Previously, I started to describe the historic changes that are occurring around the way we think about marriage and single life. The first set of transformative changes, discussed in my last post, focus on marriage itself. How important is it to your life experiences whether you ever marry and if so, whether your marriage ends? How important is it to children's fate whether they are raised in a 1-parent or a 2-parent home (or some other type)? What's striking about these questions is that they are being raised at all. Once upon a time, there was little or no debate over these issues. Now, the consensus that has been so unquestioned for so long is beginning to dissolve. That's historic.
The cultural confrontations over same-sex marriage are part of this first set of historic changes. Proponents ask why they have to be with an other-sex partner in order to have access to all of the benefits, protections, and respect that comes with legal marriage. Opponents balk at the threat to what they regard as the very definition of marriage.
All of that is small stuff compared to the second change, a true paradigm shift. Finally, what may be a critical mass of thinkers and critics, with and without formal credentials, has suggested a complete de-centering from marriage and coupling. Their question is, why should you have to be any kind of a couple to have access to basic rights, protections, dignity, and respect?
The old paradigm puts marriage at the center of our society and our individual lives. The law still treats it as the gateway to privilege, and citizens - and not just the most traditional ones - treat it like an elite social club that accords status. The United States is the odd-nation-out in this regard. As Nancy Polikoff noted in her important book:
"No other Western country, including those that allow same-sex couples to marry, creates the rigid dividing line between the law for the married and the law for the unmarried that exists in the United States (p. 2)."
Polikoff is among those leading the revolution in our thinking. Rather than focusing on marriage and who should get let into the club, she suggests, we should "start by identifying what all families need and then seek just laws and policies to meet those needs (p. 7)." (Personally, I'd substitute "individuals" for "families," but we both favor a broad vision over a narrow one.)
It is especially important to see the big picture now that Americans are spending more years of their adult lives unmarried than married. The relevant questions in contemporary American society are not, are you married and to whom, but:
• Who are the important people in your life?
• What are the defining passions and pursuits of your life?
• What makes your life meaningful and worthwhile?
• What particular combination of solitude and sociability is most conducive to your best work and your most significant contributions to society?
It is not just in our laws and policies, but in our everyday interactions with friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, and people in the street, that these kinds of considerations should be paramount. The presumption that marriage matters most would then fall away - but it would not disappear as an individual option. People who want to follow the traditional path would still be able do so.
The new mentality asks why a pair of siblings who have lived with one another for decades, and whose lives are interdependent in every way that a married couple's is (except for the sex) should not be accorded the same benefits and protections as a conjugal couple. It asks why we measure relationships only in pairs and why we look only at complete interdependencies. Why not recognize that we all have concentric circles of people who make up our personal communities, and that different people can be important to us in different ways? When assessing a trend such as the growing number of people living solo, why not resist the temptation to assume that we are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness and instead ask another set of questions first: Is this how you prefer to live? Do you find your solo living isolating and depressing or refreshing and conducive to your very best creative work? Is your time alone complemented by time with others?
If we can de-center from marriage, and value more of the important people, relationships, preferences and passions in our lives, then future demographic shifts - which we really can't predict - will be far less consequential. Even if our society as a whole took an unpredicted turn back to the 1950s model of marriage happening early, for almost everyone, and often for life, nothing would be lost. Both the married and the single would remain equal under the law. Maybe our new enlightened habits of the mind would have become so entrenched that singles could live stigma-free even if they were to become a small minority once again.
A new Living Single series is in the works - "Single-Minded Change-Makers." In it, I will be interviewing people who are on the leading edge of innovative thinking and social change. Feel free to nominate your favorite single-minded change-maker for inclusion.
I will also return eventually to the various series and topics I've promised to continue, and to the topics readers have asked me to address that I haven't gotten to yet. I have a long list but don't let that discourage you from sending more requests.
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