Individualism or Family Restoration?: Upheaval in an Institution Based on Stability

THE MARRIAGE GO-ROUND by Professor Andrew Cherlin, Reviewed by NYTimes journalist Dinitia Smith, 4/19/09

Do Americans get married too much? We continue to have one of the highest marriage rates of any Western country, despite a recent decline, but we also divorce one another at alarming rates. Since the 1960s divorce rates have been rising until now nearly half our marriages end up there, more even than in liberal Sweden, Andrew J. Cherlin, a demographer and sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, writes in his intriguing book, “The Marriage-Go-Round.”

-----------------------------------------------

THE MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND
The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today
By Andrew J. Cherlin
271 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95

To read this provocative account is to think that America’s relationships are in chaos. Even when we live together without marrying, we break up faster than in other places, he says. In one of the book’s surprising findings he says that American children whose parents are married are more likely to experience the turmoil of a parental break-up than Swedish children whose parents live together without being married.

Marriage is nevertheless an American ideal. We are the only Western nation that actually spends government money to support it. The 2005 federal Healthy Marriage Initiative now allocates $100 million a year to promote marriage. It doesn’t seem to be working; marriage rates are declining precipitously, though most Americans are still expected to marry.

Marriage is our battleground. Only in America, Mr. Cherlin says, are gay people campaigning so determinedly for the right to marry. Most gay men and lesbians in Europe, he maintains, view marriage as another oppressive heterosexual institution.

How to explain this peculiar paradox — we idealize marriage and yet we’re so bad at it. Mr. Cherlin, who is also the author of “Public and Private Families,” has taken upon himself the task of explaining and has come up with an original thesis: There are two powerful forces at war in America, a historic belief in marriage grounded in our religious heritage on the one hand and a foundational principle of individual freedom and a post-modern sense of the right to self-fulfillment on the other. When these values clash, breakup and divorce follow.

Writing clearly and carefully he traces the American idealization of marriage to the settlers’ belief in the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation. Catholicism in old Europe held celibacy as the ultimate individual attainment, but Martin Luther rejected that. “There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage,” Luther, who married an ex-nun, is supposed to have said. The Reformation also rejected Catholic religious hierarchy, focusing on the individual’s direct relationship to God.

As the new nation prospered, Mr. Cherlin writes, Americans also began to have the time and money “to cultivate their own emotional gardens.” Baby boomers were, of course, the ultimate “me generation.” The growing preoccupation with individual fulfillment can be seen in women’s magazines in the 1970s and ’80s, when McCall’s, for instance, published an article “Time for Yourself: Must It Hurt Your Marriage?” in which the writer advocated “the attainment of a private space in which individual growth can continue within the intimacy of marriage.” The subtext, according to Mr. Cherlin: If your marriage doesn’t fulfill you, you are almost obliged to leave it.

Historically it has always been easier to get a divorce in America than in European countries. Even during colonial times, though divorce was difficult, it was still possible in many places. But it wasn’t legalized in Britain until 1857. Today, Mr. Cherlin says, he knows of no other Western country where the wait is generally so short for no-fault divorce.

It doesn’t seem to matter that we are such a religious nation: more Americans say they attend church at least once a month than do people in any Western country except Ireland. Even evangelical Christianity, which holds marriage in high regard, has picked up on the self-fulfillment message in books like the “Christian Family Guide to Losing Weight” and Joel Osteen’s “Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential.” Mr. Cherlin describes Arkansas as a deeply religious and conservative place but one that in 2004 had the second highest divorce rate of any state in the country. Efforts to promote Covenant Marriage, in which couples sign an agreement before marrying, making it harder to divorce, largely failed there and in other Southern states.
Mr. Cherlin seems to accept our selfish urges as a given. He suggests that marriage isn’t even necessary in an evolutionary sense. But what, one might ask, about all those birds — those swans, those geese, those owls — who mate for life?

Instead of spending money to promote marriage, we should use it to encourage security for our children, he says. Divorce and breakup can affect children badly. But parents shouldn’t rush into another relationship just to provide a stable home. In one study by Mr. Cherlin and a colleague, the two found that every time a partner entered or left a household, the odds of an adolescent stealing, skipping school or getting drunk increased by 12 percent, though he points out that the majority of adolescents with broken homes don’t exhibit delinquent behavior.

One way to ensure children’s stability is to give single mothers resources so they aren’t pressured to find partners to support them. He points to a Wisconsin welfare experiment with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, in which the state government normally attempted to collect child support from delinquent fathers and then shared it with the federal government as reimbursement for welfare, giving the mother $50 at most. In a 1997 study the state gave the entire amount to a group of randomly selected mothers. The result: mothers who received the full child support payments were less likely to cohabit with men other than their children’s fathers — presumably causing less turmoil for the children — and were just as likely to marry. The book’s last chapter is titled “Slow Down.” Think before you rush into new relationships, Mr. Cherlin writes. That’s the least we can do.

Next Article in Books (1 of 38) » A version of this article appeared in print on April 20, 2009, on page C4 of the New York edition.