Marriage. Passe?
Gramps49
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
Has marriage run its course? They had a discussion on NPR's It's Been a Minute that said single women do not think marriage is worth it. They clarified they were talking about heterosexual marriages.
Part of the problem American women are finding is they cannot fine males who are educated enough or are too conservative these days. In addition to men being basic Neanderthals when it comes to marriage expectations.
All my kids got married.
Two of my grandkids are living with their partners. I am not hearing any talk about a future wedding in the next year or so.
Yet, the young couple next door got married two years ago after living together for five years. She said she wanted to get married before they had a baby. They now have a four month old daughter.
What say you? What are the pros and the cons to getting married? Conversely what are the pros and the cons to staying single? Is living together going to be the future?
Part of the problem American women are finding is they cannot fine males who are educated enough or are too conservative these days. In addition to men being basic Neanderthals when it comes to marriage expectations.
All my kids got married.
Two of my grandkids are living with their partners. I am not hearing any talk about a future wedding in the next year or so.
Yet, the young couple next door got married two years ago after living together for five years. She said she wanted to get married before they had a baby. They now have a four month old daughter.
What say you? What are the pros and the cons to getting married? Conversely what are the pros and the cons to staying single? Is living together going to be the future?
Comments
I'm not accusing all men of being assholes. I do think most of them are oblivious to the inequity in risk and danger, physical, financial, and otherwise. And the "piece of paper" has a tendency to improve the odds for women, because it makes it more likely that the man will remain around, because of the solidified commitment (can't say which direction the causality on that goes, it's maybe both) and because of the legal and financial shackles that go with owning up to paternity.
In the absence of marriage, we've watched women-with-children stand there helplessly as their not-quite-mothers-and-others-in-law raid their deceased boyfriend's estate, taking everything, even the car--because they are legally "next of kin." I haven't seen that happen to men with dependent children, though it's certainly possible. And it's not at all likely to happen to either gender if a legal marriage has taken place, as the spouse becomes next-of-kin, and even in the absence of a will, is not likely to lose the only car to rapacious in-laws.
The one risk I see to men outwith marriage is the correspondingly greater helplessness to protect their children, even if paternity has been established. And that too is a horrible evil, to be incapable (as one family member of mine is) of protecting children against abuse because the courts tend to favor the mother--and so he can do shit-all. Though he's tried. Again, marriage (and subsequent divorce!) won't prevent all these situations, but I suspect it makes them at least a bit less likely.
Add to that the fact that raising children has gotten increasingly more expensive. Low-income unmarried women without access to birth control will end up raising children on their own they may or may not have wanted to have, while straight women with more resources will increasingly forego romantic relationships entirely. That the birth rate throughout much of the world keeps falling shows how much women just won't have children if they don't like the conditions under which they'll raise them.
@Lamb Chopped details the down sides of not marrying for many women. But there are huge down sides for many women who get married. I have known a lot of divorced women who were glad to no longer have to take care of a husband as well as their children. On top of all the obvious extra work created by a person who doesn't pull their weight in the household, there's all the executive function work of organizing the household.
When Social Security started up and old people were no longer financially dependent on relatives, they stopped living with younger family members. We tend to romanticize older multigenerational family structures, but in the US at least old people like being independent as much as younger people so. Much the same thing has happened with women. We don't need men financially the way we used to, so we can be more independent.
My parents had about as egalitarian a marriage as people who were raised by Mennonite parents and got married in the 1950s could. But when they didn't agree, Mom deferred to what Dad wanted. I looked at their marriage, the marriages of my friends' parents and those of people in our church, and by junior high I knew there was no way I wanted that. I would have been miserable, and then I would have been divorced.
For me, moving in with someone feels like as big an emotional commitment as marrying them*. If what you want is just roommates-with-regular-sex, then I suppose it doesn't much matter, but I'd strongly encourage a legal marriage before any significant financial entanglement (owning a home together, having children, someone moving / giving up a career opportunity to support the other's career). If either of you anticipates working abroad anywhere, then getting a visa for an accompanying spouse is straightforward, and getting a visa for an unmarried partner is not.
*Mrs C and I were married when we were graduate students. Both our families were keen to tell us that nobody in the family would be upset if we just moved in together. We nodded and smiled and got on with planning our wedding. I can't do relationships on a sale-or-return basis. Perhaps other people can.
Do not most of those downsides also exist for women who move in with a man without benefit of marriage? Granted, if you just move in together, then you can just move out, without needing a legal process (unless you have children), but it seems to me that this is mostly a partnered/single distinction rather than a married/shacked-up distinction.
They were together for about 8 years before getting married during COVID.
After COVID they had a Shinto wedding ceremony and she said she didn't really feel married until then.
(Nationally, I understand that the proportion of Japanese not marrying including a large proportion remaining celibate is growing. Over 20% IIRC.)
And lots of us aren't meeting them. I feel like @Gwai and I got lucky and we only tick about half the boxes ourselves, and are somewhat unconventional.
I think that society used to have a lot of infrastructure around things working out a certain way - for good and for ill - and between my parents' generation and mine, that infrastructure has either been allowed to decay through neglect, or been actively torn down in the name of "efficiency."
Give people more economic and social security (no pun intended) and I think more of them will feel safe settling. But the economy hasn't felt that kind of safe for a lot of us since I reached adulthood in the early aughts. Current events being what they are, I have mixed feelings about raising kids as it is.
There's more to it than economics, I think, but I also think that's a big piece of it.
If we're sharing family background, my parents were more traditional with dad being a breadwinner and mom mostly staying home, but that was more because of my mom's physical and neurological handicaps than because of any predefined gender roles. My parents were probably more egalitarian in intent, but I can only imagine what that would've been like.
Be a drudge, be a whore
Or you can get married
And be all four.
Don't get married, girls....
My generation (boomer) objected to marriage as the appropriation of our labour and the denial of self actualisation. But we had The Pill, baby, and were going out there to be engineers. While at the same time culture was awash with True Love Mills & Boonery - but we had The Female Eunuch and wouldn't be fooled.
So how did it work out? In my circle some married young, and stayed married. Some married and divorced and trekked round India or moved to Florida. Some married and split up and then got together again. Some lived together for decades and then married.
What we didn't have to cope with is the divide @Ruth links to - the opposing social and political silos for men and women. That doesn't augur well. That humorous idea of the 50s - the War of the Sexes - could turn to an actual war.
His wife and girlfriend get on well, and when his wife had surgery she moved in with him and his girlfriend while she recuperated. (All the work of caring landed on the girlfriend!)
He ended up in hospital recently in intensive care, and his wife took priority over his actual partner as his wife was next of kin. His wife told the hospital that her husband was very close to his "sister" and his girlfriend got to visit him on that basis (!) though I think at some point the hospital staff must have realised that she wasn't his "sister."
Legally, his wife is in a much, much better position than his partner.
Probably, but I haven't seen numbers on this anywhere. Since people are delaying having children - there are lots of numbers on that - I would think the young adults shacking up who find the person they're with doesn't suit them can in many instances just move out. And I don't think living together has completely taken the place of marriage - I rather doubt all the people who in an earlier time would be married at 25 are living with someone.
It really depends on where you are in your life. A young woman I know moved in with her boyfriend, and they stayed together for maybe a year before deciding it wasn't working out, that their relationship had become a friendship, so she moved back in with her mom. She wasn't anywhere near the emotional commitment of marriage, and moving back home was not a painful drama.
I will not marry the man I'm living with, for several reasons, one of which is that's too financially complicated, something true for a lot of older people. He was deeply unhappy when married and doesn't want to try it again. I don't want to get married - I have no intention of ever leaving him, but I like that this is a continual choice, not one I make once and am done with. I'm fine with his son being legal next of kin; when my partner had a serious medical situation last year I got a chance to see how it is dealing with his son at such a time.
Another telling thing: more divorces are initiated by wives than husbands. Marriage doesn't work for a significant number of women.
I wonder, though, whether marriage (or the prospect of it) has the benefit of making people think about what they want. A lot of relationships seem to break down around young children, and I wonder if part of that is a tendency to drift from dating to cohabiting to kids without ever thinking about needs and expectations. Of course marriages can happen that way too, but the commitment at least gives people pause.
There is a similar commercial with a man entertaining a woman at his apartment, and the woman finds herself out the door. Here
Brings up the question: are young people finding more meaningful companionship through their pets?
Well, in the case of the two commercials, I would say they would be in their mid twenties to mid thirties. The marrying age, it seems.
I'm not at that marker yet, but it's not so far off for me (4 years) and I think when marriages do last, you change together, you change each other. I have no bloody clue who I'd be if I didn't marry @Bullfrog at 23, but I wouldn't be me. That's for damn fucking sure. Which is to say that maybe you and Mrs. Feet didn't get lucky, you built your compatible partner. Honestly I think it's partially luck. Depending on what happens to a person, you can't know how you will need to change and grow. You can't know what skills the world may demand of your partner. So one finds a partner who one can love now and hopes the two of you can still suit each other many years in the future.
There are parallels here to the UK - undereducation of men and right wing male views on the rise - as suggested by the UK Lost Boys thread and linked report. I acknowledge that the source of the report is not seen as valid by many here.
Is there any data on the US on these issues from reputable sources. My google-fu seemed to pull up sources that would be likely not well received here.
Thanks
Heron
I think in previous generations there was a social force to marry whoever was available and put up with their crap, up to and including spousal abuse and neglect. Now standards have gone up and a lot of men aren't willing to adjust. And women aren't compelled by dire economic necessity to marry for the sake of being married. Men don't realize there are expectations now, and thus don't rise to meet them.
I've also anecdotally heard about the trend of young women wanting to have a family but not finding any suitable men, which explains where many single mothers come from. It's like you want to go through the "adult" stages of life and will just push your way through them even if the infrastructure isn't there for you to do it "appropriately."
I get the sense that many kids these days might be just throwing in the towel on starting families altogether. Sex isn't that that big of a deal, and there are contraceptives. Looking around, I can't blame them, especially in the USA.
Data from Pew Research about the education gender gap in the US shows more women graduate from college than men, and notably gives this among the reasons:
And a couple of days ago I gave a link to info from the Financial Times about the political gender gap opening up between women and men throughout much of the world -- scroll up to near the top of the thread.
I recently came across this piece in the Atlantic from 2020: "What if friendship, not marriage, was at the center of life?" (gift link). It discusses people who build their lives around platonic friendships and recalls how many more people did so in 19th-century America. I suspect marriage might overall be in better shape if people expected less of it.
I particularly enjoyed the Ezra Klein/Richard Reeves interview you posted
I'd guess it's one cause. I'd guess some young men not being ambitious or feeling like it's not worth it to be ambitious is another. Which moves toward the topic of the Lost Boys thread.
And I think that healthcare has been a growing field that has become more financially viable, and that has traditionally been "women's work." It's also a field that tends to require a bit more education. I think there's something going on here.
Meanwhile, at least where I grew up, men still live in the shadow of industries that used to be there and - even decades later - are waiting for them to come back. I think that's one of the big selling points that the current administration tied to run on, bringing back the manufacturing economy of the 1950s. It isn't coming back, I think, but those are the dreams I think a lot of men have been raised on.
And there is the phenomenon of the man being the perfect friend, lover, etc., until the ring goes on, when he becomes a screaming Andrew Tate conservative, demanding his new wife leave her friends and family, quit her job, and so on and so on. Which is hard to vet against. I don't know what the stats are on this; I have only anecdotes. But if a woman knows about this, it could be (paradoxically) another reason she would not want to marry.
When my husband was doing his PhD, another student was a Saudi-Arabian Muslim, in Scotland with his wife and child while he did his PhD. Theirs had been an arranged marriage and they had not met until immediately after they were married. They seemed very happy together.
They explained that they had been chosen for each other because he was a close schoolfriend of her brother, and she had got on well at school with his sisters. As, after marriage, she would spend a lot of time with the women of his family, that was important. They had not met, but they had a good idea about the framework and ethos of each others families from their friendships with each others relatives. And those friendships would form a support for their marriage.
We lost touch with them after they returned to Saudi Arabia, but they seemed to be well placed for a long and happy marriage.
(Rather interestingly, she thought that Scottish women were repressed in ways that I hadn't thought about. She was horrified by all the slimming magazines and low-calorie foods in shops, and the idea that women would willing go hungry to "keep their figure" for men. As she pointed out, a woman in hijab is a woman who can enjoy as much chocolate as she likes!)
It used to be the case about twenty years ago in the U.S. that women with a bachelor's degree made about as much money as a man with a high school diploma. That's no longer the case with education divisions in the workforce having widened since then. Now a woman only needs an associates' degree to match the earnings a a male high school graduate in the U.S., and a woman with a master's degree should expect to earn less than a man with a bachelor's. A lot of this can simply interpreted as men and women responding rationally to the economic opportunities being offered to them.
For what are probably a lot of socially contingent reasons, the "problem" of women not wanting to spend the rest of their lives with incurious ignoramuses usually has the suggested "solution" of women lowering their standards rather than getting men to spend time reading books.
I think for guys there's a terrible responsibility in patriarchy. We're expected to be completely financially independent and capable of supporting an entire family, possibly extended in the long run, on our own income. In an economy where you have to be damned lucky get one of those kinds of jobs before you're 30, committing to something like that takes a crazy kind of courage. I'd expect responsible men to be very cautious about any kind of commitment if we know ourselves well at that age.
A man who rushes into making that kind of promise in their early 20s is a fool, or comes from a family that he knows can subsidize his mistakes for a long time.
I suspect women would have a different experience of this system, but not being one, I'll refrain from speaking to it.
In the mid-20th-century US for white guys, this wasn't nuts. My parents got married in 1958 at 22, both of them just out of college, and for four years my mother earned enough to support both of them and pay for medical school for my dad; they never needed help from their parents, and my father's parents wouldn't have been able to offer any. When he graduated, with no student loan debt, my mother was pregnant with her first child (me, planned), and she never held a paying job again. I was able to retire at 60 on my portion of their estate after Mom died.
This set of circumstances only held for a relatively short period of time, and only for some men, but I think it became an ideal that's hard to let go of. It harkens back to the 19th-century notion of the "angel in the house" and the separate spheres men and women supposedly occupied, and ignores the reality that throughout history most women have worked one way or another to support their families.
It harkens back to the 19th-century notion of the "angel in the house" and the separate spheres men and women supposedly occupied
Even in the C19th, the "separate spheres" didn't preclude middle class women from doing some work. For example, if a headmaster's wife had been a teacher prior to their marriage, she often provided cover if one of the teachers in her husband's school was off - headmaster's families generally had domestic servants who could provide childcare, and let her teach. Now we'd call that "supply teaching" but then it was "wifely duties." I've seen records of one headmaster who was chosen for a post because his wife was an excellent teacher. I've no idea what the women themselves thought - was it an annoyance, or did they enjoy being back in class, possibly catching up on old friends in the staffroom?
A GP, with a practice based in his own home, might expect his wife to arrange his appointments, and deal with calls. Nowadays that would be a "receptionist" Then it was part of her "wifely duties."
A clergy wife could play the organ on Sundays, organise bazaars, visit the sick, run the Dorcas Club, and fill her days with activities outwith the house, and yet remain within the domestic sphere.
There is a novel by Margaret Oliphant, Phoebe Junior, published in 1876. Young Phoebe has the choice of two suitors - a clever curate marked for success, or a well-meaning but dim man from a well to do family, whose father was going to pay his way into politics. Phoebe chose the latter, because she knew he was incapable of writing speeches. She thrilled at the thought of writing his speeches and hearing her words spoken in Parliament.
Obviously those who don’t see it that way won’t see it that way, but I thought someone should say this.
This is about a cultural/societal phenomenon—how our societies as a whole in general, and how young women and young men in particular view marriage. Why is it that some/many people are choosing not to marry? Why is that some/many are choosing to live together with no intent to ever marry. What social, economic or other factors are leading some to decide not to have a “significant other” and are leading others not to want or need a certificate from the state saying they and their significant other are married?
And fwiw, there are still states in the US—not many, but some—where a common law marriage can be formed, meaning that if a couple cohabitates and hold themselves out as married for a requisite period of time, that state will recognize them as legally married. (And the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution means that all other states will also recognize that marriage.)
Back when I worked in law firms, I was on the works council. I remember an employee asking us for help because her partner's family member had died and she wanted time off. Unfortunately for her the employer was under no obligation because they weren't married. If they had been, the employer would have been legally obliged to give her the days off.
That was the case in Scotland until relatively recently too (marriage by habit and repute if memory serves).
In eight of ten Canadian provinces and all three of the territories, there is such a thing as common law marriage, which kicks in after a certain number of years of living together in a conjugal relationship. This provides a number of next-of-kin privileges to partners, such as being the go-to person in case of medical issues, certain inheritance rights, participation as family for extended health benefits, time off in case of common-law family members' death, rights in the event of a break-up of the relationship, expectations about spousal support, etc.
However, these rights vary from province to province. Thus, in British Columbia, for most situations, there is virtually no difference between being "legally married" and "living common-law" in terms of spousal rights to shared property and property brought to the relationship. In Ontario, by contrast, if a spouse brings property (say a house) to the "traditional marriage," that house would be a shared asset in the case of the marriage break down. However, if a common-law spouse brings a house to a common-law marriage, the house is not a shared asset if the relationship breaks down. In fact, the owner of the house can evict the non-owner partner.
This means that when I am speaking with relatives or parishioners about marriage, non-marriage, or common-law marriage, I encourage them to look very carefully at the provincial/territorial laws (family law is a provincial matter, not federal, hence the variations).
Marriage has, on the whole, become much less common in Canada than in previous generations. So much so, that when a couple comes to me requesting marriage in the church, one of my first questions is, "What do you value about marriage (both the legal institution and a service in the church) that makes you want to do this instead of living common-law?"
I've forgotten most of it, but I do recall that one of the tests was whether the butcher's bill was addressed to "Mrs X." If the butcher thought you were married, you were married.
A CofE Canon who I liked very much summarised it this way. “Churches solemnise, Registrars legalise but essentially people marry one another”.
The historic formulation, under which women became the property of the men they married, has a lot to answer for. I’ve pointed out a few times here that the 10th Commandment
also demonstrates that historical understanding of the wife as property. And I am very glad that this understanding is arcane. But its resonance lingers.
We’ve been married for 57 years this year. We were committed to a life long partnership before we exchanged vows. The commitment and the partnership remain very much a living, loving reality.
People change, sometimes love dies, sometimes the relationship moves into incompatibility. The journey from falling in love to loving can be much more difficult than foreseen. I think we’re very fortunate to have discovered our life long commitment continues to be a great blessing. But that isn’t the case for all.
We know a few couples have been made thoroughly miserable by sticking to their life long commitment to a marriage which has become an empty shell. Relationships which have become irredeemably toxic are best brought to an end, both for the sake of the couple concerned and any children.
Apologies, I've been too flippant. In order for a common-law marriage to exist "by habit and repute" both the "habit" and the "repute" had to exist. "Habit" referred to the way the couple lived their lives, and "repute" referred to whether or not they were generally regarded as married within the community. Hence, the butcher's bill could be tangible evidence that they had the reputation of being a married couple.
It was massively complicated. There were easy cases, such as the couple who told their minister that they wanted to get married on the Saturday closest to the bride's 16th birthday. "Closest to", but not, alas "after". Their common law marriage started on the bride's 16th birthday, two days after the wedding ceremony. Similarly the couple who chose as one of the witnesses to their wedding their bridesmaid, the bride's younger sister, who, in full make-up easily passed for 16, but wasn't. Their marriage wasn't technically legal, but they clearly passed the "habit and repute" test.
The problem in Scotland, and the reason that common law marriage was abolished going forward, was the lack of clarity as to what constituted a common law marriage. If a man referred to his partner as "The Boss" when talking to his workmates, was that a running joke, such as a married man might make, or did it indicate that he did not regard her as his wife?
Generally, people thought that common law marriage was more straightforward than it actually was, and were often lulled into a false sense of security. Whereas actually getting married (assuming both parties and their witnesses were of legal age) was legally straightforward.
Of course, it is only new relationships which are affected by the abolition; any couple who had already formed a common law marriage still have a common law marriage.