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The Evolution of Matrimony: The Changing Social Context of Marriage
"The Evolution of Matrimony," Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association, 30, Winter 2006
As both a social institution and a personal experience, marriage has changed more in the past 30 years than the preceding 3,000 years. The changes in marriage have rolled across the West at different rates and have taken different forms depending on each region's cultural and religious traditions, political institutions, and economic conditions. No area has been exempt. Even people who are completely committed to "traditional" family life and communities that have laws and values to penalize departures from older norms have been caught up in these marital changes.
Right in America's Bible belt exist some of the highest rates of divorce and unwed motherhood in the country, and born again Christians divorce just as often as atheists. In 2000, Belgium, the only European state still without no-fault divorce, had higher divorce rates than its more liberal neighbors. As of 2004, Chile was the only country in the Western Hemisphere that still prohibited divorce entirely. Yet between 1990 and 2003, the number of marriages in Chile fell from 100,000 to 60,000 a year, and nearly half of all children born in Chile in the early years of the twenty-first century were born to unmarried couples.
The revolution in marriage is changing everything therapists used to think they knew about how families work and how to work with families. It is rendering obsolete many older sociological findings about who marries and why, who divorces, what predicts a good marriage, and what the consequences of non-marriage may be. It challenges our work practices, school schedules, health benefits, and interpersonal ethics, and even our most cherished emotional assumptions about marriage, divorce, parenting, sexuality, and gender roles.
Many people believe that the essence of the marriage revolution is the multiplication of diverse family arrangements. However, this is not what's new about marriage and family life. Through most of history, family diversity was the norm, and some of the variations in marriage that were acceptable in the past make our own supposedly "anything goes" society look downright conservative.
The most commonly approved form of marriage across the ages was polygamy, in which one man could marry several women, but in a few parts of Asia and India, one woman might be married to several men. Single parent families and stepfamilies were much more widespread in the past than they are today, although unlike today there were around an equal number of single-father and single-mother households. Usually, these family forms were created by high death rates. In many traditional hunting and gathering societies, in parts of nineteenth-century Japan, and in twentieth-century Malaysia, divorce rates were higher than those in the United States today. Also, half of all children born in nineteenth-century Austria, compared to less than a third in contemporary America, were born out of wedlock (Coontz, 2005; Therborn, 2004).
Contrary to the ethnocentric notion that there are universal emotional reactions and child outcomes attached to particular marital arrangements, some cultures have happily accepted arrangements that would lead to misery or even murder in today's context. In many cultures women welcomed the presence of co-wives because it gave them more freedom to come and go. "Without co-wives," they said, "a woman's work is never done." The Innuit of Alaska believed that divorce should be accomplished without jealousy and that remarriage created lasting ties between the ex-husband and the new one. A remarried woman's partner had the obligation to allow the former spouse, as well as any children of that union, to fish, hunt, and gather in the territory of the new spouse. In ancient Rome, men who had been successively married to and divorced from the same woman sometimes chipped in to jointly build her a monument after her death (Coontz, 2005).
Perhaps the most startling example of the cultural specificity of marital values is found in several small-scale societies in South America, where people believe that any man who has sex with a woman during her pregnancy contributes part of his biological substance to the child. The husband is recognized as the primary father, but all such supplementary fathers have a duty to share food with the woman and her child in the future. During the 1990s, researchers taking oral histories found that many women took lovers during their pregnancy for this very reason, and a child with a secondary father was twice as likely to survive to age 15 as a child whose mother had only slept with her husband during her pregnancy (Coontz, 2005).
Even with marital arrangements and family forms that look more familiar on the surface, interpersonal dynamics and family values often differ radically from our own. Today we stress the importance of open communication and the expression of intimate feelings or inner truths. By contrast, when seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American lovers said they wanted candor from each other, they did not mean the kind of soul-baring intimacy that most modern Americans expect, nor the idea that in a good relationship you talk frankly about your disappointments with your partner and get your grievances off your chest. Instead, candor referred to fairness, kindliness, and good temper. People wanted a mate who did not pry too deeply under the surface. The ideal mate, as U.S. President John Adams put it in his diary, was willing "to palliate faults and mistakes, to put the best construction upon words and action, and to forgive injuries" (Rothman, 1984, p. 43).
In the contemporary world, there are many regional, class, and ethnic variations in the kinds of marital interactions that are considered desirable and healthy. The public expression of tender emotions toward a lover or spouse is frowned upon in many peasant and working-class communities because this is seen as cutting across the other solidarities that are needed when neighbors vitally depend upon each other. Husbands and wives often relate to each other in public through a ritualized language of gender hostility, hiding any fondness they may really feel for each other. They refer to each other as "the old man" or, in the Cockney rhyming slang for a wife, "the trouble and strife" (Medick & Sabean, 1984).
Modern Americans tend to interpret such patterns as a sign of people's inability to reach their true or deepest inner feelings, but many Japanese citizens, according to Takeo Doi, feel that "those who are close to each other--that is to say, who are privileged to merge with each other--do not need words to express their feelings. One surely would not feel merged with another ... if one had to verbalize a need to do so!" (Morsbach & Tyler, 1986, p. 290).
Anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz suggest that inner truths and emotions are just as much culturally constructed as are the behaviors that we tend to label superficial social conventions. Some cultures see emotions as expressions of rules that govern social relationships. As such, an opposition between what yon should feel and what you really feel may be inexplicable to them (Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990).
In contemporary America it is taken for granted that loyalty to a spouse should trump other personal ties. However, through most of history marriage was not supposed to be the most powerful wellspring of sentiment and obligation. Ministers in seventeenth-century America and England warned women against using affectionate nicknames for their husbands because that would undermine the authority relations essential to a proper marriage. A common Chinese saying was "you have only one family, but you can always get another wife." A Kiowa Indian woman summed up a widespread sentiment in less patriarchal societies when she told a researcher, "a woman can always get another husband, but she has only one brother" (Coontz, 2005).
Novels and diaries from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America reveal that same-sex friendships and sibling ties were sometimes more intense than marital relationships, and no one saw anything deviant about this. Sociologist Vern Bengtson argues that today the extension of the life span, combined with the prevalence of non-marriage and divorce, has created a situation where multi-generational ties are surpassing nuclear family attachments and marriage as a source of wellbeing and social support for many individuals (Bengtson, 2001).
Not all family relations and marital values are equally valid. Human beings have a cluster of biological and emotional needs, some of which are universal, but many of which depend on the particular culture, environment, and social group in which they live. Since the most universal fact about human nature is that we are social animals, it stands to reason that our psychological needs vary according to how our societies or subgroups within a society are organized. The outcome of family relations depends on the fit between the internal dynamics of a family and its social environment. The fit between marriage, gender roles, and socio-economic institutions is in the process of unprecedented change today. Thus, we should be cautious about positing universal rules in marital and family dynamics.
Despite all the variety of marital arrangements and family values in the past, there were two cross-cultural commonalities that characterized family life through most of history. The first was that, for thousands of years, marriage was not about a man and a woman failing in love and deciding to take their personal relationship to a higher level. Marriage was a way of acquiring influential in-laws, sealing business deals, raising capital, and expanding the family labor force. So one almost universal cross-cultural value was that young people should not be allowed to freely choose their own marriage partner, especially for such a self-indulgent reason as love.
It was only 200 years ago that it became respectable and even preferable for people to marry for love, and only 100 years ago that husbands and wives began to be encouraged to develop intense sexual ties and to put their relationship ahead of all other family and friendship ties. The result was that over the course of the twentieth century marriage gradually became more fulfilling, more loving, and more central to people's identity than in the past, but it also became more fragile. Heightened expectations about fairness and mutual consideration made a good marriage work better for both the husband and wife than ever before, but also led many people to find it less bearable to enter or stay in a marriage that did not live up to those expectations.
The second common theme in the overwhelming majority of marriages through the ages, and one that lasted even longer than the barriers to romantic and sexualized love between husband and wife, was that marriage was traditionally based on the legal, economic, and reproductive subordination of women. "Husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband" said the English common law, which was also adopted in America and regulated marriage relations until the early twentieth century. A man had the legal right to forcibly restrain, imprison, and "correct" his wife until the late nineteenth century. As late as the 1970s, many states and most Western European countries had Head and Master laws, which gave husbands the final say over family decisions such as whether the wife could take a job and where the couple would live. Until the 1980s, the idea of marital rape was considered a contradiction in terms because courts held that when a wife said "I do" to marriage she had said "I will" to sex whenever her husband wanted it (Coontz, 2005).
Until the 1970s, also, women's economic dependence was so pervasive that most women had to get married, even if it meant settling for someone very different than who they wanted. They could not afford to turn down a shotgun marriage if it was an option, were required to make most of the adjustments that made a marriage work, and could very seldom leave a marriage even if it wasn't working and didn't seem like it ever would. It was only in the last 30 years that sizable numbers of women in the industrial countries of the world became free to truly marry for love and equally able to refuse a shotgun marriage or leave a marriage with a man they found unsatisfactory.
Never before in history have so many young people had the right to make their own decisions about sexuality, courtship, and marriage, and never before in history have so many women had the amount of legal, economic, and reproductive self-determination that they have gained--however incompletely--over the past few decades. These two changes--in young people's independence from the dictates of parents and in women's independence from the dictates of men--have revolutionized marriage in Western Europe and the United States and Canada. They are also eroding its traditional roles and forms all around the globe.
Marriage is certainly not dead. Indeed, most people hold the marital relationship in higher esteem than they did when the institution used to be practically mandatory. Marriage as a relationship between two individuals is taken more seriously and comes with higher emotional expectations than ever before in history. However, marriage as an institution exerts less power over people's lives than it once did. Historian Nancy Cott suggests that a good way to understand the changes in marriage in much of the industrial world is to see them as analogous to the disestablishment of religion. When the state stopped supporting one official church, religion did not disappear, but new churches and sects proliferated. When people stayed in the old church or joined it for the first time they did so for different reasons than when it was the only route to economic and political respectability, so even the traditional church had to change the way it recruited members and had to adapt to the new reasons that people chose one church over another.
The same is true of marriage. Therapists can help people "do" marriage better than they currently do, but couples will have to learn how to do it differently than in the past. Researchers and clinicians need to learn more about the new reasons that people marry in this new context, along with the changing factors that keep people in marriages--or drive them away from marriage--now that marriage is more optional and less hierarchical than in the past. Relying on old adages and coasting on old techniques is no longer an option.
References
Abu-Lughod, L., & Lutz, C. (1990). Introduction. In C. Lutz & L. Anu-Lughod, (Eds.), Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Bengtson, V. (2001). Beyond the nuclear family: The increasing importance of multigenerational bonds.
Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(1) 1-16.
Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, a history: From obedience to intimacy, or how love conquered marriage. New York: Viking Press.
Morsbach, H., & Tyler, W. J. (1986). A Japanese Amotion: Amae. In R. Harre (Ed.), The social construction of emotion. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Medick, H. & Sabean, D. (1984). Interest and emotion: Essays on the study of family and kinship. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Pfister, J. (1997). On conceptualizing the cultural history of emotional and psychological life in America. In J. Pfister & N. Schnog (Eds.), Inventing the Psychological: Toward a cultural history of emotional life in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Rothman, E. (1984). Hands and hearts: A history of courtship in America. New York: Basic Books.
Therborn, G. (2004). Between sex and power: Families in the world, 1900-2000. London: Routledge Press.