The benefits of marriage

Public Interest, Summer, 1996 by Steven Flanders

In a sane or sensible society, marriage is more an answer than a question. Of course, it is never the only answer: In any culture, a noticeable minority never marry, some because they resist for their own reasons what their culture and their families urge upon them and others for want of the right opportunity. But I venture to say that for most of humanity, past and present, the only real question here is when, or to whom. Whether to marry has been little more a question than whether to be born or whether to die.

The New York Times last spring printed a striking dispatch from a demographers' conference in San Francisco that carried to a new level of desperation the quest for an answer to a question that should not be asked. If the quoted researchers are to be taken seriously ("Studies Find Big Benefits in Marriage," April 10, 1995), we can all look forward to the gradual dissolution of the family and, perhaps, of civilization as well. These social scientists, it would seem, have abandoned the social or cultural claims of marriage as the usual accompaniment of maturation, perhaps even the definition of the ascent out of adolescence. Instead, they try, through empirical efforts that (as reported) were both misguided and incompetent, to persuade us that marriage is good for us, like diet or exercise. They claim that marriage is in our individual interests simply on instrumental grounds.

Without a doubt, the marriage institution is in our collective interests. As a matter of individual choice, however, its practical claim upon our fellow citizens and ourselves becomes weaker each year. Sad to say, the quoted researchers faithfully reflect an atomized culture in which one's own interest is about all the basis available to justify any of life's choices, large or small. Among the other forces that have undermined marriage, I would emphasize the pervasive assault on sex roles in late twentieth-century America. If young women and men cannot see themselves naturally embracing the familiar roles of wife, mother, husband, father, then marriage becomes a kind of consumer choice, to be weighed against other claims upon one's money and time.

If that's what marriage is up against, we're all doomed. Or, more precisely, our heirs are, and theirs; for it will take a couple of generations before marriage's cultural props erode, at which time it will become clear that marriage is a loser - in purely instrumental terms. When this happens, we will have fulfilled the prediction made by the young Daniel Patrick Moynihan a generation ago, the prediction Charles Murray reminds us of today: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up without fathers asks for and gets chaos. But Moynihan - then - was making a grim prediction that he hoped to forestall, of a minority of a minority community.

I would be the very last to dispute that marriage has its joys and its benefits. Unfortunately, they are mostly available outside marriage as well, at least in the short term and before the onset of old age. Marriage is disabling in lots of obvious ways: professional, sexual, economic. The married must consult, share, and be faithful, or at least offer some pretense of these. Yet, even the pretense must be a nuisance, and the reality is positively confining, in the sense that it restricts choices and opportunities.

If marriage is a misfortune in the realm of consumer choice, then children are a disaster. If we were to regard children as fabulously expensive pets, there would be no buyers. The price tag for each child might be placed at roughly one-quarter of a million dollars. A rule of thumb might be that middle-class families ultimately spend on each child about what they spend on their house.

Why do we marry? Why do we procreate? Out of self-interest? To make ourselves healthy? Hardly. We do these things out of love, and because they are our connection with future generations, with past generations, and perhaps with the infinite. But all of this is jeopardized as our culture of narcissism increasingly denies the validity of inherited marriage roles, deeming them coercive or, at least, confining. Living and making a life with the opposite sex has its charms, of course, but, truth be told, easier, cheaper, less-demanding, and less-confining alternative lifestyles abound.

Over the past 30 years, we have detached sex and procreation from the institution of marriage. Large numbers of American children are now born out of wedlock; in many communities, the number is more than half.

Well-meaning meddlers in legislatures and the courts may soon detach child rearing from marriage as well. The New York Court of Appeals last November issued a four-to-three decision that authorized in two cases adoption by a natural mother's unmarried partner. In one of the cases, it was a heterosexual partner who wished to adopt his partner's infant; in the other, a lesbian partner who wished to do the same. The majority, focusing on the statutory standard of "the best interests of the child," concluded: "To rule otherwise would mean that the thousands of New York children actually being raised in homes headed by two unmarried persons could have only one legal parent, not the two who want them." Hailing this "momentous" decision by Chief Judge Judith Kaye, the New York Times editorialized: "It will bolster the legal standing of the state's non-traditional families."