Marriage, a History (57 page)

Promoting good marriages is a worthwhile goal, and we can help many marriages work better than they currently do. I argued in the last chapter that in today’s changing world, one-size-fits-all advice books and glib formulas for marital success are of little value. But sociologists and psychologists have found a few general principles that seem to help most kinds of modern marriage flourish.

Because men and women no longer face the same economic and social compulsions to get or stay married as in the past, it is especially important that men and women now begin their relationship as friends and build it on the basis of mutual respect. You can no longer force your partner to conform to a predetermined social role or gender stereotype or browbeat someone into staying in an unsatisfying relationship. “Love, honor, and negotiate” have to replace the older rigid rules, say psychologists Betty Carter and Joan Peters.
⁵

But negotiation will not resolve every difference of opinion or interest. As men and women marry later, they come to marriage with a lot of life experience and many previously formed interests and skills. It’s no longer possible to assume that two people can merge all their interests and beliefs. When two grownups get together and neither has the whip hand, both must learn to live with their differences.

Accepting differences does not mean putting up with everything a partner dishes out. It is certainly not the same thing that psychologists meant in the 1950s, when this advice was directed only at the wife. Today acceptance in a relationship must be a two-way street. To be effective, it has to be based on
real
friendship and respect, not the counterfeit interest that so many 1950s marriage manuals recommended when they told the wife to pretend to be interested in his work and the husband to pretend to be interested in her day. And in a world where marriages are no longer held together by the compulsion of in-laws and society or the mutual dependence of two individuals who cannot do each other’s jobs, on-going emotional investments in a marriage have to replace external constraints in providing ballast for the relationship.

Another important principle that flows from the historical changes in marriage is that husbands have to respond positively to their wives’ requests for change. This is not female favoritism or male bashing. For thousands of years marriage was organized in ways that reinforced female subservience. Today, even though most of the legal and economic basis for a husband’s authority over his wife and her deference to his needs is gone, we all have inherited unconscious habits and emotional expectations that perpetuate female disadvantage in marriage. For example, it is still true that when women marry, they typically do more housework than they did before marriage. When men marry, they do less. Marriage decreases free time for women, but not for men. In many cases, write researchers Marybeth Mattingly and Suzanne Bianchi, being married places women “constantly on call,” lessening the quantity and often the quality of their leisure time.
⁶

Women are more likely to bring up marital issues for discussion because they have more to gain from changing these traditional dynamics of marriage. According to psychology researcher John Gottman and his collaborators, if a man responds positively to his wife’s request for change, that is one of the best indicators that they will stay together and have a happy marriage. It helps a lot, they note, if the wife asks nicely. But it does not help if she keeps quiet for fear of provoking conflict. Constructive, nonviolent anger does not usually lead to divorce, but stonewalling a partner’s request for change poses a big risk to a marriage.
⁷

In the thirty years I have been researching family life, I have read many women’s diaries, written over the last four-hundred years. Reading these records of women’s lives and marriages, I was struck by how often entries focused not on the joy of their marriages but on wives’ struggle to accept their lot. Many women did write about their love and respect for their husbands, of course, but many others filled their diaries with reminders to themselves to cultivate patience, self-restraint, and forgiveness. One woman’s refrain was that her husband’s behavior was “the cross I have to bear,” another’s, the reminder that her husband had never beaten her and that she should “be more grateful for what I have.” Others would pray for the forbearance to put up with a husband’s drinking or foul temper.

“Give me strength”; “Make me realize how fortunate I am”; “Help me not to provoke him”; “Give me patience.” These pleas occur over and over, even in the journals of women who were satisfied with their marriages. Men’s journals dwelled less on the need to accommodate themselves to their wives’ shortcomings, but they too reflected the frustration of living in a fixed institution in which there was no sense that problems could be worked through and relationships renegotiated.

What might I write if I had time to keep a daily diary? It would undoubtedly be infused by the greater sense of choice that my husband and I now have in comparison with the past. As with any marriage, there are times we have to search for patience and forbearance. But the choice to stay and work things out is a conscious one and a mutual process, not a unilateral resignation to accept the inevitable. My diary would record a lot more active delight in my daily married life than most journals of the past and a lot less talk about “resigning myself to my lot.” Yet as a modern woman I live with an undercurrent of anxiety that is absent from the diaries of earlier days. I know that if my husband and I stop negotiating, if too much time passes without any joy, or if a conflict drags on too long, neither of us
has
to stay with the other.

What is true for individual marriages is also true for society. As a result of centuries of social change, most people in the Western world have a choice about whether or not to enter marriage and, if they do marry, whether or not to stay in it for the rest of their lives. The structure of our economy and the values of our culture also encourage or even force people to make much more individualistic decisions than in the past. Today, as never before, decisions about marriage and family life rest with the individuals involved, not with society as a whole.

Married people may be able to reach out to friends and counselors for help, and our employers and political leaders could make it easier for us to sustain our relationships by instituting family-friendly work policies and social programs to help us juggle our many roles. But the most effective support systems for married couples, such as subsidized parental leaves, flexible work schedules, high-quality child care, and access to counseling when a relationship is troubled, would also make things easier for those people who are constructing relationships outside marriage. Conversely, any measures that significantly limited social support or freedom of choice for the unmarried would probably backfire on the quality of life for the married as well.

We can certainly create more healthy marriages than we currently do, and we can save more marriages that are in trouble. But just as we cannot organize modern political alliances through kinship ties or put the farmers’ and skilled craftsmen’s households back as the centerpiece of the modern economy, we can never reinstate marriage as the primary source of commitment and caregiving in the modern world. For better or worse, we must adjust our personal expectations and social support systems to this new reality.

1
Amy Kaler, “ ‘Many Divorces and Many Spinsters’: Marriage as an Invented Tradition in Southern Malawi, 1946-1999,”
Journal of Family History
26 (2001), pp. 547, 548.

2
On record high divorce rates of Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, see William Goode,
World Changes in Divorce Patterns
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). On high rates of illegitimacy, which accounted for more than 80 percent of total births in some sections of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century, see André Burguière, “The Formation of the Couple,”
Journal of Family History
12 (1987). For the rest of this paragraph, see the notes to chapter 2.

3
Claude Martin and Irene Thèry, “The Pacs and Marriage and Cohabitation in France,”
International Journal of Law, Public Policy and the Family
15 (April 2001); Kathleen Kiernan, “The Rise of Cohabitation and Childbearing Outside Marriage in Western Europe,”
International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family
15 (2001); Ilona Ostner, “Cohabitation in Germany—Rules, Reality and Public Discourses,”
International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family
15 (2001); Karen Mason, Noriko Tsuya, and Manja Choe, eds.
The Changing Family in Comparative Perspective
:
Asia and the United States
(Honolulu: East-West Center, 1998); Sonni Efron, “Baby Bust Has Japan Fearing for Its Future,”
Los Angeles Times,
June 24, 2001; Paul Wiseman, “No Sex Please, We’re Japanese,”
USA Today,
June 23, 2004.

4
Barbara Crossette, “UN Agency Sets Sights on Curbing Child Marriage,”
New York Times,
March 8, 2001; Constanzia Tobio, “Marriage, Cohabitation and the Residential Independence of Young People in Spain,”
International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family
15 (2001); Chan Wai Kong, “Stupid Cupid?,”
New Straits Times,
November 18, 2001; Dinah Spritzer, “More People Say, ‘We Don’t,’ ”
Prague Post,
April 15, 2004.

5
Saudi Women Advise on Marriage Crisis, BBC News, December 31, 2001 (
http: news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid1735000/1735965.stm
); Alan Riding, “Italian Court Rules that Son Knows Best About Leaving Home,”
New York Times,
April 6, 2002.

6
Wade Mackey and Ronald Immerman, “Cultural Viability and Gender Egalitarianism,”
Journal of Comparative Family Studies
33 (2002); Ariek Eckholm, “Desire for Sons Drives Use of Prenatal Scans in China,”
New York Times,
June 21, 2002; Paul Wiseman, “China Thrown Off Balance as Boys Outnumber Girls,”
USA Today,
June 19, 2002.

7
Margaret Hunt,
The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

8
Even as late as 1967, almost three-quarters of female college students in America said they would consider marrying someone they didn’t love if he had all the other qualities they wanted in a mate. It is only since the unprecedented expansion of women’s economic independence in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that women have begun to hold out for a “soul mate.” Daniel Albas and Cheryl Albas, “Love and Marriage,” in K. Ishwaran, ed.,
Family and Marriage: Cross-cultural Perspectives
(Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1992), p. 138; David Popenoe et al.,
The State of Our Unions, 2002
(New Brunswick, NJ: The National Marriage Project, June 2001).

9
George Peter Murdock,
Ethnographic Atlas
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967).

10
My thanks to Joanna Radbord, associate at Epstein Cole LLP, Toronto, and co-counsel to the applicant couples in
Halpern v. Canada,
for providing me with access to the affidavits filed in the case.
Halpern v. Canada
(2002): 60 O.R. (3d) 321 (Div Ct_; (2003) 225D.L.R. (4
^th
) 529 (Ont. CA) The Ontario Supreme Court unanimously ruled that denying equal marriage rights to gays and lesbians was unconstitutional and gave the government two years to rewrite the common law definition of marriage so that it includes two persons, not necessarily one man and one woman. The decision can be accessed online at
http://www. sgmlaw.com/userfiles/filesevent/file_1413620_halpern.PDF
. 10. Amy Kaler, “ ‘Many Divorces and Many Spinsters.’”

1
Quoted in John Jacobs,
All You Need Is Love and Other Lies About Marriage
(New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 9.

2
William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love,”
Ethnology
31 (1992).

3
Ira Reiss and Gary Lee,
Family Systems in America
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988), pp. 91-93.

4
Karen Dion and Kenneth Dion, “Cultural Perspectives on Romantic Love,”
Personal Relationships
3 (1996); Vern Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” in Clare Less, ed.,
Medieval Masculinities
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Hans-Werner Goetz,
Life in the Middle Ages, from the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

5
Francis Hsu, “Kinship and Ways of Life,” in Hsu, ed.,
Psychological Anthropology
(Cambridge, U.K.: Schenkman, 1972), and
Americans and Chinese: Passage to Differences
(Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1981); G. Robina Quale,
A History of Marriage Systems
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988); Marilyn Yalom, “Biblical Models,” in Yalom and Laura Carstensen, eds.,
Inside the American Couple
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).