I think this is a moment in social history that scholars and critics will be analyzing long into the future. There's a lot of matrimania going on - the over-the-top hyping of weddings and marriage. But as I argued in Singled Out, I suspect that's not a sign of how secure we are about the place of marriage in our lives, but how insecure.
There are at least two ongoing rhetorical maelstroms. The first, and more narrow one, is over marriage itself. On one side is the "everyone into the marital pool" movement; lined up against it are the lifeguards cautioning, "not so fast."
The second has yet to make quite as much noise as the first, but it is more profound. It asks why marriage is so central to our conversations, our politics, our scholarship, and our culture wars, at a time when it is so inessential to our lives. This perspective takes a step back - no, many steps back to get a good long view - and looks at the entirety of our lives, as we live them today, and what makes them meaningful.
The first societal face-off was lucidly illustrated by two high-profile magazine articles on marriage published in the last few weeks. The "get in the pool, NOW, and stay there!" side was Caitlin Flanagan's cover story for Time magazine, titled "Why Marriage Matters." The skeptical lifeguard was played by Sandra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic, who said of marriage, "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off."
I've written about both articles previously (Time, here, and the Atlantic, here), so I won't recap the themes in this post, but instead underscore some starkly divergent takes on the same data.
First, consider how the two characterize the place of marriage in contemporary American society.
From Time's "everyone into the marital pool":
"Getting married for life, having children and raising them with your partner - this is still the way most Americans are conducting adult life."
From the pages of the Atlantic:
"we both divorce and marry at some of the highest rates anywhere on the globe."
Tsing Loh's claim about America's extraordinarily high rates of marriage and divorce is from Andrew Cherlin's new book, The Marriage-Go-Round. I have no idea how Flanagan comes up with the notion that "most" Americans - that would be more than 50% -- get married for life, have children, and raise them with their partner. First, somewhere between 43 and 46% of all marriages end in divorce. Second, some 10% (probably more) of Americans will live single all their lives. Third, as of 2004, more than 19% of women between the ages of 40 and 44 had never had any children (Census Bureau). Flanagan's numbers just don't compute. Yet neither she nor any of the editors at Time seemed to notice. They are clinging to that white picket fence for dear life. Accuracy be damned.
Here's one more example, showing two different portrayals of the implications of single-parenting.
From Time's "marriage matters" story:
"on every significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households...in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others."
Now here's the Atlantic on the same theme:
"while having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good. The harm comes, Cherlin argues, from parents continually coupling with new partners, so that the children are forced to bond, or compete for attention, with ever new actors."
If there is just one study showing one way in which kids from single-parent homes outperform kids from two-parent homes, or even perform just a bit different rather than drastically so, then Flanagan's reckless statement simply cannot be true. In previous posts (here and here) and in Singled Out, I've rounded up a list of such studies.
Flanagan's argument that marriage matters, that it makes a "drastic" difference, is the traditional perspective. It is the reigning American worldview. That's the story that made the cover of Time, a magazine with a circulation in the millions. Tsing Loh's account, less compliant with our mythologies but also more consistent with the facts, was in the back of a magazine with far fewer readers (but more intellectual cache).
In the days surrounding the publication of the "marriage matters" story, Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor, made the rounds of the television shows, proudly touting Flanagan's work and repeating her misleading claims. He seems, in other ways, to be a smart and interesting person. These marriage wars, though, take their toll on all sorts of people who should know better.
Here's just one more example of the marital mythology making people lose their good sense. It's from the halls of academe. Recently, I've been rereading studies of marital status and depression for an academic paper I'm writing. To see whether people who get married become less depressed, ideally you'd want to follow the same people over time as they get married or stay single and see what difference that makes to their mental health. There actually are several such longitudinal studies. One 7-year study compared the depression scores of people who got married during the study to those who stayed single. But the authors did not compare the singles to all of the people who got married. Instead, they excluded anyone who got married but then got separated or divorced "because they clearly are not deriving any benefits from marriage." So in a study designed to see whether getting married was beneficial to mental health, the authors excluded anyone who got married and then split, because obviously they weren't getting any benefits from marriage. And they say so, apparently with no shame.
You can't make this stuff up.
(Still, even with that blatantly unfair advantage accorded to the married group, only the men, and not the women, showed any decrease in depression after they married. I'll tell you where to find that study - the Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1996; the quote is on p. 899. Unfortunately, though, it is not the only example of that methodological sleight-of-hand.)
Maybe, just maybe, the new and more accurate perspective is beginning to strike people as the more intriguing one. I don't have any good evidence for that, just one promising anecdote. The magazine The Week chooses one story per week to excerpt, from all of the possible magazine and newspaper long-form essays that appeared during that time. This week, they chose Tsing Loh's unconventional piece, not Flanagan's tired old tale.
I've already gone on too long, so I'll save my discussion of the second, more profound challenge to the prevailing marital mentalities for a future post.
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