Posted by
Jack Fisher on Friday, July 17, 2009 12:27:21 PM
Marriage has become a hot topic in the ongoing culture wars. While much of the conflict has taken a back seat to current economic woes, the debate still rages on. How does marriage fit into our current society and how should it be dealt with? Those in the social conservative wing argue that marriage should be promoted, encouraged, and solidified on all levels including government (which somewhat takes away from the conservative aspect of their politics). Those in more liberal social circles aruge marriage should be kept personal between free people and the only business the law has is preserving the quality and legitimacy of each marriage, sometimes giving preference to those deemed 'threatened' or subject to prejudice. At the core of each debate is the notion of 'traditional marriage.' But there's a problem with this concept. Marriage is always changing. Often, it changes faster than most people can keep up with.
Brian Alexander, a noted MSNBC columnist, recently wrote an interesting article detailing this phenomenon:
More than 20 years ago, a Newsweek magazine article called “The Marriage Crunch” scared the bejesus out of many women by stating that if a white, college-educated woman hadn't married by age 30, she had a slim chance of ever tying the knot. The most notorious nugget of the article declared that a 40-year-old single woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married.
The article was wrong then and now, a generation later, it is even more off the mark.
The vast majority of women who want to marry actually do, although they're no longer in a rush to do it. Does that mean women and men are less interested in marriage than in the past?
No! Americans love marriage compared to people in other industrialized countries. While Americans get hitched at a rate of 7.5 per every 1,000 inhabitants in a given year, the French and Germans marry at a rate of 4.5 to 4.9 per 1,000, Swedes 4.0 to 4.4, Belgians 2.8 to 3.9.
Yet as American sex lives have changed, not coincidentally, calls to “save marriage” have grown. That seems to indicate some confusion about the purpose of marriage and the role of sex within it.
Like the old Newsweek article, some traditionalists fret that Americans are falling out of the marriage habit. “Marriage has fallen by the wayside,” declares the National Marriage Project in its most recent report from 2007. The Project, a research organization based at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., blames “secular individualism” and tolerance of “alternative lifestyles” for marriage's perceived unfashionable status.
While such statements seem to fly in the face of the recent government data, the Project bases them on the divorce rate (about 45 percent of all marriages), the number of adults who are not married (roughly 50 percent of people older than age 18 are unmarried at any one time because of divorce, a spousal death, or by choice) and relaxed attitudes toward phenomena like out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation. It argues that “the institution of marriage needs to be promoted by all levels of society, particularly the families, the schools, the churches, the non-profit sector, and the government.”
This is essentially a political argument, part of the now-hibernating culture wars that are rooted in worry over sexual morality. But turning marriage into a political issue is a losing idea no matter where on the liberal-conservative spectrum you fall because marriage isn't going away. It's just changing, quickly.
Alexander later goes onto describe the current trend in marriage. He calls it 'the personalized marriage.' It follows the trend of couples marrying later and becoming sexually active at younger ages. It also takes into account women becoming better educated and more free to persue their own careers. In previous centuries, marriage was pretty much the only career they had. Freedom has opened door to new opportunities, so if she's going to get married it's going to be on her terms.
In recent surveys, nearly 90 percent of young people say they want to find their “soulmate.” A 2007 Pew study found that “mutual happiness and fulfillment” was cited by Americans as the main reason to get married by a three-to-one margin. Children ranked eighth on a list of items that made a “successful marriage.”
It's become less about creating a family unit and more about finding one's 'other half' in a sense. There's a desire not just for children or sexual satisfaction, but a more personal sense of fulfillment. This does change the nature of marriage because it means that couples are free to accommodate changing whims. So if that fulfillment isn't there anymore, divorce is more likely. In the past divorce wasn't viable because there just weren't as many opportunities out there for a divorced woman. Now the free society has provided them and that desire for personal fulfillment sometimes leads them away from one marriage and into another.
There is also a gap between the kind of marriage well-off middle class people enjoy compared to the poor.
However, there is one segment of our society in which women do not marry at the numbers they used to, helping to fuel worry over marriage in general. But it’s not about sex, it’s about economics and lack of education.
According to the new government figures, about 53 percent of poor black women have not been married by age 35 and it's not because they are too busy working on Wall Street.
In a sense the way marriage is approached depends on the kinds of resources one has. It goes back to past centuries when women did not have the freedom or education to make sound decisions about marriage. In a society of many different socioeconomic backgrounds, certain groups will approach it differently. And as those groups change, so will marriage. The 'traditional marriage' crowd may not agree with these changes, but they are not subject to the whims of politics. It will change whether they want it to or not. Freedom and a free society allows it to do so in a ways that wouldn't be possible under old orders of tyranny.
In the end, Alexander offers the best way to approach modern marriage.
The newest figures prove that we don’t hate marriage in this country, we just have a problem staying married because we still don’t understand the complex institution and become disenchanted when our expectations crumble. In the segments of our society in which marriage may truly be in trouble, the cause isn’t sex, or tolerance of “alternative lifestyles.” It’s lousy education, tough economics and, yes, sometimes a lack of personal discipline. Try fitting all that into a political philosophy.
Among the well-educated and economically secure — an increasingly rare bunch these days — we managed to break the shackles binding marriage to sex and to free ourselves to make better choices later. That’s good. But we risk those marriages by forgetting that to a large degree they are business arrangements, ones in which you get to dress inappropriately at the office, but business just the same.