Rarely has there been a time when basic assumptions about the significance of marriage for adults, their children, and society have been as contested as they are now. When it comes to this major social institution, we don't just live in interesting times, we live in momentous times.
My area of expertise is social psychology, not social history. So I speak from my reading of how the science of marriage and single life has come to be understood in different ways at different points in time. One set of conclusions stakes out a place in our cultural conversations and comes to be understood as the conventional wisdom of our time, only to be challenged by the next wave of claims. I'll describe the last four decades of shifts, and welcome real historians to add modifications and extensions.
In 1972, Jessie Bernard set the topic ablaze with the publication of her book, The future of marriage. There, she introduced the term "his and hers marriages." Basically, his was better. She claimed that compared to single men, married men had better mental health and greater happiness. In contrast, married women suffered in mental and physical health not only in comparison to married men, but also single women.
Research ramped up, and so did religious and ideological movements. Marriage was oh-so-important to the religious right and the pro-marriage movement took off. Contentiousness over issues such as same-sex marriage and reproductive rights intensified, and continues to this day. Policy positions were articulated in which marriage was cast as an anti-poverty program. Marriage-promotion programs were funded by the federal government.
Two of the four groups in Jessie Bernard's analysis did not fit with flow of the "marriage-is-transformative" narrative - the happy single women and the unhappy married women. Along came the next wave of ideologues (and scientists, too) claiming that "marriage is good for everyone." That's what sociologist Linda Waite told the New York Times. She told USA Today that "Marriage improves the health and longevity of men and women." The book she published in 2000 with pundit and right-wing columnist Maggie Gallagher would become the touchstone for all who wanted to claim that getting married makes people superior to their single selves. The title summarized their argument: The case for marriage: why married people are happier, healthier, and better off financially.
I'd like to think that I'm part of the most recent wave, challenging the most fundamental conclusion across both previous sets of understandings - that getting married results in large and lasting improvements in health and happiness at least for men, and maybe for women, too. I also contest the claims that children who are raised by single parents are doomed.
When I discuss these matters with people who are not social scientists, sometimes they throw their hands up in exasperation. It seems to them that people can just pick any data to claim anything. I don't think things are quite that dire.
What is important is reading the original journal articles (and my impression is that far too few science writers actually do so) and understanding how to interpret the results. Say, for example, a study finds that people who are currently married are healthier than people who are currently unmarried (divorced or widowed or always-single). Maybe a press release reports that married people are healthier, then the media headlines proclaim, "Get married, get healthy!" Already, the findings have been substantially misrepresented.
I've explained this in detail many times before, on this blog and in my books, Singled Out and Single with Attitude, so here I'll just mention some basics. To say that getting married makes people healthier by looking only at those who got married and stayed married comes dangerously close to pseudo-science. All the people who got married and then got divorced or became widowed are set aside - or they are folded into the group of people who never got married.
My favorite analogy involves pharmaceutical research. Imagine if a drug company tried to persuade you to take a drug based on findings from only those people who took the drug and stayed on it. They want to exclude from their analyses all the people who took the drug, hated it, and refused to continue taking it - even if nearly half of all participants fell into the "let me out!" category. If you were teaching an introductory methods class to undergraduates, you would not accept a proposed research design that looked like that. In your role as a consumer of all sorts of televised claims for all sorts of products, you would mercilessly mock anyone who tried to sell you their bill of goods based only on the ratings of people who liked their bill of goods. Imagine if teachers could turn in the evaluations of just those students who liked their courses, or if workers could set aside any evaluations they didn't like. It is only a bit of a caricature to say that you are getting just that when you hear claims that getting married makes you happier and healthier and results in a longer life.
The argument that "marriage wins" is still the dominant one, but increasingly, it is getting kicked around a bit. My favorite example occurred last summer when two high-profile magazine articles - one in the Atlantic, and another a cover story in Time - made strikingly different claims about what we know from the research on marital status. I described the two in detail here (complete with contrasting quotes). Basically, Time went all in with the matrimania, while the Atlantic was much more skeptical.
The experiences of marriage, cohabitation, single life, divorce, or widowhood do not stand still. As meanings and cultural contexts change, so, too, may the implications for health and well-being. For example, people who are divorced, when measured at one point in time, sometimes appear to be doing less well than people who are currently married or people who have always been single. The differences are not always big (in fact, sometimes they are not even there), and they can fade over time as the divorce recedes into the past. (Plus, we can never know whether the divorced people would have done better if they stayed married - we'd need to randomly assign people to stay married or get divorced to learn that.) Still, there are intimations that if there are real risks that come with getting divorced, they, too, may be a thing of the past. A very recent study of longevity (described here) produced results consistent with that possibility, though more definitive work is still needed.
Over time, I think our scientific understandings and media representations are going to become more and more accurate. Right now, too many scientists and journalists have put their name to claims and they are invested in those claims. Though it is sometimes a national sport to make fun of 20-somethings, I think they are generally a more open-minded group than many of their elders. They surely do not share the same level of hostility toward the GLBT community, for instance, and they seem less impressed by traditional sex roles. If the data really do show that there are many ways to live a happy, healthy, and meaningful life, I think they'll mostly accept that - no temper tantrums necessary.
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