Soundbites
from
The Case for Marriage
January
2001
These
soundbites from The Case for Marriage tell, in the authors’ own words,
that they have found that marriage is highly beneficial to most persons.
The headlines are by the staff of Massachusetts News.
First
Time in History: Marriage
Under Sustained Attack
For perhaps the first time in human history, marriage as
an ideal is under a sustained and surprisingly successful attack. Sometimes
the attack is direct and ideological, made by “experts” who believe
a lifelong vow of fidelity is unrealistic or oppressive, especially
to women.
‘Happy
Marriage’ is Important Say 93%
Ninety-three percent of Americans rate “having a happy marriage”
as either one of the most important, or very important objectives….Only
8 percent of American women consider remaining single an ideal, a proportion
that has not changed over the last generation….When it comes to marriage,
Americans have both high hopes and debilitating fears…they are desperate
to have only one marriage, and they want it to be happy. They don’t
know whether this is possible anymore.
Myths
About Marriage
Myth 1) Divorce is usually the best answer for kids when a marriage
becomes unhappy.
Myth 2)
Marriage is mostly about children; if you don’t have kids, it doesn’t
matter whether you cohabit or marry or stay single.
Myth 3)
Marriage may be good for men, but it is bad for women, damaging their
health and self-esteem and limiting their opportunities.
Myth 4)
Promoting marriage and marital obligation puts women at risk for violence.
Myth 5)
Marriage is essentially a private matter, an affair of the heart between
two adults, in which no outsider, not even the children of the marriage,
should be allowed to interfere.
Better
Sex
What these prominent researchers found may shock you: married people
have both more and better sex than singles do. They not only have sex
more often, but they enjoy it more, both physically and emotionally,
than do their unmarried counterparts.
Crucial
for Children
For children’s ultimate socioeconomic attainment, the quality
of parents’ marriage appears to matter far less than its durability
– it is divorce that influences how much education children get, what
kind of careers they pursue, and how much money they will make as adults.
When it comes to educating and launching children into the world of
work, the structural supports marriage provides are more important than
the emotional ones.
Healthier,
Wealthier and Live Longer
Both men and women live longer, healthier, and wealthier
lives when married, but husbands typically get greater health benefits
from marriage than do wives. On the other hand…wives reap even greater
financial advantages than do husbands.
A
Dangerous Myth
The single most dangerous myth of the post-marriage culture
is the idea that marriage – or divorce – is, can be, or should be, just
another lifestyle choice, a purely personal relation created by the
couple, for the couple.
[As Andrew
Cherlin put it, married folks “are more likely today than in the past
to evaluate their marriage primarily according to how well it satisfies
their individual emotional needs. If their evaluation on these terms
is unfavorable, they are likely to turn to divorce.”]
Big
Change Since ‘60s
Once again, public opinion shifted along with expert advice.
In 1962, 51% of young mothers interviewed disagreed with the notion
that “parents who don’t get along should stay together.” In 1985 those
same women by 82% disapproved of “staying together for the sake of the
children.”
Single
Parenthood is Deemed Okay
Once this basic conception of marriage as an adult affair
took hold, other cultural changes soon followed. As marriage ceases
to be viewed as vital to children, single motherhood is elevated in
status, no longer a family tragedy but just another personal option
in a freedom-loving world. “If a woman can’t find Prince Charming and
wants a baby and is ready, society should not dictate what is acceptable,”
one pastor told the Los Angeles Times. In 1994, when American teenage
girls (the future mothers of America) were asked whether or not they
personally would consider having a child out of wedlock, only half answered
with a firm no. A majority of all Americans and 70 percent of young
adults agree that women should have the right to bear a child out of
wedlock without reproach.
Demoted
to Just Another Relationship
But as marriage comes to be viewed as primarily a subjective,
emotional relation between two adults, the marriage bond begins to be
described as just one of many equally valid lifestyle choices. Marriage
is demoted from a uniquely honored relation to just another relationship.
Committed
Couples Organize
Their Lives Differently
The promise of permanence is key to marriage’s transformative
power. People who expect to be part of a couple for their entire lives
– unless something awful happens – organize their lives differently
from people who are less certain their relationship will last.
Most
Say Marriage is ‘Very Happy’
Most married people describe their marriages as “very happy.”
Among the nearly twenty thousand married men and women questioned over
the last several decades as part of the General Social Survey, 66 percent
of the husbands and 62 percent of the wives give their marriage the
highest possible happiness rating. Almost no one – 2 percent of the
married men and 4 percent of the married women – described their marriage
as “not too happy.”
Increases
Salary
In the United States, according to some estimates, getting
a wife increases a man’s salary by about as much as a college education.
Powerful
in Obtaining Wealth
Marriage plays a powerful role in both the attainment of
wealth and the plunge into poverty. When people marry, they are immediately
better off, because they now have a claim on not only their own, but
their spouses’ future income. Over time, the advantages of marriage
increase, as couples benefit from higher earnings created by specialization,
a lifestyle that encourages savings, the help of a partner in restraining
impulse spending, and the reduced costs sharing a life permits.
When it
comes to building wealth or avoiding poverty, a stable marriage may
be your most important asset.
Divorce
Is Bad for Kids
Psychologically, at least, children in very high-conflict
marriage families experience their parents’ divorce as a relief. When
marriages of more middling quality end, however, children experience
the family breakup as an unmitigated and inexplicable disaster.
The bad
news is that in this country, the majority of divorces involving children
apparently are not ending terrible marriages but marriages that are,
from a child’s point of view, at least “good enough.”
Staying
Married for Children
is Not Unreasonable
The starting results of Amato and Booth’s investigation, one of
the largest and most well-designed studies of its kind, led these two
social scientists to make this unusually firm pronouncement: “Spending
one-third of one’s life living in a marriage that is less than satisfactory
in order to benefit children – children that parents elected to bring
into the world – is not an unreasonable expectation.”
Single
Women Much More
Likely to be Raped or Assaulted
Single and divorced women were four to five times more likely
to be victimized in any given year than married women. (The widowed,
however, are the least likely.) Single and divorced women were almost
ten times more likely than wives to be raped and about three times more
likely to be the victims of aggravated assault than wives. Bachelors
were about four times as likely to be the victims of a violent crime
as husbands.
Boyfriends
Cause Violence to Children
For children, a marriage license may be even more crucial.
An unmarried mother’s boyfriend also appears to pose a particular danger.
One study found that although boyfriends contribute less than 2 percent
of nonparental child care, they commit almost half of all reported child
abuse by nonparents. As researcher Leslie Margolin concluded, “Mothers’
boyfriends committed 27 times more child abuse than their hours in child
care would lead us to predict…a young child left alone with a mother’s
boyfriend experiences elevated risk of physical abuse.”
Mortality
Higher for Singles
Mortality rates were higher for the unmarried of both sexes,
but 50 percent higher among women and 250 percent among men. The relatively
unhealthy lives of single men, compared to those of single women, seem
to explain the gender gap in marriage benefits here.
Psychologically
Good for Husband and Wife
A closer look, a broader view, and several decades of new
research show that her [Bernard’s] influential conclusion that marriage
is good for men’s mental health but bad for women’s is not true. On
average, his marriage and her marriage are equally committed, equally
happy, and equally psychologically healthy.
Americans
Not ‘Investing’ In Marriage
A simple but, we believe, true answer to the question of
why marriage is in trouble is that Americans have invested less moral,
spiritual, cultural, political, and legal energy into supporting the
marriage vow.
Easier
Divorce Has Reduced Benefits for All
If much of the magic that marriage works stems from its ability
to give men and women a sense of security that their partnership will
last, the sharp decline in the law’s willingness to enforce the terms
of the marriage has reduced the benefits of marriage for everyone. Everyone’s
marriage is profoundly affected by the presence (or absence) of social
and legal supports…
Divorce
anxiety not only produces more divorce, but it creates less happiness
in marriage, even in those unions that do survive. Marriage can become
just a piece of paper if you are always wondering in the back of your
mind whether or not your partner might walk.
Divorce
Blossomed with ‘Women’s Movement’
“Even in the early 1960s,” sum up social historians Steven Mintz
and Susan Kellogg, “marriage and family ties were regarded by the ‘human
potential movement’ as potential threats to individual fulfillment as
a man or a woman. The highest forms of human needs, contended proponents
of the new psychologies, were autonomy, independence, growth and creativity,”
which marriage often thwarted. The search for autonomy and independence
as the highest human good blossomed with the women’s movement into a
critique of marriage per se, which the more flamboyant feminists denounced
as “slavery,” “legalized rape,” and worst of all, “tied up with a sense
of dependency.”…Reflecting both these broader trends and this expert
consensus, the proportion of high-school-senior girls who agreed that
most people will have fuller and happier lives if they choose legal
marriage rather than staying single or just living with someone dropped
about one-fourth (or ten percentage points) between 1976 and 1992, while
the opinion of boys remained unchanged.
Marriage
Remains Goal of Many
Despite
the startling rise in divorce, cohabitation, and unwed parenthood, marriage
remains a core value and aspiration of many Americans.
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