Marriage’s Lost Golden Age

Here is an intriguing statement about marriage from Stephanie Coontz’ new book, Marriage: A History: “It took more than 150 years to establish the love-based, male-breadwinner marriage as the dominant model in North America and Western Europe. It took less than 25 years to dismantle it.” My own pastoral work as a marriage counselor spanned just these latter 25 years, years fraught with anxiety, frustration, and confusion both for me and for a lot of my couples. From personal experience, then, I resonate to a lot of what Coontz is getting at not only in her statement itself, but in the book which lays out everything else that the statement implies.

Across those 25 years, almost before our very eyes, my counselees and I watched with mild horror (a) the dissolution of marriage as, in Coontz’ description, “the master event” of peoples’ lives, (b) the overturning by both women and men of sex-only-in-marriage as the ideal, (c) one failed research effort after another on reversing a soaring divorce rate, and finally, (d) the discovery that without a lot of support from family, friends, and faith communities, being a single parent sucks. What got to me most in the counseling I did during those years --- besides trying to find enough hours in the week for more and more troubled couples --- was the extent of the guilt that people felt over not keeping their marriages going the way they were “supposed” to go. Clinging with a ferocious nostalgia to the love-based, male-breadwinner, always-happy-children model only made their guilt feelings worse.

For some, divorce did relieve things a little. As one divorcee put it, sadly: “I guess there are a lot of people out there like me whose first time around will turn out to be just for practice.” But many of my former couples still have not moved on to anything like a better life. They cannot find that just-right person for the next time around. Or they thought they had, but their new partner turned out to be just as boring and neglectful as the last one was. Or they wound up with just more abuse. And through it all, their children have had to trade in most of their illusions about parental nurture for the harsh realities of street-learned resilience.

The really tragic thing about all this is that the very model that has contributed most to the instabilities in marriage today also contains just that understanding from which strong marriages not only can be but are still being built. If what we are really looking for most in relationships, whatever our other political and social agendas for them may be, is getting emotional needs met, then marriage is still one of our very best bets for making it happen. As one widely read writer, Mel Krantzler, kept harping at us, we have our best chance for happiness with the very partner that we may think we ought to get rid of.

There is a good bit of evidence to support Krantzler’s rants. For one thing, most reliable studies still show that the split-up rate of second marriages is higher than for first ones, and that it goes even higher for thirds. (Good studies on fourth marriages and above have nor appeared as yet.) Live-in relationships before marriage are not any more successful; most of the ones I know that made a go of it were the ones whose participants eventually followed my invitation to head to the court house for a license and then meet me at the altar.

We need to be clear that not all marriages either can or should be saved. As the title of his most widely read book, Creative Divorce, should make plain, Mel Krantzler knew this well. But what we need to appreciate is that more marriages are salvageable than the current divorce rate would indicate, within and not beyond the “emotional intimacy” model of the ideal marriage relationship. Another book that has been around a while but is still worth reading, this one by therapist Michelle Weiner Davis, shows this with considerable insight. Apropos its major convictions, the book carries the title, Divorce Busting.

I am going to try to put up, rather than shut up, about this perspective in the next column. Yes, yes --- I know. I promised earlier that this Junetide, my thoughts on marriage would span just three columns. Perhaps you will be willing to chalk up my need for a fourth to an unwillingness to stay as pessimistic about the prospects for emotionally intimate marriages as Stephanie Coontz sometimes sounds. Deal?