Section:
CONSIDER THIS
SOMETIMES a
belief becomes so strong that suggesting
it might be wrong is nearly impossible.
One such belief is that
marriage
is good for us. Last April, when Vermont
finally recognized same-sex
marriage,
many of our fellow Vermonters rushed to
celebrate. Neither one of us did. They
were puzzled by our lack of enthusiasm.
"You have to support
gay
marriage,"
a straight colleague angrily shouted at
one of us. But why do we have to
celebrate any
marriage?
Unlike conservatives who attack
gay
marriage,
it's not the
gay
part we object to; it's the
marriage
part. What does it even mean? Over the
past 15 years, Americans have been
fighting about that, and therefore about
what it means to be a citizen and an
adult.
In 1996, as
Congress turned "welfare" into
"workfare," it proclaimed that "marriage
is the foundation of a successful
society." A few years ago, President
George W. Bush created the Healthy
Marriage
Initiative to promote
marriage
as a solution to poverty and for the
well-being of children. Currently the
government spends about $150-million
annually to promote
marriage
among our country's poorest citizens. In
The Audacity of Hope, President Obama
claims that supporting
marriage
among low-income couples should be
"something everyone can agree upon." As
one of his earliest acts as president,
with two wars and an economic meltdown
on his hands, Obama took time to approve
taking $5-million out of antipoverty
funds to promote
marriage
for young people.
The belief
that
marriage
is good for us also explains why
gay
and lesbian activists have been fighting
so hard for same-sex
marriage.
According to Freedom to Marry, the
national organization behind much of the
gay-marriage
movement,
marriage
is "the most powerful expression we have
for the affirmation of love and
commitment, a source of social
recognition … that hold(s) two people
together through life's ups and downs."
Marriage
is also the source of more than a
thousand federal rights and
responsibilities, not to mention cheaper
gym memberships, social approval, and
all those gifts that arrive on your
wedding day.
Where there
are policy disputes, you can expect
social scientists to weigh in with their
supposedly objective data. One
noteworthy example is Mark Regnerus's
recent op-ed essay in The Washington
Post, urging young people to get
married. Regnerus argues that "today, as
ever,
marriage
wisely entered into remains good for the
economy and the community, good for
one's personal well-being, good for
wealth creation, and, yes, good for the
environment, too."
Marriage
promises to save the poor, empower
gays
and lesbians, and socialize the young.
In support of those promises, the
romantics wax about love and happiness,
the pragmatics tout rights and security,
and the experts crunch the numbers. But
as critical sociologists, we find
ourselves agreeing most strongly with
Marx--Groucho--who quipped, "Marriage
is a wonderful institution, but who
wants to live in an institution?"
Institutions
serve two purposes, practical and
ideological. We will do well to keep
both in mind in evaluating the benefits
that
marriage
supposedly offers.
•
Marriage
makes you rich. Advocates claim
that
marriage
increases wealth. That makes sense; if
the key to a successful
marriage
is hard work, you should at least get
paid for it. It's true that married
people are wealthier than unmarried
people, but it's not
marriage
that makes you rich.
Marriage
is not randomly distributed across the
population. People who get married (and
stay married) tend to be wealthier and
whiter than people who do not. For
instance, 95 percent of white women will
marry at some point in their lifetime,
while only 43 percent of black women
will.
To say
marriage
creates wealth is to confuse correlation
with causation. If there is more wealth
in Manhattan than in Brooklyn, that does
not mean that moving to Manhattan will
make you wealthier. In fact, moving--and
marrying--may make you poorer, given the
high start-up costs. A move requires
first and last months' rent, a moving
van, and lots of bubble wrap. A
marriage
often demands a wedding, and with the
average cost of weddings at $30,000,
getting married is going to cost you.
Nor will
moving into
marriage
necessarily increase your earnings or
earning potential. If you're poor and
have little education, saying "I do"
won't get you off welfare or make
minimum wage any less a dead end. If you
already have means,
marriage
might help. Be careful, though, because
even when
marriage
does produce wealth, divorce often
destroys it. If you are getting married
for the economic benefits, better make
sure it's forever.
•
Marriage
is traditional. As Frank
Sinatra once crooned: "Love and
marriage
/ go together like a horse and
carriage/… It's an institute you can't
disparage / Ask the local gentry and
they will say it's elementary." But
there is nothing elementary about the
form of
marriage
as we practice it today. Despite the
claims of sociologists, politicians, and
marriage
advocates on all sides,
marriage
has changed over time and exists
differently in different cultures.
Marriage
as we imagine it today developed during
the late 1800s, when it became "for
love" and "companionate." Until that
point, one married for material and
social reasons, not romance. Women
required
marriage
for survival; men did not. That left men
free to behave as they wished:
Prostitutes and buggery were part of
many a married man's sexual repertoire.
But then the Victorians (with their
sexual prudishness) and first-wave
feminists (with their sense that what's
good for the goose is good for the
gander) insisted that antiprostitution
and antisodomy laws be enacted, and that
married men confine their sexual
impulses to the conjugal bed. The result
was enforced lifelong sexual monogamy
for both parties, at least in theory.
That might
have seemed reasonable in 1900, when the
average
marriage
lasted about 11 years, a consequence of
high death rates. But these days, when a
marriage
can drag on for half a century, it can
be a lot of work. Laura Kipnis calls
marriage
a "domestic gulag," a forced-labor camp
where the inmates have to spend all
their time outside of work working on
their
marriage.
And if the
dyadic couple locked in lifelong
monogamy was a radical new form, so was
the family structure it spawned. The
nuclear family is primarily a mutant
product of the nuclear age. Before World
War II, most Americans lived among
extended family. The definition of
family was not the couple and their
offspring, but brothers, sisters, aunts,
uncles, and grandparents as well. With
the creation of suburbs for the middle
classes, large numbers of white
Americans began participating in the
radical family formation of two married
parents plus children in a detached
house separated from extended family.
Although the
nuclear family is idealized as "natural"
and "normal" by our culture (Leave It to
Beaver) and our government ("family
values"), it has always been both a
shockingly new way of living and a
minority lifestyle. Even at its height,
in the early 1970s, only about 40
percent of American families lived that
way. Today that number is about 23
percent, including stepfamilies. The
nuclear family is not only
revolutionary; it is a revolution that
has failed for most of us.
•
Marriage
makes you healthy. According to
the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, married people have better
health than those who are not married. A
closer look at the data, however,
reveals that married and never-married
Americans are similar; it's the divorced
who seem to suffer. The lesson might be
to never divorce, but an even more
obvious lesson to be drawn from the
research might be to never marry.
Naomi Gerstel
and Natalia Sarkisian's research shows
that married couples are more isolated
than their single counterparts. That is
not a function just of their having
children. Even empty-nesters and couples
without children tend to have weak
friendship networks.
Marriage
results in fewer rather than more social
ties because it promises complete
fulfillment through the claims of
romance. We are instructed by movies,
pop songs, state policy, and sociology
to get married because "love is all you
need." But actually we humans need more.
We need both a sense of connection to
larger networks--to community, to
place--and a sense of purpose that is
beyond our primary sexual relationships.
FOR
THOSE REASONS,
marriage
has been self-destructing as a social
form. The
marriage
rate in the United States is at an
all-time low. In 1960 about two-thirds
of adult Americans were married. Today
only slightly more than half of
Americans live in wedded bliss.
Actually, even the bliss is declining,
with fewer married Americans describing
their unions as "very happy."
Maybe it's the
decline in happiness that has caused an
increasing number of Americans to say "I
don't," despite Hollywood's presenting
us with happy ending after happy ending
and a government bent on distributing
civil rights on the basis of marital
status. Apparently no amount of
propaganda or coercion can force humans
to participate in a family form so out
of sync with what we actually need.
With all that
marriage
supporters promise--wealth, health,
stability, happiness,
sustainability--our country finds itself
confronted with a paradox: Those who
would appear to gain the most from
marriage
are the same ones who prove most
resistant to its charms. Study after
study has found that it is the poor in
the United States who are least likely
to wed. The people who get married are
the same ones who already benefit most
from all our social institutions: the
"haves." They benefit even more when
they convince everyone that the benefits
are evenly distributed.
Too often we
are presented with the false choice
between a lifelong, loving
marriage
and a lonely, unmarried life. But those
are far from the only options. We should
consider the way people actually live:
serial monogamy, polyamory, even
polygamy.
Instead of
"blaming the victims" for failing to
adopt the formative lifestyles of the
white and middle class, we should
consider that those avoiding
marriage
might know exactly what they are doing.
Marriage
is not necessarily good for all of us,
and it might even be bad for most of us.
When there is broad, seemingly unanimous
support for an institution, and when the
institution is propped up by such
disparate ideas as love, civil rights,
and wealth creation, we should wonder
why so many different players seem to
agree so strongly. Perhaps it's because
they are supporting not just
marriage
but also the status quo.
We can dress
up
marriage
in as many beautiful white wedding gowns
as we like, but the fundamental fact
remains:
Marriage
is a structure of rights and privileges
for those who least need them and a
culture of prestige for those who
already have the highest levels of
racial, economic, and educational
capital.
So when you
hear activists and advocates--gay,
Christian, and otherwise--pushing to
increase not only
marriage
rights but also
marriage
rates, remember these grouchy words of
Marx: "Politics is the art of looking
for trouble, finding it everywhere,
diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying
the wrong remedies."
Marriage
is trouble. Americans haven't failed at
marriage.
Marriage
has failed us.
~~~~~~~~
By Laurie
Essig and Lynn Owens
Laurie Essig
and Lynn Owens are assistant professors
of sociology at Middlebury College.
Essig is author of American Plastic:
Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and the Spirit
of Our Time, forthcoming from Beacon
Press in 2010. Owens is author of
Cracking Under Pressure: Narrating the
Decline of the Amsterdam Squatters'
Movement, to be published in paperback
this month by Amsterdam University
Press.
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