Marriage, a History (50 page)

Population experts predict that 50 percent of children in the United States will spend part of their lives in a household that does not contain both their married, biological parents. Perhaps we can reduce that number. But we cannot return to a world where almost all child rearing and care giving take place in and through marriage.
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As the age of marriage rises, people are also less and less likely to wait for a wedding to initiate them into sex. Some people see hope for a revival of traditional sexual mores in the declining support for promiscuous sexual behavior and the new popularity of virginity pledges among teenagers in the opening years of the twenty-first century. Certainly, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, especially AIDS, and the emotional turmoil that comes with casual sexual relationships have made promiscuous sex less attractive. With divorce readily available, there are also fewer excuses not to honor existing marital commitments. So more people now expect fidelity within committed relationships than in the 1970s, even as acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation, and divorce has continued to grow.

Still, this does not mark a return to conservative sexual mores, especially among young people. There has been a decline in early sexual initiation, but it has been more marked for boys than for girls and more likely reflects the continuing decline of the double standard than a return to “traditional morality.” As was foreshadowed in the racy 1920s, when “respectable” young women began engaging in premarital sex on a larger scale, boys today are more likely to begin their sexual lives in romantic relationships than in exploitative encounters with so-called bad girls. A girlfriend has more influence than a casual partner over the timing of sexual initiation and the use of contraception when sex occurs.
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Seen in this light, maintaining virginity longer does not necessarily signal a return to traditional sexual mores but may reflect young women’s growing sexual independence and control over their sexual relationships. Moreover, many teenagers who delay the onset of genital intercourse are substituting other behaviors, such as oral sex, which increased significantly among teens in the 1990s.
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I was completely flummoxed a couple of years ago in Minnesota when a group of teenage girls told me that several of them were having oral sex with their boyfriends so they could still be virgins when they graduated from high school.

Many people who are turned off by casual sex but not yet ready to marry have resorted to cohabitation, which is a more stable and committed relationship than dating but less likely to last than marriage. Even as divorce and unwed pregnancy slowed, cohabitation rates have continued to increase in the new century. For many, living together has become a normal stage in courtship—the majority of marriages now begin as cohabitation—but for others, living together has become an alternative to marriage.

British demographer Kathleen Kiernan suggests that in Europe and North America, a four-stage process has made cohabitation almost equal in status to marriage. In the first stage, most people marry without having lived together first. Only a small bohemian minority and some of the very poor live together outside marriage. In the second stage, more people from more walks of life live together for a time but usually move on to marriage and almost invariably marry if they become parents.
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The third stage is achieved when cohabitation becomes a socially acceptable alternative to marriage. A woman is comfortable taking her unmarried partner to a party at work or a family gathering. A man can tell his boss about his live-in lover. In this stage, says Kiernan, couples living together no longer feel compelled to marry if the woman becomes pregnant, even if they decide to have the child. Far from hiding their unmarried state, as couples used to do, they proudly send out birth announcements with both parents’ names. However, most couples who have a child and stay together eventually do marry at some point, especially if they plan to have a second child.

In the fourth stage, however, cohabitation and marriage become virtually indistinguishable legally and socially. Couples may have several children without ever marrying. The number of married couples and cohabiting couples is about the same, and children living with both parents are almost equally distributed between the two categories.

The United States, it appears, was transitioning from stage two to stage three at the end of the twentieth century. Sweden, however, had by then reached stage four. In fact, more children are now born each year to cohabiting couples in Sweden than to married ones, and the tendency for couples to marry after the second birth has faded. Some observers believe that America is headed in this direction. Personally, I am skeptical. Sweden’s family patterns have very distinctive cultural roots and are supported by an equally distinctive political and economic system. People in the United States still place much more importance on getting married than Swedes do, and demographers calculate that 90 percent of Americans will eventually marry.

However, there is no question that marriage had lost its privileged legal and cultural position in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. And anyone dreaming of a return to traditional marriage at the beginning of the twenty-first century was in for a shock.

When President Nixon remarked in 1970 that the issue of gay marriage would have to wait until 2000, he picked that year to symbolize the inconceivable future. In fact, though, his prediction turned out to be remarkably accurate. In July 2000, Vermont made same-sex civil unions legally equivalent to marriage. In 2003, Canada legalized gay and lesbian marriage in two of its most populous provinces. On November 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that its state constitution guaranteed equal marriage rights for same-sex couples.

Then things really heated up. President Bush declared in his January 20, 2004, State of the Union address that the nation must “defend the sanctity of marriage.” The newly elected mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsome, indignant at the thunderous applause that followed the president’s announcement, directed city hall to start issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples on February 12. The first two people he invited to get their licenses were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, lesbian activists who had been a committed couple for fifty-one years. “Why should my wife and I, who have been married for only two years, be entitled to more rights than they are after half a century?” Newsome asked assembled reporters.
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Newsome’s directive provoked a storm of activity on both sides of the issue. More than thirty-two hundred gay and lesbian couples, many from out of state, flocked to San Francisco to get married. President Bush called for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting same-sex marriage. This spurred defiant local officials in New Mexico, New York, and Oregon to issue same-sex wedding licenses. Commissioners in one Oregon county decided they didn’t feel comfortable defying their state’s ban on same-sex marriage but didn’t feel ethical not doing so. Their solution was to stop issuing wedding licenses to anyone, same or opposite sex!

Commentators who had been predicting a return to traditional marriage immediately changed their tune. Phyllis Schlafly claimed that “the gays have moved in to deliver the knockout punch” to marriage. The fundamentalist Protestant minister James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, put it even more starkly. “The institution of marriage is on the ropes,” he wrote in September 2003, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of antisodomy laws and Canada’s acceptance of same-sex marriage. “Barring a miracle,” Dobson warned in his April 2004 newsletter, “the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.”
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Opposition to same-sex marriage comes from a number of directions. For some Americans, denying gays and lesbians the right to marry is a matter of deep religious conviction. Others believe that legalizing gay and lesbian marriage would send the message to heterosexuals that it’s okay to raise a child without both a mother and a father in the home. Still others see gay marriage as the final nail in the coffin of traditional marriage and family life. Stanley Kurtz, writing in the August 4-11, 2003,
Weekly Standard,
an influential conservative magazine, predicted that gay marriage will “take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and ‘polyamory’ [group marriage]. Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals . . . in every conceivable combination of male and female.”
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The religious debate over same-sex marriage rests on personal faith and can’t be settled by comparing the social science evidence, pro and con. But from a historical perspective, the claim that we stand on the brink of legalizing polygamy is a bit farfetched. In fact, the historical trend has been running in the opposite direction. Most countries where polygamy is still legal are moving to repeal those laws. Young women in cultures that practice polygamy are defying their parents and community leaders in order to make their own choices. It is also hard to imagine any government agreeing to pay pensions to three or four survivors instead of one or any employer paying medical insurance for three spouses.

Some of the agitation on the issue of same-sex marriage strikes me as a case of trying to lock the barn door after the horses have already gone. The demand for gay and lesbian marriage was an inevitable result of the previous revolution in heterosexual marriage. It was heterosexuals who had already created many alternative structures for organizing sexual relationships or raising children and broken down the primacy of two-parent families based on a strict division of labor between men and women.

In the short run, the United States is unlikely to join Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada in legalizing same-sex marriage. By the end of 2004, forty-three states had passed statutes limiting marriage to a man and a woman, and eleven had enshrined this defiintion in their constitutions. The United States is one of the most sexually conservative countries in the industrial world. In 2002, 42 percent of Americans told pollsters that homosexuality was morally wrong. Only 16 percent of Italians, 13 percent of the French, and 5 percent of Spaniards felt that way.
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Still, even in America attitudes toward homosexuality have changed immensely over the past fifteen years. Since the end of the 1990s support for same-sex marriage has bobbed back and forth between a low of 31 percent and a high of 40 percent. This is a minority of the population, to be sure, but half of the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds polled by
USA Today
in March 2004 supported legalization of gay marriage, compared with just 19 percent of respondents over sixty-five. And ironically, as views have polarized over the question of whether gays and lesbians should be able to use the word
marriage
to describe their relationships, the once-radical demand for same-sex civil unions has become a compromise position. “Let them have the same rights as me and my wife,” one businessman told me. “Just don’t call it marriage.”
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Constitutional amendments or not, gay and lesbian families are not going back into the closet. One-third of female same-sex households and more than one-fifth of male same-sex households include biological children under eighteen. Eight U.S. states and the District of Columbia currently allow a child to have two legal mothers or two legal fathers. And 40 percent of the nation’s adoption agencies report that they have placed children with gay or lesbian parents. This is a reality that won’t go away. In 2002 the American Academy of Pediatrics called for legalizing partner adoptions in families where the biological parent of a child lives with a same-sex partner. In 2004 the American Psychological Association endorsed same-sex marriage.
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Only a small minority of gays and lesbians are interested in marrying at this point. But those who do seek that right are not the main threats to the stable male breadwinner family system or the primacy of marriage in social and personal life. Divorce, single parenthood, and cohabitation among heterosexuals have already reshaped the role of marriage in society and its meaning in people’s lives. Marriage has also been fundamentally transformed by the behavior of married people who will never divorce and by single people who would never consider having children out of wedlock.

The reproductive revolution has shaken up all the relationships once taken for granted between sex, marriage, conception, childbirth, and parenting. People who could not become parents before can now do so in such bewildering combinations that a child can potentially have five different parents: a sperm donor, an egg donor, a birth mother, and the social father and mother who raise the child. On the other hand, some married couples use new reproductive technologies to avoid having children altogether. Seen in this light, a childless marriage is just as much a challenge to the tradition that children are the central purpose and glue of a wedded relationship as is a gay union.

The many young people who delay marrying until their late twenties or early thirties also contribute to the diminishing role of marriage in organizing social and personal life. Today, in contrast with medieval Europe and colonial America, most young people go through an extended period when they do not live with and are not under the control of their parents or any other married people. However, as singles they can exercise most of the political and economic privileges of adulthood when they turn eighteen and twenty-one.

This large pool of single youth, along with the extension of the life span, has contributed to a stunning explosion of solitary living in Western societies. More than one-quarter of all U.S. households now contain only one person. At various times and in various places in history, rates of nonmarital sex, divorce, cohabitation, or out-of-wedlock childbearing have been higher than they are today.
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But never before have so many people lived alone. And never before have unmarried people, living alone or in couples, had the same rights as married adults. The spread of solitary living and cohabitation reduces the social weight of marriage in the economy and polity, creating tastes, habits, expectations, and voting blocs that are not tied to the role of wife or husband.