Americans are big on the social construct of marriage. For some of us, anyway. Those same folks who project copious value on marriage are often the same ones who are quick to point out that only specific people should have the right to marry (one man, one woman).
And while that idea is fodder for another column, the word of importance to me here is “right.” Marriage is a right. It is not a necessity or a requirement. It is a choice to legalize a commitment to another person. It doesn’t increase the value or the legitimacy of that commitment.
So why do we as a society place such excessive emphasis on this institution that has been around for thousands of years?
Marriage was initially conceived as the most logical means to gain political or economic advantage by forming alliances and combining property and assets. The greater good outweighed the desires of the involved individuals. But the culture that existed at that time no longer exists today. Many of the roles once fulfilled by marriage are now handled by other institutions, both political and economic.
Marriage simply doesn’t wield the power it once did. It doesn’t have the same effect on individual lives, and that’s nothing to lament. As cultural norms, behaviors, and opportunities change, it is only logical that the construct of marriage change as well.
And yet.
Articles and books abound critiquing the sorry state of our society. If we’re to believe the authors, the rise in the increase of incidence of everything from erectile dysfunction (OK, I made this one up) to poverty is due to the deterioration of the state of marriage.
According to the Administration for Children and Families, Congress declared in 1996 that “marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” If this was ever the case, it certainly isn’t today. And it has nothing to do with a decline in morality or personal values.
In the not-so-distant past, marriage was a sort of credential; it brought young people respect and was a rung on the ladder to adulthood. For most, the gains of marrying outweighed the opportunities available to those who remained single. This just isn’t true any longer.
Women no longer need to depend on men for income or status; they’re completely capable of being first-class, productive citizens on their own. Who knew? Even as recently as the 1950s — when 80 percent of all U.S. households belonged to married couples — men and women identified themselves as husbands and wives and cultivated the respective habits, tastes, and needs of those roles.
By that era, we had introduced the concept of love into marriage. If you truly loved, you married. End of story.
But by 2000, married couples represented less than 51 percent of all U.S. households. Love no longer needed to be sanctioned by the state, and being someone’s spouse doesn’t carry the clout it once did.
When one can obtain elsewhere many of the benefits once provided only by marriage, there needs to be a better reason to get married.
More than any other social factor, poverty is blamed on failure to marry or sustain a marriage. Because single mothers and their children represent the bulk of the worst cases of poverty in this country, marriage-is-doomed activists argue that these women would rise up from poverty if only they married.
While I can agree that having two incomes makes raising children easier, I still find this logic faulty. I think one can safely assume that people interact most frequently with others in their socioeconomic class. If this is true, then most of the men these single women interact with probably live in poverty as well.
If the point of marrying (in this case) is to raise oneself up from poverty, why marry someone whose job prospects are no better than your own? Where will the activists be when these new wives find themselves with another mouth to feed instead of a wage-earner? When she and her child are suffering emotionally, if not physically, from making that leap of faith?
Research indicates that low-income women who marry and divorce live in more severe poverty than those who never marry at all. Single mothers are not by their mere existence the drain on society we so often hear they are. Approximately 50,000 children were adopted in 2001; one-third of them went to single women. Thirty percent of hard-to-place foster children adopted that year went to single women, nearly all of them African- American.
In fact, according to the results of an adoption survey published on August 7, 2008 on , minority women are trying to adopt at a higher rate than white women. Oh stereotype, where art thou?
Marriage is not inherently good or bad. Like anything else, it assumes the value it is given. For some, it’s the ultimate goal, the brass ring. For others, it’s just one of many viable options.
Society no longer revolves around this legalized personal union, and that shouldn’t be cause for concern. The problem isn’t the deterioration of an ancient social construct, but the refusal to acknowledge its place in an ever-evolving culture.
American society will never revert to what it once was, and neither will marriage. We need to let go of this obsession. Why not spend less energy — and fewer federal dollars — trying to “save” and “protect” something that clearly isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor and realize instead that the only sure thing is change and the need to adapt?
Let’s focus our resources on educating all people in both academics and life/parenting skills, providing quality job skills training, and actually paying them a living wage. Then, regardless of marital status, they might have genuine hope of building happy, healthy lives.
Rebecca Valentine (mzwrite@frii.com) owns a writing and editorial service in Windsor, where she’s raising her four children.
