Victorian marriage certificate

The Marriage Debates

My all-time-favorite undergraduate paper examined what critics called Chaucer's "marriage group debate." I don't remember now why it had that name, but I do indeed remember my stunned discovery that contemporary arguments about the purposes of marriage went back to 1395 or so. The Wife of Bath, who has outlived several husbands, comments and argues in the interludes between the pilgrim's tales that marriage depends upon the mutual respect, equality, and freely chosen commitment between marriage partners. Other travelers see her emphasis upon interpersonal relationships as a formula for social chaos and a violation of the natural order: duty, not love, holds a marriage together. Various stories are told to illustrate the different points of view, and in particular the claim that either wives or husbands are necessarily dominant in (and often unfaithful to) a marriage.

In fact the marriage debate is a lot older than Chaucer, and its key issues seem not to have changed one iota from his time to ours, or for that matter since classical antiquity. In Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism (Norton, 1997), Christopher Lasch offers a brief but astute socio-literary history of the classic tension between the free personal equality implicit in romantic love, on the one hand, and on the other, those constraints, expectations, and obligations necessary for a marriage to endure for a lifetime and to provide for the financial security, adequate nurture, appropriate socialization, and due legal inheritance of children. When those constraints deteriorate, as Gertrude Himmelfarb argues in The Demoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (Knopf, 1995) and again in One Nation, Two Cultures (Knopf, 1999), both divorce rates and illegitimacy skyrocket: children are the worse for it, and so thereby is the society as a whole.

Two very recent books within the marriage debate are particularly rich in potential for parish ministry and for general conversation about marriage within the church. First on that list is Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially (Doubleday, 2000). The subtitle is long but it gets the book's main idea down to half a sound bite, which seems to be the current trend in subtitles. Marriage is actively good for you; it's not just an outmoded, useless, confining, abusive, bourgeois, patriarchal institution. The creative achievement of the book is its array of evidence: no matter how you look, where you look, what you ask, or how carefully you control for confounding variables, married people are better off than people who are not married. People who live together "without benefit of clergy" do not reap the same rewards. All of the data on which the book is based comes from nationally representative samples and from studies published in major, reputable academic journals: this is world-class social science in highly readable form. That's not surprising: Waite is a sociologist at the University of Chicago. Gallagher is a journalist and I presume it may be thanks to her that Waite's statistical data are explained with such engaging pizzazz. Their argument is straightforward, cleanly organized, and eminently readable.

Waite and Gallagher are appropriately cautious about assigning causalities: when they speculate about reasons why, they make it very clear that they are speculating. But over and over again they suggest that this wide array of down-to-earth, practical goods follow reasonably from sustained commitment and mutual support, and that such compassionate commitment is in turn supported by how marriage is a publicly acknowledged social form. It should come as no surprise that reviews have been very few and at best quite skeptical: how can commitment be good for us? What about the ideal of rugged individualism, and the popular portrait of divorce as an act of courageous, costly, self-redemptive self-realization? Yet another genuinely important book is falling quickly from the cultural horizon.

Needless to say, there are considerable implications here for the public status of sustained, committed relationships between persons of the same sex. Equally obvious is how useful a book like this might be for youthful skeptics who think that a marriage certificate is "just a piece of paper." The Case for Marriage could be very engaging for high school students or young singles, especially if paired with all the data demonstrating that the more often one cohabits the less likely one is to marry successfully. On that point, see another title from the University of Chicago and environs: Robert T. Michael et al., Sex In America: A Definitive Survey (Little, Brown and Company, 1994). That's the readable, general-audience version of their massive academic tome, The Social Organization of Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1994). They also document that married people have the best and most frequent sex, and furthermore that we are overwhelmingly faithful to marriage vows. It's amazing stuff.

The Case for Marriage ends with a small, select, and very intelligent list of organizations endeavoring to strengthen and sustain marriages, including a web site, smartmarriages.com, that offers access to a considerable array of resources. From all this wealth of material, Waite and Gallagher single out one program, developed by a married pair of lay Roman Catholics for use in parishes, which endeavors to link new marrieds into mentoring relationships with couples whose marriages have endured. See marriagesavers.com.

Above all, perhaps, The Case for Marriage implicitly raises very big questions about the pastoral care of single adults. Although some single people will quite reasonably find themselves upset or depressed by this book, it pulls into focus the power of healthy, kindly, supportive human relationships of any kind. I am reminded of Patrick Glynn's very engaging book, God, The Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World (Prima Publishing, 1997, 1999 [paperback]). Among other things, Glynn collects the evidence that people who are active in churches do better on a whole variety of social measures, even after you control for the possibility that they are active because they are happy, healthy, etc., and not the other way around. Surely that's because some of the benefits that Waite and Gallagher attribute to marriage are also available through long-enduring friendships fostered by church communities. (Glynn's is another book I'd strongly recommend for teenagers, who suffer a lot from the casual contempt freely expressed by their unchurched classmates.) Ideally, it seems to me, Christian faith and practice help to form in us the capacity to be good friends generally, not merely or exclusively with our spouses.

In The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton University Press, 1996), Rodney Stark brings the issue of supportive community into sharp focus from another perspective altogether. He contends that the church flourished in part because mutual care improved survival rates in a wide variety of ways, and in part because many were astounded by and attracted to that example of mutual care in the unquestionably brutal social reality of the ancient world. As various scholars have demonstrated in various ways, historically speaking there is no question that early Christianity was characterized by its particular support for single people and for the unmarried state of life generally.

My second major nominee for important new book is Judith Wallerstein, Julia Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study (Hyperion, 2000). Wallerstein and her colleagues put a narrative face upon existing statistics that children of divorce have relatively higher rates of difficulty in getting married and in staying married themselves. Through profiles of various adult children of divorce, Wallerstein et al. attribute this difficulty to the absence of role models and, to a lesser extent, the disruption in the child's life caused by the parents' grief. In that regard, I always remember Barbara Kingsolver's image for the experience of divorce in her collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson: divorce, she says, is like amputating your own gangrenous leg without anesthesia. I suppose that some people marry frivolously and divorce frivolously, but every divorce I've ever witnessed seemed to me not the liberating choice depicted by popular cant but something closely akin to a slow, agonizing, unreconciled death in the family.