Marriages they are a-changin’

As an American, there is a nine in 10 chance you will marry at some point in your life. Fifty-six percent of Americans 18 years old and over are married right now. And that famous statistic about one in two marriages breaking apart? It’s still holding true, with the recent book Marriages, Families, and Intimate Relationships estimating that roughly 40 to 60 percent of new marriages will end in divorce.

Marriage is such an interesting animal because in the 20th century it transitioned from being less of an economic arrangement to more of a psychological choice. Before urbanization and individualism, most people in America lived in sparsely populated areas where marrying and having numerous children was a requirement for both financial and social survival. The idea of love had a little less to do with it.

While the fact that marriage is no longer essential to survival has likely contributed to the galloping divorce rates of the last 40 years, along with the recent upswing in those who choose not to marry (28 percent of American adults were single in 1970, compared with 39 percent in 2002, according to the U.S. Census), the United States is still very much a marriage culture. Americans had 2.1 million weddings in 2006 alone, spending approximately $86 billion on a lucrative marriage industry (and that number doesn’t include the honeymoons).

The median age of first-time brides and grooms has been on the rise since 1960, when it was a whopping 20.3 for females and 22.8 for males. The ages have increased and stayed more or less stagnant over the last 10 years, with the median age at 25.9 for females and 27.5 for males in 2006.

The increase in the unmarried, the later-married and the same-sex married has been bemoaned by the right-wing nut jobs du jour for quite a while, Mike Huckabee being the latest in a line of many. Besides gems of rationality, like comparing homosexuality to bestiality, he also said, “There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived.”

But this isn’t true; the world has been rewriting what marriage and family means for hundreds of years. (Perhaps Huckabee would like to go back to arranged marriages and shotgun weddings?) The “sacred institution of marriage” is a flimsy phrase, when one considers how much marriage has changed over the last century alone and how far we’ve come. Interracial marriage wasn’t legal in all 50 states until 1967, and spousal rape wasn’t banned in all 50 states until 1993. The history of the institution of marriage is hardly sacred.

Yet, it’s interesting how there is a growing faction of young people that yearns for “traditional” values, perhaps a result of the fast-growing rate of self-identified evangelical Christians in the country, but also, perhaps, as a backlash to the divorce culture that Generation Xers and Millenials have grown up with. In the late ’90s, the Yankelovich Partners research firm found that 73 percent of Gen-Xers favored “a return to more traditional standards in family life,” in contrast to 56 percent of Baby Boomers, who had said the same 20 years earlier.

The key word there is traditional, a word that’s always been a slippery one to throw around. Yes, divorce culture has resulted in too many broken homes in the last 40 years, but attempting returns to “more traditional standards” is a misguided way of going about things, particularly marrying young. Brigham Young University’s Family Studies Center, an organization that can hardly be accused of having a socially progressive bias, reported that marriages contracted under age 22 had much higher chances of marital instability. The early marriage rates of the 1950s may have resulted in more “stable” marriages then, but that’s not the case today.

Marriage and families are in a constant state of change, as they have been for centuries. “Traditional values” are often spoken in the context of loving your partner and staying with them, taking care of your children, teaching them how to be respectful and hard working, instilling the importance of community, etc. What some wistful-eyed ones don’t always understand is that those values can coexist with later marriages, or a lack of marriage, in our modern world. Even (gasp) children of same-sex couples can be properly cared for and turn out all right.

The principles of love and respect and care are not “traditional”; they are inherently human and can be spread across all political and social boundaries. As Ellen Goodman noted years ago when she surveyed the increasing number of place settings at her Thanksgiving dinners, “We make a family by making room.”