THE NUMBER of married adults has fallen to its lowest level since the government began keeping records more than 100 years ago. According to Census Bureau data in today’s New York Times, 52 percent of the population over 18 years is now married, as opposed to 57 percent ten years ago. That’s a drop of five percent in just a decade. For the first time in recorded history, the number of never-married young adults, between 25 and 34, exceeds those married.

The economy likely contributed to the recent decline but the downward progression appears to be set in place. Marriage is being replaced by cohabitation, which is inherently more unstable and results in more female-headed households. The death of patriarchy leads to matriarchy. Men and women will never stop mating, and those who are financially secure will generally marry. But the incentives to marry have lessened for both men and women. And the effects are much more pronounced among the lower income levels.

For a man, especially a man at lower income, why marry if you may someday end up paying child support and living apart from your children? Why not live together instead? For a woman, there is no shame to having your children on your own, although most women still prefer marriage. There are many other obvious factors in the decline, including public assistance for unmarried mothers, the decline in male wages and the shift to female workplaces. And there is the most obvious factor of all: no one needs to get married.

The Love Revolution was bound to lead to a decline in love.

                                                                    —  Comments —

Kevin Stay writes:

The current trend in marriage is inevitable the further along a society gets in “normalizing” procreation as other than a divine act reserved exclusively to a married couple. In addition the accepted viewpoint of the day, even by those considering themselves conservative, is that marriage is simply some sort of “contract” given preferential treatment by the government which recognizes it as beneficial to the society. Marriage is not a human concept; it is appointed by God. As our society continues to remove and replace God what motivation remains for a man to commit to marriage? 

It is not in the nature of men as a group to set aside “adventuring” for the relatively boring existence of building a stable household with a wife and raising children. Sexual intimacy with a wife in a marriage viewed as ordained of God is a powerful aspect in having a man largely leave behind that adventurous nature. Many now look upon sexual intimacy as nothing more than a physical act where it should be a deeply spiritual and supremely intimate sharing between a man and woman. A truly traditional conservative viewpoint must accept sexual intimacy as something God has reserved for those who are married.

Brendan writes:

I think the decline of marriage among all but the elite class is also due to the idea that relationships are about personal happiness and self-actualization. These are, of course, also the same reasons behind the high divorce rates, other than, again, among the “working rich,” who tend to be in an income pocket where they have enough (typically combined) income to make the joint lifestyle very comfortable, but neither has enough solo income to not take a substantial lifestyle hit upon divorce — unlike the non-working rich, or uber-rich, who can pay a hefty divorce settlement or support and still have piles of money left over, but also unlike the truly middle and lower classes, where there isn’t enough of a difference between the marital income and solo income to make a huge lifestyle difference, especially when state assistance is taken into account at the lower levels.

If relationships are about self-actualization and personal happiness, then it stands to reason that marriage is in decline as an institution. Marriage was not designed primarily to promote self-actualization and happiness — in fact, these were seen as possible side-effects of something that was created by God as a covenant between a man and a woman reflecting the covenant between God and man. Even a secularist, however, would have to admit, when pressed, that a secular explanation of the origin of marriage doesn’t have much to do with personal happiness and self-actualization, but rather the idea of maintaining wealth within male blood kin, or even of binding men together with their offspring for the benefit of the tribe (more male investment in both the future tribe members (his kids) and the tribe as a whole (which his kids will live in). None of that had much to do, in itself, with sustained individual happiness. Indeed the idea of lifetime monogamy is an imposition — a sacrifice — on both men and women, and is at times not going to be happiness-inducing, when viewed from the self-focused, self-actualization perspective. Yet, this is what we want, today, in marriage. Women writers on marriage boast about how “love conquered marriage” — meaning that marriage was transformed for the better when it became about personal happiness in lifelong love affairs. But we know that this flies in the face of the reality of marriage — yet we cling to it, as a kind of utopian ideal — and one which, itself, goes a long way to both undermining marriages that do exist as well as retarding the formation of married couples (again, due to the extremely high bar that expectation sets for a marital relationship right off the bat).

For example, if we look at the “traditional” marriage vows (which are mostly trashed today due to the “patriarchal” reference to female obedience), they don’t reflect the contemporary view of marriage at all. Instead, they state that marriage is to endure — regardless of wealth, health, good times and so on. That just isn’t what people view marriage as being about any longer– today it is viewed as being a good thing as long as it makes you happy and as long as “you are growing” in it. If it starts getting to the “poorer, worse, sickness” type areas, it’s time to get out of dodge and start again. The traditional marriage vows reflected the reality that marriage isn’t a white-hot lifelong love affair for *most* couples — some, of course, do get lucky and have that, but it’s rare. Instead marriage was supposed to be about commitment, regardless of the inevitable ups and downs. Today, however, for many people marriage is about feeling good and happy, and when they feel unhappy (and yes, it is typically women who are unhappy, because I think women typically have a significantly higher threshold for what makes them happy in a relationship than men do), they feel it’s better to find someone else than to stick to a commitment. After all, marriage is about happiness and self-actualization — if it isn’t filling that role, if you “love him like a brother, but not like a lover any more” and so on, why bother staying married — and, if the guy isn’t an absolute Prince Charming that you can imagine being white-hot in love with for 80 years, why bother marrying him?

It all comes down to how we have redefined marriage in a very self-focused way. The new marriage is narcissism. The working rich who have more stable marriages and high marriage rates are also narcissistic, it’s just that in their specific demographic, there is a ‘sweet spot’ of disincentives for divorcing, in brass-tacks, financial terms. That sweet spot doesn’t apply to the higher and lower, so you’re back to happiness and self-actualization — and the reality is that many people, men and women alike, will find lifelong monogamy, in the context of contemporary life expectancies, to be not clearly conducive to personal happiness and self-actualization for decades on end without down periods.

Laura writes:

You seem to be saying that marriage is inimical to personal happiness and that only during periods when marriage is viewed as something to be endured that it can widely succeed. But, relative to the alternatives, marriage is conducive to individual well-being (happiness is not the right word because it implies euphoria).

Brendan writes:

Marriage, properly understood, ultimately does lead to personal “well-being” — but that isn’t what our culture defines as “happiness”, as I think I pointed out in my post.

In our culture, happiness is not a state of long-term well-being, but rather a state of short-term fulfillment and, importantly, a constant sense of being self-actualized. Yes, you’re right that euphoria is in fact a part of this vision. The number one reason women cite for divorce is that they have “fallen out of love” with their husbands. What that generally means is that the euphoric feeling isn’t there any longer. These same will often say, sometimes with some self-satisfied indignation, that they still “love” their husbands, but that this love is no longer of the euphoric “being in love” sort. I think most marriages go through patches like that for each party, and that is not new. What is new, however, is the idea that when such a patch comes along, and marriage is no longer, for the time being, euphorically-happiness-providing, and therefore no longer “self-actualizing” in a “healthy” way, it is good to ditch it. The same holds true for pre-marital relationships in terms of forgoing marriage altogether.

The main problem is people are not interested in hearing about their long-term “well-being.” People want their happiness/euphoria/self-actualization *now* — and if marriage doesn’t provide it — or it doesn’t seem like it holds the prospects for doing so — people will decide against marriage.

Laura writes:

Popular culture at all levels has spread the myth of the constant high and lifelong euphoria. The idea that love is loyalty and movement through time doesn’t sell. If you were an advertiser, which would you rather have for your audience: that pumped-up high that makes them forget how much they are spending or a state of reflective detachment? As I said, the Love Revolution has led to a decline in love, but it’s been good for business in the short run.   

This manufactured, euphoric love is even sold in religion. People are supposed to always feel God and if they cannot feel Him, then He must not be there and there is no point in going through the motions of faith. There’s a strange paradoxical hard-heartedness to people who must feel love. Some of the most sentimental people are also the most callous. To deny that love exists when it is unaccompanied by sentiment is to deny it has any depths. It’s like saying a flower is all bloom and no stem or roots. It’s like saying life is all in the day and nothing at night.

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