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January 2001

Evelyn Reilly spoke separately with the authors, Linda Waite, and Maggie Gallagher about the book. When they both commented on the same subject, their answers are located together.

MassNews:  The book is full of good news about marriage. It looks like it could be a real “bombshell in the culture war.”

LW:  Well, I guess people are sort of treating it that way. Some people just hate it – or hate the message, I guess. We wanted it to be seen as sort of a dispassionate reading of the evidence that produced a strongly held position. I didn’t want the book to be seen as a political piece, because it’s not.

MG:  I do think we are engaged in an ongoing debate on the role and status of marriage in society, and that this debate is particularly intense among influential elites. I’m constantly struck by what seems to be an organized effort to de-institutionalize marriage based on the assumption that there is no difference between marriage and cohabitation and other kinds of families, which the research really doesn’t support.

I have on my desk an essay in the Family Law Quarterly which is a most influential journal among legal scholars of family law, in which the scholar is making the assertion that, really, people who are married and are living together are in the same factual circumstances and therefore, it’s just irrational sentiment that causes the law to treat them differently, whether it’s in the tax code or in any other way.

I was just struck by that and I checked to see if he was going to point to any research findings that indicated the truth of this sweeping generalization. The answer is no, he just thought it was obviously true and he could just say that and take the pose of being the rational scientific man, without actually looking at any of the evidence!

MassNews:  Does Marriage have any practical effects?

MG:  One of the things we do in the case of marriage is, quite deliberately and extensively, compare these consequences of marriage and cohabitation. To sum up, in every way that scientists know how to measure, you are happier, healthier, you live longer, you have less likelihood of signs of mental illness and emotional distress, you earn more, you acquire more wealth, you are more financially successful, and to top it off, you even have better sex more often if you are married than if you are single. And even larger, people are somewhat more aware of the evidence that your children are much more likely to grow up to be happy, healthy and productive as individuals if their parents stay married.

In most cases, cohabiters get only a fraction of the marital benefit; in some cases they don’t get any of it. It just does not have the same consequences as marriage.

MassNews:  Are there people who ignore the evidence, as this man did, driven by ideology?

MG:  Well, I think it begins as an ideological commitment and spreads from there through ignorance. It is a certain pose. In the beginning, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, you began more often to see scholars make the assertion that there were such things as formal unions and informal unions and that they were essentially the same thing.

I don’t like to speak to people’s motivations, so I really don’t know why, but it seems self-evident to them that, yes there are certain advantages to people living in the house. You have two potential incomes and two potential parents, but I think rather absurdly, many scholars, especially many of the people who are not really at the forefront of their fields, have been willing to accept the idea with regard to children that anybody in the house is a parent!

MassNews:  What about the studies that say that two parents are not better than one?

There have been a couple of research studies recently that have trumpeted that two parents are not better than one. If you look at them universally, they accomplish this result by lumping in, not only stepfathers but mothers’ live-in boyfriends, with married two-parent families! And sure, when you do that, you can say that two parents don’t have any significant advantage.

So I don’t know how much of it is ideologically driven. Probably some of it is. Some of it is a tendency to abstraction. This is what intellectuals do. They abstract and deal with abstractions. Sometimes they forget that they are not really pulling out the relevant (information). They say, “There are two parents. Well there are two people, that’s the same as two parents.”

The other thing that happens intellectually is, for some reason, when you say that education is important or that poverty matters, the intellectual, the cognitive elites, will tend to accept that at face value. But if you say that marriage matters, then the universal tendency is to try to deconstruct marriage into its component parts, for example, “It’s not marriage that matters, it’s money that matters. It’s not marriage that matters, it’s good parental relationships. It’s not marriage that matters, it’s access to better schooling.”

In other words, if you take the package of things that happen as a result of two parents being committed to each other, building one family, not multiple different families and having their child live with both parents, part of the benefit is that people who are married have more money. They have more money because they make more money. They have more money because they spend less money and they manage money better, and they are not out spending part of their money on unrelated sex partners. Their time, their energy and their money are focused. Even if you take away all the different things that marriage does, you often find that there’s a substantial benefit to marriage left.

MassNews:  I think I see almost a parallel, in the attempts to ignore the obvious and seek out a cause that fits a certain way of thinking. There are some philosophers who try to explain away the existence of evil by saying it is only a result of poverty, ignorance and disease.

MG:  That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in that way. I do find that some people, and I mean some very smart and well meaning people, too - I was recently debating a scholar who does a lot of work on poverty and is quite sympathetic to the idea that marriage matters, but wanted to argue quite vigorously.

He was saying, “Sure, there are advantages to marriage, but you can’t compare them to education because there are these selection effects on who gets married - particularly when you deal with things like the greater earnings that married people have, particularly married men.” 

And I said, “Well there are all these selection effects on who gets educated too. It’s not random who gets a college degree – people who are smarter, who work hard and stay focused, don’t fall into alcoholism and substance abuse, don’t get involved in crime and are generally steadier and more competent people, are on average going to find themselves getting a diploma.

But we have no problem attributing all the benefits of a college education to the education itself and saying ‘education matters.’ And yet when you say ‘marriage matters,’ there’s just this enormous effort to say, ‘Well it couldn’t be.’”

MassNews:  What are the reactions when you tell people the importance of marriage?

Actually, there are two reactions when you tell people how important marriage is to the well being of adults as well as to children and communities. They either say, “Well, that’s obvious.” Or they say, “That is impossible! A piece of paper cannot possibly have these kinds of wide-ranging effects. Obviously it’s just that happier and healthier and higher-earning people get married, and that explains it.” And then you have to step back and explain to them that all this research is making extensive efforts to control these kinds of confounding evidence, and you can explain the mechanisms. But the striking thing to me is that many more people with a Ph.D. take the latter position as their first. They don’t know anything about this literature; that’s their instinctive reaction.

I believe that marriage is a public good in the same way that education is a public good. When we live in societies where most people are adequately educated, it’s not just those people who are better off, the whole community benefits. There’s a price to ignorance and illiteracy, which is not paid just by the person who is ignorant or illiterate. And in the same way, everyone is better off, whether they’re personally married or not, if they’re living in a society where most people eventually enter marriages that mostly last.

MassNews:  I remember first hearing in the ‘60s that marriage was just a piece of paper. If it was chic to think so at that time, then that’s what these people learned when they were undergraduates.

MG:  Yes, and increasingly, even among people who are not hostile to marriage, we’re kind of losing track of bits and pieces of it. We’ve redefined marriage as a private emotional relationship.

MassNews:  I was struck with that being your central argument.

MG:  Right. Exactly. And this is not necessarily only true among people who are anti-marriage. It is also true among many people who are pro-marriage. When you go and try to make an argument that divorce law should be re-crafted so that it reduces unnecessary divorce, conservatives will say “Oh, that’s none of the government’s business.”

But marriage has always been a public and legal contract. It’s never been a private emotional relationship. That’s the difference between marriage and cohabitation. But their instinctive way of thinking about this is, “Whether people get married, whether they stay married, whether they have children out of wedlock, as long as they’re not on welfare, that’s nobody else’s business.”

MassNews:  I think that for most people there is an intuitive sense that yes, marriage is important. But we are unable to explain it, so we don’t try.

MG:  Well, yes, and I think we have, both of us, all of us, on all sides of the political spectrum, inherited this profoundly individualistic, and sometimes deceptive, bias. I mean, I think the importance of the individual is a great and important theme of American society, but it can become a social myth that can obscure some important social realities as well.

MassNews:  One of which is that we are all a lot more happy and productive if we are inter-dependent rather than totally independent.

MG:  That is exactly right. One of the things, as I’m reflecting on the larger implications of this body of research, is that one of the reasons you are better off if you are married is that you are not an individual, that your money isn’t your own to spend however you please, that you can’t do whatever you want because you matter a lot to someone else and you have to behave in responsible, loving ways. It struck me that this is a larger truth.

You know, autonomy - the feeling that you can do whatever you want - the flip side of that is that you don’t matter very much to other people; and as soon as you matter a lot, your freedom to behave however you want becomes constrained. It’s true if you get married, it’s true if you become a parent; it’s also true if you become the president of a large corporation. You have power and authority but you don’t have autonomy. You can’t do whatever you want because you can’t keep that position unless other people feel they can count on you. You have to behave like a corporation president.

MassNews:  So there are tradeoffs, but in the long run they are productive.

MG:  And fundamentally we’ve deeply oversold autonomy as the source of and the root of human flourishing.

MassNews:  It seems to be a fruit of the “me generation” and also the ACLU’s litigation on behalf of radical individual liberty as opposed to the communal benefit.

MG:  I think that’s true but I do think it stretches larger than any one particular movement. Part of what happens is that there is a paradox. As we become and live more as isolated individuals, we’re not sure how much we can count on our marriages, for example, whether we’re going to get divorced.

People try really hard. It’s very costly to live in a society where you never know if love’s going to last or if anyone will take care of you. You both celebrate the alleged joys of what you’re forced to live with, so there’s a lot of propaganda. You see this particularly with women about how, “Oh, she’s on her own, after her divorce, making it solo, she’s got the new love, she’s so happy.” You know, “Divorce and be happy, or stay married and be miserable for the sake of the children.”

When you feel that you can’t rely on basic things like marriage and the family, I think a lot of this hyper-autonomy is just really an attempt to make the best of this rather unattractive position we find ourselves in. Because in America if you’re unhappy you’re a loser, so you’d better make the best of the fact that you live in a culture in which you’re just not sure whether anyone will love you.

MassNews:  Did you do anything different in your research?

One of the things we did in The Case for Marriage was take that and look at it as an empirical scientific proposition. Does divorce typically make people happy? If divorce is such a good strategy for happiness, why do fewer than one out of five divorced women tell us that they are very happy with their lives in general?

The other thing we did, which I do not believe has ever been done elsewhere, at least I’ve never seen it, is we tried to take a look at what happens to unhappy marriages that don’t end in divorce. It’s dramatic! We saw these amazing turnarounds that nobody, nothing in our discussions, led us to predict! It highlights that when somebody divorces and they tell you their marriage was just a bad marriage (and I’m not talking here about violence and abusive marriages, but more of the ordinary woes that lead to more of the ordinary divorces), a bad marriage is not a fixed fact. It’s a prediction that one person makes at one point in time about a future that inherently can change. And just as good marriages go bad, “bad” marriages, if you hang in there, go good. If you don’t like how you’re feeling one day, wait awhile, you’ll feel something different.

MassNews:  I know one couple where that is remarkably true. They were close and had a close family. Then a teenage son died. It hurt them so badly that they were living in the same house but in different rooms and hardly speaking. That went on for years. But they stayed together. Now they’re retired and just as happy as can be, having a wonderful time.

MG:  It is tragic but there is so much divorce around these life circumstances, everything from having a baby (there is a surprising amount of divorce generated by having your first baby) to deaths. I know a married couple that had been married 20 years when their daughter committed suicide. The wife was depressed and went to a counselor, who decided to concentrate on trying to get her to divorce her husband. It’s an amazing thing that a counselor would think that somebody is depressed because her daughter killed herself, and this was intimately related to whatever deficiencies there were in the marriage!

MassNews:  I would think there would be professional associations that would publicly be oriented to restoring marriage.

MG:  There are now. They call themselves “marriage educators” to distinguish themselves from marriage counselors, who mostly adopt marriage neutrality as a professional ethic. That is, if you are a distressed couple and you go to most marriage counselors, the way they will frame the question we’re dealing with is, “I’m here to help you decide whether you want to stay married or whether you want to get a divorce.” That’s divorce counseling.

As marriage educators frame it, “You are unhappy in your marriage. My goal is to help you learn how to communicate better and love each other more effectively so you can have a more satisfying marriage. How can I help you have a more satisfying marriage?” You can help a lot more people if that’s your framing question.

If you say the goal of the therapy is to help you as an individual think about what would benefit you most, you’ve already annulled the marriage. You, psychologically, are annulling it.

MassNews:  I am amazed by the stunning statistic that 86% of unhappy marriages that hang in there for five years end up being happier.

MG:  Not only happier but really very happy.

MassNews:  That is really remarkable and should be enough by itself, I would think, to cause a change in no-fault divorce laws.

MG:  I don’t know what is enough to cause a retreat from what I call unilateral divorce, which I think is a more accurate way to describe the problem with our current laws. They really treat divorce as the individual right of one person for any reason. What you’ve done is you’ve made marriage less than a contract. We could not have our amazing, explosive market capitalist society if judges treated other contracts the way they treat the marriage contract. We side with the person who wants to break the contract, at any time, for any reason, and that’s it. This is portrayed as an expansion of freedom but really what it does is it takes away from people the right to make an enduring marriage commitment and to enjoy the benefits of it. You have to find some way to give at least some weight to the marriage vow and to reduce unnecessary divorce as an explicit goal of divorce law. If you are not doing those two things, you are really privatizing marriage in an important way that really makes it difficult for marriage to do what it is supposed to.

MassNews:  Are you satisfied with the publicity you are getting?

MG:  We have been getting tremendous positive interest from many sources. I would divide it up into three areas. There is a lot of interest in conservative and pro-family circles and a lot of interest in the book in mainstream publications. On the other hand it was rather viciously and contemptuously reviewed in organs that think of themselves as being for the intellectual elite, such as the New York Times. That whole network still seems to feel that there is something about marriage that requires them not to be in favor of it, or for a book that makes the case for it.

If you go out and look at ordinary Americans, the word “marriage” is not an ideologically divisive term. Really large majorities of every race, ethnic group, income level and education think a good marriage is really important and express concerns about high levels of divorce and fatherlessness (but not the people in the policy community and among the various elites). It’s true with abstinence education. It’s true with the new monies available to promote fatherhood, part of which is promoting fatherhood through strengthening marriage. There are people just vehemently opposed to this idea, and it’s very hard to figure out exactly what the motivation is. 

There was a new fatherhood bill passed in Congress, the “Fatherhood Counts” legislation, I think it was called. There’s going to be a big debate this year. One of the goals is strengthening marriage in two-parent families. And almost none of the programming on the ground is directed at that goal. It’s all directed at getting mothers into the work force, becoming single mothers and having them become self-sufficient. I know that there is going to be a lot of rather vigorous debate in the policy community and in the public about whether and how to strengthen marriage in low-income communities. I think that’s one of the new big issues.

MassNews:  Historians Will and Ariel Durant, after a study of many societies concluded that those who were able to delay the onset of sexual activity among the young had the highest level of civilization.

MG:  Ideas have consequences. Once you remove the idea that the state’s interest, and the public interest, is in channeling the erotic love of men and women into stable married families, I literally do not think societies can survive that don’t do that in some way. 

There is a larger point which George Gilder has made which is that underneath our political constitution and our economic constitution there is a sexual constitution, and the way we define the meaning and purpose of sex and gender ends up having an intimate relationship with the success of our society.

MassNews:  It does, after all, have to do with a contract between the two halves of the human race.

MG:  Yes, marriage is a universal human institution. It exists in different forms in every known society and it’s always about a recognized sexual union between a man and a woman that includes not necessarily equal but reciprocal rights and responsibilities towards each other and towards any children of that sexual union.