here was partly built by the parents and even grandparents of today’s young adults, who challenged traditions and ultimately helped shape the meaning of marriage and family today.
The Slide Away from Marriage
Many of the assumptions underlying the nuclear family were shattered in the 1960s. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique blew the cover off women’s discontent as suburban housewives. The advent of the birth control pill in 1960 freed couples from the once-ubiquitous shotgun marriages, and Roe v. Wade in 1973 granted further insurance against unplanned pregnancies. Before that in the 1950s, in nearly one-half of teen marriages, the woman was pregnant.3 The counterculture, women’s, and gay rights movements, in the wake of the civil rights era, further pushed the boundaries of convention as both men and women reexamined their roles in life. Everything, including marriage and relationships, seemed up for grabs.
Women were also getting more serious about education. In fact, today women outnumber men in both undergraduate and graduate schools and in degree completion. In certain cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they are outearning men for the first time. Education and larger salaries are two critical factors in the decision of whom to marry and when, and educated women now have more of both.
“College is the best contraception,” says Network associate member Maria Kefalas. “Pursuing a goal, a degree, just makes the idea of having kids and settling down seem, at the very least, bad timing and, at the very worst, a catastrophe.” The numbers back this up. Those who are not in school or adrift in school are indeed much more likely to have children in their early twenties. College, in other words, expands horizons, offers a safe place to mature, provides necessary credentials, and opens a door to a brighter future, for both men and women. As we saw in the first chapter, a college degree is the ticket to a better job and, on the whole, greater security and affluence. Although money isn’t everything, it does make life a little easier.
With more at stake—not to mention the high divorce rates of their parents—marrying and having children too soon seems imprudent to young adults. Shouldn’t I get settled in my job first so I can make sure that my child will be able to go to a good school in a good neighborhood? Why should I marry my high school sweetheart now that I’ve seen the world, and it turns out that we no longer have that much in common?
The economic downturn has pushed the wedding date back even farther. Today’s economy (even before the recession) demands a mobile workforce, and it makes more sense to forage for work unattached to a new family.
Me Time
All these factors culminate in one of the biggest changes: the rapid increase in the number of young people living alone, as single heads of the household. To get a sense of the magnitude of this change, in 1950, only 5 percent of young women ages twenty through twenty-nine were single heads of the household. By 2000, 35 percent were. Not surprisingly, at the same time, the age at first marriage rose from twenty for women and twenty-two for men in 1960 to twenty-five and twenty-seven, respectively, in 2000. Michael Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at Stanford, sees a connection between this shift and the rise of new forms of relationships, including the rise of interracial couples (among blacks and whites, quintupling since 1960), gay couples, and living together without marrying.4 Living on one’s own makes it harder for parents and other family members to influence a young adult’s choices. Without the supervision of nearby relatives—a supervision that persisted until quite recently—couples living on their own are freer to carve their own paths into marriage and partnering. Rosenfeld finds that moving away from home to another state increases the odds of a nontraditional union.
For women in particular, this “hiatus” of living on their own, as sociologists Frances Goldscheider and Linda Waite have called it, makes them more leery of marriage. They are also likely to have fewer children and to expect less traditional roles for men and women. Some even argue that this stint of independent living has a greater impact on marriage and family plans than college and employment.5
As people become accustomed to living on their own, another thing happens. They become set in their ways, and meeting Mr. or Ms. Right gets harder. Shu, a Chinese American living in New York City, didn’t originally plan to be single at age thirty. Relationships would come later, she had decided, as she kept her eye on the prize and got her MBA and settled into a career. But as time passed, she found herself getting more selective about the men she dated. “I think having had personal relationships with different types of guys helped shape me. I think whatever experiences I had in a relationship let me know now what works for me, what doesn’t work for me, what I’m able to deal with, and what I will tolerate or not accept for me as a person.”
With a salary in the six figures as a bank manager, she earns enough even in New York City to buy a condo, which she recently did. “My mom doesn’t understand that,” she says of her condo. “She doesn’t understand: Why would a single woman do the apartment thing if there’s no husband? For me, though, it’s the right next step.”
For Shu’s mother, and many traditional mothers like her, the goal is for her daughter to find a good man and settle down. But Shu, who has fully absorbed the American dictum that girls can do anything, has set her sights elsewhere. “My priorities right now are ‘me’ time,” she says as she watches her mother cook the dinner for their large extended family who are living together in Brooklyn. “I don’t think my mother has ever had just me time.”
Yet Shu also senses the time pressure and feels ready to shift gears. “The next ten years of my life will be definitely more focused on my personal life and possibly having a family. You know, I’m on pace with my work and school expectations. On a personal side, I’d like to develop that more now, so it’s really about taking my personal relationships and making them more complete.” The next ten years of her life are her thirties. A generation or two ago, Shu would have planned these steps for her twenties.
Shu recently contacted an old friend whom she has known for years as “just friends.” They deliberately decided to start dating, and it’s been going very well, with one hitch: He’s a teacher in Boston. However, the distance suits her on some level. “What is satisfying about the relationship,” she says, “is that I don’t have to compromise what’s important to me. I think I’d be terrified of getting married at this point, because I’m just not ready for marriage. I wouldn’t know how to be married. It’s something I want to do, absolutely, but I don’t necessarily know if it would make our relationship any stronger or any better. At this point, if we could live together, spend more time together, that would be the best thing.”
Wary is probably the best word to describe her and most of her peers’ feelings toward marriage—wary of compromise, wary of giving up one’s individuality, wary of missing out on something better. Although she knows her boyfriend is a good match for her in many ways, and she cannot imagine “finding somebody else that makes me feel as good as I feel now,” she is nonetheless leery of making the move to Boston, or of him moving to New York. “Because we are so different makes it interesting and stimulating. But it al
so makes me wonder, you know, at what point will that become less exciting?”
Shu also echoes many of her peers when she hedges on marriage, saying she’s not sure it will improve her relationship. This hesitancy reflects the long chain of cultural shifts that began in the 1960s and 1970s, when people began questioning the purpose and function of marriage as an institution. “It’s just a piece of paper,” the conversation goes. And yet, marriage is clearly more than that—otherwise it would have faded long ago. Its bulldog persistence signals something important to us. This is part of why Shu says, “I’m just not ready for marriage.” All of this examination of marriage has done one thing. It has elevated it in the eyes of many young people. Sitting high atop a pedestal, marriage is something nearly unattainable—hardly just a piece of paper.
You Have to Be an Adult to Be Married
The meaning of marriage is being reimagined. Instead of reflex—something you “do” at a certain age—marriage has become a step that is earned. As the path to adulthood stretches out, and along with it the responsibilities and milestones that mark adulthood, marriage today sits at the end, not the beginning, of a long chain of accomplishments and goals. “Back in the 1950s,” says Network chair Frank Furstenberg, “people married hardly knowing each other.” They married, he said, without a laundry list of qualities they would like in their mate or the need to know every single aspect about his or her life. They married because the time was right and they’d met someone suitable. (Or quite often, they married simply because the girl was pregnant.) “It began with a hope and a pledge,” says Furstenberg, “and often very little to back that pledge up. Today, increasingly, people want to see evidence that it’s going to work. That doesn’t mean that it will work, but they’re more wary about the pledge and the hope.”
Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone Page 12
