Marital Mythology

I very much appreciated Julian Sanchez's thoughtful review of my book, Marriage, A History ("Marital Mythology," June). I was sorry, however, to hear that I come across as fatalistic about the future of marriage. I certainly don't think marriage is dead, and I do think there are ways to save more potentially healthy marriages than we currently do. There's fascinating research out there about what makes for a good marriage, though my editor felt most of that should be saved for another book.

My main point was simply that many of the same things that have made marriage potentially fairer and more fulfilling than in the past have also made it more optional. Policy makers are deluded to think we can shoehorn enough people back into early, lifelong marriage that we won't have to figure out how to help single-parent families and other non-marital family arrangements work better as well

Stephanie Coontz

Professor of History and Family Studies

The Evergreen State College

Olympia, WA

I've always felt there must be some truth to Charles Murray's conclusions about the link between welfare and unwed motherhood. But the arguments made by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, as described in Julian Sanchez's review, may very well indicate that changes to such incentives, even the total elimination of welfare, may not cause rates of unwed motherhood among poor women to drop to the levels among middle- and upper-class women.

There is another interpretation of their findings that merits investigation: biological motivations. Evolution programs us to look for desirable mates who have genetic traits favorable to our offspring and who will help raise such offspring. But we are also programmed to reproduce, to some extent, at any cost. It has been shown among other species that if circumstances require a choice between survival and reproduction, evolution chooses reproduction. A good example: A species of spider in which the female eats the male after copulation. This species is very solitary, and the chances of a male even meeting a female are remote, let alone the chances of meeting two in a lifetime. So the male offers himself as a food source so the female can lay more eggs.

Educated, middle- and upper-class Americans have a good chance of finding a high-quality mate, so it makes more sense to wait. The poor inner-city woman, on the other hand, finds fewer available and/or desirable men. So she chooses reproduction with a man that she may not marry over choosing not to reproduce at all.

Men, meanwhile, have long been more promiscuous than women, due to the lower costs to men for reproduction. While it is true children raised by both parents will have a better outcome in life, a father that can be a mere "sperm donor" to many women can have many more surviving offspring than a monogamous man. Logically, even one marital infidelity can result in one more child than would have been attained in the marriage. If the balance of power has shifted between men and women in poor neighborhoods simply due to supply and demand, that is a strong incentive toward infidelity.

Of course, people don't literally think this way, but the subconscious motives that drive our decision-making are there because in the past they produced behavior that resulted in successful survival and reproduction.

One rather unexpected conclusion:

The best social policy change to encourage marriage among the poor might not be elimination of welfare but elimination of the drug war. By reducing the number of men in prison, it would require men on the outside to compete more for women. And it would remove the black-market incentives that cause many of those men to become undesirable marital candidates.

Jim Nelsen

via e-mail

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