The State of the American Marital Estate

Prof. Eli Finkel has not yet published his book on the current state of marriage in America, but he has offered a tease in a New York Times column.

In part, his study involves statistical surveys. In part, it involves cultural analysis.

The data tells us that the marriages of college graduates are far more durable than the marriages of high school dropouts.

Finkel reports:

One of the most disturbing facts about American marriage today is that while divorce increased at similar rates for the wealthy and the poor in the 1960s and ’70s, those rates diverged sharply starting around 1980. According to the sociologist Steven P. Martin, among Americans who married between 1975 and 1979, the 10-year divorce rate was 28 percent among people without a high school education and 18 percent among people with at least a college degree: a 10 percentage point difference. But among Americans who married between 1990 and 1994, the parallel divorce rates were 46 percent and 16 percent: an astonishing 30 percentage point difference.

Some have taken offense at the notion that a good marriage seems increasingly to be the preserve of an elite, but the data tells us that marital happiness correlates with financial security. There is nothing strange or bizarre about the correlation. The data also affirms Joel Kotkin’s analysis of a new American proletariat.

Pychologists like Finkel are not satisfied with mere statistics. They want to know how happy today’s marriages are.

By his report, the results are not very encouraging:

Consider, for example, that while the divorce rate has settled since the early 1980s at around 45 percent, even those marriages that have remained intact have generally become less satisfying.

Finkel believes that our expectations about marriage have changed. Over the past few decades we have decided that marriage should be all things to a couple. The worst part is that people expect it to be a therapeutic experience. When it does not provide us with a therapeutic uplift, we feel that something is wrong.

Psychologists believe that the new expectations require more time. They conclude that people would be happier in their marriages if they spent more time at home and less time on the job.

Speaking for his co-authors, Finkel explains:

Our central claim is that Americans today have elevated their expectations of marriage and can in fact achieve an unprecedentedly high level of marital quality — but only if they are able to invest a great deal of time and energy in their partnership. If they are not able to do so, their marriage will likely fall short of these new expectations. Indeed, it will fall further short of people’s expectations than at any time in the past.

But, if people work less and spend more time at home they will usually earn less. They will have fewer promotions. They will enjoy lower status and prestige.

Will any of those contribute to your marital happiness? Maybe they will; maybe they won’t. Obviously, the division of household labor and the gender differences also play a role.

I am naturally intrigued by the notion that today’s couples believe that their marriages should be like therapy. Isn't therapy working well enough all by itself? Why do people need to take therapy with them into their marriages? Unsurprisingly, the advent of the therapeutic marriage dates to the Vietnam counterculture.

In Finkel’s words:

Since around 1965, we have been living in the era of the self-expressive marriage. Americans now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth. Fueled by the countercultural currents of the 1960s, they have come to view marriage less as an essential institution and more as an elective means of achieving personal fulfillment. “You make me want to be a better man,” from the 1997 movie “As Good as It Gets,” could serve as this era’s marriage ideal. In the words of the sociologist Robert N. Bellah, love has become, in good part, “the mutual exploration of infinitely rich, complex and exciting selves.”

Unfortunately, this feels like taking a bath in psychobabble. It shows that when therapy becomes a culture it tells people how they should conduct themselves in their marriages. By presenting its opinions as science, it has succeeded in imposing them on more than a few people.

When Bellah says that marriage is about “the mutual exploration of infinitely rich, complex and exciting selves” you come away with the impression that people today are full of themselves.

In place of this absurd task of mutual exploration, how about a little sex? Are modern couples so absorbed in their journeys toward self-actualization that they neglect to make love?

As Finkel notes, credit or discredit for this ethic of self-actualization belongs to Abraham Maslow.

The Economist described its basic tenets:

Dr Finkel told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this week that most married Americans expect their spouses to develop profound insights into the essential qualities of their other half, fulfilling their needs for esteem and self-actualisation. A spouse, these days, can be expected to be a confidant, lover, co-parent, breadwinner, activity partner and therapist. This, he concludes, makes being happily married harder than it was in the past.

Unfortunately, depending so much on your spouse is more a symptom than a cure. If you expect your spouse to be everything for you, you probably do not have very fulfilling friendships, family ties or work.

But, then again, it might be the other way around. If you try to make your spouse the only other person in your world, you are not likely to have very many good friendships, family ties or very much career success.

Finkel is correct to call thes the new mode “the all-or-nothing” marriage. He should have added that all-or-nothing thinking characterizes depression. This type of marriage should count as a symptom, not as a cure.

I have little doubt that more and more people conduct their marriages and their lives as therapy. Witness the television show “Girls.” Just because it’s the newest thing that does not mean that it’s a good thing.

How does it happen that people who are pursuing a self-centered goal can function within a cooperative social relationship? Bellah seemed to believe that mutual exploration will do it, but if each spouse is devoting him or herself to actualizing all of his or her full human potential, it becomes impossible to do anything more than to pay lip service to the other person. In some cases, lip service works just fine, but still….

These definitions leave no place for responsibility or for negotiation. They ignore the importance of a couple's rituals and routines. But, since these are the ways we affirm our commitment to a marriage, we are left with two souls baring themselves soulfully and trying to create a connection that they would better affirm by developing more couple routines.

Still, expectations do contribute to our happiness. If we believe that all marriages are as fulfilling as the therapists pretend, and if we judge our own marriages against the fictional accounts we read in the media, we are likely to be dissatisfied.

An unrealistic expectation can make a marriage more difficult. If someone chooses to spend more time at home trying to have a therapeutic marriage and less time at work or with friends, he will be dislocating himself from his social network and expecting that his wife will provide something that she cannot reasonably provide. If he sacrifices friend time for wife time, he might believe that she owes him something. When she cannot provide it, he might demand it. 

This is not a formula for a happy marriage.

Finkel understands that in many cases the self-actualization solution is a dead end. So he recommends readjusting expectations:

But if couples lack the time and energy, they might consider adjusting their expectations, perhaps by focusing on cultivating an affectionate bond without trying to facilitate each other’s self-actualization.

Whatever he means by an “affectionate bond” it sounds like he is encouraging them to sit around exchanging feelings. Surely, a woman would be more comfortable and at home doing so than would be a man. If she expects that her husband will provide something that she should be gaining form her girl friends, she will be dissatisfied. 

Those who want to bond with their spouses should, as I mentioned, developed couple routines. They should also treat each other with courtesy and respect, to be trustworthy and reliable in all things great and small.

Trouble in Role-Reversal Marriages

How are all of those non-traditional marriages doing? You know which ones, the ones where the man has ceded the traditional male role of breadwinner to his wife?

Naturally, one does not want to jump to conclusions, but still, the new survey from Denmark will grab your attention:

Science Daily reports:

The study, by Lamar Pierce, PhD, professor of strategy at Olin, and colleagues in Denmark, shows that men married to women with higher incomes are more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication than their male breadwinner counterparts.

Apparently, there’s trouble in Feministland. The common sense notion that strong, powerful women who take on male roles compromise a man’s erectile function turns out to be true.

There may not be an app for that, but there are pills for that.

But then, you will ask, how are the women in these non-traditional marriages doing? Do women feel fulfilled and contented by their roles as breadwinners? Isn’t that what Betty Friedan predicted?

Unfortunately, the results are not encouraging:

The researchers looking at more than 200,000 married couples in Denmark from 1997 to 2006 also found that wives who outearned their husbands were more likely to suffer from insomnia and to use anti-anxiety medication.

They did not find these effects for unmarried couples or for men earning less than their wives prior to marriage.

Let’s see, the birth control pill is credited with having ushered in the sexual revolution. Now we discover that the great feminist vision of gender equality in marriage can only be sustained by Prozac and Xanax.

You’ve come a long way, baby!

The New Custom of Arranged Parenting

Everybody believes it, to the point where most people have made it into dogma. We all believe that marriage is or should be an expression of romantic love.

Yet, anyone who affirms this point of view does not know what marriage is and has not studied its history.

At best, the merger of romantic love and marriage is relatively recent and relatively localized. It dates to the past few hundred years and it seems largely to be limited to the West. It has been most prominent in the Anglosphere.

Some cultures have thought it a good idea for married couples to develop some level of affection for each other, but they have rarely been willing to make the future of the species and the good order of society rest on the vagaries of adolescent or post-adolescent passion.

Stephanie Coontz has argued the point persuasively in her book, Marriage, A History. She opens a chapter about “the radical idea of marrying for love” by quoting George Bernard Shaw:

George Bernard Shaw described marriage as an institution that brings together two people "under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions. They are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part."

Throughout most of human history people did not marry for love. As best as I can tell, this radical and radically deviant custom began to develop during the Protestant Reformation.

When Martin Luther’s followers left the Church they were relieved of their vows of chastity. Bereft of property or power they faced an unusual challenge in finding mates.

If two individuals lacking either a dowry or a visible means of support meet and wish to mate, what could they be offering to each other? The solution: when you have nothing to offer, you offer your love.

When two young people have nothing to offer but their love, they are signaling their destitution, even their incompetence. The reason that nearly all human communities proscribed marriage for love was because they did not want families to embarrass themselves.

For that reason, most human societies throughout history have relegated romantic love to adulterous liaisons… whether through courtesans, concubines, mistresses or favorites. In the West women practiced courtly love, one of the few forms of institutionalized adultery where the adulterer is an adulteress.

It almost goes without saying, but in the past homosexuals have often engaged in arranged marriages and have sought romantic love outside of marriage.

You might feel offended that a homosexual has not been allowed to marry the person he loved, but, for the vast majority of humans, marrying the person they loved was never an option.

As you know, the institution of marriage is currently in turmoil. Homes and families are being subjected to a degree of disorder that has been rare in human history and that, most would agree, is not good for children.

Rather than argue the case for traditional marriage, I want to examine a new custom that is currently developing.

The New York Times reports that young people are now beginning to try out a new custom: arranged parenting. Two people find each other on the internet and contract an arrangement whereby they will, together, produce a child without benefit of love, romance, sexual intercourse or marriage.

You can imagine that some people believe this is completely crazy, but we do better to examine it more dispassionately.

Often these arrangements involve unmarried and unattached women whose fertility is declining. But they also involve gay men and women who would not be seeking romance with a partner of the opposite sex.

The couple produces a child without benefit of a marriage contract, but they often sign a contract stipulating rights and responsibilities. As the new custom develops more of such couples will be signing more contracts.

For the most part, the co-parents do not live together, but they do share responsibilities in roughly the same way that a divorced couple would.

The fact that these children will have two separate homes is hardly optimal. But, for many of the women, giving a child a present father is better than being a single mother.

But then, what about the gay men who are involving themselves in these arrangements? Some of them are involved in relationships or even “same-sex marriages” but their wish to involve themselves in parenting arrangements suggests that they prefer to offer their children two parents of two different genders.

Intuitively, it feels better for a child to have two parents who are not living together than for the child to be told that Daddy is really vial #93736287, or that having two Mommies and no Daddy is the same as having one Mommy and one Daddy.

It seems clear to me, at least, that the custom as we are seeing it is still in its embryonic stage. The next step for these families will be to live together. Arranged parenting seems to be a step toward arranged marriage. Many young people, having seen what happened to the marriages their parents contracted on the basis of romantic love, might find this an appealing option.

The Changing Male Mind

Over at the Hooking Up Smart blog Susan Walsh shared a fascinating chart two days ago. Link here.

The chart offers a snapshot of what men want… in a mate. It compares male preferences between 1939 and 2008. Stephanie Coontz  reported on this culture shift a year ago in The New York Times.

The chart tells us that today’s men place relatively greater importance on love, attraction, education, sociability and good looks.

The greatest increases involved education, sociability, good looks and good financial prospect.

Today’s men rated love and sexual attraction most important. Men in 1939 rated good character the most important.

In 1939 men valued: dependable character, emotional stability, pleasing disposition, good health, desire for home and children. They placed far more importance on housekeeping skills, religious affiliation and chastity than do men today.

For whatever the reason, today’s men do not seem to be looking for wives. They seem to see marriage as a romantic interlude. Men in 1939 saw marriage as a social alliance.

As  Coontz notes, the education penalty has nearly vanished. That means, men do not hold higher education against women, especially when those women can help support the family. Of course, in an unstable marital climate a woman who can support herself will receive less alimony.

Yet, the more salient point is that men place the highest value on romantic love, sexual attraction and good looks. Today’s man is not looking for a wife; he seems more clearly to be looking for what a previous age would have called a courtesan or concubine.

Otherwise, it is difficult to understand why a modern man who values his prospective wife’s education also places so much more value on good looks than his 1939 counterpart.

When marriage was seen as an alliance between social beings, qualities like religious affiliation and social refinement were far more important. If you are going to make a life together and become part of a community these qualities are of great importance.

But, if marriage is based on romantic love and attraction, along with good looks, what will happen when they all fade.

Good character gains value over time; sexual attraction and good looks are diminishing assets.

One might say that the institution of marriage has evolved. One might also say that people no longer understand what marriage is, and therefore have unrealistic expectations about it. If the latter is true, the institution is more likely to punish their ignorance.

Perhaps it is too obvious to state, but marriages contracted in 1939 were much less likely to end in divorce than are more modern marriages. 

What We Can Learn from Arranged Marriage

All marriages are arranged.

Some are arranged by parents. Others are arranged by the prospective mates themselves.

Throughout human history most marriages have been arranged with the active involvement of parents. The human species, in its wisdom, has chosen not to entrust such an important decision to callow youths.

In Asia parental involvement is the norm. In America it tends not to be.

Even in America, however, the parents of Asian-American children are often directly involved in arranging meetings between prospective spouses. The same holds true among Orthodox Jews.

Needless to say, this takes a great deal of the mystery out of dating.

Obviously, the great American experiment in allowing young people to choose their mates without any parental involvement is proving definitively that it’s better for parents to be involved.

In all cases, parental involvement still allows young people to accept or reject a prospective spouse.

In America, we are so enamored with youthful exuberance and autonomy that we, as a culture, prefer a hands-off approach to mating. We have even made a fetish out of making  your own mistakes.

American parents today often refuse to interfere with youthful mating rituals. At times, they even refuse to offer an opinion.

Usually, they live to regret their reticence.

Why the silence? Most parents of rebellious adolescents know only too well that if they offer an opinion their children are likely to do just the opposite, as a point of youthful pride.

Some young people make it a point of pride to marry someone they know their parents would never accept.

American youth have been brought up to distrust and to defy authority. They are hypersensitive to any advice that might threaten their illusion of autonomy and independence.

Allowing young people independence has produced a marriage market that borders on anarchy.

Many older people are quietly distressed to see what is happening. They do their best to instruct their children on the criteria and standards they should use to make their way through the chaos, but that simply makes them involved at remove.

Given how much of a mess the mating game has become, many people long for the days when there was more parental involvement.

This morning The New York Times offers an excellent article on arranged marriage. It points out that, in the best of circumstances, young people who do not enlist the active involvement of their parents often filter prospective mates through criteria that their parents would use.

It makes perfect sense that parents would be involved in the choice of a spouse. Young people should be happy to accept the wisdom of people love them more than anyone else, who know them better than anyone else and who have considerable life experience in the area.

As the Times notes, parents can bring a more objective perspective to the mating game, and thus offer direction and guidance to young people who are likely to get carried away with love or lust or both.

What lessons can young Americans can draw from this article?

First, don’t date anyone you wouldn’t marry.

Second, don’t allow yourself to fall in love with someone you would never marry. .

Third, don’t marry anyone your parents would not accept.

Fourth, if you don’t know who your parents would accept make it your business to find out.

If your parents tell you that it doesn’t matter who you marry as long as you’re in love and are happy, they are either deluded or are lying to you.

Marriage is a social and very public commitment. Love is a private and personal commitment.

If you begin with nothing but true love, you are setting yourself up for failure.

A Marriage of Resentment and Contempt

It begins in the schools. There, empowered female teachers have set out to enhance the performance of girls by systematically favoring them at the expense of boys.

The Huffington Post reported that British boys are convinced that female teachers grade them unfairly. On the other hand, schoolgirls believe that male teachers grade them fairly.

I do not know the extent to which female American teachers try to punish boys in order to improve the performance of girls, but girls are consistently outperforming boys in schools and are taking up most of the places in colleges.

It seems inevitable that some boys are dropping out of school and failing to pursue advanced education because they have been demoralized.

Think about it, if all the girls receive great grades then boys will, at first try to improve their performance. Once they discover that they are still receiving lower grades, they will give up. This translates into depression.

Convinced, and not without reason, that the game is rigged, they stop playing.

Depression, as Martin Seligman defined it, is learned helplessness. When something is learned, someone is teaching it. When your female teachers convince you that you can never get it right and that you will never be judged fairly, you will become demoralized and depressed.

If any teachers are using their power to depress boys in order to favor girls they are engaging in child abuse. They might think that they are advancing a cause, but their behavior needs to be called out and stopped.

Of course, a boy’s experience with empowered female teachers will surely not encourage him to become very closely involved with girls.

If he is not allowed to express his anger toward his female teachers, he might try to avenge the slights by punishing the girls he becomes involved with. He will not be looking for love; he will be looking for payback.

Their experience with empowered female teachers will not encourage boys, once they become men, to trust women or become very closely involved with them.  

Rob Long suggests that when these boys grow up they are unlikely to believe that it is possible to have harmonious relationships with women. 

A recent poll bears this out. Suzanne Venker reports:

According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

More women want to get married and more men don’t. This suggests that men are increasingly being conditioned to dread close contact with women. It also suggests that men have discovered that, like school, the marriage game is rigged against them.

One would suspect that men who are brought up in such schools would be insufferable husbands. Yet, surprisingly, when men do get married they make a great effort to make their marriages work. If we believe Lisa Hickey these men marry women who resemble the harridans they have known in the classroom.

Hickey does not mention it, but I will assume that the modern marriages she describes involve people who did not marry young. I also imagine that these modern marriages involve two-earner couples who divide up household chores.

If Hickey’s article suggests anything, it tells us that the interactions between these modern married couples are contentious and bitter, a marriage of resentment and contempt. It demonstrates that this new modern version of marriage is unworkable.

Hickey believes that it can all be solved if couples merely learn how to communicate better, this being the therapeutically correct panacea for marital strife.

Yet, her male interviewees have largely passed beyond the stage of talking it out. They have discovered that they cannot win an argument with a modern woman. They know that it is impossible to negotiate or compromise with someone who is all take and no give.

Hickey describes husbands’ attitudes:

…there is despair in the voices of married men. The refrain heard over and over is some variation of “I want to have a good marriage. I love my wife. But sometimes, all I feel is resentment—from my wife, toward my wife, toward the marriage. I believe my wife thinks I am an asshole, and she treats me as such.”

One admires the stoic fortitude of these men, but still, they should have seen this before, not after they got married.

Bitter experience teaches them that if their wives are treating them contemptuously trying to talk it out is another losing game. 

These men can either tune their wives out or get angry. They have few other choices.

Marriage coach John Wilder offers a picture of what happens when couples try to communicate:

 “Women are constantly trying to control their husbands. If a man dares to critique his wife, she immediately goes on the attack, screaming and crying with the express intent of teaching, so that no good man would ever do it again. Most men learn the lesson well and early and learn to ‘seethe in silence.’ The resentment continues to grow. Men feel defenseless against this kind of attack and don’t know how to have any equality.”

Unfortunately, men try to placate their intemperate wives, the better to stop the criticism and the complaining.

Hickey explains:

Often a man will admit that a central issue in their [sic] lives is dealing with the irrational-seeming criticism from their wives in a way that isn’t defensive but shows compassion and love, despite the cost to their souls.

When a man engages with irrationality he will never win. If he tries to be compassionate and understanding, his wife will think less of him and feel more contempt. 

If, as Hickey suggests, these wives are dishing out far more humiliation than love, then the women need to change their mode of interaction. They need to tamp down the criticism and complaining and to stop expecting that their husbands should be just like their girlfriends.

Unfortunately, today’s modern woman has developed an expectation that men should act like women in a relationship. It's a formula for repeated disappointments. 

Women who have postponed marriage in favor of career, have, Hickey suggests, assembled a coterie of unmarried female friends who salve the pain of a singlehood they have chosen freely by commiserating and sharing their contempt for men.

It isn’t a good preparation for marriage.

Hickey contends that the men often have good intentions. Yet their good intentions and their best efforts never seem to improve the situation, so they become demoralized and give up.

In her words:

But almost always, the men we talked to start with an intention of trying to understand their wives, get a grasp on what would make the marriage work, and have an intense desire to move toward an increasingly great relationship, instead of one where they feel continually disconnected. And yet, they can’t seem to get there. Despair is the end result of ongoing frustration and disconnection. 

It's Not the Infidelity, Stupid

Several weeks ago I commented on a new study about divorce.  Norwegian researchers discovered that when couples share the household chores they are 50% more likely to get divorced. Call it the price of gender equity at home.

Naturally, we do not want to plight our troth to a single study. Rational creatures that we are, we seek more confirming evidence

Today, the London Telegraph reports that a British law firm has discovered that marriages most often fail over issues like dividing household chores.

The failure to reach a satisfactory household division of labor causes more divorces than, say, infidelity.

The Telegraph explains:

According to analysis of divorce cases by Gateley, a UK law firm, seven in ten marriages fall apart because couples fail to reach an agreement on decisions relating to the home, such as how monthly finances are arranged, where couples live or how household responsibilities are carved up.

Only one in five marriages ends because of infidelity, the law firm said.

Married couples can solve the problem, the British lawyers say, by thinking of marriage as a “business merger,” or, as I would call it, an alliance.

Conducting a marriage is best considered to be a complex negotiation. Assuming that everything will work out because two people love each other is a formula for divorce.

Today, people marry later than they ever have. No longer are young marrieds teenagers in their salad days.

In principle, life experience teaches negotiation skills. The older you are the better you should be at working out differences without resorting to drama.

Therefore, we should expect that mature adults would best be able to negotiate the terms of their merger to everyone’s satisfaction.

Yet, this is apparently not the case.

Attorney Elizabeth Hassall explained:

Yes it’s romantic to be walking down the aisle, but the realities of a ‘merger’ are a little more cut and dry, It is often the case that people simply don’t think about it, or feel comfortable discussing life choices, but what is apparent is that going into a marriage blind could be a recipe for disaster.

Most people today believe that marriage is an expression of love between equal partners. Of course, it isn’t. It never has been.

Blind romantics sometimes believe that any discussion about how to divide up household responsibilities will sully their love.  As Hassall suggests, they are “going into a marriage blind.”

Strangely, enough, in the old days when people married younger they did not have these problems. Today’s older married couples do. How can that happen?

The mystery is more apparent than real. In the past roles were clearly defined. Husbands and wives knew what they had to do, knew what was expected of them, knew what their responsibilities were and were happy to fulfill their roles.  

Different cultures defined rules differently, but most were defined by gender and most created separate spheres of authority and responsibility.

In most cases the home was a woman’s domain. She held the power and the authority.

This did not mean that she did everything. It did mean that everyone knew who was in charge. 

When both parties to the marriage know and understand this division of household labor there is less chance for confusion and encroachment.

Today’s young women consider household chores to be a form of  domestic servitude. Too many of them have accepted the mindless feminist dictum that being a suburban housewife is akin to being in a concentration camp.

These women see men as adversaries and potential oppressors. They do not discuss the division of household chores because they are afraid that the ensuing fight will diminish their marriage prospects.

When they get married they discover that their husbands were brought up by mothers who taught them not to do household chores. And they also discover that, often enough, having two people in the kitchen is a formula for chaos.

Ultimately, the problem seems to come down to finance. One might note that Japanese couples do not have as many problems over household finances because wives have complete control over them. They do not argue about where to live because a wife’s decision is final.

In a culture where wives are homemakers, many of the problems that bedevil contemporary marriages diminish.

The Telegraph reports:

Of the seven in ten marriages that fail because people can not agree on simple domestic issues, by far the most common cause is lack of agreement over finances. One in eight of these marriages disintegrate because couples are unable to agree on where to settle down.

Having broken down the traditional division of household labor, modern couples often face the task of reinventing the wheel.

They refuse to respect tradition and insist that they can do it better than anyone else. Too often they pay for their arrogance with their marriages. 

Marital Advice from Divorcees

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Seek out marital advice from people whose marriages had failed.

It sounds like asking Julia Allison for some pointers about dating.  

There's something wrong with a culture that seeks how-to advice from people who don't know how to.

Most researchers look at successful marriages. It makes a lot of sense. Psychologist Terry Orbuch has chosen the opposite tack. She believes that divorcees have spent more time obsessing over failure, and thus, that they will be especially good at giving advice.

Huh?

Elizabeth Bernstein summarizes Orbuch’s concept:

People who lose the most important relationship of their life tend to spend some time thinking about what went wrong. If they are at all self-reflective, this means they will acknowledge their own mistakes, not just their ex's blunders. And if they want to be lucky in love next time, they'll try to learn from these mistakes.

Of course, people who are introspective, self-absorbed and self-critical are, by definition, more likely to end up divorced.

People who know what went wrong and who swear never to make the same mistake again often end up making different mistakes.

Perfecting the art of introspective self-criticism gets them caught up in a feedback loop, between mistakes and self-critical self-awareness.

Nothing about the process helps you to develop the good habits that are the basis for a successful marriage.

As might be imagined, Orbuch’s divorcees say what a psychologist would want them to say. They advise talking things over, expressing your feelings, being open, honest and supportive.

While wallowing in therapy culture pieties, the study does not say how the divorced couples defined their roles. Did they see themselves as husband and wife in the more traditional sense or did they see themselves as equal persons?

We know nothing about who was playing which roles, and have no information about any couple’s financial condition.

Orbuch’s advice is wrong and wrongheaded because it suggests that a marriage can be made to work.

True enough, marriage requires work and adjustment. But you cannot force it to work when other factors are militating against it.

If you want to know what makes a marriage work, begin with the most important fact: whom you choose to marry. If you choose the wrong person, you are not going to make it work by rearranging your mental furniture and showering your spouse with empathy.

Over at the Hooking Up Smart blog, Susan Walsh has offered a good list of questions you should ask yourself when you are choosing a mate.

If I had to limit myself to three qualities that are most important in a successful marriage, I would begin with character.

If your beloved has bad character, if he or she is unreliable and cannot be trusted, if he or she evinces disloyalty… you are going to have more drama than harmony, and ultimately a less successful marriage.

How do you judge character? Try asking your friends and family.

If none of the people who love you the most likes your intended, then it is likely that your love has blinded you to the person’s character flaws.

Marriage is a social institution. When you marry someone you make that person a part of your family and a part of your circle of friends.

If you choose someone whose bad character alienates these people marriage will cost you your social moorings.

Good communication will not compensate for the ensuing problems.

Serious sociological studies have shown that the second most important predictor of a happy marriage is: coming from the same or a similar culture.

You do not need to think the same thoughts, have the same feelings or have the same interests. You are not going to be happy if you marry an echo chamber.

It does mean that you should have a great deal in common, culturally. If you come from radically different cultural backgrounds you will find that the social cues that mean one thing in one culture mean something else in someone else’s culture.

It may be the case that you will feel a stronger emotional connection to someone who comes from a different world, but that just means that your emotions are compensating for your inability to understand the signals you are sending each other.

The further apart you are culturally, the more you will have to explain yourself all the time.

People who come from radically different worlds often exhaust themselves trying to bridge their culture gap with words and feelings.

With marriage and with any romantic relationship the less you have to explain yourself the better off you will be.

Finally, marriages fail because no one knows what marriage is any more. People have come to believe that marriage expresses true love and involves an emotional affinity, as in soul mating.

If you want a happy and long lasting marriage you will to rely less of feeling and more on consistent routines. The more harmonious your household, the better your marriage. 

Talking about why you can’t get along does not help you to get along. It exacerbates the tensions by accentuating the points of conflict.

Single Motherhood Revisited

In 1992 then Vice President Dan Quayle was wildly excoriated for saying that single-motherhood was not a good thing.

Speaking in San Francisco, Quayle said:

It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.

The outcry was vigorous and immediate. Sophisticated intellectuals denounced Quayle for being a Republican yahoo.

Clearly, television sitcoms do not set cultural standards. At least, I like to think they don’t.

Yet, the debate surrounding the issue allows the general public to see what opinion makers and other deep thinkers value. The debate about Dan Quayle made very clear that single motherhood was just another lifestyle choice.

The result: while college educated Americans still cling to the old model of the nuclear family, those who have less education have embraced singlehood motherhood with gusto.

Obviously, all those passionate defenses of Murphy Brown had an effect. And not a good one.

As the old saying goes: be careful what you wish for….

Today, journalists who are studying the outcome of this policy are beginning to see more clearly.

The New York Times reported yesterday:

While many children of single mothers flourish (two of the last three presidents had mothers who were single during part of their childhood), a large body of research shows that they are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of school.

And also:

Across Middle America, single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed.

The Times compared the lives of two Michigan families. In one family three children were being brought up by a single mother. In the other children were being brought up by their biological parents.

Clearly, two working parents bring in a far greater income than a single mother. The Times emphasized the point. Yet, it also pointed out the inescapable truth that children are hurt when a father is not present.

In its words:

While many studies have found that children of single parents are more likely to grow up poor, less is known about their chances of advancement as adults. But there are suggestions that the absence of a father in the house makes it harder for children to climb the economic ladder.

Writing in the Washington Post Isabel Sawhill argued that Quayle was correct. For the record, Sawhill is a fellow at liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution.

In her words:

Twenty years later, Quayle’s words seem less controversial than prophetic. The number of single parents in America has increased dramatically: The proportion of children born outside marriage has risen from roughly 30 percent in 1992 to 41 percent in 2009. For women under age 30, more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. A lifestyle once associated with poverty has become mainstream. 

Strangely, this suggests that middle Americans no long take their cultural cues from those who are doing better; they are emulating those who are doing worse.

Refreshingly, Sawhill also defends marriage against the popular custom of cohabitation.

Rarely do we read such a strong defense of traditional marriage, so hers is worth pondering:

…marriage is a commitment that cohabitation is not. Taking a vow before friends and family to support another person “until death do us part” signals a mutual sense of shared responsibility that cannot be lightly dismissed. Cohabitation is more fragile — cohabiting parents split up before their fifth anniversary at about twice the rate of married parents.  Often, this is because the father moves on, leaving the mother not just with less support but with fewer marriage prospects. For her, marriage requires finding a partner willing to take responsibility for someone else’s kids.

She is absolutely right. Making a public commitment by taking a vow before friends and family makes you more serious, more responsible, and more likely to stay together.

As long as dimwitted celebrities are still telling the world that marriage is just a piece of paper, Sawhill’s words are must reading.

Second, she reports that research has shown that a child brought up by both biological parents will have many advantages in life.

She writes:

…a wealth of research strongly suggests that marriage is good for children. Those who live with their biological parents do better in school and are less likely to get pregnant or arrested. They have lower rates of suicide, achieve higher levels of education and earn more as adults. Meanwhile, children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed.

Why should this be so?

People in stable marriages may have better relationship skills, for instance, or a greater philosophical or religious commitment to union that improves parenting. Still, raising children is a daunting responsibility. Two committed parents typically have more time and resources to do it well.  

Whatever the reason, the evidence is clear: children do better when they are raised by their two married biological parents.

Clearly, there are exceptions to the rule, but those who decided, as a matter of cultural politics, to make the exceptions into the rule should take responsibility for the damage done to people who took their ideas as words to live by.

Pre-Marriage

When marriages were arranged, people married without even knowing each other.

Then courtship was introduced as a prelude to marriage and people spent time getting to know each other before they walked down the aisle.

Nowadays, even courtship is not sufficient. Young couples require a trial period, in order to know whether they can get alone, whether they are compatible, whether they have great sex, and so on. They cohabit.

To distinguish it from courtship, I will call it pre-marriage. It may not start out as a pre-marriage but inertia inevitably leads it in the direction of marriage.

In an excellent column today, University of Virginia psychologist Meg Jay says that for many young people cohabitation is about “prophylaxis.” That is, protection.

It makes sense. Young people have been brought up to think that if they use protection they can do as they please. Rather than limit the precept to sex, they seem to have extended it to other areas of their lives.

Now that our culture has ritualized pre-marriage, social scientists have researched its value as an institution. They have discovered that it increases the likelihood of divorce.

The bottom line is: pre-marriage is bad for your marriage.

To clarify the analysis, Jay explains that we need to distinguish between two kinds of cohabitation. Some people engage in a pre-marriage because they are engaged or because they know that they will soon be engaged.

They have discussed what they are doing and they have committed to each other. Having exercised proper moral agency, they are called deciders.

Others, called sliders, fall into a pre-marriage without giving it too much thought. They are sharing a space; they become lovers; they believe that it’s cheaper to cohabit… and before you know it, they are a constituted couple.

Having allowed themselves to be led into something without exercising moral agency they have just let things slide.

Jay reports that cohabitation is much more a problem with sliders than deciders.

She describes how it happens:

Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

Ironically, a generation brought up to be independent and autonomous, to make its own free choices has somehow fallen into the habit of letting relationships develop without there being any discussion, agreement, or definition. When it comes to cohabitation they are acting like moral slugs.

Having overcome the rules and roles that define social relationships they are paying the price. Neither married nor single, they have no real idea of what their roles are.

How many people do you know who dreamed of growing up to become someone’s domestic partner?

For the slider group, pre-marriage is founded on a basic misunderstanding. Women see it as a simulated marriage; men see it as a substitute for marriage.

Jay explains:

Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. 

Once two young people start living together, they start developing couple habits, couple rituals, and couple routines. They become identified socially as part of the couple. The longer it lasts the greater their investment in their relationship.

Jay explains well why it is so difficult to get out of cohabitation:

Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t. Too often, young adults enter into what they imagine will be low-cost, low-risk living situations only to find themselves unable to get out months, even years, later. It’s like signing up for a credit card with 0 percent interest. At the end of 12 months when the interest goes up to 23 percent you feel stuck because your balance is too high to pay off. In fact, cohabitation can be exactly like that. In behavioral economics, it’s called consumer lock-in.

Lock-in is the decreased likelihood to search for, or change to, another option once an investment in something has been made. The greater the setup costs, the less likely we are to move to another, even better, situation, especially when faced with switching costs, or the time, money and effort it requires to make a change.

After a while it feels cheaper to marry than to separate. It’s not a good foundation for a marriage.