Modern Romance (3 page)

This sentiment was widely shared. Everyone, including the women who said they were happily married, said they wanted their daughters and granddaughters to approach marriage differently from how they had. They wanted the young women they knew to date a lot of men and experience different relationships before they took a husband. “My daughter, I told her go out, get an education, get a car, enjoy yourself,” said Amelia. “Then, at the end, choose someone.”

Even Victoria, who had been married for forty-eight years to the man who grew up in the apartment above her, agreed. She emphasized that she loved her husband dearly but hinted that, given another chance, she might have done something else.

“My husband and I, we understand each other,” she said. “But we’re very different. Sometimes I wonder, if I had married someone who had the same interests as me . . .” She trailed off.

Maybe she was interested in doughnuts and was thinking about a life with Alfredo?

THE LUXURY OF HAPPINESS:

FROM COMPANIONATE TO SOUL MATE MARRIAGE

The shift in when we look for love and marriage has been accompanied by a change in what we look for in a marriage partner.
When the older folks I interviewed described the reasons that they dated, got engaged to, and then married their eventual spouses, they’d say things like “He seemed like a pretty good guy,” “She was a nice girl,” “He had a good job,” and “She had access to doughnuts and I like doughnuts.”
*

When you ask people today why they married someone, the answers are much more dramatic and loving. You hear things along the lines of “She is my other half,” “I can’t imagine experiencing the joys of life without him by my side,” or “Every time I touch her hair, I get a huge boner.”

On our subreddit we asked people: If you’ve been married or in a long-term relationship, how did you decide that the person was (or still is) the right person for you? What made this person different from others? The responses were strikingly unlike the ones we got from the older people we met at the senior center.

Many were filled with stories that illustrated a very deep connection between the two people that made them feel like they’d found someone unique, not just someone who was pleasant to start a family with.

One woman wrote:

The first moment I truly remember falling in love with my boyfriend was when I was singing Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” under my breath to myself while we were studying near each other and then he started singing it at the top of his lungs. And we sang the whole song just laughing and dancing around the room. Moments like those where I feel so free and goofy and loved make me know he is the right person. Also I feel like since we’ve been together, I have become the best version of myself. I push myself to try different things and keep learning even though I’m out of school. It’s so much for myself but having his support in my corner has made all the difference.

Another woman wrote:

He makes me laugh, and if I don’t feel like laughing, he stops and takes the time to find out why. He makes me feel beautiful and loved in my most ugly and unlovable moments. We also share the same faith, morals, work ethic, love of movies and music, and the desire to travel.

And one said:

He’s different from everyone because: He’s a one-of-a-kind human being. There is no one in this world like him. He is stunning, and I am amazed by him every single day. He’s made me a better person for having known and loved him. 5 years going strong and I’m still obsessed with him. He is my best friend.

All of these people had found someone truly special. From the way they described things, it seemed like their bar for committing to someone was much higher than it had been for the older folks who settled down just a few generations ago.

To figure out why people today use such exalted terms when they explain why they committed to their romantic partner, I spoke with Andrew Cherlin, the eminent sociologist of the family and author of the book
The Marriage-Go-Round
. Up until about fifty years ago, Cherlin said, most people were satisfied with what he calls a “companionate marriage.” In this type of marriage each partner had clearly defined roles. A man was the head of his household and the chief breadwinner, while a woman stayed home, took care of the house, and had kids. Most of the satisfaction you gained in the marriage depended on how well you fulfilled this assigned role. As a man, if you brought home the bacon, you could feel like you were a good husband. As a woman, if you kept a clean house and popped out 2.5 kids, you were a good wife. You loved your spouse, maybe, but not in an “every time I see his mustache, my heart flutters like a butterfly” type of way.

You didn’t marry each other because you were madly in love; you married because you could make a family together. While some people said they were getting married for love, the pressure to get married and start a family was such that not every match could be a love match, so instead we had the “good enough marriage.”

Waiting for true love was a luxury that many, especially women, could not afford. In the early 1960s, a full
76 percent
of women admitted they would be willing to marry someone they didn’t love. However, only 35 percent of the men said they would do the same.
3

If you were a woman, you had far less time to find a man. True love? This guy has a job
and
a decent mustache. Lock it down, girl.

 • • • 

This gets into a fundamental change in how marriage is viewed.
Today we see getting married as finding a life partner. Someone we love. But this whole idea of marrying for happiness and love is relatively new.

For most of the history of our species, courtship and marriage weren’t really about two individuals finding love and fulfillment. According to the historian Stephanie Coontz, author of
Marriage, a History
, until recently a marital union was primarily important for establishing a bond between two families. It was about achieving security—financial, social, and personal. It was about creating conditions that made it possible to survive and reproduce.

This is not ancient history. Until the Industrial Revolution, most Americans and Europeans lived on farms, and everybody in the household needed to work. Considerations about whom to marry were primarily practical.

In the past, a guy would be thinking,
Oh, shit, I gotta have kids to work on my farm. I need four-year-old kids performing manual labor ASAP. And I need a woman who can make me clothes. I better get on this.
A woman would think,
I better find a dude who’s capable on the farm and good with a plow so I don’t starve and die.

Making sure the person shared your interest in sushi and Wes Anderson movies
and
made you get a boner anytime you touched her hair would seem far too picky.

Of course, people did get married because they loved each other, but their expectations about what love would bring were different from those we hold today. For families whose future security depended on their children making good matches, passion was seen as an extremely risky motivation for getting hitched. “Marriage was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love,” writes Coontz.
4

Coontz also told us that before the 1960s most middle-class people had pretty rigid, gender-based expectations about what each person would bring to a marriage. Women wanted financial security. Men wanted virginity and weren’t concerned with deeper qualities like education or intelligence.

“The average couple wed after just six months—a pretty good sign that love was still filtered through strong gender stereotypes rather than being based on deep knowledge of the other partner as an individual,” she said.

Not that people who got married before the 1960s had loveless marriages. On the contrary, back then couples often developed increasingly intense feelings for each other as they spent time together, growing up and building their families. These marriages may have started with a simmer, but over time they could build to a boil.

But a lot of things changed in the 1960s and 1970s, including our expectations of what we should get out of a marriage. The push for women’s equality was a big driver of the transformation. As more women went to college, got good jobs, and achieved economic independence, they established newfound control over their bodies and their lives. A growing number of women refused to marry the guy in their neighborhood or building. They wanted to experience things too, and they now had the freedom to do it.

According to Cherlin, the generation that came of age during the sixties and seventies rejected companionate marriage and began to pursue something greater. They didn’t merely want a spouse—they wanted a soul mate.

By the 1980s, 86 percent of American men and 91 percent of American women said they would not marry someone without the presence of romantic love.
5

 • • • 

The soul mate marriage is very different from the companionate marriage.
It’s not about finding someone decent to start a family with. It’s about finding the perfect person whom you truly, deeply love. Someone you want to share the rest of your life with. Someone with whom, when you smell a certain T-shirt they own, you are instantly whisked to a happy memory about the time he or she made you breakfast and you both stayed in and binge-watched all eight season of
Perfect Strangers
.

We want something that’s very passionate, or boiling, from the get-go. In the past, people weren’t looking for something boiling; they just needed some water. Once they found it and committed to a life together, they did their best to heat things up. Now, if things aren’t boiling, committing to marriage seems premature.

But searching for a soul mate takes a long time and requires enormous emotional investment. The problem is that this search for the perfect person can generate a lot of stress. Younger generations face immense pressure to find the “perfect person” that simply didn’t exist in the past when “good enough” was good enough.

When they’re successful, though, the payoff is incredible. According to Cherlin, the soul mate marriage has the highest potential for happiness, and it delivers levels of fulfillment that the generation of older people I interviewed rarely reached.

Cherlin is also well aware of how hard it is to sustain all these good things, and he claims that today’s soul mate marriage model has the highest potential for disappointment. Since our expectations are so high, today people are quick to break things off when their relationship doesn’t meet them (touch the hair, no boner). Cherlin would also like me to reiterate that this hair/boner analogy is mine and mine alone.

The psychotherapist Esther Perel has counseled hundreds of couples who are having trouble in their marriages, and as she sees things, asking all of this from a marriage puts a lot of pressure on relationships. In her words:

Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it’s a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.
6

Ideally, though, we’re lucky, and we find our soul mate and enjoy that life-changing mother lode of happiness.

But a soul mate is a very hard thing to find.

FINDING YOUR SOUL MATE

Okay, so no one said
searching for a soul mate would be easy.
Still, in many ways it seems like today’s generation of singles is better off because of the changes in modern romance. Taking time to develop ourselves and date different people before we get married helps us make better choices. For instance, people who marry after the age of twenty-five are far less likely to divorce than those who get married young.
7

We also don’t even
have
to get married if we don’t want to. Getting married and starting a family was once seemingly the only reasonable life course. Today we’ve become far more accepting of alternative lifestyles, and people move in and out of different situations: single with roommates, single and solo, single with partner, married, divorced, divorced and living with an iguana, remarried with iguana, then divorced with seven iguanas because your iguana obsession ruined your relationship, and, finally, single with six iguanas (Arturo was sadly run over by an ice cream truck).

There are no longer any predetermined life paths. Each of us is on our own.

When we do marry, we are marrying for love. We are finding our soul mates. And the tools we have to find our soul mates are incredible. We aren’t limited to just the bing-bongs who live in our building. We have online dating that gives us access to millions and millions of bing-bongs around the world. We can filter them any way we want. When we go out, we can use smartphones to text any number of suitors while we are out barhopping. We aren’t constrained by landlines and relegated to whomever we have made firm plans with.

Our romantic options are unprecedented and our tools to sort and communicate with them are staggering.

And that raises the question: Why are so many people frustrated?

 • • • 

For the book, Eric and I wanted to see what would happen if we were able to gather groups from different generations to discuss dating past and present.
We organized a large focus group of two hundred people.

We sent out an invite and said that anyone who attended had to bring one or two parents to the event. Then, when people showed up, we split the families into two different sections—young folks on the left and parents on the right. We spent an hour going back and forth between the sides, asking people to explain how they met new people to date, asked each other out, and made decisions about marriage and commitment.