Monday Madness [The Marriage Myth]

Hola mi Gente,

Hope everybody is well with the start of the work week because if you ain’t, you’re in for a fucked up week. LOL!

Man… Am I gonna get ripped for today's post. ::runs::

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The Marriage Myth

I married beneath me, all women do.

-- Nancy Astor

Everywhere we look, it seems, we’re being told that the institution of traditional marriage is in a state of crisis!

That is a misleading statement. It is not that marriage is in crisis. Rather, it is that the institution of marriage isn’t, nor has it ever been, traditional. Human unions have gone through so many transformations, we would be wrong to assume that it was ever a stable institution. The reality is that marriage has always been in flux. It has only been based on the concept of love for 200 years, for example. Before that, it was a way of ensuring economic and political stability. Historian Stephanie Coontz points out that since the hunter-gatherer days to the modern era, “almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before.” So when we think of cohabitation, gay marriage, or stepfamilies as deviating from the so-called “norm,” we are wrong, because there has never really been a “norm.”

This should be a wake-up call for people in the U.S. obsessed with the ideal of the perfect nuclear family -- mother, father and two kids. In fact, the nuclear family, as espoused by religious fanatics is actually a downsized version of the agricultural extended family. Today’s family is a fragmented version imposed by the exploitative effects of the industrial revolution and capitalism. 

We are trying to force ourselves to be something we never really were, or were for a very brief period of time. Instead, we need to be more tolerant of and open to wider range of human unions. People overly invested in traditional “family values” lack the skills to adapt to current social realities that have changed marriage, such as the increased independence of women.

I would agree that many of our familial woes come from an unrealistic, idealized version of marriage. “Forever after” is a an idealistic and, I would submit, an immature vision of marriage. I think advocating for a more expansive interpretation of marriage would help. What I am stating here isn’t new, many have had this idea before, and centuries-long historical documentation confirms it.

Coontz’s basic thesis is that what we think of as the traditional marriage -- marriage based on love -- was not the purpose of marriage for thousands of years. Instead, marriage was about acquiring in-laws, jockeying for political and economic advantage, and building the family labor force. If you were a farmer, you had children in order to increase the workforce, for example. Admittedly this is not very romantic, but was very pragmatic. It was only about 200 years ago that society began to accept the notion that young people could choose their own mates, and should choose their own mates on the basis of something like love, which had formerly been considered a threat to marriage. As soon as people began to do that, all of the demands that we now think of as radical new demands -- from the demand for divorce, to the right to refuse a shotgun marriage, to even recognition of same-sex relations -- were immediately raised.

But it was not until the last 40 years that people began to actually act on the new ideals for beloved marriage. Social conservatives say that there has been a crisis in the last 40 years, and I agree with them, that marriage has been tremendously weakened as an institution. Where I disagree with conservatives is whether this is such a bad thing. What is clear is that marriage has lost its monopoly on organizing sexuality, human relations, and political, social, and economic rights. I agree that this shift poses tremendous societal challenges, but I disagree with the idea that one could make marriage better by trying to shoehorn everyone into the older and outdated forms of marriage. We need newer, more relevant metaphors to live by because the main things that have weakened marriage as an institution are the same things that have strengthened marriage as a relationship.

Marriage is now more optional, because for the first time ever, in Western democracies, men and women have more or less equal rights in marriage and outside it. Women have more economic independence, for example. This means that a marriage can be negotiated, and made more responsive and individualized than ever before. So modern marriage, when it works, is better for people, it’s fairer, it’s more satisfying, it’s more loving and fulfilling than ever before in history.

The contradiction is that the same things that make it so are the things that allow people not to marry, or to leave a marriage that they find unsatisfying. I would agree with those that say you can’t have one (equality) without the other (the power to choose). Therefore, we need to learn to deal with the alternatives to marriage. Alternatives to marriage being singlehood, cohabitation, divorce, and stepfamilies to name just some -- and all of the kinds of alternatives to marriage that have arisen.

What we need to be doing is not necessarily strengthening the union of marriage as it’s been known for years, but better adapting to new forms of marriage that have arisen as a response to modern life.

With every evolutionary leap, there are opportunities and crises. The industrial revolution opened up new opportunities for many people, but it also created havoc in some peoples’ lives and in the biosphere. But the point is that there was no way to go back to turn everyone into self-sufficient farmers. So we had to reform the factories, and we had to deal with the reality we faced. I say that it is the same with marriage. There is no way to force men and women to get married and stay married. There is no way to force women to make the kinds of accommodations they used to make, to enter a shotgun marriage, or to stay in a marriage they find unsatisfying because they didn’t have the economic freedom to make those choices. We have to learn to adapt to both the opportunities and the problems that raises for us.

It’s a fact that evangelical Christians are just as likely to remain single or divorce as atheists. And this is just one example of an irreversible revolution in personal life on the same order as the industrial revolution. It doesn’t matter what your values are. Everyone is affected by this. Even people who want or think they are in a traditional marriage are not exempt from these changes. So that the divorce rates of evangelical Christians are the same as those of agnostics and atheists. And in fact, the highest divorce rates in the country are found in the Bible Belt. People who believe that sex outside of marriage is immoral, tend to get married early and that is a risk factor for divorce. So that’s one of the reasons that they tend to divorce more. We are experiencing a revolutionary change in the way that marriage operates, and the dynamics of marriage. Today, the demands on relationships are so much higher. It is so much more important now to meet as equals, to be good friends as well as lovers, to have values that allow us to change throughout our lifespan and negotiate. And a lot of people with so-called traditional values in fact don’t have those skills.

I think we can start from the beginning, acknowledging that people need support systems. We live in a very unfriendly environment for families. Ironically, it’s the social conservatives -- the same who like to spout empty rhetoric about “traditional family values -- who are least friendly to families. They oppose, for example, policies that support married couples. If marriages are going to survive, couples need things subsidized parental leave so it’s not a class privilege to take some time with your children. Family-friendly work policies are needed. We need high quality, affordable child-care. So that we don’t have to call in sick or quit a job or spend hours agonizing about our children. 

The lack of social supports for a broader definition of what it means to be a family, stresses families. So it’s very ironic that many of the people who claim to be most in favor of marriage do not spend any time building these support systems.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Resources

Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, a history: From obedience to intimacy, or how love conquered marriage. New York: Viking.

Click here to go to Stephanie Coontz’ website, which offers of articles by the author.