I stumbled upon Time magazine this week, and was arrested by the front cover, which loudly proclaimed: "Marriage: What's It Good For?" Which, when you stop and think about it, is an excellent question.
Of course, I have stopped to think about it, having lived with my partner for the past 5 years, and for the past year I've been sporting a solid looking diamond (they are far more sparkly in person than you would imagine). Aye, but there's a rub: We decided not to get married. Halt your rabid assumptions of betrayal and lost love, we're both perfectly happy and committed and all that jazz. But somewhere amid the frenetic planning of a wedding, the crunching of numbers that always wind up having too many zeros to sit comfortably with my bank account, we looked at each other and said: "Wait a minute. Why are we doing this again?"
Which seems to be a growing trend, according to Time magazine and the Pew Research Center. On a personal note, I'd like to think it has to do with the broadening of our definition of marriage, or what being committed and in love means, of the waning of Christian influence. All of that certainly is an element of it -- "We're just more flexible about how family gets defined," Time proclaims -- but what surprised me in this article was the parallels they drew between income and marriage.
On the dichotomy of the sexes side: "Well-off women don't need to stay in a marriage that doesn't make them happy." Which could be a rather good thing, as my partner points out, especially in cases of spousal abuse. The ongoing march of women's rights has brought this element of matriarchal independence into marriage. Women are equal partners, emotionally, sexually, and most importantly financially. I'm still working my way through Sex At Dawn (as you may recall me waxing long-windedly about) and so naturally while reading through Time I was mentally drawing all sorts of parallels between the two. What particularly leapt to mind (and had me leaping up to paw frantically through my book until I found it again) was the Mosuo of southwest China.
Briefly, Mosuo culture slants towards the matriarchal, in the sense of title, family, belonging is centered with the women. They have a unique sense of "marriage", a term I use very losely here since they, for all intents and purposes, have no marriages. Men will meander into a woman's home (invited, of course), spend the night, and leave the next morning. Sometimes these are long-term companionships, sometimes not, and any children born stay with the mother and are raised in her household.
Which brings me right back around to Time mag. They devoted some time to looking at children, and how the recent trends in marriage may or may not be affecting them. Although three quarters of those surveyed said that raising kids is "best done married", in 2008 "41% of babies were born to unmarried moms... an eightfold increase from 50 years ago, and 25% of kids lived in a single parent home, almost triple the number from 1960". It goes on to describe what is supposedly the predominant situation for unwed mothers, saying that a quarter of those who didn't marry the father had moved on to live with or marry another man. Andrew Cherlin, Sociologist at John Hopkins Univ, is quoted as saying: "About 21% of American children will see at least two live-in partners of their mothers by the time they're 15. And an additional 8% will see three or more."
For the Mosuo culture, not knowing who exactly your dad is (although many of them do, there just isn't a particular emphasis on it) has no adverse effect on the children. They have male role models in the community, in their uncles, grandfathers, older siblings. Without a possessive sense of paternity, the community as a whole loves and cares for children equally. Similar to an account of a female truck river in Polynesia (page 108 in Sex at Dawn if you're interested), who gave two of her nine children to an infertile friend, which seemed the normal, and imminently practical, thing to do. "All of us love all the children," she said.
Yes, I may be kicking an unwed horse with my nigh obssession with this book, but it's hard not to point wildly and yell AhHa! when looking at the statistics kicked up by this marriage data. The wedding industry has become bloated, and the trends point solidly towards lower-income couples not getting married while also not waiting to start a family, while higher-income couples are getting married as a show of "the ultimate merit badge" (another Cherlin quote). There's a wonderful graph showing the percentage of births outside of marriage along a timeline from the 60s until 2008. All lines point up. 41% in 2008 versus somewhere along the 5% mark in 1960. Again in the 60s, roughly 70% of American adults were married, and today that number sits somewhere south of 52%.
All signs point to the institution of marriage going the way of the dodo, and yet almost half the people surveyed said they wanted to get married (64% in the group of unmarried people living with a partner), and there's that previously cited quote saying that three quarters said having kids is best done married. "Half or more of the respondents in the Pew poll say that marital status is irrelevant to achieving respect, happiness, career goals, financial security or a fulfilling sex life. When it comes to raising kids, though, it's a landslide, with more than three-quarters saying it's best done married."
So here's this whole article, this slew of data, showing that an overwhelming number of us are eschewing marriage, while maintaining this tenacious grip on it's sanctity. The article -- after spending several pages statistically proving it's dodo-esque nature -- naively claims that "marriage is still the best avenue most people have for making their dreams dome true... not all the old traditions of marriage are obsolete."
I remain solidly unconvinced. What's marriage good for? Absolutely nothing.
