The marriage hoax

Conservative moralists, alarmed by the divorce rate, want us to return to a Golden Age of Marriage. Too bad it never existed.

By Maria Russo

Mar 19, 2001 | It must be America's most often cited statistic: Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. For many social commentators, including voices from the right such as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead ("The Divorce Culture") and Gertrude Himmelfarb ("One Nation, Two Cultures"), the lesson in this seems like a no-brainer: Our high divorce rate is a sign of widespread moral decline, evidence that we've become a selfish, consumer-oriented society, one in which even the most hallowed of relationships is disposable.

Last fall, two widely discussed books sounded an urgent call of alarm. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's "The Case for Marriage" and Judith Wallerstein's "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce" both argued that our easy-out approach to marriage is getting out of hand; divorce, they feel, should be granted more rarely. But a new round of books published this year -- Nancy Cott's "Public Vows," Hendrick Hartog's "Man and Wife in America" and Marilyn Yalom's "A History of the Wife" -- tells a different, if less mediagenic, story. These books are histories, not polemics, but together they make a clear and compelling argument: The nation hasn't suffered a massive decline in moral fiber since the 1950s, and marriage isn't really any more fragile now than it was in the days of our grandparents and great-grandparents. The truth is that marriage has always been a shaky, contested, unreliable institution, and we're kidding ourselves that it was ever any other way.

The authors of "The Case for Marriage," a sociologist (Waite) and a nationally syndicated conservative columnist (Gallagher), assert that the current state of marriage represents not a particularly wobbly phase in its long history but a crisis that may herald the death of wedlock itself. We're "on the verge of becoming a postmarriage culture," Waite and Gallagher say, and they predict a grave social crisis if we don't change course. They fear that marriage is becoming "optional -- a private taste rather than a matter of urgent shared concern."

Their main evidence, of course, is that 50 percent divorce rate. They'd like people to stop thinking nothing can be done about it; the divorce boom, they say, presents grave problems of "public health" that must be fixed. To that end, their book reads like an infomercial for marriage. In a cheerleading tone that shifts now and then into one of ominous foreboding, they hail the "overwhelming scientific evidence" they've gathered proving that marriage is "good for you." They argue that current no-fault divorce laws should be changed, that unmarried couples who live together should not be given legal rights or even social approval and that government and media should step in to promote "a positive view of marriage," in the manner of current anti-smoking campaigns.

By saying that marriage is good for us, they mean that getting married will improve an unmarried person's health, both mentally and physically. For example, if you're married, their surveys have found, you "not only have sex more often, but ... enjoy it more, both physically and emotionally," than unmarried cohabiting people do: Forty-two percent of wives and 50 percent of husbands say they find sex physically satisfying, as opposed to 39 percent of cohabiting women and 39 percent of cohabiting men. The same 42 percent of wives but 48 percent of husbands say they find sex emotionally satisfying, as opposed to 39 percent of cohabiting women and 37 percent of cohabiting men.

Besides the head scratching this inspires -- they're saying that less than half of all marriages are sexually satisfying, and they consider that good advertising for marriage? -- there's a more fundamental problem with the authors' reasoning, one that becomes apparent when you read the histories of marriage. You can't approach "married," "divorced" and "cohabiting" people as if these were static categories, akin to eye color or ethnic background. It's like trying to lock a rifle's sights on a moving target. Whether two people are married, living together or divorced at any given moment reflects not just the state of their relationship and their degree of commitment to each other but also their personal responses to the legal and social options available at the time.

Next Page: The funny numbers of the anti-divorce camp

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