Marriage Articles


1. Two Year Marriage Tickets
2. India's Angry Brides
3. The Wrong Partner?
4. China
5. Advice
6. Marriage Changes
7. Less Divorce
8. Some Low-Key Advice
9. Grandma's Lamp
10. Evolution of Marriage
11. Online Dating Better Marriages
12. Marrying Billionaires
13. Language
14. Hugh Grant
15. Relationship Quality
16. 3 Kinds of Marriage
17. The New Marriage
18. Marital Happiness
19. Las Vegas
20. Biblical Marriage
21. Trophy Wives
22. The Case Against Marriage
23. Why We Marry The Wrong Person
24. Beta Test Model
25. C19 Marriage
26. Sex Every Night
27. Mathematics of Marriage
28. The marriage squeeze
29. Tiny Weddings
30. Marital Coercion
31. Singletons Are Happier
32. Changing Trends
33. How romanticism ruined love (Part 1)






(See also Same Sex Marriage Articles)

Two Year Marriage Tickets

  • Mexico City lawmakers want to help newlyweds avoid the hassle of divorce by giving them an easy exit strategy: temporary marriage licenses.

    Leftists in the city's assembly -- who have already riled conservatives by legalizing gay marriage -- proposed a reform to the civil code this week that would allow couples to decide on the length of their commitment, opting out of a lifetime. The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple stays happy. The contracts would include provisions on how children and property would be handled if the couple splits.

    "The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends," said Leonel Luna, the Mexico City assemblyman who co-authored the bill. "You wouldn't have to go through the tortuous process of divorce," said Luna, from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, which has the most seats in the 66-member chamber. Luna says the proposed law is gaining support and he expects a vote by the end of this year.

    Around half of Mexico City marriages end in divorce, usually in the first two years. The bustling capital, one of the world's largest cities, is much more liberal than the rest of the country, where the divorce rate is significantly lower although on the rise.

    Abortion is legal in Mexico City, while the Supreme Court ruled this week to uphold state laws in Baja California that say life begins at conception. Leftist Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, who angered the Catholic Church when he made Mexico City the first Latin American city to legalize gay marriage in late 2009, announced this month he would soon step down to run for president.

    The church criticized the proposed change. "This reform is absurd. It contradicts the nature of marriage," said Hugo Valdemar, spokesman for the Mexican archdiocese. "It's another one of these electoral theatrics the assembly tends to do that are irresponsible and immoral."

    The Church holds considerable sway in the country with the world's second largest Catholic population after Brazil.

    This story made it on to FARK with caption Mexico proposes issuing temporary marriage licenses so couples can opt out if they eventually decide they don't want the Juan they're with.

    (and with these comments:)

    It should be a rental agreement. 3 years and you can opt out.

    No thanks, I'll keep taking them out for test drives and then returning them to the lot. To be honest, you're better off getting an older model, the insurance is cheaper and they are less likely to be stolen.

    Yes, but newer models are less likely to have been rear-ended, and are more likely to have all of their original parts.

    I get the feeling most people will end up shopping at the Used Car lot.

    When dealing with the ones off if the Used Car lot, you'll have to start worrying about the Trannies and suspension issues.

    That reminds me, I was planning on trading in the old one and getting a newer and more expensive model.

    This idea presupposes that the couple will divorce. But, you know, Juan is the loneliest number.

India's Angry Brides

    It was banned in India over fifty years ago but the practice is still so widespread that it was blamed for the deaths of more than 8,000 women in 2010.

    Now anger over the practice of demanding dowries, which frequently leads to violence against brides, has prompted the creation of a new variation on the hit game Angry Birds, known as Angry Brides.

    Traditionally, Indian dowries - usually paid in the form of gold and cash but sometimes as clothes, cars and watches - are given by the bride's family to a groom and his parents to ensure that she is well looked after in her new home.

    Although officially the practice was outlawed just a few years after India gained independence in 1947, it is still widely observed. It frequently leads to abuse of women, who are mistreated when the groom and his family use her as a bargaining chip, demanding extra cash from her family, often well after the marriage.

    Many women commit suicide as a result of the physical and mental stress, while others have been murdered in so-called 'stove burnings' after being doused in kerosene.

    Ram Bhamidi is senior vice president at Shaadi.com, an Indian matrimonial search website with two million members that has launched an app for the Angry Brides game on its Facebook page.He said: "The Angry Brides game is our way of throwing a spotlight on the nuisance of dowry. According to a 2007 study ... there is a dowry-related death every four hours in India. We condemn this menace and have consistently run campaigns on social media to help create awareness of the issue."

    According to the group's webpage, where the app can be downloaded, more than 270,000 people have said they 'like' the game since it was launched a week ago. The web page depicts an eight-armed woman resembling Kali, the Hindu goddess associated with power, death and destruction, beneath which is a caption that says: "A woman will give you strength, care and all the love you need ... NOT dowry!"

    Players assume the guise of a bride and to win they have to hit three dodging grooms - a pilot, a builder and a doctor - using a variety of readily available household objects that include a frying pan, tomato, broomstick and stiletto shoe.

    Figures from the National Crime Records Bureau show that in 2010 there were 8,391 cases of dowry-related deaths in India and 90,000 cases of torture and cruelty towards women by their husbands or family.

The Wrong Partner?

    Elliott Katz was stunned to find himself in the middle of a divorce after two kids and 10 years of marriage. The Torontonian, a policy analyst for the Ottawa government, blamed his wife. "She just didn't appreciate all I was doing to make her happy." He fed the babies, and he changed their diapers. He gave them their baths, he read them stories, and put them to bed. Before he left for work in the morning, he made them breakfast. He bought a bigger house and took on the financial burden, working evenings to bring in enough money so his wife could stay home full-time.

    He thought the solution to the discontent was for her to change. But once on his own, missing the daily interaction with his daughters, he couldn't avoid some reflection. "I didn't want to go through this again. I asked whether there was something I could have done differently. After all, you can wait years for someone else to change."

    What he decided was, indeed, there were some things he could have done differently - like not tried as hard to be so noncontrolling that his wife felt he had abandoned decision-making entirely. His wife, he came to understand, felt frustrated, as if she were "a married single parent," making too many of the plans and putting out many of the fires of family life, no matter how many chores he assumed.

    Ultimately, he stopped blaming his wife for their problems. "You can't change another person. You can only change yourself," he says. "Like lots of men today," he has since found, "I was very confused about my role as partner." After a few post-divorce years in the mating wilderness, Katz came to realize that framing a relationship in terms of the right or wrong mate is by itself a blind alley.

    "We're given a binary model," says New York psychotherapist Ken Page. "Right or wrong. Settle or leave. We are not given the right tools to think about relationships. People need a better set of options."

    Sooner or later, there comes a moment in all relationships when you lie in bed, roll over, look at the person next to you and think it's all a dreadful mistake, says Boston family therapist Terrence Real. It happens a few months to a few years in. "It's an open secret of American culture that disillusionment exists. I go around the country speaking about 'normal marital hatred.' Not one person has ever asked what I mean by that. It's extremely raw."

    What to do when the initial attraction sours? "I call it the first day of your real marriage," Real says. It's not a sign that you've chosen the wrong partner. It is the signal to grow as an individual—to take responsibility for your own frustrations. Invariably, we yearn for perfection but are stuck with an imperfect human being. We all fall in love with people we think will deliver us from life's wounds but who wind up knowing how to rub against us.

    A new view of relationships and their discontents is emerging. We alone are responsible for having the relationship we want. And to get it, we have to dig deep into ourselves while maintaining our connections. It typically takes a dose of bravery—what Page calls "enlightened audacity." Its brightest possibility exists, ironically, just when the passion seems most totally dead. If we fail to plumb ourselves and speak up for our deepest needs, which admittedly can be a scary prospect, life will never feel authentic, we will never see ourselves with any clarity, and everyone will always be the wrong partner.

    Romance itself seeds the eventual belief that we have chosen the wrong partner. The early stage of a relationship, most marked by intense attraction and infatuation, is in many ways akin to cocaine intoxication, observes Christine Meinecke, a clinical psychologist in Des Moines, Iowa. It's orchestrated, in part, by the neurochemicals associated with intense pleasure. Like a cocaine high, it's not sustainable.

    But for the duration—and experts give it nine months to four years—infatuation has one overwhelming effect: Research shows that it makes partners overestimate their similarities and idealize each other. We're thrilled that he loves Thai food, travel, and classic movies, just like us. And we overlook his avid interest in old cars and online poker.

    Eventually, reality rears its head. "Infatuation fades for everyone," says Meinecke, author of Everybody Marries the Wrong Person. That's when you discover your psychological incompatibility, and disenchantment sets in. Suddenly, a switch is flipped, and now all you can see are your differences. "You're focusing on what's wrong with them. They need to get the message about what they need to change."

    You conclude you've married the wrong person—but that's because you're accustomed to thinking, Cinderella-like, that there is only one right person. The consequences of such a pervasive belief are harsh. We engage in destructive behaviors, like blaming our partner for our unhappiness or searching for someone outside the relationship.

    Along with many other researchers and clinicians, Meinecke espouses a new marital paradigm—what she calls "the self-responsible spouse." When you start focusing on what isn't so great, it's time to shift focus. "Rather than look at the other person, you need to look at yourself and ask, 'Why am I suddenly so unhappy and what do I need to do?'" It's not likely a defect in your partner.

    In mature love, says Meinecke, "we do not look to our partner to provide our happiness, and we don't blame them for our unhappiness. We take responsibility for the expectations that we carry, for our own negative emotional reactions, for our own insecurities, and for our own dark moods."

    But instead of looking at ourselves, or understanding the fantasies that bring us to such a pass, we engage in a thought process that makes our differences tragic and intolerable, says William Doherty, professor of psychology and head of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota. It's one thing to say, "I wish my spouse were more into the arts, like I am." Or, "I wish my partner was not just watching TV every night but interested in getting out more with me." That's something you can fix.

    It's quite another to say, "This is intolerable. I need and deserve somebody who shares my core interests." The two thought processes are likely to trigger differing actions. It's possible to ask someone to go out more. It's not going to be well received to ask someone for a personality overhaul, notes Doherty, author of Take Back Your Marriage.

    No one is going to get all their needs met in a relationship, he insists. He urges fundamental acceptance of the person we choose and the one who chooses us. "We're all flawed. With parenting, we know that comes with the territory. With spouses, we say 'This is terrible.'"

    The culture, however, pushes us in the direction of discontent. "Some disillusionment and feelings of discouragement are normal in the love-based matches in our culture," explains Doherty. "But consumer culture tells us we should not settle for anything that is not ideal for us."

    As UCLA psychologist Thomas Bradbury puts it, "You don't have a line-item veto when it comes to your partner. It's a package deal; the bad comes with the good."

    Further, he says, it's too simplistic an interpretation that your partner is the one who's wrong. "We tend to point our finger at the person in front of us. We're fairly crude at processing some information. We tend not to think, 'Maybe I'm not giving her what she needs.' 'Maybe he's disgruntled because I'm not opening up to him.' Or, 'Maybe he's struggling in his relationships with other people.' The more sophisticated question is, 'In what ways are we failing to make one another happy?'"

    Now in a long-term relationship, Toronto's Katz has come to believe that "Marriage is not about finding the right person. It's about becoming the right person. Many people feel they married the wrong person, but I've learned that it's truly about growing to become a better husband."

    What's most noticeable about Sarah and Mark Holdt of Estes Park, Colorado, is their many differences. "He's a Republican, I'm a Democrat. He's a traditional Christian, I'm an agnostic. He likes meat and potatoes, I like more adventurous food," says Sarah. So Mark heads off to church and Bible study every week, while Sarah takes a "Journeys" class that considers topics like the history of God in America. "When he comes home, I'll ask, 'What did you learn in Bible Study?'" she says. And she'll share her insights from her own class with him.

    But when Sarah wants to go to a music festival and Mark wants to stay home, "I just go," says Sarah. "I don't need to have him by my side for everything." He's there when it matters most—at home, at the dinner table, in bed. "We both thrive on touch," says Sarah, "so we set our alarm a half hour early every morning and take that time to cuddle." They've been married for 14 years.

    It takes a comfortable sense of self and deliberate effort to make relationships commodious enough to tolerate such differences. What's striking about the Holdts is the time they take to share what goes on in their lives—and in their heads—when they are apart. Research shows that such "turning toward" each other and efforts at information exchange, even in routine matters, are crucial to maintaining the emotional connection between partners.

    Say one partner likes to travel and the other doesn't. "If you view this with a feeling of resentment, that's going to hurt, over and over again," says Doherty. If you can accept it, that's fine—provided you don't start living in two separate worlds.

    "What you don't want to do," he says, "is develop a group of single travel friends who, when they are on the road, go out and flirt with others. You start doing things you're not comfortable sharing with your mate." Most often, such large differences are accompanied by so much disappointment that partners react in ways that do not support the relationship.

    The available evidence suggests that women more than men bring some element of fantasy into a relationship. Women generally initiate more breakups and two-thirds of divorces, becoming more disillusioned than men. They compare their mates with their friends much more than men do, says Doherty.

    He notes, "They tend to have a model or framework for what the relationship should be. They are more prone to the comparison between what they have and what they think they should have. Men tend to monitor the gap between what they have and what they think they deserve only in the sexual arena. They don't monitor the quality of their marriage on an everyday basis."

    To the extent that people have an ideal partner and an ideal relationship in their head, they are setting themselves up for disaster, says family expert Michelle Givertz, assistant professor of communication studies at California State University, Chico. Relationship identities are negotiated between two individuals. Relationships are not static ideals; they are always works in progress.

    To enter a relationship with an idea of what it should look like or how it should evolve is too controlling, she contends. It takes two people to make a relationship. One person doesn't get to decide what it should be. And to the extent that he or she does, the other partner is not going to be happy.

    "People can spend their lives trying to make a relationship into something it isn't, based on an idealized vision of what should be, not what is," she says. She isn't sure why, but she finds that such misplaced expectations are increasing. Or, as Doherty puts it, "A lot of the thinking about being married to the wrong mate is really self-delusion."

    Sometimes, however, we really do choose the wrong person—someone ultimately not interested in or capable of meeting our needs, for any of a number of possible reasons. At the top of the list of people who are generally wrong for anyone are substance abusers—whether the substance is alcohol, prescription drugs, or illicit drugs—who refuse to get help for the problem.

    "An addict's primary loyalty is not to the relationship, it's to the addiction," explains Ken Page. "Active addicts become cheaper versions of themselves and lose integrity or the ability to do the right thing when it's hard. Those are the very qualities in a partner you need to lean on." Gamblers fall into the same compulsive camp, with the added twist that their pursuit of the big win typically lands them, sooner or later, into deep debt that threatens the foundations of relationship life.

    People who cheated in one or more previous relationships are not great mate material. They destroy the trust and intimacy basic to building a relationship. It's possible to make a case for a partner who cheats once, against his own values, but not for one who compulsively and repeatedly strays. Doherty considers such behavior among the "hard reasons" for relationship breakup, along with physical abuse and other forms of overcontrolling. "These are things that nobody should have to put up with in life," he says.

    But "drifting apart," "poor communication," and "we're just not compatible anymore" are in a completely different category. Such "soft reasons," he insists, are, by contrast, always two-way streets. "Nobody gets all the soft goodies in life," he finds. "It's often better to work on subtle ways to improve the relationship."

    In an ongoing marriage, he adds, "incompatibility is never the real reason for a divorce." It's a reason for breakup of a dating relationship. But when people say "she's a nice person but we're just not compatible," Doherty finds, something happened in which both were participants and allowed the relationship to deteriorate. It's a nice way to say you're not blaming your partner.

    The real reason is likely to be that neither attended to the relationship. Perhaps one or both partners threw themselves into parenting. Or a job. They stopped doing the things that they did when dating and that couples need to do to thrive as a partnership—take time for conversation, talk about how their day went or what's on their mind. Or perhaps the real love was undermined by the inability to handle conflict.

    "If you get to the point where you're delivering an ultimatum," says Bradbury, you haven't been maintaining your relationship properly. "It's like your car stopping on the side of the road and you say, 'It just isn't working anymore'— but you haven't changed the oil in 10 years." The heart of any relationship, he insists—what makes people the right mates for each other—is the willingness of both partners to be open and vulnerable; to listen and care about each other.

    Although there are no guarantees, there are stable personal characteristics that are generally good and generally bad for relationships. On the good side: sense of humor; even temper; willingness to overlook your flaws; sensitivity to you and what you care about; ability to express caring. On the maladaptive side: chronic lying; chronic worrying or neuroticism; emotional overreactivity; proneness to anger; propensity to harbor grudges; low self-esteem; poor impulse control; tendency to aggression; self-orientation rather than an other-orientation. Situations, such as chronic exposure to nonmarital stress in either partner, also have the power to undermine relationships.

    In addition, there are people who are specifically wrong for you, because they don't share the values and goals you hold most dear. Differences in core values often plague couples who marry young, before they've had enough life experience to discover who they really are. Most individuals are still developing their belief systems through their late teens and early 20s and still refining their lifestyle choices. Of course, you have to know what you hold most dear, and that can be a challenge for anyone at any age, not just the young.

    One of the most common reasons we choose the wrong partner is that we do not know who we are or what we really want. It's hard to choose someone capable of understanding you and meeting your most guarded emotional needs and with whom your values are compatible when you don't know what your needs or values are or haven't developed the confidence to voice them unabashedly.

    Maria Lin is a nonpracticing attorney who married a chef. "I valued character, connection, the heart," she says. "He was charming, funny, treated me amazingly well, and we got along great." But over time, intellectual differences got in the way. "He couldn't keep up with my analysis or logic in arguments or reasoning through something, or he would prove less capable at certain things, or he would misspell or misuse terms. It was never anything major, just little things."

    Lin confides that she lost respect for her chef-husband. "I didn't realize how important intellectual respect for my partner would end up being to me. I think this was more about not knowing myself well enough, and not knowing how being intellectually stimulated was important to me, and (even worse) how it would tie to that critical factor of respect."

    It is a fact that like the other basic pillars of life, such as work and children, marriage is not always going to be a source of satisfaction. No one is loved perfectly; some part of our authentic self is never going to be met by a partner. Sure, you can always draw a curtain over your heart. But that is not the only or the best response.

    "Sometimes marriage is going to be a source of pain and sorrow," says Givertz. "And that's necessary for personal and interpersonal growth." In fact, it's impossible to be deliriously happy in marriage every moment if you are doing anything at all challenging in life, whether raising children, starting a business, or taking care of an aging parent.

    Disillusionment becomes an engine for growth because it forces us to discover our needs. Knowing oneself, recognizing one's needs, and speaking up for them in a relationship are often acts of bravery, says Page. Most of us are guarded about our needs, because they are typically our areas of greatest sensitivity and vulnerability.

    "You have to discover—and be able to share—what touches you and moves you the most," he observes. "But first, of course, you have to accept that in yourself. Few of us are skilled at this essential process for creating passion and romance. We'd rather complain." Nevertheless, through this process, we clarify ourselves as we move through life.

    At the same time, taking the risk to expose your inner life to your partner turns out to be the great opportunity for expanding intimacy and a sense of connection. This is the great power of relationships: Creating intimacy is the crucible for growing into a fully autonomous human being while the process of becoming a fully realized person expands the possibility for intimacy and connection. This is also the work that transforms a partner into the right partner.

    Another crucial element of growth in relationships, says Givertz, is a transformation of motivation—away from self-centered preferences toward what is best for the relationship and its future. There is an intrapsychic change that sustains long-term relationships. Underlying it is a broadening process in which response patterns subtly shift. Accommodation (as opposed to retaliation) plays a role. So does sacrifice. So do willingness and ability to suppress an impulse to respond negatively to a negative provocation, no matter how personally satisfying it might feel in the moment. It requires the ability to hold in mind the long-term goals of the relationship. With motivation transformed, partners are more apt to take a moment to consider how to respond, rather than react reflexively in the heat of a moment.

    In his most recent study of relationships, UCLA's Bradbury followed 136 couples for 10 years, starting within six months of their marriage. All the couples reported high levels of satisfaction at the start and four years later. What Bradbury and his colleague Justin Lavner found surprising was that some couples who were so satisfied at the four-year pass eventually divorced, despite having none of the risk factors identified in previous studies of relationship dissolution—wavering commitment, maladaptive personality traits, high levels of stress.

    The only elements that identified those who eventually divorced were negative and self-protective reactions during discussions of relationship difficulties and nonsupportive reactions in discussing a personal issue. Displays of anger, contempt, or attempts to blame or invalidate a partner augured poorly, even when the partners felt their marriage was functioning well overall, the researchers report in the Journal of Family Psychology. So did expressions of discouragement toward a partner talking about a personality feature he or she wanted to change.

    In other words, the inability or unwillingness to suppress negative emotions in the heat of the moment eliminates the possibility of a transformation of motivation to a broader perspective than one's own. Eventually, the cumulative impact of negative reactivity brings the relationship down.

    "There is no such thing as two people meant for each other," says Michelle Givertz. "It's a matter of adjusting and adapting." But you have to know yourself so that you can get your needs for affection, inclusion, and control met in the ways that matter most for you. Even then, successful couples redefine their relationship many times, says Meinecke. Relationships need to continually evolve to fit ever-changing circumstances. They need to incorporate each partner's changes and find ways to meet their new needs.

    "If both parties are willing to tackle the hard and vulnerable work of building love and healing conflict, they have a good chance to survive," says Page. If one party is reluctant, "you might need to say to your partner, 'I need this because I feel like we're losing each other, and I don't want that to happen.'"

    In the end, says Minnesota's Doherty, "We're all difficult. Everyone who is married is a difficult spouse. We emphasize that our spouse is difficult and forget how we're difficult for them." If you want to have a mate in your life, he notes, you're going to have to go through the process of idealization and disillusionment—if not with your current partner then with the next. And the next. "You could really mess up your kids as you pursue the ideal mate." What's more, studies show that, on average, people do not make a better choice the second time around. Most often, people just trade one set of problems for another.

    Boston's Real reports that he attended an anniversary party for friends who had been together 25 years. When someone commented on the longevity of the relationship, the husband replied: "Every morning I wake up, splash cold water on my face, and say out loud, 'Well, you're no prize either.'" While you're busy being disillusioned with your partner, Real suggests, you'll do better with a substantial dose of humility."

China

    Shocking pictures of a bloodied seven-month-old foetus lying on a hospital bed next to its mother horrified the world when they were released on the internet last month, and served as a reminder of the most pernicious effects of China’s one-child policy. Local officials in Shanxi province made Feng Jianmei, 23, terminate her pregnancy because she already had one child and could not pay the 40,000 yuan (£4,051) fine for having a second.

    Such forced abortions are relatively rare in China today. In areas with less zealous officials, many second births go unreported, or else the threat of fines is enough to put most mothers off. A more common consequence of the one-child policy is that many women are choosing to abort because their unborn child is the “wrong” sex.

    Though less alarming than forced abortions, the elective abortion of female foetuses is having a widespread and damaging effect on Chinese society as a whole.

    Son preference in China is nothing new. It predates the one-child policy by thousands of years to a time when male children were needed to work the land. They would inherit it, pass on the family name and look after parents in their old age.

    Daughters, by contrast, became of little use since they were sent to live with their husband’s family. Raising a daughter, it was said, was like watering somebody else’s fields.

    With the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979, girls were not just considered a waste of a family’s resources; they became the reason that they couldn’t have a son. “Male preference played out in infanticide and the neglect of female children. Parents sought out less medical help for baby girls,” says Professor Therese Hesketh, Professor in Global Health at University College London, whose research covers sex selection in China.

    The use of ultrasound technology from the early 1980s let parents know the sex of their baby and many chose not to keep females. By 1987, 113 boys were being born for every 100 girls; well above the worldwide average sex ratio at birth (SRB) of 106 boys to 100 girls. Since 1994 the use of ultrasound to determine a baby’s gender has been banned, but the practice continues.Abortion is readily available in China and a growing trade of roaming non-medical professionals offering ultrasounds for as little as £10 has made sex-selective abortions even easier. By 2005 the SRB had jumped to 120:100.

    “We’re only truly understanding the impact of gender imbalance now, as the first affected generation hits relationship age,” Hesketh says. Figures vary, but it is thought that by 2020 20 to 40 million Chinese men will be statistically unable to find spouses. The irony is that as the competition to find a female partner heats up, these women who were so unwanted at the time of their birth are now in great demand. “We’re like pandas. There are fewer of us around, so we’re more treasured,” laughs Wang Li, a pretty 24-year-old secretary who, in her knit sweater, boots and skinny jeans, looks as if she has just walked out of an H&M catalogue. “There’s more choice and we are freer to date than before.”

    Walk around any big city in China and you will soon get the impression that women now have the upper hand. In Beijing’s metro, for example, a poster for the latest theatre show pictures a beautiful woman smiling between two competing romantic interests.

    This rom-com’s title, On the Pirate Ship, is taken from a Chinese idiom meaning “to be tricked into a hopeless expedition”. Just as the poster hints, for many young men in China today, dating can feel just like that: a hopeless expedition.

    He Wei is a yoga teacher who lives in Beijing. At 26 he belongs to that hapless cohort of men. He explains: “As there are fewer women than men, there’s a lot of pressure. They’re in a better position when it comes to choosing. If you want a wife, you need to show you can look after them.”

    It takes more to woo a Chinese woman today. “In the past, people were introduced by relatives, or if they dated, a date meant going to the park. Now you have to spend money in restaurants and cafés,” says Chen Xiaomin, director of the Women’s Studies Centre at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. Securing a date is one thing. Securing a marriage is even trickier. A recent report by the All-China Women’s Federation, which surveyed 32,000 people in 2010, shows that more than 70 per cent of single women would marry a man only if he already owned a home.

    A flash set of wheels also helps — as one unlucky young man found out in 2011 on the popular dating programme If You Are the One. His offer to one of the contestants, Ma Nuo, 22, a model, to take her for a romantic ride on his bike was rejected with the harsh putdown: “I’d rather cry in a BMW car than laugh on the back seat of a bicycle.”

    Every week viewers continue to see nice guys passed over for less charming but richer options. “Of course, these shows are sensationalist,” He Wei says. “But even in real life, the first thing most girls look out for is your economic situation.”

    Online, Chinese female daters can be just as blunt as Ma Nuo. One profile read: “I am 24 years old, recently broke up with my boyfriend, and am eager to find a new one to comfort me. My requirements are that you make at least 5,000 yuan [£505] a month, that you have a house and a car. There is no age limit. If you don’t fit the criteria, don’t contact me.”

    Young women recognise their desirability and see dating and marriage as a means of social advancement. “High-earning men in urban areas have no problem finding dates and wives. The gender imbalance means nothing to them,” Hesketh says. Meanwhile, those earning smaller wages in the cities rely on the incoming stream of rural women, looking to upgrade from a farming lifestyle.

    Starting out from the wealthy coastal belt in China’s east, there has been a trickle-down effect, with Chinese men increasingly looking to poorer areas farther west for spouses. In recent years there has been a growing trend of importing brides from neighbouring countries, including Vietnam, Burma and North Korea. In this brave new market based on “marrying up”, women at the top are losing out. Liu Qian is a gorgeous 29-year-old sales executive whose frequent smiles soften her otherwise power-woman persona. She recalls a date last year in which, after she revealed that her salary was four times his level, he became intimidated. “We never saw each other again,” she said. “Men want women to be reliant on them. They want young, pretty, not-too-smart girls.”

    It doesn’t help that career women like her often spend their twenties focusing on their job and by the time they start looking to settle down are considered too old by many men. In the All-China Women’s Federation report, 90 per cent of men surveyed said that a woman should be married before the age of 27. Single women over this age in China risk being categorised as sheng nu, “leftover ladies”.

    The male equivalent of a sheng nu in China is a guang gun, “a bare branch”. Far more numerous than sheng nu — more than 90 per cent of all unmarried people aged 28-49 are male — these men are far from bachelors in the Western sense.

    They live in a society that stigmatises “bare branches unable to bear fruit”, meaning those unable to have children because they lack the resources to attract a partner.

    They are uneducated, poor and often live in rural areas, where the number of women of marriageable age compared with the number of men is unusually low as a result of internal migration. Millions of men and women move from the countryside to the cities each year. But while women often marry city-dwellers and stay on, men tend to move back. This means that in some rural counties there can be as many as three men for every two women.

    In the coming decades some experts fear that these frustrated single men will band together, creating a violent subculture. In the worst scenarios imagined, gangs of guang gun rape and pillage their way around the country as a means to gain the face, money and sexual satisfaction denied to them.

    Already each year the Chinese police uncover some 10,000 cases of trafficked women. According to a report in The Global Times newspaper, China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission has found that problems such as forced prostitution, abductions and trafficking of women and children (to be raised by families as future wives for their sons) are particularly rampant in areas where there is a high ratio of men to women.

    Other experts warn, however, that it is hard to establish a direct link between gender imbalance and the increase in sexual crimes against women: “The majority of single men we’ve interviewed for our studies are more likely to be depressed than angry.” And it’s not surprising; they know they are facing a lonely old age in a society with little welfare support for the elderly.

    The one silver lining in these two equally bleak possibilities for the guang gun and the rest of Chinese society is that the latest census in 2010 showed that the SRB had actually dropped to 118:100 — an indication perhaps that sex-selective abortions are on the wane as society modernises.

    It is too early to say, however, whether gender imbalance is on a definite downward course, and, Hesketh says, “even when the gender ratio balances out nationally, there are still likely to be pockets of imbalance in rural areas. This will be a problem not just for the next decade, but the next century.”

    Meanwhile, back in Beijing, He Wei is fortunately not too aware of this gloomy outlook. He is busy thinking about his own future. “I’d like a girlfriend who is kind-hearted, who believes in me and is faithful,” he said. “She shouldn’t be with me and other men at the same time.” And he hopes that, with such simple requirements, his quest to find the one — or anyone — won’t be yet another hopeless expedition.

Advice

    A reader is advised to be honest with herself about the state of her marriage.

    Q Two years ago, my marriage was in trouble and I started having an affair. This has now ended. I want to make my marriage work as I have two young children, but I don’t feel very attracted to my husband and almost have to force myself to have sex with him. He seems so boring compared with sex with my lover. How can I start enjoying it again?

    A Affairs happen. They are sometimes opportunistic, but more often than not they are a reaction to conscious, or even subconscious, feelings of dissatisfaction. It may be personal: feeling unfulfilled, trapped, unsuccessful, uncreative or even broke.

    Or it may be to do with the relationship: feeling sexually unfulfilled, stifled, rejected, silenced, let down, abused or unappreciated. If you feel immobilised by the cards you have been dealt, or the choices you have made, meeting someone who makes you feel sexually alive is like having your central nervous system jump-started. Suddenly there is hope, of happiness, hot sex and a future where you don’t feel like a dud or a corpse. An affair makes you feel beautiful, wanted and desired again, and the guilt and secrecy serve to quadruple your responsivity.

    And then ... the guilt finally gets to you and you give it all up. You say you’ve done it for your kids, but the truth is that you can’t face being the bad guy. You don’t want to break up your happy family. Only trouble is, in your absence, the problems are still dogging the marriage and, unsurprisingly, your husband’s well-worn bedroom choreography doesn’t hold a candle to the electric sex you had with your lover. It is an unfair comparison and if you don’t address it it will destroy your marriage — but on some subconscious level that might be exactly what you are hoping for. If you fail to engage with your husband sexually and you argue with him constantly, the marriage will eventually break down, and, of course, this time it won’t be your fault.

    So you need to be absolutely sincere with yourself about whether or not you really want this marriage to work. It is not easy to be the one who quits on a family, but if you don’t think you can go on, then the fairest thing you can do is be honest with your husband about how you feel.

    If, on the other hand, you conclude that you are sure you want to remain in the marriage, then you need to be proactive about dealing with the difficulties. This is easier to do with the help of a third party. You can access couple psychotherapy at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (tccr.org.uk), or contact your local branch of Relate (relate.org.uk). Try to channel the initial sense of relief you will get from doing this into your sex life. Stop standing on the sidelines, making comparisons. Even if you have to force yourself, just do it. Research shows that positive action creates positive emotion, even when people are faking it. In the 1970s, James Laird proved that even “forcing” a smile could increase happiness. The psychologist Robert Epstein used these ideas to design a set of scientific exercises to increase feelings of love and intimacy (access his article “How science can help you fall in love” at drrobertepstein.com).

    You should also try to take some time out together, but not just dinner. Instead, take off for the weekend and do something physically demanding. Go hiking, take a diving or kayaking course or climb a mountain. Being together out in the wilds will increase your feelings of vulnerability and make your husband seem more sexually attractive; challenging yourselves physically will force you to work together and make you feel more connected.

Marriage Changes

    The present debate about whether same sex marriage should be made legal, is just the latest step in a long process of change. Traditionalists have a picture of marriage as an unchanging institution which cannot be modified without threatening all of society. But in fact marriage is not fixed and unchanging; it has evolved as society has changed.

    In Biblical times there were strict laws about marriage and sex. Deuteronomy 22:13-21 says a marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed.This is no longer considered a good idea in polite society.

    Deuteronomy 22:22 also says that "If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die..." This is not often enforced today.

    For a long time, marriage-by-conquest was allowed (Deuteronomy 21). Analysis of Icelandic genes shows that while the male Y chromosomes come from Scandinavian stock as you'd expect, 50% of the female genes are of Celtic origin. They come from Scotland and Ireland, a convenient spot to drop off on en route to a new life in Iceland. So quite obvious that the women were kidnapped by Vikings whose own womenfolk weren't particularly keen on the prospect of a gruelling sea voyage then a hard life on a volcanic outcrop in middle of the North Atlantic.

    In the recent past, marriage was mainly an economic decision. Rich people married to cement alliances, poor people married for an extra hand on the plough (or for the very poor, someone to pull the plough). The husband owned the wife in the same way as he owned the rest of his possessions. When women began to ask for equal rights, male dominance was justified by biblical passages such as Genesis 3 ('he shall rule over you') and Ephesians 5 (' wives submit yourselves unto your own husband, as unto the Lord'). But today women are recognized as equals, both legally and socially.

    Interracial marriages were once forbidden. The Bible saying that God angered by Israelites marrying into other tribes (Ezra 10, Numbers 36, Nehemiah 13), as well as the Curse on Ham (black people are bad), was used as justification for miscegeneation laws in the US, as well as Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa. The last law in America was only ruled unconstitutional in 1967.

    In the 1800's the age of consent for English females was 10, and courts required girls alleging rape to provide impossible standards of proof. The law did nothing, either, to prevent the routine abuse of female servants and, in particular, slaves. Yet, at the same time, for a black man to have sex with a white woman was considered the most monstrous of crimes, punishable by castration, burning alive or decapitation followed by display of the severed head on a pole.

    Divorce used to be very hard to obtain. In 1800 there were only 4 divorces in England, partly because each one required an Act of Parliament. Even into the twentieth century the rules favoured men so much that many women were discouraged from getting a divorce. Again there are Biblical commands against divorce (Malachi 2), or if adultery has occurred, allows remarriage after a divorce only for the innocent party (Matthew 5). But these instructions are widely ignored - the rates of divorce and remarriage are much the same for christians and non believers.

    So clearly there is no such thing as 'traditional marriage'. Attitudes change.




    So what will happen in the future? 90% Americans think polygamy is morally wrong - more than those against human cloning, abortion or the death penalty. Yet it has been popular, and taken for granted, for most of human history. Polygamy gives women more options: they can marry above their station. "Which woman wouldn't rather be John Kennedy's third wife than Bozo the Clown's first?"

    Robots are increasingly being employed as nurse aids and companions for the elderly alone. The film Lars and The Real Girl showed a shy man using a blow up doll as a stepping stone toward a real relationship. When (not if) robots become humanoid enough, will humans sill prefer to deal with a partner with human problems and complaints?

    The lesson of history is that attitudes change, and in a predictable way. One generation has a strong emotional attachment to a traditional idea. The next generation stops and looks at the idea rationally, and sentiment begins to change. The third generation changes the rules and the fourth generation shrugs and wonders what all the fuss was about.

Less Divorce

    At last, a research finding that’s genuinely surprising and contradicts what we all assumed: divorce rates are plunging. Seriously. Shocking or what? There were 165,000 divorces in 1993, but fewer than 120,000 in 2010. And there is more: men, it seems, have become more serious about commitment. According to the Marriage Foundation: “The stability in the number of men applying for divorce, compared to the dramatic decline in the number of women, especially in the first three years of marriage, implies that men are improving at keeping their wives happy.” So there it is. Men are not all bastards, divorce is not virtually inevitable and things have been getting steadily better. It’s taken 20 years, but men have learnt what we need and they are prepared to give it to us to maintain a happy union. These are the 10 things that they have worked out make us happy.

    1 Feeling fancied. We may not want to have sex because we are tired /  feel fat / the room is spinning, but we like to think that our men are gagging for it, even if we have a cold sore and are wearing our Great Uncle Bulgaria specs. Men have learnt that it pays to pretend they would be at it like a greyhound out of a trap, all the time. Unconditional attraction (his) is the basis of a happy relationship.

    2 It’s important to talk. Often, when men get married, they don’t feel it is necessary any more and suddenly they have nothing to say. Even when you’ve just been to see Anna Karenina and want to rip it apart over a bottle of wine, they would rather you ripped it apart while they just nodded. This does not work long term. Women will always look for a man who makes them feel interesting.

    3 Never criticise. That dress is a bit tight. You’re a bit late. You look a bit rough this morning. Comments like these are death to a marriage. Here is the thing: we are judging ourselves more harshly than you can imagine, so we need your total support. Also, be careful about praising other women in our presence, unless it is for stuff we don’t care about (“She’s a marvellous potter”).

    4 Don’t back us into a corner. There is a drama queen in every woman waiting for her big moment. We will be off, flinging our wedding rings into the gutter, and this might easily be over an unreturned pen. Men have learnt it pays to take “out of all proportion” situations seriously, not to laugh in the face of quivering rage, and the importance of never saying, “Calm down.”

    5 But don’t be a total pushover. This is tricky to judge, but the man who pulls it off gets a lot of credit. It is important to indulge most behaviour, but establish that rudeness, throwing stuff out of windows, aggressive flirting, cutting up or burning personal property and sulking will not be tolerated.

    6 If you can’t be romantic, don’t be unromantic. Resist turning on Sky Sports as soon as you get to the hotel. Don’t point out the food in our teeth. Don’t always choose another drink over us.

    7 Have the same attitude to money as we do. Women aren’t all looking for rich men, but none of them is looking for a tightwad.

    8 Be prepared to play the daddy role (not in a pervy way). We can look after ourselves and other people, but we like to think that you will keep an eye on mortgage rates / war / famine / knowing when to decamp to a high hill in Scotland because of the imminent threat of icecap melt / revolution.

    9 Be the sort of bloke who can shop in Ikea, sit through the Twilight movies, discuss K-Mid’s make-up, but don’t love it — that creeps us out.

    10 Be reliable, especially as time goes on and it’s no longer about sitting in cafes staring into each other’s eyes. We want a man who is on time, parks swiftly, can book a train without screwing up, do a speedy supermarket shop and who never lets us down.

Some Low-Key Advice

    A few years ago, my marriage was at a low ebb and I read several books of romantic advice. “Take a break,” they all exhorted. My wife and I ended up at Luton airport at 6am. She was cross I hadn’t printed the tickets. I was furious because she likes me to be queue fodder, while she roams the terminal gazing at scarves. We rowed. Thereafter, I began to notice how most love rules are misguided — wrong, even — and began a quest to find the New Rules of Love. This is what I’ve learnt.

    Don’t have couples therapy

    Ask a couple “What’s the secret of staying together?” and they usually say: “Well, it does take a lot of work.” Nobody says what form the work will take, but the implication is that it will involve couples therapy — a prospect that strikes fear into the heart of the modern man. If he goes to couples therapy, he knows it will be like going a few rounds with Muhammad Ali. He can take it for a while, but then there’s a risk he may start to talk. Couples therapy can be positive, but I’d question the modern belief that each grievance must be aired, that a sick relationship can be criticised back to health. We went to couples therapy once. I said my wife was impatient. She said I was messy, that I’d last done the laundry some time back in 2006, and that I aired our private problems in a national newspaper. The therapist said we shouldn’t rush to find solutions, to which my wife said: “I disagree.” So I said: “Why don’t we get a cleaner?” And she said: “Done.” Then the therapist made us say why we loved each other, which we found excruciating — having to flirt with your partner in front of teacher. Afterwards, we went to the pub, where we sang a karaoke version of Islands in the Stream, which cheered us up immensely. Thus we stumbled on the First Rule of Love: most relationships do not need work. What they need is play. You don’t need to go anywhere to do this. Just spend time together. Laugh. Sing. (But try not to interrupt when your man’s crooning like Kenny Rogers.)

    Don’t talk about your feelings

    The first problem is that it’s generally the woman in the partnership who likes to talk about her feelings. She says things like“I’m fed up of finding your big pants on the radiator”, and the man retreats like a snail who’s been jabbed with a spade. Here’s a situation that we found ourselves in: 11.46pm, I tramped tiredly to the bedroom and found that the dog had weed on the carpet. I swore, whereupon my wife, who was in the bath, spoke freely of her feelings. She’d been all cosy in the bath; I’d entered and started swearing. I said: “It wasn’t me who pissed on the floor.” We rowed. “Don’t go to sleep on a row,” vicars always counsel at a wedding. But each attempt to solve the row resulted in it flaring up again, and, finally, I spent the night on the sofa, where I was woken at 7am by the television announcing that the “Numberjacks are on their way”. It was a bad night, but it taught me the Second Rule of Love: don’t feel you must talk about your feelings, not unless you have something positive to say. Say thank you. Tell them what you’ve enjoyed today. Better still, don’t talk at all. Try listening. And don’t be afraid to go to sleep on a row. But do try not to go to sleep on the remote control. After the Numberjacks, Mr Tumble appeared, and he started singing. Nobody should have to listen to that.

    Don’t search for a soul mate

    I love to eavesdrop on women talking. Often they’re discussing men. This is a conversation I heard in a pub: “He leaves his tea bags by the sink.” “Don’t stand for that shit.” “He leaves his socks by the bed.” “Sandra, listen, don’t stand for that shit.” We are a disgruntled culture. We read books such as He’s Just Not That into You, which give lots and lots of examples of crap men who must be chucked. In addition, we are aware of fast-growing companies such as Match.com and eHarmony, which tell us of the “soul mates” waiting for us once we’ve chucked our boring old other halves.

    Now you can chuck your lover and look for a new one. You’ll find men who collect things (DVDs, football programmes, restraining orders). You’ll find older men. (That’s like getting a rescue dog: they’ll have their own basket, problems will emerge.) Or — so it appears — you can stay and get cross. In modern relationships, it seems there’s one person who does some of the jobs; the other does everything else, and they’re furious. In most relationships, however, both people contribute for the same amount of time, and you won’t feel love until you stop keeping score. The secret of life is gratitude. Don’t seek a soul mate, I say. Seek a housemate who occasionally lets you sleep with them. In love, we get back what we give out. Be kind. Be forgiving. Your love will flourish like a big oak tree.

    Don’t look for love online

    I got a new mobile recently. Every day since, I’ve been sent a Daily Babe — an image of a semi-naked woman. When I read my e-mails, I am contacted by Olga, a sweet-looking girl with large breasts who insists she just “likes to chat”. We all watch a lot of television, and we start to notice that real life isn’t like the movies. It’s like the public swimming baths. We don’t see men who look like Justin Timberlake. We see flab. We see hair where hair shouldn’t be. “Hey,” you want to object, “I know my man doesn’t look like Justin Timberlake. And I don’t click on Match.com.” All right, so maybe you’re like my wife: she spends an hour a day on Rightmove.com as she seeks the dream house. She sizes up counties as if they were lovers. First it was Lincolnshire. Lincolnshire was plain, but cheap. “Lincolnshire,” she thought. “I could have you.” Then it was Kent. Kent was fertile. Kent was curvy. And all this searching, this comparing — it takes time. It also chips away at our contentment. Philosophers tell us we’re happiest when we’re in the moment. That’s the real problem with the TV, the mobile — our attention is constantly elsewhere. So this is the Fourth Rule of Love. Turn off the telly. Turn off the phone. Go to bed early with a good book. You may find someone waiting for you. They’ll probably be online, checking out a four-bedder in Margate.

    Don’t sleep together

    Whenever you read a glossy magazine, you’ll find features such as “Hot tips that will give you a great sex life”. But if you’re married, then it’s unlikely you’re putting them into action. You don’t have the time. You’re tired. And if you have just had a bad-tempered conversation with them about half-term, then, sorry, you won’t feel minded to start blowing on their perineum. You may not even want to share a bed with them.

    Which brings me to my tip: try sleeping apart occasionally. “Oh, come on,” I hear you say. “Then we’ll never have sex. Besides, you must go to bed together, or you’ll never get the pleasure of touching and cuddling and falling asleep in someone else’s arms.” Well, yes, it is lovely when they wake you for sex. But what if you’re waking when they need a wee? I wake if my neighbour needs a wee. I wake if a cat in a nearby street has a dream about a wee. And I know lots of you out there are the same.

    You’re lying awake at night, thinking 4am thoughts: “I can’t sleep. Tomorrow I won’t be able to work. I’ll earn no money, and I’ll die, and it’s all your fault for waking me up.” Bad sleep makes us see everything in a negative light, especially our partners, and that’s the root of all evil. Be kind to them. Be kind to yourself. And try sleeping apart occasionally. Have eight hours of delicious sleep. Then return, the next night, to the marital bed. At which point...

    Don’t have great sex

    Beware everything you read in magazines, such as “Hot tip: talk to your partner about your fantasies”. Don’t do this. (“Darling, what do you fantasise about?”; “Other people, nude.”) Don’t worry too much about having great sex, I say. Have bad sex often. See yourself as the Volvo of lovers: unexciting, but guaranteed to get them safely back home. You may notice that, the night after you’ve done it, you feel more tempted to do it again. So do! Build up a little sex wave and surf on it to the beach of pleasure. That said, two last sex tips: don’t expect multiple orgasms. They are a myth. The fact is this: after she’s — ahem — been backed into the garage the first time, no woman says: “Yes! Again! More! Yes!” She says: “Sorry... Don’t touch me there.” Also, don’t try to have sex twice in one night. No man can do that. Well, there must be one man, somewhere, who can do that. But after the first time, he probably needs eight hours’ sleep and some Weetabix.

Grandma's Lamp

    My mother’s mother had refined and firm tastes. When I was a boy she took me with her to a Pittsburgh department store to buy a lamp for her artfully decorated apartment. I would say “This one works” and she would respond that it didn’t go with her sofa. I would ask “How about that one?” and she would say that a shade of its colour wouldn’t look right next to the wallpaper. Another was too tall and would obscure the view from one of her windows for people seated at the dinner table. Yet another was too short to serve as a good source of light on her favorite end table, which was low to the ground.

    Even if I hadn’t been an impatient 8 year old, I would have been exasperated by her pickiness. But she did eventually find, after looking at countless non-suitable models, a lamp that matched everything in her carefully laid out apartment. And even I could see that it was indeed perfect, accentuating everything, distracting from nothing, and not requiring any other item in her apartment to be moved even an inch.

    I think about Grandma’s lamp when I listen to never-married middle aged people talk about how hard it is for them to find a suitable spouse. A lawyer acquaintance in Boston is pushing 40. He has dated many women but can’t seem to find the life partner he seeks. “All I want is a woman who looks reasonably nice, acts reasonably nice and who likes me. Why is that so hard?” he complains.

    But when I ask him if he would move to Miami or Reno or Dubuque to marry such a woman, he says no, his life is in Boston. And when I ask him if he would change his career in a significant way to marry such a woman he says oh no, he is doing well at the firm and he would have to start over somewhere else. And when I ask if he would be willing to marry such a woman if she wanted more children than he does (He wants one or at most two) he says no, he’s almost 40, and he has only so much time and many other things he wants to do in life. And if the woman couldn’t get along with his current friends? A big problem, his friends are life-long sources of support and meaning for him. And if she had children from a prior marriage? No way, don’t want to be a step-parent. And so on.

    Like my grandmother, he isn’t really looking for just any good lamp, although unlike her, he doesn’t realize it. He has his life’s apartment, the wallpaper, the carpet and the furnishings and wants that perfect lamp that will accentuate everything in its current form, detract from nothing, and require nothing to be moved even an inch. And he is dating women who are on the same quest, but apparently looking for an equally particular but different lamp. Good luck to him and the many other people like him that I have met. They need it more than they may recognize.

    This observation isn’t intended to romanticize getting married young, as used to be the fashion. Many people who marry young get divorced. After all, when you are young, you have the disadvantages of not really knowing who you are, where you will live, or what you will do in life. On the other hand, you have the advantages of not really knowing who you are, where you will live, or what you will do in life. If you determine all these things in alliance with another person at an age when life is more flexible for both of you, you won’t get forced into the choice between getting married and having to undo decisions you have made on your own over many years in which you are now understandably deeply invested.

Evolution of Marriage

    It is more than a little ironic that gay marriage has emerged as the era’s defining civil-rights struggle even as marriage itself seems more endangered every day. Americans are waiting longer to marry: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age of first marriage is 28 for men and 26 for women, up from 23 and 20, respectively, in 1950. Rates of cohabitation have risen swiftly and sharply, and more people than ever are living single. Most Americans still marry at some point, but many of those marriages end in divorce. (Although the U.S. divorce rate has declined from its all-time high in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it has remained higher than those of most European countries.) All told, this has created an unstable system of what the UCLA sociologist Suzanne Bianchi calls “partnering and repartnering,” a relentless emotional and domestic churn that sometimes results in people forgoing the institution altogether.

    Though people may be waiting to marry, they are not necessarily waiting to have children. The National Center for Family and Marriage Research has produced a startling analysis of data from the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that women’s median age when they have their first child is lower than their median age at first marriage. In other words, having children before you marry has become normal. College graduates enjoy relatively stable unions, but for every other group, marriage is collapsing. Among “middle American” women (those with a high-school degree or some college), an astonishing 58 percent of first-time mothers are unmarried. The old Groucho Marx joke—“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”—applies a little differently in this context: you might well ask why gays and lesbians want to join an institution that keeps dithering about whether to admit them even as the repo men are coming for the furniture and the fire marshal is about to close down the clubhouse.

    Against this backdrop, gay-marriage opponents have argued that allowing same-sex couples to wed will pretty much finish matrimony off. This point was advanced in briefs and oral arguments before the Supreme Court in March, in two major same-sex-marriage cases. One of these is a constitutional challenge to a key section of the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. The other involves California’s Proposition 8, a same-sex-marriage ban passed by voters in 2008 but overturned by a federal judge in 2010. Appearing before the high court in March, Charles J. Cooper, the lawyer defending the California ban, predicted that same-sex marriage would undermine traditional marriage by eroding “marital norms.”

    The belief that gay marriage will harm marriage has roots in both religious beliefs about matrimony and secular conservative concerns about broader shifts in American life. One prominent line of thinking holds that men and women have distinct roles to play in family life; that children need both a mother and a father, preferably biologically related to them; and that a central purpose of marriage is abetting heterosexual procreation. During the Supreme Court arguments over Proposition 8, Justice Elena Kagan asked Cooper whether the essence of his argument against gay marriage was that opposite-sex couples can procreate while same-sex ones cannot. “That’s the essential thrust of our position, yes,” replied Cooper. He also warned that “redefining marriage as a genderless institution could well lead over time to harms to that institution.”

    Threaded through this thinking is a related conviction that mothers and fathers should treat their union as “permanent and exclusive,” as the Princeton professor Robert P. George and his co-authors write in the new book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. Marriage, seen this way, is a rigid institution that exists primarily for the rearing of children and that powerfully constrains the behavior of adults (one is tempted to call this the “long slog ’til death” view of marriage), rather than an emotional union entered into for pleasure and companionship between adults. These critics of gay marriage are, quite validly, worried that too many American children are being raised in unstable homes, either by struggling single parents or by a transient succession of live-in adults. They fear that the spread of gay marriage could help finally sever the increasingly tenuous link between children and marriage, confirming that it’s okay for dads, or moms, to be deleted from family life as hedonic fulfillment dictates.

    In mounting their defense, advocates of same-sex marriage have argued that gays and lesbians who wish to marry are committed to family well-being; that concern for children’s welfare is a chief reason many do want to marry; that gay people are being discriminated against, as a class, in being denied rights readily available to any heterosexual. And to the charge that same-sex marriage will change marriage, they tend to argue that it will not—that married gays and lesbians will blend seamlessly with the millions of married straight Americans. “The notion that this group can somehow fundamentally change the institution of marriage—I find it difficult to wrap my head around,” says Gary Gates, a demographer with the Williams Institute, a research center affiliated with the UCLA School of Law.

    But what if the critics are correct, just not in the way they suppose? What if same-sex marriage does change marriage, but primarily for the better? For one thing, there is reason to think that, rather than making marriage more fragile, the boom of publicity around same-sex weddings could awaken among heterosexuals a new interest in the institution, at least for a time. But the larger change might be this: by providing a new model of how two people can live together equitably, same-sex marriage could help haul matrimony more fully into the 21st century. Although marriage is in many ways fairer and more pleasurable for both men and women than it once was, it hasn’t entirely thrown off old notions and habits. As a result, many men and women enter into it burdened with assumptions and stereotypes that create stress and resentment. Others, confronted with these increasingly anachronistic expectations—expectations at odds with the economic and practical realities of their own lives—don’t enter into it at all.

    Same-sex spouses, who cannot divide their labor based on preexisting gender norms, must approach marriage differently than their heterosexual peers. From sex to fighting, from child-rearing to chores, they must hammer out every last detail of domestic life without falling back on assumptions about who will do what. In this regard, they provide an example that can be enlightening to all couples. Critics warn of an institution rendered “genderless.” But if a genderless marriage is a marriage in which the wife is not automatically expected to be responsible for school forms and child care and dinner preparation and birthday parties and midnight feedings and holiday shopping, I think it’s fair to say that many heterosexual women would cry “Bring it on!”

    Beyond that, gay marriage can function as a controlled experiment, helping us see which aspects of marital difficulty are truly rooted in gender and which are not. A growing body of social science has begun to compare straight and same-sex couples in an attempt to get at the question of what is female, what is male. Some of the findings are surprising. For instance: we know that heterosexual wives are more likely than husbands to initiate divorce. Social scientists have struggled to explain the discrepancy, variously attributing it to the sexual revolution; to women’s financial independence; to men’s failure to keep modern wives happy. Intriguingly, in Norway and Sweden, where registered partnerships for same-sex couples have been in place for about two decades (full-fledged marriage was introduced several years ago), research has found that lesbians are twice as likely as gay men to split up. If women become dissatisfied even when married to other women, maybe the problem with marriage isn’t men. Maybe women are too particular. Maybe even women don’t know what women want. These are the kinds of things that we will be able to tease out.

    In the past few years, as support for same-sex marriage has gained momentum, advocates have been able to shift their strategy away from fighting bans on it (on the books in 38 states as of this writing) and toward orchestrating popular votes in its favor. In 2012, voters in Maine, Maryland, and Washington state passed measures legalizing same-sex marriage, joining the District of Columbia and the six states that had already legalized gay marriage via legislatures or courts. Similar measures are moving forward in four other states. In the coming weeks, the high court is expected to issue its rulings on gay marriage. After oral arguments in the two cases concluded, many Court observers predicted that the part of DOMA in question might well be struck down as a federal intrusion on states’ ability to decide family law, thereby forcing the federal government to recognize the marriages of same-sex couples. As for Prop 8, any number of outcomes seem possible. The Court could decide that the case should not have been heard in the first place, given that the ban isn’t being defended by California state officials but instead by the original supporters of the initiative. Such dismissal on “standing” could have the effect of legalizing same-sex marriage in California. Alternatively, the Court could deliver a narrow ruling (whether upholding or overturning the ban) that does not apply to every state. Among other feasible, if less likely, outcomes: the Court could use Prop 8 to declare all such bans unconstitutional, legalizing gay marriage everywhere.

    Whatever happens with the high court, it seems likely that gay marriage will continue its spread through the land. So what happens, then, to the institution of marriage? The impact is likely to be felt near and far, both fleetingly and more permanently, in ways confounding to partisans on both sides.

    RULES FOR A MORE PERFECT UNION

    Not all is broken within modern marriage, of course. On the contrary: the institution is far more flexible and forgiving than it used to be. In the wake of women’s large-scale entry into the workplace, men are less likely than they once were to be saddled with being a family’s sole breadwinner, and can carve out a life that includes the close companionship of their children. Meanwhile, women are less likely to be saddled with the sole responsibility for child care and housework, and can envision a life beyond the stove top and laundry basket.

    And yet for many couples, as Bianchi, the UCLA sociologist, has pointed out, the modern ideal of egalitarianism has proved “quite difficult to realize.” Though men are carrying more of a domestic workload than in the past, women still bear the brunt of the second shift. Among couples with children, when both spouses work full-time, women do 32 hours a week of housework, child care, shopping, and other family-related services, compared with the 21 hours men put in. Men do more paid work—45 hours, compared with 39 for women—but still have more free time: 31 hours, compared with 25 for women. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists and professors of public policy at the University of Michigan, have shown that happiness rates among women have dropped even as women have acquired more life options. One possible cause is the lingering inequity in male-female marriage: women’s at-home workload can become so burdensome that wives opt out of the paid workforce—or sit at the office making mental lists of the chores they do versus the chores their husbands do, and bang their heads on their desks in despair.

    Not that everything is easy for fathers in dual-earner couples, who now feel afflicted by work-life conflict in even greater numbers than their wives (60 percent of men in such couples say they experience this conflict, versus 47 percent of women, according to a 2008 study by the Families and Work Institute). And men face a set of unfair expectations all their own: the Pew Research Center found in 2010 that 67 percent of Americans still believe it’s “very important” that a man be ready to support a family before getting married, while only 33 percent believe the same about women.

    This burden, exacerbated by the economic realities facing many men today, has undoubtedly contributed to marriage’s recent decline. As our economy has transitioned away from manufacturing and industry, men with a high-school education can no longer expect the steady, well-paying union jobs that formerly enabled many to support their families. Outdated assumptions that men should bring something to the table, and that this something should be money, don’t help. Surveying their prospects, many working-class mothers reject marriage altogether, perhaps reasoning that they can support a child, but don’t want a dependent husband.

    A growing body of social science has begun to compare straight and same-sex couples to get at the question of what is female, what is male. The findings are surprising.

    It’s not that people don’t want to marry. Most never-married Americans say they still aspire to marriage, but many of them see it as something grand and out of reach. Getting married is no longer something you do when you are young and foolish and starting out; prosperity is not something spouses build together. Rather, marriage has become a “marker of prestige,” as the sociologist Andrew Cherlin puts it—a capstone of a successful life, rather than its cornerstone. But while many couples have concluded that they are not ready for marriage, they have things backwards. It’s not that they aren’t ready for marriage; it’s that marriage isn’t ready for the realities of 21st-century life. Particularly for less affluent, less educated Americans, changing economic and gender realities have dismantled the old institution, without constructing any sort of replacement.

    As we attempt to come up with a more functional model, research on same-sex unions can provide what Gary Gates of the Williams Institute calls an “important counterfactual.” Although gays and lesbians cannot solve all that ails marriage, they seem to be working certain things out in ways straight couples might do well to emulate, chief among them a back-to-the-drawing-board approach to divvying up marital duties. A growing body of scholarship on household division of labor shows that in many ways, same-sex couples do it better.

    This scholarship got its start in the late 1960s, with a brilliant insight by the sociologist Pepper Schwartz, then a doctoral candidate at Yale. Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval—including changes at the university, which had just begun to admit female undergraduates—gender was, Schwartz says, “all we thought about.” Like many of her peers, she was keen to figure out what women were and what men were: which traits were biological and which social, and where there might be potential for transformational change. “It occurred to me,” she says, that “a naturally occurring experiment” could shed light on these issues. Actually, two experiments: the rise of unmarried heterosexual cohabitation, and the growing visibility of gay and lesbian couples. If she surveyed people in three kinds of relationships—married; straight and cohabiting; and gay and cohabiting—and all showed similarity on some measures, maybe this would say something about both men and women. If the findings didn’t line up, maybe this would say something about marriage.

    After taking a teaching position at the University of Washington (where she remains a faculty member), Schwartz teamed up with a gay colleague, the late Philip Blumstein, to conduct just such a survey, zeroing in on the greater San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle metropolitan areas. It was a huge effort. Unmarried cohabiting couples were not yet easy to find, and gays and lesbians were so leery of being outed that when Schwartz asked a woman who belonged to a lesbian bridge group whether she could interview the other players about their relationships, the woman said, “We don’t even talk about it ourselves.” Schwartz and Blumstein collected responses to 12,000 questionnaires and conducted hundreds of interviews; at one point, they had 20 graduate students helping tabulate data. The project took about a decade, and resulted in a groundbreaking piece of sociology, the book American Couples: Money, Work, Sex.

    What Schwartz and Blumstein found is that gay and lesbian couples were fairer in their dealings with one another than straight couples, both in intent and in practice. The lesbians in the study were almost painfully egalitarian—in some cases putting money in jars and splitting everything down to the penny in a way, Schwartz says, that “would have driven me crazy.” Many unmarried heterosexual cohabitators were also careful about divvying things up, but lesbian couples seemed to take the practice to extremes: “It was almost like ‘my kitty, your litter.’ ” Gay men, like lesbians, were more likely than straight couples to share cooking and chores. Many had been in heterosexual marriages, and when asked whether they had helped their wives with the housework in those prior unions, they usually said they had not. “You can imagine,” Schwartz says, “how irritating I found this.”

    There were still some inequities: in all couples, the person with the higher income had more authority and decision-making power. This was least true for lesbians; truer for heterosexuals; and most true for gay men. Somehow, putting two men together seemed to intensify the sense that “money talks,” as Schwartz and Blumstein put it. They could not hope to determine whether this tendency was innate or social—were men naturally inclined to equate resources with power, or had our culture ingrained that idea in them?—but one way or another, the finding suggested that money was a way men competed with other men, and not just a way for husbands to compete with their wives. Among lesbians, the contested terrain lay elsewhere: for instance, interacting more with the children could be, Schwartz says, a “power move.”

    Lesbians also tended to discuss things endlessly, achieving a degree of closeness unmatched by the other types of couples. Schwartz wondered whether this might account for another finding: over time, sex in lesbian relationships dwindled—a state of affairs she has described as “lesbian bed death.” (The coinage ended up on Schwartz’s Wikipedia page, to her exasperation: “There are other things that I wish I were famous around.”) She posits that lesbians may have had so much intimacy already that they didn’t need sex to get it; by contrast, heterosexual women, whose spouses were less likely to be chatty, found that “sex is a highway to intimacy.” As for men, she eventually concluded that whether they were straight or gay, they approached sex as they might a sandwich: good, bad, or mediocre, they were likely to grab it.

    RULE 1: Negotiate in advance who will empty the trash and who will clean the bathroom.

    Other studies have since confirmed Schwartz and Blumstein’s findings that same-sex couples are more egalitarian. In 2000, when Vermont became the first state to legalize same-sex civil unions, the psychologist Esther Rothblum saw an opportunity to explore how duties get sorted among a broad swath of the same-sex population. Rothblum, now at San Diego State University, is herself a lesbian and had long been interested in the relationships and mental health of lesbians. She also wanted to see how legal recognition affected couples.

    As people from around the country flocked to Vermont to apply for civil-union licenses, Rothblum and two colleagues got their names and addresses from public records and asked them to complete a questionnaire. Then, they asked each of the civil-union couples to suggest friends in same-sex couples who were not in civil unions, and to identify a heterosexual sibling who was married, and wrote those people asking them to participate. This approach helped control for factors like background and upbringing among the subjects. The researchers asked people to rate, on a scale of one to nine, which partner was more likely to do the dishes, repair things around the house, buy groceries. They asked who was more likely to deal with the landlord, punish the children, call the plumber, drive the kids to appointments, give spontaneous hugs, pay compliments. They also asked who was more likely to appreciate the other person’s point of view during an argument.

    They found that, even in the new millennium, married heterosexual couples were very likely to divide duties along old-fashioned gender lines. Straight women were more likely than lesbians to report that their partner paid the mortgage or the rent and the utility bills, and bought groceries, household appliances, even the women’s clothing. These wives were also more likely to say they did the bulk of the cooking, vacuuming, dishes, and laundry. Compared with their husbands, they were far, far more likely to clean the bathroom. They were also more likely than their husbands to perform “relationship maintenance” such as showing affection and initiating serious conversations. When Rothblum and her colleagues held the heterosexual husbands up against the gay men, they found the same pattern. The straight guys were more likely to take care of the lawn, empty the trash, and make household repairs than their partners. They were the ones to fix drinks for company and to drive when the couple went out. They cooked breakfast reasonably often, but not dinner. On all these measures and more, the same-sex couples were far more likely to divide responsibilities evenly. This is not to say that the same-sex couples split each duty half-and-half. One partner might do the same chore regularly, but because there was no default assignment based on gender, such patterns evolved organically, based on preferences and talents.

    Rothblum’s observations are borne out by the couples I interviewed for this piece. “I’m a better cook, so I take on most of that responsibility,” said Seth Thayer, who lives in a small coastal town in Maine. His husband, Greg Tinder, “is a better handyman.” Others spoke of the perils of lopsided relationships. Chris Kast, a Maine newlywed, told me that he and his husband, Byron Bartlett, had both been married to women. In Bartlett’s first marriage, it was tacitly assumed that he would take out the garbage. Now the two men divide tasks by inclination. “I’m more of a Felix Ungar—I notice when something’s dirty—but we both clean,” Kast said. “With Chris and I,” Bartlett added, “we have to get everything done.” Isabelle Dikland, a Washington, D.C., business consultant who is married to Amy Clement, a teacher, told me about a dinner party she recently attended with a group of mostly straight parents. Dikland and Clement, who had just had a second daughter, were extolling the virtues of having two children. The straight mother they were talking with seemed dubious. “If we had a second kid, guess who would do all the work,” she told them. “I’d have to give up my career; I’m already doing everything.” The woman glanced surreptitiously at her husband, at which point Dikland “dropped the subject really quickly.”

    RULE 2: When it comes to parenting, a 50-50 split isn’t necessarily best.

    Charlotte J. Patterson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has arresting visual evidence of the same egalitarianism at work in parenting: compared with husband-and-wife pairs, she has found, same-sex parents tend to be more cooperative and mutually hands-on. Patterson and a colleague, Rachel Farr, have conducted a study of more than 100 same-sex and heterosexual adoptive parents in 11 states and the District of Columbia; it is among the first such studies to include gay fathers. As reported in an article in a forthcoming issue of the journal Child Development, the researchers visited families in their homes, scattered some toys on a blanket, invited the subjects to play with them any way they chose, and videotaped the interactions. “What you see is what they did with that blank slate,” Patterson says. “One thing that I found riveting: the same-sex couples are far more likely to be in there together, and the opposite-sex couples show the conventional pattern—the mom more involved, the dad playing with Tinkertoys by himself.” When the opposite-sex couples did parent simultaneously, they were more likely to undermine each other by talking at cross-purposes or suggesting different toys. The lesbian mothers tended to be egalitarian and warm in their dealings with one another, and showed greater pleasure in parenting than the other groups did. Same-sex dads were also more egalitarian in their division of labor than straight couples, though not as warm or interactive as lesbian moms. (Patterson says she and her colleagues may need to refine their analysis to take into account male ways of expressing warmth.)

    By and large, all of the families studied, gay and straight alike, were happy, high functioning, and financially secure. Each type of partner—gay, straight; man, woman—reported satisfaction with his or her family’s parenting arrangement, though the heterosexual wife was less content than the others, invariably saying that she wanted more help from her husband. “Of all the parents we’ve studied, she’s the least satisfied with the division of labor,” says Patterson, who is in a same-sex partnership and says she knows from experience that deciding who will do what isn’t always easy.

    Even as they are more egalitarian in their parenting styles, same-sex parents resemble their heterosexual counterparts in one somewhat old-fashioned way: a surprising number establish a division of labor whereby one spouse becomes the primary earner and the other stays home. Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me that, “in terms of economics,” same-sex couples with children resemble heterosexual couples with children much more than they resemble childless same-sex couples. You might say that gay parents are simultaneously departing from traditional family structures and leading the way back toward them.

    In his seminal book A Treatise on the Family, published in 1981, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker argued that “specialization,” whereby one parent stays home and the other does the earning, is the most efficient way of running a household, because the at-home spouse enables the at-work spouse to earn more. Feminists, who had been fighting for domestic parity, not specialization, deplored this theory, rightly fearing that it could be harnessed to keep women at home. Now the example of gay and lesbian parents might give us all permission to relax a little: maybe sometimes it really is easier when one parent works and the other is the supplementary or nonearning partner, either because this is the natural order of things or because the American workplace is so greedy and unforgiving that something or somebody has to give. As Martha Ertman, a University of Maryland law professor, put it to me, many families just function better when the same person is consistently “in charge of making vaccinations happen, making sure the model of the World War II monument gets done, getting the Christmas tree home or the challah bought by 6 o’clock on Friday.” The good news is that the decision about which parent plays this role need not have anything to do with gender.

    More surprising still, guess who is most likely to specialize. Gay dads. Using the most recent Census Bureau data, Gary Gates found that 32 percent of married heterosexual couples with children have only one parent in the labor force, compared with 33 percent of gay-male couples with children. (Lesbians also specialize, but not at such high rates, perhaps because they are so devoted to equality, or perhaps because their earnings are lower—women’s median wage is 81 percent that of men—and not working is an unaffordable luxury.) While the percentage point dividing gay men from straight couples is not statistically significant, it’s intriguing that gay dads are as likely as straight women to be stay-at-home parents.

    Gay men’s decisions about breadwinning can nonetheless be fraught, as many associate employment with power. A study published in the Journal of GLBT Family Studies in 2005 by Stephanie Jill Schacher and two colleagues found that when gay men do specialize, they don’t have an easy time deciding who will do what: some stay-at-home dads perceived that their choice carried with it a loss in prestige and stature. As a result, gay men tended to fight not over who got to stay home, but over who didn’t have to. “It’s probably the biggest problem in our relationship,” said one man interviewed for that study. Perhaps what Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name” is inherent in child-rearing, and will always be with us.

    RULE 3: Don’t want a divorce? Don’t marry a woman.

    Three years after they first gathered information from the couples who received licenses in Vermont, Esther Rothblum and her colleagues checked back to evaluate the condition of their relationships. Overall, the researchers found that the quality of gay and lesbian relationships was higher on many measures than that of the straight control group (the married heterosexual siblings), with more compatibility and intimacy, and less conflict.

    Which is not to say same-sex couples don’t have conflict. When they fight, however, they fight fairer. They can even fight funny, as researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley showed in an article published in 2003, based on a study of couples who were navigating potentially tense interactions. Recruiting married straight couples as well as gays and lesbians in committed relationships, the researchers orchestrated a scenario in which one partner had to bring up an area of conflict to discuss with the other. In same-sex couples, the partner with the bone to pick was rated “less belligerent and less domineering” than the straight-couple counterpart, while the person on the receiving end was less aggressive and showed less fear or tension. The same-sex “initiator” also displayed less sadness and “whining,” and more affection, joy, and humor. In trying to make sense of the disparity, the researchers noted that same-sex couples valued equality more, and posited that the greater negativity of straight couples “may have to do with the standard status hierarchy between men and women.” Which perhaps boils down to something like this: straight women see themselves as being less powerful than men, and this breeds hostility.

    When it comes to conflict, a crucial variable separates many gay and lesbian couples from their straight counterparts: children. As Rothblum points out, for married heterosexual parents, happiness tends to be U-shaped: high at the beginning of marriage, then dipping to a low, then high again. What happens in that low middle is child-rearing. Although the proportion of gay and lesbian couples with children is increasing, same-sex couples are still less likely than straight couples to be parents. Not all research comparing same-sex and married straight couples has done an adequate job of controlling for this important difference. One that did, a 2008 study in the Journal of Family Psychology, looked at couples during their first 10 years of cohabitation. It found that childless lesbians had a higher “relationship quality” than their child-free gay-male and heterosexual counterparts. And yet a 2010 study in the same journal found that gay-male, lesbian, and straight couples alike experienced a “modest decline in relationship quality” in the first year of adopting a child. As same-sex couples become parents in greater numbers, they could well endure some of the same strife as their straight peers. It remains to be seen whether the different parenting styles identified by Charlotte Patterson might blunt some of the ennui of child-rearing.

    As for divorce, the data are still coming in. A 2006 study of Sweden and Norway found higher dissolution rates among same-sex couples in registered partnerships than among married straight people. Yet in the United States, a study by the Williams Institute has found that gay unions have lower dissolution rates than straight ones. It is simply too soon to tell with any certainty whether gay marriages will be more or less durable in the long run than straight ones. What the studies to date do (for the most part) suggest is this: despite—or maybe because of—their perfectionist approach to egalitarianism, lesbian couples seem to be more likely to break up than gay ones. Pepper Schwartz noted this in the early 1980s, as did the 2006 study of same-sex couples in Sweden and Norway, in which researchers speculated that women may have a “stronger general sensitivity to the quality of relationships.” Meaning maybe women are just picky, and when you have two women, you have double the pickiness. So perhaps the real threat to marriage is: women.

    THE CONTAGION EFFECT

    Whatever this string of studies may teach us about marriage and gender dynamics, the next logical question becomes this: Might such marriages do more than merely inform our understanding of straight marriage—might their attributes trickle over to straight marriage in some fashion?

    Researchers found that same-sex couples tend to fight fairer. In conflict, they are “less belligerent and less domineering” than straight couples, and engage in less “whining.” In the course of my reporting this year in states that had newly legalized same-sex marriage, people in the know—wedding planners, officiants, fiancés and fiancées—told me time and again that nuptial fever had broken out around them, among gay and straight couples alike. Same-sex weddings seemed to be bestowing a new frisson on the idea of getting hitched, or maybe restoring an old one. At the Gay and Lesbian Wedding Expo in downtown Baltimore, just a few weeks after same-sex marriage became legal in Maryland, Drew Vanlandingham, who describes himself as a “wedding planner designer,” was delighted at how business had picked up. Here it was, January, and many of his favorite venues were booked into late summer - much to the consternation, he said, of his straight brides. “They’re like, ‘I better get a move on!’ ” It was his view that in Maryland, both teams were now engaged in an amiable but spirited race to the altar.

    Ministers told me of wedding booms in their congregations. In her years as the pastor of the Unitarian church in Rockville, Maryland, Lynn Strauss said she had grown accustomed to a thin wedding roster: some years she might perform one or two services; other years, none. But this year, “my calendar is full of weddings,” she said. “Two in March, one in April, one in May, one in September, one in October—oh, and one in July.” Three were same-sex weddings, but the rest were heterosexual. When I attended the church’s first lesbian wedding, in early March, I spoke with Steve Greene and Ellen Rohan, who had recently been married by Strauss. It was Steve’s third marriage, Ellen’s second. Before he met Ellen, Steve had sworn he would never marry again. Ellen said the arrival of same-sex marriage had influenced their feelings. “Marriage,” she said simply, “is on everyone’s mind.”

    Robert M. Hardies, who is a pastor at the Unitarian All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., and who is engaged to be married to his longtime partner and co-parent, Chris Nealon, told me that he has seen “a re-enchantment of marriage” among those who attend same-sex ceremonies: “Straight folks come to [same-sex] weddings, and I watch it on their face—there’s a feeling that this is really special. Suddenly marriage is sexy again.” We could chalk these anecdotes up to the human desire to witness love that overcomes obstacles—the same desire behind all romantic comedies, whether Shakespeare’s or Hollywood’s. But could something a bit less romantic also be at work?

    There is some reason to suppose that attitudes about marriage could, in fact, be catching. The phenomenon known as “social contagion” lies at the heart of an increasingly prominent line of research on how our behavior and emotions affect the people we know. One famous example dates from 2008, when James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis published a study showing that happiness “spreads” through social networks. They arrived at this conclusion via an ingenious crunching of data from a long-running medical study involving thousands of interconnected residents—and their children, and later their grandchildren—in Framingham, Massachusetts. “Emotional states can be transferred directly from one individual to another,” they found, across three degrees of separation. Other studies have shown that obesity, smoking habits, and school performance may also be catching.

    Most relevant, in a working paper that is under submission to a sociology journal, the Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott, along with her co-authors, Fowler and Christakis, has identified a contagion effect for divorce. Divorce, she found, can spread among friends. She told me that she also suspects that tending to the marriages of friends can help preserve your own. McDermott says she readily sees how marriage could itself be contagious. Intriguingly, some of the Scandinavian countries where same-sex unions have been legal for a decade or more have seen a rise, not a fall, in marriage rates. In response to conservative arguments that same-sex marriage had driven a stake through the heart of marriage in northern Europe, the Yale University law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. and Darren Spedale in 2006 published an analysis showing that in the decade since same-sex partnerships became legal, heterosexual marriage rates had increased 10.7 percent in Denmark, 12.7 percent in Norway, and 28.8 percent in Sweden. Divorce rates had dropped in all three countries. Although there was no way to prove cause and effect, the authors allowed, you could safely say that marriage had not been harmed.

    So let’s suppose for a moment that marital behavior is catching. How, exactly, might it spread? I found one possible vector of contagion inside the Washington National Cathedral, a neo-Gothic landmark that towers watchfully over the Washington, D.C., skyline. The seat of the bishop of an Episcopal diocese that includes D.C. and parts of Maryland, the cathedral is a symbol of American religious life, and strives to provide a spiritual home for the nation, frequently hosting interfaith events and programs. Presiding over it is the Very Reverend Gary Hall, an Episcopal priest and the cathedral’s dean. Earlier this year, Hall announced that the cathedral would conduct same-sex weddings, a declaration that attracted more attention than he expected. Only people closely involved with the church and graduates of the private schools on its grounds can marry there. Even so, it is an influential venue, and Hall used the occasion to argue that same-sex couples offer an image of “radical” equality that straight couples can profitably emulate. He believes, moreover, that their example can be communicated through intermediaries like him: ministers and counselors gleaning insights from same-sex couples, and transmitting them, as it were, to straight ones. Hall says that counseling same-sex couples in preparation for their ceremonies has already altered the way he counsels men and women.

    “I have a list of like 12 issues that people need to talk about that cause conflict,” said Hall, who is lanky, with short gray hair and horn-rims, and who looks like he could be a dean of pretty much anything: American literature, political philosophy, East Asian studies. As we talked in his office one morning this spring, sunlight poured through a bank of arched windows onto an Oriental rug. Over the years, he has amassed a collection of cheesy 1970s paperbacks with names like Open Marriage and Total Woman, which he calls “books that got people into trouble.” The dean grew up in Hollywood, and in the 1990s was a priest at a church in Pasadena where he did many same-sex blessings (a blessing being a ceremony that stops short of legal marriage). He is as comfortable talking about Camille Paglia and the LGBT critique of marriage as he is about Holy Week. He is also capable of saying things like “The problem with genital sex is that it involves us emotionally in a way that we’re not in control of.”

    When Hall sees couples for premarital preparation, he gives them a list of hypothetical conflicts to take home, hash out, and report back on. Everybody fights, he tells them. The people who thrive in marriage are the ones who can handle disagreement and make their needs known. So he presents them with the prime sticking points: affection and lovemaking; how to deal with in-laws; where holidays will be spent; outside friendships. He talks to them about parenting roles, and chores, and money—who will earn it and who will make decisions about it.

    Like Esther Rothblum, he has found that heterosexual couples persist in approaching these topics with stereotypical assumptions. “You start throwing out questions for men and women: ‘Who’s going to take care of the money?’ And the guy says, ‘That’s me.’ And you ask: ‘Who’s responsible for birth control?’ And the guy says, ‘That’s her department.’ ” By contrast, he reports, same-sex couples “have thought really hard about how they’re going to share the property, the responsibilities, the obligations in a mutual way. They’ve had to devote much more thought to that than straight couples, because the straight couples pretty much still fall back on old modes.”

    Now when Hall counsels heterosexuals, “I’m really pushing back on their patriarchal assumptions: that the woman’s got to give up her career for the guy; that the guy is going to take care of the money.” Every now and then, he says, he has a breakthrough, and a straight groom realizes that, say, contraception is his concern too. Hall says the same thing is happening in the offices of any number of pastors, rabbis, and therapists. “You’re not going to be able to talk to heterosexual couples where there’s a power imbalance and talk to a homosexual couple where there is a power mutuality,” and not have the conversations impact one another. As a result, he believes there will be changes to marriage, changes that some people will find scary. “When [conservatives] say that gay marriage threatens my marriage, I used to say, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ Now I say, ‘Yeah, it does. It’s asking you a crucial question about your marriage that you may not want to answer: If I’m a man, am I actually sharing the duties and responsibilities of married life equally with my wife?’ Same-sex marriage gives us another image of what marriage can be.”

    Hall argues that same-sex marriage stands to change even the wedding service itself. For a good 1,000 years, he notes, the Christian Church stayed out of matrimony, which was primarily a way for society to regulate things like inheritance. But ever since the Church did get involved, the wedding ceremony has tended to reflect the gender mores of the time. For example, the Book of Common Prayer for years stated that a wife must love, honor, and obey her husband, treating him as her master and lord. That language is long gone, but vestiges persist: the tradition of the father giving away the bride dates from an era when marriage was a property transfer and the woman was the property. In response to the push for same-sex marriage, Hall says, the General Convention, the governing council of the entire Episcopal Church, has devised a liturgy for same-sex ceremonies (in most dioceses, these are blessings) that honors but alters this tradition so that both spouses are presented by sponsors.

    “The new service does not ground marriage in a doctrine of creation and procreation,” Hall says. “It grounds marriage in a kind of free coming-together of two people to live out their lives.” A study group has convened to look at the Church’s teachings on marriage, and in the next couple of years, Hall expects, the General Convention will adopt a new service for all Episcopal weddings. He is hopeful that the current same-sex service will serve as its basis.

    The legalization of same-sex marriage is likely to affect even members of churches that have not performed such ceremonies. Delman Coates, the pastor of Mt. Ennon Baptist, a predominantly African American mega-church in southern Maryland, was active in his state’s fight for marriage equality, presenting it to his parishioners as a civil-rights issue. The topic has also led to some productive, if difficult, conversations about “what the Scriptures are condemning and what they’re confirming.” In particular, he has challenged his flock over what he calls the “typical clobber passages”: certain verses in Leviticus, Romans, and elsewhere that many people interpret as condemnations of homosexuality. These discussions are part of a long-standing effort to challenge people’s thinking about other passages having to do with divorce and premarital sex—issues many parishioners have struggled with at home. Coates preaches that what the Bible is condemning is not modern divorce, but a practice, common in biblical times, whereby men cast out their wives for no good reason. Similarly, he tells them that the “fornication” invoked is something extreme—rape, incest, prostitution. He does not condone illicit behavior or familial dissolution, but he wants the members of his congregation to feel better about their own lives. In exchanges like these, he is making gay marriage part of a much larger conversation about the way we live and love now.

    Gay marriage’s ripples are also starting to be felt beyond churches, in schools and neighborhoods and playgroups. Which raises another question: Will gay and lesbian couples be peacemakers or combatants in the “mommy wars”—the long-simmering struggle between moms who stay at home and moms who work outside it? If you doubt that straight households are paying attention to same-sex ones, consider Danie, a woman who lives with her husband and two children in Bethesda, Maryland. (Danie asked me not to use her last name out of concern for her family’s privacy.) Not long after she completed a master’s degree in Spanish linguistics at Georgetown University, her first baby was born. Because her husband, Jesse, works long hours as a litigator, she decided to become a full-time parent—not an easy decision in work-obsessed Washington, D.C. For a while, she ran a photography business out of their home, partly because she loves photography but partly so she could assure people at dinner parties that she had paying work. Whenever people venture that women who work outside the home don’t judge stay-at-home moms, Danie thinks: Are you freaking kidding me?

    She takes some comfort, however, in the example of a lesbian couple with whom she is friendly. Both women are attorneys, and one stays home with their child. “Their life is exactly the same as ours,” Danie told me, with a hint of vindication. If being a stay-at-home mother is “good enough for her, then what’s my issue? She’s a huge women’s-rights activist.” But while comparing herself with a lesbian couple is liberating in some ways, it also exacerbates the competitive anxiety that afflicts so many modern mothers. The other thing about these two mothers, Danie said, is that they are so relaxed, so happy, so present. Even the working spouse manages to be a super-involved parent, to a much greater extent than most of the working fathers she knows. “I’m a little bit obsessed with them,” she says.

    Related to this is the question of how gay fatherhood might impact heterosexual fatherhood—by, for example, encouraging the idea that men can be emotionally accessible, logistically capable parents. Will the growing presence of gay dads in some communities mean that men are more often included in the endless e‑mail chains that go to parents of preschoolers and birthday-party invitees? As radically as fatherhood has changed in recent decades, a number of antiquated attitudes about dads have proved strangely enduring: Rob Hardies, the pastor at All Souls, reports that when his partner, Chris, successfully folded a stroller before getting on an airplane with their son, Nico, he was roundly congratulated by passersby, as if he had solved a difficult mathematical equation in public. So low are expectations for fathers, even now, that in Stephanie Schacher’s study of gay fathers and their feelings about caregiving, her subjects reported that people would see them walking on the street with their children and say things like “Giving Mom a break?” Hardies thinks that every time he and Chris take their son to the playground or to story hour, they help disrupt this sort of thinking. He imagines moms seeing a man doing this and gently—or maybe not so gently—pointing it out to their husbands. “Two guys somehow manage to get their act together and have a household and cook dinner and raise a child, without a woman doing all the work,” he says. Rather than setting an example that fathers don’t matter, gay men are setting an example that fathers do matter, and that marriage matters, too.

    THE SEX PROBLEM

    When, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Pepper Schwartz asked couples about their sex lives, she arrived at perhaps her most explosive finding: non-monogamy was rampant among gay men, a whopping 82 percent of whom reported having had sex outside their relationship. Slightly more than one-third of gay-male couples felt that monogamy was important; the other two-thirds said that monogamy was unimportant or that they were neutral on the topic. In a funny way, Schwartz says, her findings suggested that same-sex unions (like straight ones) aren’t necessarily about sex. Some gay men made a point of telling her they loved their partners but weren’t physically attracted to them. Others said they wanted to be monogamous but were unsupported in that wish, by their partner, gay culture, or both.

    Schwartz believes that a move toward greater monogamy was emerging among gay men even before the AIDS crisis. Decades later, gay-male couples are more monogamous than they used to be, but not nearly to the same degree as other kinds of couples. In her Vermont research, Esther Rothblum found that 15 percent of straight husbands said they’d had sex outside their relationship, compared with 58 percent of gay men in civil unions and 61 percent of gay men who were partnered but not in civil unions. When asked whether a couple had arrived at an explicit agreement about extra-relational sex, a minuscule 4 percent of straight husbands said they’d discussed it with their partner and determined that it was okay, compared with 40 percent of gay men in civil unions and 49 percent of gay men in partnerships that were not legally recognized. Straight women and lesbians, meanwhile, were united in their commitment to monogamy, lesbians more so than straight women: 14 percent of straight wives said they had had sex outside their marriage, compared with 9 percent of lesbians in civil unions and 7 percent of lesbians who were partnered but not in civil unions.

    The question of whether gays and lesbians will change marriage, or vice versa, is at its thorniest around sex and monogamy. Private behavior could well stay private: when she studied marriage in the Netherlands, Lee Badgett, the University of Massachusetts economist, found that while many same-sex couples proselytize about the egalitarianism of their relationships, they don’t tend to promote non-monogamy, even if they practice it. Then again, some gay-rights advocates, like the writer and sex columnist Dan Savage, argue very publicly that insisting on monogamy can do a couple more harm than good. Savage, who questions whether most humans are cut out for decades of sex with only one person, told me that “monogamy in marriage has been a disaster for straight couples” because it has set unrealistic expectations. “Gay-male couples are much more likely to be realistic about what men are,” he said. Savage’s own marriage started out monogamous; the agreement was that if either partner cheated, this would be grounds for ending the relationship. But when he and his husband decided to adopt a child, Savage suggested that they relax their zero-tolerance policy on infidelity. He felt that risking family dissolution over such an incident no longer made sense. His husband later suggested they explicitly allow each other occasional dalliances, a policy Savage sees as providing a safety valve for the relationship. If society wants marriage to be more resilient, he argues, we must make it more “monagamish.”

    This is, to be sure, a difficult argument to win: a husband proposing non-monogamy to his wife on the grounds that it is in the best interest of a new baby would have a tough time prevailing in the court of public opinion. But while most gay-marriage advocates stop short of championing Savage’s “wiggle room,” some experts say that gay men are better at talking more openly about sex. Naveen Jonathan, a family therapist and a professor at Chapman University, in California, says he sees many gay partners hammer out an elaborate who-can-do-what-when sexual contract, one that says, “These are the times and the situations where it’s okay to be non-monogamous, and these are the times and the situations where it is not.” While some straight couples have deals of their own, he finds that for the most part, they simply presume monogamy. A possible downside of this assumption: straight couples are far less likely than gay men to frankly and routinely discuss sex, desire, and the challenges of sexual commitment.

    Other experts question the idea that most gay males share a preference for non-monogamous relationships, or will in the long term. Savage’s argument that non-monogamy is a safety valve is “very interesting, but it really is no more than a claim,” says Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Garcia points out that not all men are relentlessly sexual beings, and not all men want an open relationship. “In some ways, same-sex couples are healthier—they tend to have these negotiations more,” he says. But negotiating can be stressful: in many cases, Garcia notes, one gay partner would prefer to be monogamous, but gives in to the other partner.

    So which version will prevail: non-monogamous marriage, or marriage as we conventionally understand it? It’s worth pointing out that in the U.S., same-sex unions are slightly more likely between women, and non-monogamy is not a cause women tend to champion. And some evidence suggests that getting married changes behavior: William Eskridge and Darren Spedale found that in the years after Norway, Sweden, and Denmark instituted registered partnerships, many same-sex couples reported placing a greater emphasis on monogamy, while national rates of HIV infections declined.

    Sex, then, may be one area where the institution of marriage pushes back against norms that have been embraced by many gay couples. Gary Hall of the National Cathedral allows that in many ways, gay relationships offer a salutary “critique” of marriage, but argues that the marriage establishment will do some critiquing back. He says he would not marry two people who intended to be non-monogamous, and believes that monogamy will be a “critical issue” in the dialogue between the gay community and the Church. Up until now, he says, progressive churches have embraced “the part of gay behavior that looks like straight behavior,” but at some point, churches also have to engage gay couples whose behavior doesn’t conform to monogamous ideals. He hopes that, in the course of this give-and-take, the church ends up reckoning with other ongoing cultural changes, from unmarried cohabitation to the increasing number of adults who choose to live as singles. “How do we speak credibly to people about their sexuality and their sexual relationships?” he asks. “We really need to rethink this.”

    So yes, marriage will change. Or rather, it will change again. The fact is, there is no such thing as traditional marriage. In various places and at various points in human history, marriage has been a means by which young children were betrothed, uniting royal houses and sealing alliances between nations. In the Bible, it was a union that sometimes took place between a man and his dead brother’s widow, or between one man and several wives. It has been a vehicle for the orderly transfer of property from one generation of males to the next; the test by which children were deemed legitimate or bastard; a privilege not available to black Americans; something parents arranged for their adult children; a contract under which women, legally, ceased to exist. Well into the 19th century, the British common-law concept of “unity of person” meant a woman became her husband when she married, giving up her legal standing and the right to own property or control her own wages.

    Many of these strictures have already loosened. Child marriage is today seen by most people as the human-rights violation that it is. The Married Women’s Property Acts guaranteed that a woman could get married and remain a legally recognized human being. The Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia did away with state bans on interracial marriage. By making it easier to dissolve marriage, no-fault divorce helped ensure that unions need not be lifelong. The recent surge in single parenthood, combined with an aging population, has unyoked marriage and child-rearing. History shows that marriage evolves over time. We have every reason to believe that same-sex marriage will contribute to its continued evolution.

    The argument that gays and lesbians are social pioneers and bellwethers has been made before. Back in 1992, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens suggested that gays and lesbians were a harbinger of a new kind of union, one subject to constant renegotiation and expected to last only as long as both partners were happy with it. Now that these so-called harbingers are looking to commit to more-binding relationships, we will have the “counterfactual” that Gary Gates talks about: we will be better able to tell which marital stresses and pleasures are due to gender, and which are not.

    In the end, it could turn out that same-sex marriage isn’t all that different from straight marriage. If gay and lesbian marriages are in the long run as quarrelsome, tedious, and unbearable; as satisfying, joyous, and loving as other marriages, we’ll know that a certain amount of strife is not the fault of the alleged war between men and women, but just an inevitable thing that happens when two human beings are doing the best they can to find a way to live together.

Online Dating Leads to Better Marriages

    I met my husband at a party in a bygone era. He had no online profile. Neither did I. We didn’t trade email addresses, as neither of us had one of those either. He seemed like a good guy–and a party was as good a venue as any for meeting a future spouse. He still seems like a good guy and I rather doubt I would have done any better if I had dated online (assuming that had been an option). But I guess I’m old fashioned, as a new study suggests that, on average, we can do better if we find our spouse using a computer.

    In the decades since that long-gone, offline era, people have increasingly been using the Internet to search for compatible partners. In by far the largest study of its type, social neuroscientist John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago and his colleagues report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that online meetings have resulted in a surprising number of successful marriages. From an online survey of 19,131 American adults who married between 2005 and 2012, the researchers revealed, for the first time, that a large proportion of marriages are emerging from online interactions. “I was astounded to see that over a third or marriages are now starting online. None of us knew that,” Cacioppo says.

    Cacioppo’s team also found that meeting your spouse online was associated with a lower rate of marital breakups than were offline venues (5.96 versus 7.67 percent). And couples who met online also reported a higher rate of marital satisfaction than those who met without a computer intermediary. (Despite meeting online, all of the couples got together in person before they married.) The differences are slight, but meaningful. After all, where you happen to meet your spouse plays only small role in the success of a relationship. “The fact that it is significant at all and that online is superior to offline to me is surprising,” Cacioppo points out. “That breakup and marital satisfaction follow same pattern suggests that something about meeting online that is associated with better outcomes.”

    The study wasn’t designed to address what that “something” might be, but possibilities include access to more potential partners online and the fact that communicating electronically has, in other studies, led to greater self-disclosure and liking of the other person. (For more about the psychology of online dating, see “How to Find Love in a Digital World,” by Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis and Susan Sprecher, Scientific American Mind, September/October 2012.) The results cannot be explained by demographic factors such as the fact that those who met their spouse online tended to be better educated and more likely to be employed, as the scientists controlled for those influences. They could however, stem from personality factors such as being a better decision-maker, perhaps, or more ready for commitment.

    Not all online - or offline - settings resulted in equal levels of marital satisfaction. Chat rooms and virtual worlds proved to be less positive places to rendezvous than were social networking and online dating sites. Cacioppo suspects that part of the difference lies in the degree to which people portray their true selves on these sites. In virtual worlds, he points out, you may have a made-up persona, whereas social media may promote greater authenticity, although he is quick to note that the study did not test this.

    Among offline meeting places, marital satisfaction was greater for those who met through school, a place of worship or a social gathering (but not a bar or club) than those who first got together at work, on blind date, through a family connection or at a bar or club. Being real could play a role here, too. Blind dates and bars, after all, may encourage people to dress or act differently than they usually do. Meanwhile, other (possibly political) problems may plague the work setting or family influences.

    The study was funded by EHarmony.com, which could make the results suspect. But Cacioppo insisted on safeguards. Two independent statisticians oversaw and verified the analysis of the data. In addition, the company agreed from the start that the results would be published no matter what they were, that EHarmony would not be a focus of the study, and that all data would remain public.

    In defending his potential conflict of interest, Cacioppo (who is a member of the company’s advisory board) says he was open about it from the start. He believes the ends are worth the means, as long as the science is done right. “There has been very little government funding for research about love, marriage and relationships in last several decades,” he says. “It’s easy to make fun of, but it’s really important for us to understand, because we aren’t doing it very well.” Industry, he says, may be the relationship scientist’s only partner.

    It is clear from this work that the landscape of dating and marriage is shifting and changing. A decade ago, people stigmatized online data. “Poor John has to date on line. He’s such a loser,” Cacioppo quips. But few people think that way now. “Dating, or at least meeting, people online is no longer stigmatized. It is not even associated with adverse outcomes.”

    Cacioppo himself, however, is an outlier. He met his coauthor and spouse, Stephanie, on a panel at a scientific conference in Shanghai two and a half years ago. “I turned to her and said, ‘If I start to snore, punch me.’” Cacioppo recalls. It wasn’t a pickup line. “It was authentic,” he says. It seemed to work. Stephanie emailed him when she returned to the University of Geneva, where she was then a faculty member. Their romance is ongoing. “We’re still on our honeymoon,” she says.

Marrying Billionaires

    Eighty-two-year-old Rupert Murdoch won't stay single for long. Nor do any lonely members of his tycoon cohort. What their next wives should expect.

            Rupert Murdoch, I’m told, was sighted upstate last week at Roger Ailes’s Fourth of July party, his sleeves rolled up and looking 20 years younger. There’s nothing like announcing you are starting divorce proceedings against your 44-year-old third wife to make an 82-year-old billionaire feel the onset of spring again.

    As a Fox anchor emailed her friends when the news broke, “Ladies, rev your engines.”

    Except for the age of the newly single men on the dating market—80 is the new 55 - it is astonishing to see how nothing has changed in the social dynamics of divorce. The ease with which the Viagra set can find themselves a younger wife, compared to women of the same age (or even 20 years younger), remains the same since the William Howard Taft era. Plus, high-gloss girlfriends who close the marriage deal often now discover that, thanks to the little blue pill, there is no safe plateau even for third wives.

    Eighty-year-old Leonard Lauder, of the multibillion-dollar cosmetics fortune, who was widowed in 2011 after 52 years of devoted marriage to the esteemed Evelyn, appears poised to marry 54-year-old Linda E. Johnson, an elegant brunette and president and CEO of the Brooklyn Public Library. Their whirlwind courtship left in the dust the battalion of 65-year-old Park Avenue widows who thought charming rendezvous at the same dinner parties in Aspen for years meant they might be the next Mrs. Lauder.

    This summer in Southampton, the portentous 82-year-old Hungarian philanthropist George Soros, who is worth about as much as the national debt, is tying the knot for the third time to 40-year-old Japanese-American Tamiko Bolton. He proposed last summer, apparently with a Graff diamond ring in a platinum setting on a rose gold band. Hard news for his ex-mistress, a Brazilian soap-opera star who in 2010 allegedly hurled a glass light at him when she learned he was allocating their shared $2 million Manhattan love nest to another woman.

    It’s hard to imagine any of these newly eligible guys needing to post their dating profile on Match.com. But that’s what 71-year-old media goddess Martha Stewart announced she is doing on the Today show in May, adding that she is “open to all kinds of people” and loves “to be surprised.”

    For years I have had a “Sex and Decorating” theory of rich divorces: the more decorating going on, I have surmised, the less that sex is a wifely priority. Excited at the châtelaine role of multiple houses; the attention of art buyers, fashion consultants, interior designers, and purveyors of fine antiques; and more deadly still, the envy of others in competition for the attention that goes with them, former mistresses forget why they were signed up in the first place. Their husbands on the dinner-party circuit start to get that rogue-elephant look that signifies their first request for an update on the small print in the pre-nup.

    The alluring, sexually direct Wendi Deng briefly became an icon of uxorious protectiveness when she leapt in front of her husband during a British parliamentary committee hearing on phone-hacking, slapping an assailant bearing a shaving-cream pie. All agree she gave Rupert an extended second wind before he began to find her a hyper-social irritation with a challenging Chinese accent. “I don’t understand a word she says,” he confided to a mutual friend after 10 years of marriage.

    What’s interesting about the new crop of billionaire-geezer engagements is that formerly termed “cupcakes” are out of style. Wendi Murdoch, a glamorous dynamo whom I have always found extremely engaging, was the harbinger of this billionaire dating trend. She has an MBA (from the Yale School of Management), and so does the next Mrs. Soros, who started an Internet dietary-supplement-and-vitamin-sales company and now has developed a “web based yoga platform.” Leonard Lauder’s charming fiancée likewise is a businesswoman of substance.

    What an encouraging trend! Except will it lead to the blooming a few years hence of a new marital theory of Sex and Substance Overload?

    One common denominator of super-affluent alpha men is the conviction, unchallenged every day, that the world revolves around them. It’s not enough anymore to have a good-looking geisha in your life who nurtures your off-duty creature comforts. No, today what they want is a fabulous-looking, high-powered, boldface Washington-networked alpha woman in her mid-30s or well-groomed 40s who at the same time will be able to drop everything and sail off on a boat to the Virgin Islands or perform like a porn star the same week as a board meeting (hers).

Language

    Institutions aren’t immutable. The meanings of words aren’t fixed. The newly changing definitions of the word “marriage” in English dictionaries, as reported last week, to encompass same-sex unions nicely illustrate both these truths.

    Polling evidence shows majority support for gay marriage. The most persistent objection to legislative reform is that marriage, by definition, means the union of a man and woman. Yet the institution of marriage has always adapted to shifting mores. Allowing women to own property independently, recognising marital breakdown as grounds for divorce and criminalising marital rape haven’t undermined marriage. They’ve strengthened it by eliminating injustices that violate the ideal of equal citizenship.

    Enabling same-sex couples to marry is that type of moderate, stabilising reform. Their continued exclusion would eventually chip away at the legitimacy of marriage. Imagine what would have happened in the US if the Supreme Court had not, in 1967, invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage across the country. If it were still a discriminatory institution, marriage would by now be a damaged one.

    The traditionalist Coalition for Marriage attacks the “mangling of the English language” in same-sex unions. Its misunderstanding of how language works replicates its failure to grasp how institutions adapt.

    Language reflects how we perceive the world, not the other way round. Because most people, especially the young, see nothing unnatural in same-sex unions, the terms “marriage”, “husband” and “wife” are naturally coming to be understood in extended senses. These are making their way into general usage. Advances in homosexual equality are enriching the language as well as buttressing our institutions.

Hugh Grant

    Of all the films that brought Hugh Grant fame and fortune, one drew unqualified praise. It is the story of a womanising cad who discovers the meaning of being a father figure.

    Grant’s character in About a Boy learns that intimacy with another human being is not as frightening as he thought — but he refuses to change completely.

    The actor seemed to find unexpected depths in the role. Grant, said The Washington Post, lent the part “layer upon layer of desire, terror, ambivalence and self-awareness”.

    And that, perhaps, is a clue to how to interpret the news last week that the man who defines the English for filmgoers worldwide has taken an unusual path to parenthood.

    The disclosure that the actor went in 15 months from childless playboy to largely absent father of three set off a national conversation about men and commitment, tinged with shock that any man, let alone a public figure, could have made two women pregnant at the same time.

    It emerged that as well as the two children he fathered in a “fleeting” relationship with Tinglan Hong, reportedly a Chinese restaurant worker, Grant also has a child with Anna Eberstein, a Swedish freelance television producer. The birth was re-registered in December to name Hugh John Mungo Grant as the father, and both women, whose pregnancies overlapped, now live near his London home.

    If this were simply the story of a wealthy star and his private life, it might have been a tabloid tale for a day or two and then died.

    Instead, it touched a nerve. The condemnation, apparently universal among women and shared by many men, suggested widespread shame and guilt over the 2m lone parents in the UK and the fathers who are missing from the exhausting grind of caring for young children.

    It also threw new light on Grant’s campaign against press intrusion as the public face of Hacked Off, an organisation that seeks to hold newspapers to account.

    “Can’t stand the man,” ran the most popular comment under a newspaper column published online. “ don’t watch his films after the Hacked Off campaign and he is the last person on earth to give lessons on behaviour to the press after these episodes and Divine Brown.”

    The reference to Brown was a reminder of an earlier occasion in which wit and self-deprecating charm got Grant out of trouble. He had been arrested with a prostitute two weeks before the release of his first studio-financed Hollywood film, but with a television interview or two all was forgiven.

    This time the outcome is less certain. What does that teach us about British attitudes to modern men?

    “HE’S the most charming man on the planet,” a friend, speaking on condition of anonymity, said last week. “He shares with Cary Grant not just a surname but a sort of English charm that no one else has. And he uses it ruthlessly. But he can’t bear commitment.”

    It was a conclusion reached by strangers and friends alike and explains the story’s resonance. Experts say the nature of male commitment in Britain has changed. Men are now less likely to commit to a woman just because she is pregnant. Paradoxically, they are more likely to engage with the child.

    “Men of my father’s generation took a passive role: they brought in the money and didn’t get actively involved,” said Susan Quilliam, a relationship psychologist. “Guys nowadays, if they plan a family, they want to get involved. But that’s paralleled by a growing reluctance to be an active parent in certain situations. If the father isn’t consulted , the woman is far more likely to say, ‘Well, actually I don’t need you,’ and the father to say, ‘I’m not taking responsibility.’ ”

    By all accounts, including his own, Grant was thrilled to become a father the first and third times, with Hong. He bought her a house in his cousin’s name to keep her out of the press and stayed away from the birth of their daughter, Tabitha, for the same reason. On the second day he could not resist visiting her in hospital and the story broke.

    Later the parents (they are not a couple in the conventional sense) organised a christening. “He doesn’t have a relationship with the mother of his children, as such,” said one of his circle. “But everything has been done as it would be if they did have a relationship. It’s all very much on his terms, which is sort of the deal with him.”

    Was parenthood planned? He says not, but some friends have doubts — especially since the arrival of a brother for Tabitha in December 2012. His son with Eberstein had arrived three months earlier and Grant’s reaction is unrecorded. In Sweden, her family is delighted.

    “I don’t know how you can have two children with someone by accident,” said a friend. “His line, if there is one, is that it’s all slightly happened to him rather than the other way round. But I would say that was kind of wishful thinking.

    “Pretty obviously he has got a problem with commitment. He’s not someone who thinks marriage is a very interesting option and I think he would say his friends’ marriages are not particularly good. He sees it as a trap. He doesn’t make any secret of that, really.”

    So Grant remains free to pursue the life of a single man while visiting his young families when it suits him.

    The real Hugh Grant is complex, however. Those who know him well say his ambivalent embrace of fatherhood is part of a mass of contradictions that make him who he is. On the one hand, he is a dutiful son from an understated, old-fashioned, middle-class family, and he wants his offspring to experience a similar childhood.

    And on the other . . . Only Grant, perhaps, could have got away with the scene in About a Boy in which he is asked to be a godparent by a couple who think they see another side to him. As they hold their tiny daughter, they are shocked by his response.

    “Listen, I’m really, really touched,” says his character, Will Freeman. “But you must be joking. I couldn’t possibly think of a worse godfather for Imogen.

    “You know me. I’ll drop her at her christening. I’ll forget her birthdays until her 18th, when I’ll take her out and get her drunk . . . and possibly, let’s face it, you know, try and shag her.”

    And that, said a friend last week, “could have been Hugh”.

    SURPRISINGLY, even the Marriage Foundation admits Grant might be doing the right thing by not living with the mothers of his children. Research shows those who live together before getting engaged have poorer marriages — “lower levels of interpersonal commitment to their partners, lower relationship quality and lower levels of confidence in their relationships,” as an American study put it. The effect holds true even when other factors, such as age, ethnicity and religion, are considered.

    The reason, says the foundation’s Harry Benson, is that women and men understand the significance of cohabitation differently. “Women are more likely to be committed early on after moving in,” he says. “The temptation is to say, ‘Well, I do feel really committed, so let’s keep going and have a baby.’ Whereas the man might think, ‘I haven’t yet committed.’ ”

    What happens next is the couple get married because, with a child in their intertwined lives, separation is too much to contemplate. The result is a weaker marriage. Some sociologists are so concerned about this, they think couples should be educated about the benefits of getting engaged before living together.

    This is not to promote marriage for its own sake — all the couples in the research were married — but to combat the uncertainty and insecurity felt by one or both halves of many cohabiting couples and to make poor life decisions less likely.

    Others are more relaxed. “One of the things we’re seeing increasingly is couples and families living ‘alternatively’,” says Denise Knowles, a Relate counsellor. “They don’t actually have to live together to be committed to one another and have a healthy relationship.

    “This is something people struggle to understand, because we’re so entrenched in thinking Mum, Dad and children should all live under the same roof. That’s great if it works but if the parents aren’t so happy, then it’s not healthy for them or for the children to be pushed into an environment that’s not working.”

    It is not just men who are reluctant to commit, she adds. “There are lots of reasons why women are delaying motherhood. They want to focus on careers and everything else is getting pushed back. We’re in education longer; it’s harder to buy your own property and become independent.” Some mothers like a father to be hands-on. “Others are happy with him flitting in and out.”

Relationship Quality

    One in four people in Britain is unhappy with their relationship, according to a new study by relationship charity OnePlusOne. Whether you think that is a surprisingly high number — or even perhaps surprisingly low — the good news is that the charity believes it has the answer to improving your partnership. The key is to focus on RQ, or Relationship Quality. Successful relationships may weather as much hardship and stress as those that fail, but they survive and flourish because of attitude, behaviours and skills that are, in theory, available to us all.

    Forget expensive presents and dramatic displays of affection — what counts are the tiny everyday markers of goodwill: saying “hello” when your partner walks in; thanking them for making dinner. These basics are often lost over the years, and it erodes RQ. What really matters to all of us, says Penny Mansfield, director of OnePlusOne, is the small gesture “that tells us, ‘I see you, I see what matters to you, I value you, I want things to be better for you.’ ” This is the true punctuation of love, “what makes a relationship worthwhile”.

    The charity’s report, Understanding Relationship Quality, published this week, collates evidence-based wisdom from studies spanning more than 50 years. The charity cites one of its own investigations, in which it distinguished two relationship attitudes: “non-developmental” — those of us who are frozen by difficulties, feel imprisoned by misery and leave — and “developmental”. Couples with a “developmental” outlook tend to separate their feelings from the partnership. They’re more able to rationalise unhappiness by recognising that, say, unemployment, or the strain of trying to get pregnant, is causing strain, but the problem may be surmountable.

    These people, says Mansfield, “could get through the difficult phases because they didn’t focus on the distress, they accepted it as just a time they had to cope with”. This long view gives perspective and hope; it prevents you being swamped in the current misery. Simple habits, like reminiscing about good times, or looking fondly through photos, can reinforce those deeper bonds. “This,” says Mansfield, “is an important protective factor, because when people weigh up whether a relationship is good enough to stay or bad enough to go, they often consider the good qualities, and strengths, in that partnership.”

    Despite this optimism, couples with high RQ understand when change is needed. Quality time is often wheeled out as essential to relationships, but spending hours together is not an automatic boost. “People often don’t use that that time well,” says Mansfield. Comfort can breed complacency. She recommends challenging yourself — which doesn’t have to mean skydiving together, but can be something as simple as seeing The Wolf of Wall Street even if you suspect you’ll hate it, because, in taking that chance, “you discover something new in yourself and each other; it’s invigorating to a relationship. You connect differently; and it’s not that the old ways don’t matter, it’s about finding new ways of being connected.”

    Often, when we fall in love, we sigh about finding our “other half”, but according to Mansfield, “differences are important in keeping people together; it gives an edge to your relationship — we don’t want to live with clones”. And yet, of course, we naturally want our own way, so how we manage these differences determines whether our relationship will flourish or falter. It’s important to remember here that the healthiest compromise is not about accepting a disagreeable middle ground.

    “Often,” says Mansfield, “an agreement will be more in favour of one person’s opinion than another, and any harmony is to do with the grace of the person who gives way, and how the other recognises that grace.” RQ isn’t found in rigid equal division of labour: “I do five of this, you do five of that” is unhelpful — whereas conceding when you see a principle matters more to your partner propagates an instinctive fairness and reciprocation. If you don’t compromise with flexibility, says Mansfield, “you feel disconnected”.

    There are pressure points that test all couples — bereavement, money trouble or the transition to parenthood — and at such times retaining humanity and sanity is critical. For the majority, a new baby brings “a drop in satisfaction and a rise in conflict”. And not only because of sleep deprivation and the sex drought (lovemaking is psychologically and physiologically important, but “don’t underestimate non-sexual intimacy”). It’s also because of the decrease in independence, the shock of being forced to make multiple joint decisions. If you go out, do you take the baby, get a babysitter, does one parent stay home? Sleep routines, feeding, childcare, schools . . . “You can no longer say, ‘I’ll do my thing, you do yours’.”

    This is when arguing spikes, and how you manage conflict differentiates high RQ from low. Essentially, contain your bile; focus on the disagreement, not the person; negotiate. “Once one person starts managing their reactions, being more thoughtful, it changes the tenor of the discussion.” Avoid extremes: verbal abuse; storming out; sulking (“The silent treatment is destructive — the atmosphere speaks volumes, of unhappiness and dissatisfaction”). Rather than avoid direct conflict, better to “expect disagreement but manage your emotions”.

    A degree of exasperation comes with the territory — perhaps he’ll always lose his keys, his wallet, and make you late for that dinner party. But, remarkably, those with high RQ manage to be grateful: they consider the great bore and woe of being married to a neat-freak. As Mansfield says, “Often, we’re attracted to people who are different to us, a bit of a challenge. If you look at the flipside and say, ‘They are disorganised but they’re very easygoing’, it can help you manage negativity.”

    Couples with high RQ are not afraid of the awkward conversation. They act, don’t brood. “Good relationships become eroded because when there are difficulties, people silently jump to negative conclusions, decide their partner isn’t as caring as he or she once was. Once those thoughts take hold, behaviours change, and you stop being nice to each other.” Whereas if you can be less idealistic, realise that even the most perfect relationships wax and wane, “you’re far more motivated to do something to maintain it or improve it, or to be supportive”. Mansfield adds: “We have a developmental view of our children — we should take that same attitude with our partners.”

    Yet this is impossible without knowledge of yourself, as well as each other. Our vulnerabilities from childhood re-emerge in our adult relationships — if your mother had post-natal depression, “a crying baby evokes all sorts of emotions, and echoes from your past” — and a partner who understands your sensitivity can make allowances. In strong, solid relationships, “each brings strength to the other’s weaknesses. There is a great opportunity, in an adult partnership, to heal.” RQ is achievable if you stick to the enduring rules of honest, thoughtful connection, says Mansfield: “Recognising the other person, thinking about what they need, and expressing what they mean to you.”

3 Kinds of Marriage

    What’s happening to American matrimony? In 1960, more than 70 percent of all adults were married, including nearly six in ten twentysomethings. Half a century later, just 20 percent of 18-29-year olds were hitched in 2010. Marriage was the norm for young America. Now it's the exception.

    American marriage is not dying. But it is undergoing a metamorphosis, prompted by a transformation in the economic and social status of women and the virtual disappearance of low-skilled male jobs. The old form of marriage, based on outdated social rules and gender roles, is fading. A new version is emerging—egalitarian, committed, and focused on children.

    There was a time when college-educated women were the least likely to be married. Today, they are the most important drivers of the new marriage model. Unlike their European counterparts, increasingly ambivalent about marriage, college graduates in the United States are reinventing marriage as a child-rearing machine for a post-feminist society and a knowledge economy. It’s working, too: Their marriages offer more satisfaction, last longer, and produce more successful children.

    The glue for these marriages is not sex, nor religion, nor money. It is a joint commitment to high-investment parenting—not hippy marriages, but "HIP" marriages. And America needs more of them. Right now, these marriages are concentrated at the top of the social ladder, but they offer the best—perhaps the only—hope for saving the institution.

    The Marriage Gap

    Matrimony is flourishing among the rich but floundering among the poor, leading to a large, corresponding “marriage gap.” Women with at least a BA are now significantly more likely to be married in their early 40s than high-school dropouts.

    During the 1960s and 1970s, it looked as if the elite might turn away from this fusty, constricting institution. Instead, they are now its most popular participants. In 2007, American marriage passed an important milestone: It was the first year when rates of marriage by age 30 were higher for college graduates than for non-graduates. Why should we care about the class gap in marriage? First, two-parent households are less likely to raise children in poverty, since two potential earners are better than one. More than half of children in poverty—56.1 percent, to be exact—are being raised by a single mother.

    Second, children raised by married parents do better on a range of educational, social and economic outcomes. To take one of dozens of illustrations, Brad Wilcox estimates that children raised by married parents are 44% more likely to go to college. It is, inevitably, fiendishly difficult to tease out cause and effect here: Highly-educated, highly-committed parents, in a loving, stable relationship are likely to raise successful children, regardless of their marital status. It is hard to work out whether marriage itself is making much difference, or whether it is, as many commentators now claim, merely the "capstone" of a successful relationship.

    Three Kinds of Marriage

    The debate over marriage is also hindered by treating it as a monolithic institution. Today, it makes more sense to think of “marriages” rather than “marriage.” The legalization of same-sex marriages is only the latest modulation, after divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, step-children, delayed child-bearing, and chosen childlessness.

    But even among this multiplicity of marital shapes, it is possible to identity three key motivations for marriage - money, love, and childrearing - and three corresponding kinds of marriage: traditional, romantic, and parental.

    Traditional marriage is being rendered obsolete by feminism and the shift to a non-unionized, service economy. Romantic marriage, based on individual needs and expression, remains largely a figment of our Hollywood-fueled imaginations, and sub-optimal for children. HIP marriages are the future of American marriage - if it has one.


    1. Traditional Marriage: Going, Going...

    The traditional model of marriage is based on a strongly gendered division of labor between a breadwinning man and a homemaking mom. Husbands bring home the bacon. Wives cook it. In these marriages, often underpinned by religious faith, duty and obligation to both spouse and children feature strongly. In their ideal form, traditional marriages also institutionalize sex. Couples wait until the wedding night to consummate their relationship, and then remain sexually faithful to each other for life.

    Attempting to restore this kind of marriage is a fool’s errand. The British politician David Willetts says that conservatives are susceptible to “bring backery” of one kind or another. Many conservative commentators on marriage fall prey this temptation: To restore marriage, they say, we need to bring back traditional values about sex and gender; bring back “marriageable” men; and bring back moms and housewives.

    It is too late. Attitudes to sex, feminist advances, and labor market economics have dealt fatal blows to the traditional model of marriage.

    Sex before marriage is the new norm. The average American woman now has a decade of sexual activity before her first marriage at the age of 27. The availability of contraception, abortion, and divorce has permanently altered the relationship between sex and marriage. As Stephanie Coontz, the author of Marriage, A History and The Way We Never Were, puts it, “marriage no longer organizes the transition into regular sexual activity in the way it used to.”

    Feminism, especially in the form of expanded opportunities for women’s education and work, has made the solo-breadwinning male effectively redundant. Women now make up more than half the workforce. A woman is the main breadwinner in 40% of families. For every three men graduating from college, there are four women. Turning back this half century of feminist advance is impossible (leaving aside the fact that is deeply undesirable).

    There is class gap here, however. Obsolete attitudes towards gender roles are taking longest to evolve among those with the least education.

    The bitter irony is that those most likely to disdain female breadwinners (the least educated men and women) would be helped the most by dual-earner households. The men who want to be breadwinners are very often the ones least able to fill that role.

    Traditional marriage, then, is being undermined on all sides. Most Americans think marriage is not necessary for sexual fulfillment, personal happiness, or financial security, according to Pew Research. They’re right.

    2. Romantic Marriage: Great for a While, but for Whom?

    What about love?

    If the breadwinner-housewife model for marriage is dying, there is still a romantic model. This is a version of marriage based on spousal love—as a vehicle for self-actualization through an intimate relationship, surrounded by ritual and ceremony: cohabitation with a cake.

    Many scholars worrying about the decline of marriage point to a shift from stable, traditional marriages to disposable, romantic ones—what Andrew Cherlin, Brad Wilcox and others describe as a “deinstitutionalization” of marriage. After studying relationships in poor Philadelphia neighborhoods, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas concluded that “marriage is a form of social bragging about the quality of the couple relationship, a powerfully symbolic way of elevating one’s relationship above others in a community, particularly in a community where marriage is rare.” More recently, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have suggested that the family has shifted from being “a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.” As a consequence, marriage has become a “hedonic” relationship that is “somewhat less child-centric that it once was.”

    Romantic marriages are ideal for Hollywood, and ideal for many couples, but they are not ideal for raising children, for the simple reason that the focus is on the adult relationship, not the parent-child relationship. Romantic marriages are passionate, stimulating, and sexy. Parenting, by contrast, involves hard physical labor, repetitive tasks, and exhaustion.

    Even when divorced parents re-marry, the negative effects on children can be detected, perhaps because the necessary investment in a new relationship “crowds out” investment in the children. (Half of the parents unmarried at the birth of their child are in a new relationship by the time they start kindergarten.) These parents are engaged in the intense emotional work of building a new adult relationship, at a time when their children may need them the most. It is hard to have sleepless nights with a new lover when you are having sleepless nights as a new mother.

    3. HIP Marriages: It’s About the Kids

    Given the obsolescence of traditional matrimony and the shortcomings of romance (for children, at any rate), it is easy to predict a slow death for marriage. In fact, we can see marriage persisting among the most affluent and educated Americans. But they’re not going back to the old model their parents rejected. They are creating a new model for marriage—one that is liberal about adult roles, conservative about raising children.

    The central rationale for these marriages is to raise children together, in a settled, nurturing environment. So, well-educated Americans are ensuring that they are financially stable before having children, by delaying childrearing. They are also putting their relationship on a sound footing too - they’re not in the business of love at first sight, rushing to the altar, or eloping to Vegas. College graduates take their time to select a partner; and then, once the marriage is at least a couple of years old, take the final step and become parents. Money, marriage, maternity: in that order.

    By delaying childbearing, these new-model spouses can actually get the best of both worlds, enjoying the benefits of a romantic marriage, before switching gears to a HIP marriage once they have children. This means the relationship has some built-in resilience before entering the “trial by toddler” phase–and also, that emotional investment in the children can take priority for the next few years, following years of investment in each other. Many couples manage a “date night” every week or so–but every night is parenting night. Indeed, there is some evidence that there is less sex in these egalitarian, child-focused marriages. But least for this chapter of the relationship, sex is not what they’re about.

    The HIP Formula: Conservative About Kids

    Married, well-educated parents are pouring time, money and energy into raising their children. This is a group for whom parenting has become virtually a profession.

    When it comes to the most basic measure of parenting investment—time spent with children—a large class gap has emerged. In the 1970s, college-educated and non-educated families spent roughly equal amounts of time with their children. But in the last 40 years, college-grad couples have opened up a wide lead, as work by Harvard’s Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) shows. Dads with college degrees spend twice as much time with their children as the least-educated fathers.

    Although college graduates tend to be a reliably liberal voting bloc, their attitudes toward parenting are actually quite conservative. College grads are now the most likely to agree that “divorce should be harder to obtain than it is now” (40%), a slight increase since the 1970s. Although we can’t be sure why, this is likely connected to the accumulating evidence that single parenthood provides a steep challenge to parenting.

    On the opposite end of parenting too little, there has developed a small backlash against over-parenting and child-centered marriages. Perhaps a few parents are overdoing it. We don’t really know. But we do know that engaged, committed parenting is hugely important. Simply engaging with and talking to children has strong effects on their learning; reading bedtime stories accelerates literacy skill acquisition; encouraging physical activity and feeding them balanced meals keeps them healthy, strong and alert. Marriage is becoming, in the words of Shelly Lundberg and Robert Pollak, a "co-parenting contract" or "commitment device" for raising children.

    "The practical significance of marriage as a contract that supports the traditional gendered division of labor has certainly decreased: our argument is that, for college-educated men and women, marriage retains its practical significance as a commitment device that supports high-levels of parental investment in children." Scholarly disputes over whether marriage causes or merely signals better parenting miss the point. As a commitment device, HIP marriages do not cause parental investments—but they do appear to facilitate them. Forthcoming work from Brookings suggests that stronger parenting is the biggest factor explaining the better outcomes of children raised by married parents.

    ...But Liberal About Relationships

    The HIP model of marriage, then, is built on a strong, traditional commitment to raising children together. But in other respects it differs sharply from the traditional model. Most importantly, the wife is not economically dependent on the husband. HIP wives have a good education, an established career, and high earning potential. We cannot understand modern marriage unless we grasp this central fact: The women getting, and staying, married are the most economically independent women in the history of the nation. Independence, rather than dependence, underpins the new marriage.

    Of course, affluent couples may decide that for a period, one parent will devote more of their time to parenting than to career, especially when the children are young. If the mother takes some time out, these marriages masquerade, briefly, as traditional ones: a breadwinning father, a home-making mother, and a stable marriage.

    But HIP marriages are actually recasting family responsibilities, with couples sharing the roles of both child-raiser and money-maker. There will be lots of juggling, trading and negotiating: “I’ll do the morning if you can get home in time to take Zach to baseball.” Since the 1960s, fathers have doubled the time they spend on housework and tripled their hours of childcare.

    College graduates are more likely to approve of women working, for example, even when her husband’s “capable of supporting her.” The greater liberalism of well-educated Americans extends beyond gender roles, too. Compared to less educated Americans, for example, college graduates are more liberal about abortion, pre-marital sex, legal marijuana, and gay marriage.

    So: College grads are highly conservative when it comes to divorce and having children within marriage; but the most egalitarian about gender roles; and the most liberal about social issues generally.

    Saving Marriage For the Poor

    Most Americans support marriage, most Americans want to get married, and most Americans do get married. Why then is the institution atrophying among those with least education and lowest incomes?

    A lack of “marriageable” men is a common explanation. It is clear that the labor market prospects of poorly-educated men are dire. But the language itself betrays inherent conservatism. “Marriageability” here means, principally, breadwinning potential. Nobody ever apparently worries about the “marriageability” of a woman: Presumably she just has to be fertile.

    If a man can’t earn—and that’s apparently his only authentic contribution—he becomes just another mouth to feed, another child. But men with children are something more than just potential earners: They are fathers. And what many children in our poorest neighborhoods need most of all is more parenting.

    The proportion of children being raised by a single parent has more than doubled in the last four decades. Most black children are now being raised by a single mother. Mass incarceration plays a role here: More than half of black men without a high school degree do some jail time before they turn 30. In short, the nation faces a fathering deficit. By continuing to see the male role in such constricting terms—as breadwinner or nothing—we are inadvertently contributing to the slow death of marriage in our most disadvantaged communities.

    Here, the traditional marriage needs to be turned on its head. In many low-income families, it is the mother who has the best chance in the labor market. But this doesn’t make men redundant. It means men need to start doing the “women’s work” of raising kids. Although there is a lingering determinism about parenting and gender roles, recent evidence - in particular from Ohio State University sociologist Douglas B. Downey - suggests that women have no inherent competitive advantage in the parenting stakes.

    The children who can benefit most from high levels of parental investment, from both mom and dad, are the poorest. HIP marriages are an elite invention that could make the greatest difference in the poorest communities, if only attitudes can be shifted. Our central problem is not the slow retreat of the idea of traditional marriage. It is the stubborn persistence of the idea of traditional marriage among those people for whom it has lost almost all rationale.

    To Promote Marriage, Promote Parenting

    The debate about America’s “marriage crisis” focuses on failure—on the forces working to undermine marriage, especially in the poorest communities. It would serve our purposes better to turn our attention to success. Against all predictions, educated Americans are rejuvenating marriage. We should be spreading their successes. Given the implications for social mobility and life chances, we should be striving to accelerate the adoption of new marriages further down the income distribution.

    Perhaps propaganda—or, more politely, social marketing—has a role to play. The elites running our public institutions aren’t abandoning marriage: but maybe they aren’t encouraging it either. In Coming Apart, the social analyst Charles Murray accuses the affluent of failing to “preach what they practice”

    “The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgementalism instead. [They] don’t want to push their way of living onto the less fortunate, for who are they to say that their way of living is really better? It works for them, but who is to say it will work for others? Who are they to say that their way of living is virtuous and others’ ways are not?”

    Murray casts the new marriage as a reversion to old virtues, especially religion. That’s wrong. HIP marriages are based on a new virtue, appropriate for the modern economy: heavy investment in children. More important, it is hard to know what Murray wants from the “new upper class.” What would it mean to "push their own way of life onto the less fortunate"?

    The idea that marriage can be anything other than a freely-chosen commitment is medieval. Americans, in particular, react badly to the government passing judgment on voluntary relationships between adults: that’s one reason the bar on gay marriages has gone. And as it happens, Bush-inspired policies to promote marriages have had little success. What we need is a not a Campaign for Marriage, but a Campaign for Good Parenting, which may, as a byproduct, bring about a broader revival of marriage.

    The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinoski once described marriage as a means of tying a man to a woman and their children. Nowadays, women don’t need to be tied to a man. Sex and money can be found outside the marital contract. But children do need parents—preferably loving, engaged parents. Indeed they may need them more than ever. In 21st century America, nobody needs to marry, although many will still choose to. Recast for the modern world, and re-founded on the virtue of committed parenting, marriage may yet have a future. That future of marriage matters most for the individuals in the house that aren't in the union: our children.

Marriage Is A Flexible Concept

    Lord Wilson of Culworth, a family justice in the Supreme Court, said that marriage was “an elastic concept, entirely capable of embracing people of the same sex”.

    As a result in part of divorce, families were now made up of “step-families of the half-blood”, he said. “The blended family often replaces the nuclear family.” Although some cultures prohibited marriage between first cousins, others did not.

    He added: “If today, for example, you want to marry your uncle, you should leave the UK and go to Australia, where you would be allowed to enter into what they call an avunculate marriage.”

    Lord Wilson, whose judicial career was in the family courts, was giving a historical perspective on marriage, under the title Marriage is made for Man, not Man for Marriage.

    Western cultural and historical perceptions of marriage had changed through the centuries — with shifting attitudes on practices such as polygamy, rape in marriage and marriage between children or relatives, he said.

    Divorce had also had an extraordinary impact on the traditional Christian concept of marriage and there was now an “uncomfortable mismatch” between a couple’s vows in church and the reality of divorce. The availability of divorce had also had a “profound effect” on social demographies, precipating many more remarriages.

    “In their wake come many more step-families and relationships of the half-blood, so the blended family now often replaces the nuclear family,” he said.

    Nor was same-sex marriage a novel concept: it was allowed in ancient Egypt and Republican Rome, although it became outlawed under the Roman Empire. “Then for the next 1,500 years, Christian doctrine cast an irrational opprobrium upon all sexual acts other than procreative ones. In my view, the malign effects of the doctrine leave a residue even today,” he said.

    He said that laws sometimes went beyond defining who people were entitled to marry and put an obligation on them to marry another, he said — as in the Book of Deuteronomy. That prohibited a man marrying his dead brother’s wife, unless they had not had children, in which case “youhad a positive duty to marry her”.

    Priests were allowed to marry after the break with Rome in 1552, he added. In Ireland, up to 1863, a marriage between a Protestant and Catholic was void.

    Another variable was the age of marriage: in Shakespearean England, the common law provided that the minimum age was 12 for a girl and 14 for a boy on the basis that once physically capable of becoming parents they should be capable of getting married.

    Lord Carey had argued against same sex marriage on the basis that it might lead to the introduction of polygamy, Lord Wilson said. However, the argument “seems to conjure up a slippery slope once the traditional concept of ‘one man: one woman’ is abandoned”. The right to take multiple wives was as inconsistent with the traditional Western notion of marriage as same sex marriage; yet it was a deeply rooted facet of marriage in other cultures and Old Testament kings practised it. Today it was practised in many parts of the Muslim world, he said.

    Finally there were the changing laws on marriage: husbands did not commit the offence of rape if the victim was his wife, which changed in 1991; and wives had no right under our law in England and Ireland to hold property, enter into a contract or sue a third party for damages. It used also to be a criminal offence, until 1857, to commit adultery.

    Full text of speech (an interesting read) here

Marital Happiness



Las Vegas

    More than 80,000 marriage certificates are issued each year by Clark County, the municipal authority for Las Vegas. If all of them are followed through, a couple is married every four minutes and 20 seconds. The list of ways they go about it is as extensive as it is bizarre. So, three weeks ago, when one of those certificates was issued to me and my fiancee, Katy, we had some thinking to do.

    Everyone must apply for a $60 licence in person at the local marriage bureau and declare how many times they have been married previously (a drunk man at the booth next to me said: “This is my third. The first two were just for practice”). But from there, the options are virtually limitless. You can have a shotgun wedding featuring actual shotguns. You can be married in the courthouse at the National Museum of Organised Crime & Law Enforcement. You can be married on the rollercoaster at New York-New York, or on the 103rd floor of the Stratosphere Casino, Hotel & Tower. At Mandalay Bay, you can be married underwater at the Shark Reef Aquarium or, if you prefer, on Mandalay beach. You can be married in full medieval(ish) armour at Excalibur. You can do it in front of the Mirage hotel’s volcano, because who wouldn’t want a fake volcano erupting in the middle of their nuptials?

    Darth Vader can marry you. So can Spock. You can be married wearing blue-suede shoes as you drive through a chapel in a pink Cadillac. Absolutely don’t care where you tie the knot? Head to the ubiquitous fast-food chain Denny’s (free pancakes with every service).

    It’s easy to assume people get married in Vegas because they’re blackout drunk or have lost a bet. (Or won one.) However, while that crowd still accounts for a few people every year, the majority do it because they mean it.

    Katy and I had been engaged for three years, but now we wanted to marry in a hurry, and I was already visiting Vegas. So she flew out to meet me, and now, instead of a grey register office in Kent, we are standing in the middle of the Neon Boneyard, on a bright March morning, with Pastor Pete reciting a script he’s read thousands of times. He adds a personal touch here and there, and as requested leaves out any religious references. Katy says yes. The sun is shining. Life is good.

    We chose the Neon Boneyard not because we have any connection to the demolished casinos and hotels that have donated their signs to this excellent museum exhibit, but because it looks great in pictures, and we’d decided the city’s wackiest nuptials weren’t for us. We did speak about getting married in a helicopter, but concluded we didn’t need to add the fear of death on top of everything; same went for me being kidnapped by cowboys and held at gunpoint. Plenty of couples feel differently, though, and Brendan Paul, proprietor and lead Elvis at the Graceland Wedding Chapel, knows more about their tastes than most.

    Graceland performs 150 ceremonies a week — Paul personally appears at about 100, and can do as many as 25 in a single day, knocking them out in 15 minutes. When he needs time off, there are another three Elvises (Elvi?) ready to step in. Paul reckons he may have attended as many as 50,000 weddings.

    Until 2006, when the local courthouse began to close at midnight, Graceland, like chapels around the city, would marry people through the night at weekends, regardless of how long the couple had known each other or how sober they were. (I asked the processing officer what condition a person has to be in to legally apply. She said: “Vertical.”)

    Even with the reduced hours, a significant number of the 160,000 regret their decision, but the chapels don’t offer an exit strategy. “If we get a call saying they made a mistake, we say: ‘Well, the part that we did here was legal — you’re married. We can’t annul it. You have to go back through the courthouse, and they’ll tell you how to fix it,’” says Paul, while strumming his guitar in full Elvis regalia. “But I tell the girls who work out front: to us it’s just another day at the office, but to everyone who comes through here, it’s their wedding day, a special day. Even if it’s their eighth one.”

    Paul welcomes all-comers to Graceland, and has always found a way to be professional — even on the day he knew the groom was standing at the altar with annulment papers in his back pocket, or the time a widow brought in a picture of her late husband and insisted Elvis renew the vows.

    Paul almost had me wishing I was getting married at Graceland. We couldn’t have been happier with the Neon Boneyard, though — or anything about the day. From the museum, we went to play a bit of Kiss-themed mini golf. (It’s possible to get married there, too — it has the band’s full endorsement and a chapel just before the first tee.) Then we headed out with LV Wedding Connection for some photos around the city, before an excellent dinner at Alizé at the Palms hotel. We wound up at a zombie burlesque show. At one point, the undead dragged me onto the stage, where I was bound, whipped and paddled for the entertainment of the living. They had no idea it was my wedding day.

Biblical Marriage

    We must tell the whole story about the treatment of women and biblical marriage, one which hardly resembles the rosy picture religious conservatives seek to invoke with that phrase.

    We must tell the truth that the bible says that fathers can sell their daughters into sexual slavery (Ex 21:7)—given that enslaved women were used to breed slaves and for sexual gratification; there was no slavery for women in the bible that was not sexual slavery. (An argument can be made for the sexual abuse of male slaves as well.)

    We must tell the truth that the bible says soldiers can take virgin girls home with them as the spoils of war (Num 31:17).

    We must tell the truth that the bible says cut the nails off the woman you take home as your war prize (Deut 21:11)— making the rape easier on the rapist.

    We must tell the truth that the bible says that Israelite identity does not protect women from wholesale rape as a tool of war; Judges 21:10-23 details repeated kidnappings of girls for rape marriage within Israel by other Israelites.

    We must tell the truth that the bible says Ruth and Orpah were abducted into rape marriages just like the Nigerian schoolgirls. In Ruth 1:4, the verb used for their union is not the verb for marriage (l-q-ch) but the verb n-s-’, to “lift,” “abduct,” as in “throw her over your shoulder and run off with her.” It is the same verb used in the Judges text detailing the abduction and rape of the girls in Shiloh.

    We must tell the truth that what is biblical is not always godly, holy or even right.

Trophy Wives

    Cookbook author, ‘Extra’ host, jewelry line, ‘Basketball Wives’—we all know the trajectory for celebrity spouses and exes. But Tiger Woods’s former wife is charting a wiser course.

    Elin Nordegren, ex-wife of Tiger Woods, just did something few commencement speakers manage: She surpassed expectations, delivering a funny, gracious, and definitely memorable speech at her graduation from Rollins College in Florida.

    Thanks to her nearly perfect GPA, Nordegren was awarded the Hamilton Holt Outstanding Senior Award. Describing college as a refuge during her sometimes tumultuous personal life and role as a reluctant public figure, she said: “Education has been the only consistent part of my life the last nine years. And it has offered me comfort. Education is one thing that no one can take away from you.” Making light of her unpleasant experience in the glare of the media, she added, “I was unexpectedly thrust into the media limelight. I probably should have taken more notes in that [Communication and the Media] class!”

    With her speech, Nordegren not only established herself, finally, as more than a mute former trophy wife, but she also showed what spouses of the wealthy and powerful could and ideally should be but in today’s culture rarely seem to be. That is, she proved herself willing to carve out an identity distinct from that of her powerful ex-husband—and one not dependent on his star power. In this, she is miles apart from the endless parade of girlfriends and wives (and occasionally husbands) of celebrities who seem to go from red carpet escort to handbag or jewelry designer, Extra TV host, or cookbook author virtually overnight. And conveniently, their husbands, or wives, appear by their side, because everyone knows that if he or she did not, no one in the media would bother to cover their latest professional endeavor, which is likely subsidized by their spouse, either in dollars or in the brand cachet his or her name provides.

    There are countless examples, from the new Mrs. Alec Baldwin going from yoga teacher to TV correspondent, to Mrs. Jerry Seinfeld writing a cookbook for kids (that others alleged had already been written), to all of George Clooney’s exes, who manage to end up as models, cast members of Dancing with the Stars, reality show hosts, or some combination of all of the above. (That’s at least partly why the media hoopla around the future Mrs. Clooney, Amal Alamuddin, has been so intense. She is one of the first women the world’s most eligible bachelor has been linked to recently who doesn’t seem to benefit professionally from his star power in the slightest, and doesn’t seem to want to. With her credentials, we may soon be referring to him as Mr. Alamuddin.)

    She shunned the limelight and focused on forging her own identity as Elin Nordegren, not as Elin Woods, professional trophy wife turned professional ex. Although Hollywood is littered with other examples, perhaps the most egregious are the stars of the horror shows known as Basketball Wives, Love & Hip-Hop, and Hollywood Exes on VH1. Some celebrity spouses may have the decency to pretend they have a talent or career, albeit one everyone knows their spouses are bankrolling, but on these shows, all pretense is thrown out the window. Instead, the women make clear that they are strictly on the show thanks to their marriage, or more often than not, simply a sexual relationship with a powerful or famous man. And the women are more than OK with that. Basketball Wives was conceived and produced by Shaunie O’Neal, ex-wife of basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal. Did I mention the part about most of these women on these shows being exes? Not only are they riding the coattails of men, but they are no longer even with these men. Even more appalling, they clearly are not embarrassed to be doing so, and they are being rewarded for that tacky behavior, which sets the feminist movement back decades every time an episode airs.

    Which is what makes Nordegren’s speech and trajectory so refreshing. A part-time model when she met Woods, she easily could have ridden the title of Mrs. Tiger Woods onto the pages of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition. Instead, she shunned the limelight and focused on forging her own identity as Elin Nordegren, not as Elin Woods, professional trophy wife turned professional ex. In her speech, she told her fellow students: “When you told me stories about your full-time day jobs, about coming home to cook dinner for your families, and about making sure your children were cared for while you were attending classes, you inspired me. Whatever obstacle I was facing at the time, your stories and sharing helped me put things in perspective.” She later told People magazine, “If I can inspire even one mom to go back and get her degree with the message that it’s never too late, then I am happy.”

    And if she can inspire other women to be their own women, not simply a woman known through the man in her life, then many of us will be happy, too.

Fools Rush In - The Case Against Marriage

    It was a nice – if humid – day for a white wedding. The bride was willowy and poised, the groom clearly ecstatic. There were sermons and songs, bored wriggling children, vows, of course, and later a vineyard, a gentle mauve dusk, plastic tables in a marquee, fairy lights, prawns, champagne and speeches, both the bride and groom tearing up a bit as they spoke of their journey towards each other. “The rest of our lives is not enough,” said the groom.

    We – the guests – cheered and raised our glasses, and some of us struggled with a steady stream of inappropriate thoughts.

    With ill-timing, I had that week read a paper by American academic Professor Eli J Finkel entitled ‘The Suffocation of Marriage’, as well as the new book by British journalist Helen Croydon, Screw the Fairytale. In their different ways, each likens at least some marriages to a slow, panicked death from lack of oxygen. Croydon, in particular, asks whether many of us simply shoehorn ourselves into marriage because we’ve been sold on the myth of happy-everafter; and because we’re running from an even more powerful force – the stigma of singledom.

    If the growing crowd of single people in the Western world needed a mascot, Croydon, 36, would be the ideal candidate. Blonde and elfin, she has established in her regular newspaper journalism that she’s both a romantic and a sexual adventuress with a high libido. But her main message – that she far prefers living alone and enjoying “low maintenance lovers” to sharing her life with a partner – is a hard one to impress on a world obsessed with coupling. “I went on TV today,” she says down the phone from London. “And I was in the green room with a woman who’s well-known over here. And she just kept looking at me and saying, ‘Why is a beautiful sparky girl like you single? Why?’” The implied question, she sighs, not being why she had chosen to be single, but how she had failed to attract a man.

    Popular culture treats singledom as a temporary state marked by hilarity and awkward sex, with marriage the natural, happy ending. Whether it’s lovable English stuff-up Bridget Jones or her bony US counterpart Carrie Bradshaw, fiction’s single heroines are essentially waiting for a white knight and a big fluffy wedding. And in real life, too, most of us view finding The One – who’ll love us forever despite our flaws, who’ll turn with a shrug of sexual indifference from all others, and who’ll share all of their income and secrets with us and us alone – as the happy ending, and the beginning. The beginning of proper adulthood as we grew up believing it should be.

    Croydon, though, writes of relationships with such distaste you might seriously question the point of being in one: “It just feels like I wilt when I’m in a relationship. I’ve always felt that my thirst for life, my spark, my energy, my joi de vivre, my productivity, my career, my health, my sleep, my gym routine, my friendships, my libido… have been best when there’s just me.” She picks up this theme on the phone: “Even in a healthy relationship there’s still this pull on your sense of self and your independence,” she says. “When you’re single you’re more adventurous, more open to new friendships and experience. Relationships close doors.”

    She paints a grim picture of married people – extinguishing any sparks of flirtation between their spouse and another, reacting with rage over infidelity by a spouse who “they probably don’t even fancy any more”, branding other married people who stray as “immature” rather than questioning the sanity of life-long monogamy. As for the beauty of motherhood, here’s Croydon on the local ‘Buggyfit’ class she sees in the park on her daily run to the gym: “A group of about 20 women with puffed cheeks pushing prams in a funny trot in circles, round and round the bandstand,” she writes. “Always one or two are under the gazebo in the middle, tending to a soiled baby on his back screaming… Every time I jog past I think, ‘Please God, don’t ever let me be one of them!’

    Croydon refers to her single, childless life as a kind of lucky accident. She first gained attention in the UK when she wrote a best-selling memoir Sugar Daddy Diaries, about the years she’d spent in her late 20s and early 30s perusing websites that cater to attractive women seeking rich older men, and vice versa. “I hope I become better known for this latest book,” she says nervously. But those years had a deep impact on her, establishing her in the unattached lifestyle she learned she loved, while also throwing a cold light on the compromises and deceptions of marriage – most of her wealthy benefactors had wives at home whom they claimed to adore, if not desire.

    “Until I was about 30 I believed that I would probably get married and have kids,” she says. “It wasn’t until I developed a niche writing about relationships that I had the opportunity to actually question it. So many people I interviewed described how they had sort of sleep-walked into marriage.”

    In Screw the Fairytale, Croydon investigates the lifestyles of various groups who live outside the norm. There are women having babies without men, asexual couples who cuddle with clothes on, couples who live in separate houses, men who have separated from their wives and now get along with them better than ever, swingers, polyamorists. But Croydon is at her best when writing about those such as herself, who she believes have a metaphoric ‘single gene’, and lamenting the patronising that particularly single women endure: ‘Have you met anyone yet?’ ‘You’re too fussy’! ‘What about when you lose your looks?’ ‘Be careful – you could wake up and realised you missed out,’ etcetera.

    With huge inconvenience, in the midst of writing Screw the Fairytale, Croydon fell in love. Suddenly, she had a bona fide boyfriend. She worried this would ruin the thrust of her project, but gradually decided it allowed her to write about love from a more empathetic standpoint.

    And then… “My affection and care for the ‘proper boyfriend’ didn’t wane, but excitement for the relationship did, as well as my tolerance to operate as a half of a couple instead of as an individual.” The relationship ended.

    Now she speaks with passion on the pleasure of coming home to an empty flat, her hat cupboard organised just so, the heating turned up high. “My ex’s house was freezing; I could never live in that temperature. And the thought of someone else’s dust mingled with mine – I find it destructive. I don’t think that I’m unique in feeling this way.”

    Croydon has recently launched a dating website called Part Time Love (parttimelove.co.uk), which operates in the US, Australia and the UK and promises “meaningful romance without every day commitment”. “There’s a real market for it,” she says. “Single parents, people who travel through their jobs or are just out of relationship… They don’t want a meaningless fling, but neither do they want to feel obliged to have the phone call every night before you go to bed.” It is not – the homepage clarifies – a “no strings” site.

    Because that’s another cliché about single women Croydon would like to dispel – that when they’re not at home singing into a wine bottle, they’re out having frequent and random sexual encounters. She shudders at the thought of one-night stands and also laments that none of her part-time lovers were available to help last time she moved flats.

    It’s as if, I suggest, she’s calling for a new middle ground – not just loosening the rules of marriage, but raising our expectations of casual affairs as well. “Absolutely!” she says. “This is something I believe very strongly. I hate that expression ‘f*** buddy’: the idea of no emotional attachment, no friendship even, nor continuity. But then there’s this expectation of coupling: we’re together, we have to meet each other’s friends, see each other x times per week… I wish you could have that care and affection, but not that conventional relationship which just eats into your life.”

    There have been some similar calls lately from the other side of the equation – the married side – for an opening of the window for a little fresh air. Alain de Botton and Christopher Ryan are two married writers who Croydon points to as having recently written in favour of infidelity; and then there is Professor Finkel and his widely reported paper ‘The Suffocation of Marriage’, which examines the evolution of the institution through the centuries. Once a means to shelter (and maybe a few goats and chickens), he says, marriage has become in the past 50 years a union we look to for everything, including “self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth”.

    Such high expectations, says Professor Finkel, when people have the time and psychological skills to meet them, can make for the most satisfying marriages in history. But those same expectations possibly explain why fewer people now get married – because who could measure up? (New Zealand figures reflect those in the US and the UK, with 45 marriages per every 1000 New Zealanders in 1971 – dropping to 12 in 2013.)

    Finkel has caused a stir by suggesting that establishing “consensual non-monogamy” might be a healthy step in a long-term relationship. But this was, he emails me from Illinois, “egregiously mischaracterised by the media... I’ve never argued that adultery is a good thing [but I have argued that] couples who are struggling to achieve a fully satisfying marriage have several options… One of those options is to make decisions about specific things they will not ask their marriage to accomplish for them… In special cases – such as those in which the marriage is generally deeply fulfilling but the sex and passion are currently too low – it might be wise to consider a conversation with your partner about whether you should relax your sexualexclusivity requirements.”

    Croydon is less afraid to jump right in there. “I think we know deep down that long-term partnership is separate from passion,” she says. “But the fairytale gets in the way.”

    The author certainly found couples open to the idea of “relaxed sexual exclusivity”, but when I put it to a range of my partnered female friends, it was unanimously rejected. “It would destroy us,” says Beth*, 41, a Wellington lawyer who has been with her partner Matt for three years. “I wouldn’t be able to avoid focusing all my thoughts and misery on what he was doing. The chase and the thrill are fleeting things that are lovely at the beginning of a relationship, but when you’ve built something, it’s like an investment.

    “I’ve had all the danger and great sex with unreliable men that I want,” she says. “And I’ve no desire to be back out there.”

    “Look at Woody and Mia,” says Kate, 43, referring to the most famous relationship train wreck of our times. “There was a couple who lived apart, and see what happened?” Kate works in advertising in Auckland and has been single for several years, but I found her views on relationships to be as black and white as my married friends. And I saw her point: blurring the distinction between being together and not could result in confusion along the lines of, ‘Yes, but I assumed it would be okay to sleep with her because she’s your adopted daughter, not mine.’

    When it came to talking to men about these things, I realised just how closed relationships are. Among couples I knew, asking the man to share his honest feelings about monogamy with me seemed disrespectful to his wife. Then I remembered an ex-colleague who spoke to me last year about his relationship with his wife, who, helpfully, I didn’t know. Despite adoring his young son and feeling happy that he and his wife were almost in a financial position to buy a house, Andy, 36, felt frustrated and bored – even depressed – about his relationship, and was struggling with attractions towards other women.

    Recalling this chat, I felt confident that his views on monogamy would differ from those of my female friends. But when I gave him a call he surprised me. “Is monogamy a natural state for men?” I asked. “Define natural,” he replied. “Natural doesn’t always mean good or helpful. If I ate every chocolate bar I thought looked good, I’d be in a terrible state. I mean, I think as a guy you’re programmed to have a wandering eye – did you see that magazine cover with [former cricketer] Adam Parore and his hot, new wife, 20 years younger? That tells you a lot about men.” What about a mutually open relationship? I asked. “My wife joked about that the other day,” said Andy. “And part of my brain went, ‘What, really? Awesome!’ It has such an appeal on the face of it, but in my heart I know it would be disastrous, risky and emotionally disruptive. It would ruin what we have. Imagine saying to your wife: ‘Oh, she was nice; let’s get her around again…’

    “No,” he said, pulling back from the window and closing it for good. “It’s impossible. It’s impossible.”

Why We Marry The Wrong Person

    Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together.

    How do the errors happen? With appalling ease and regularity. Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.

    It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories. One: We don’t understand ourselves

    When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’

    It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy – or, more accurately, not consistently miserable.

    All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

    The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

    Marital Problems

    The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.

    With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

    Two: We don’t understand other people

    This problem is compounded because other people are stuck at the same low level of self-knowledge as we are. However well-meaning they might be, they too are in no position to grasp, let alone inform us, of what is wrong with them.

    Naturally, we make a stab at trying to know them. We go and visit their families, perhaps the place they first went to school. We look at photos, we meet their friends. All this contributes to a sense we’ve done our homework. But it’s like a novice pilot assuming they can fly after sending a paper plane successfully around the room.

    In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists. By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point.

    We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, or stance on, authority, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, projection, money, children, aging, fidelity and a hundred things besides. This knowledge won’t be available via a standard chat.

    In the absence of all this, we are led – in large part – by what they look like. There seems to be so much information to be gleaned from their eyes, nose, shape of forehead, distribution of freckles, smiles… But this is about as wise as thinking that a photograph of the outside of a power station can tell us everything we need to know about nuclear fission.

    We ‘project’ a range of perfections into the beloved on the basis of only a little evidence. In elaborating a whole personality from a few small – but hugely evocative – details, we are doing for the inner character of a person what our eyes naturally do with the sketch of a face.



    We don’t see this as a picture of someone who has no nostrils, eight strands of hair and no eyelashes. Without even noticing that we are doing it, we fill in the missing parts. Our brains are primed to take tiny visual hints and construct entire figures from them – and we do the same when it comes to the character of our prospective spouse. We are – much more than we give ourselves credit for, and to our great cost – inveterate artists of elaboration.

    The level of knowledge we need for a marriage to work is higher than our society is prepared to countenance, recognise and accommodate for – and therefore our social practices around getting married are deeply wrong.

    Three: We aren’t used to being happy

    We believe we seek happiness in love, but it’s not quite as simple. What at times it seems we actually seek is familiarity – which may well complicate any plans we might have for happiness.

    We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we knew in childhood. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what love meant. But unfortunately, the lessons we picked up may not have been straightforward. The love we knew as children may have come entwined with other, less pleasant dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating, in short: suffering.

    As adults, we may then reject certain healthy candidates whom we encounter, not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced (too mature, too understanding, too reliable), and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. We head instead to candidates whom our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways.

    We marry the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong – undeserved; because we have no experience of health, because we don’t ultimately associate being loved with feeling satisfied.

    Four: Being single is so awful

    One is never in a good frame of mind to choose a partner rationally when remaining single is unbearable. We have to be utterly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to have any chance of forming a good relationship. Or we’ll love no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us being so.

    Unfortunately, after a certain age, society makes singlehood dangerously unpleasant. Communal life starts to wither, couples are too threatened by the independence of the single to invite them around very often, one starts to feel a freak when going to the cinema alone. Sex is hard to come by as well. For all the new gadgets and supposed freedoms of modernity, it can be very hard to get laid – and expecting to do so regularly with new people is bound to end in disappointment after 30.

    Far better to rearrange society so that it resembles a university or a kibbutz – with communal eating, shared facilities, constant parties and free sexual mingling… That way, anyone who did decide marriage was for them would be sure they were doing it for the positives of coupledom rather than as an escape from the negatives of singlehood.

    When sex was only available within marriage, people recognised that this led people to marry for the wrong reasons: to obtain something that was artificially restricted in society as a whole. People are free to make much better choices about who they marry now they’re not simply responding to a desperate desire for sex.

    But we retain shortages in other areas. When company is only properly available in couples, people will pair up just to spare themselves loneliness. It’s time to liberate ‘companionship’ from the shackles of coupledom, and make it as widely and as easily available as sexual liberators wanted sex to be.

    Five: Instinct has too much prestige

    Medieval miniature. Meeting of the Roman Senate. Discussion on marriage between a plebeian woman and a roman patrician. 15th century.

    Back in the olden days, marriage was a rational business; all to do with matching your bit of land with theirs. It was cold, ruthless and disconnected from the happiness of the protagonists. We are still traumatised by this.

    What replaced the marriage of reason was the marriage of instinct, the Romantic marriage. It dictated that how one felt about someone should be the only guide to marriage. If one felt ‘in love’, that was enough. No more questions asked. Feeling was triumphant. Outsiders could only applaud the feeling’s arrival, respecting it as one might the visitation of a divine spirit. Parents might be aghast, but they had to suppose that only the couple could ever know. We have for three hundred years been in collective reaction against thousands of years of very unhelpful interference based on prejudice, snobbery and lack of imagination.

    So pedantic and cautious was the old ‘marriage of reason’ that one of the features of the marriage of feeling is its belief that one shouldn’t think too much about why one is marrying. To analyse the decision feels ‘un-Romantic’. To write out charts of pros and cons seems absurd and cold. The most Romantic thing one can do is just to propose quickly and suddenly, perhaps after only a few weeks, in a rush of enthusiasm – without any chance to do the horrible ‘reasoning’ that guaranteed misery to people for thousands of years previously. The recklessness at play seems a sign that the marriage can work, precisely because the old kind of ‘safety’ was such a danger to one’s happiness.

    Six: We don’t go to Schools of Love

    The time has come for a third kind of marriage. The marriage of psychology. One where one doesn’t marry for land, or for ‘the feeling’ alone, but only when ‘the feeling’ has been properly submitted to examination and brought under the aegis of a mature awareness of one’s own and the other’s psychology.

    Presently, we marry without any information. We almost never read books specifically on the subject, we never spend more than a short time with children, we don’t rigorously interrogate other married couples or speak with any sincerity to divorced ones. We go into it without any insightful reasons as to why marriages fail – beyond what we presume to be the idiocy or lack of imagination of their protagonists.

    In the age of the marriage of reason, one might have considered the following criteria when marrying:

    - who are their parents

    - how much land do they have

    - how culturally similar are they

    In the Romantic age, one might have looked out for the following signs to determine rightness:

    - one can’t stop thinking of a lover

    - one is sexually obsessed

    - one thinks they are amazing

    - one longs to talk to them all the time

    We need a new set of criteria. We should wonder:

    - how are they mad

    - how can one raise children with them

    - how can one develop together

    - how can one remain friends

    Seven: We want to freeze happiness

    We have a desperate and fateful urge to try to make nice things permanent. We want to own the car we like, we want to live in the country we enjoyed as a tourist. And we want to marry the person we are having a terrific time with.

    We imagine that marriage is a guarantor of the happiness we’re enjoying with someone. It will make permanent what might otherwise be fleeting. It will help us to bottle our joy – the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing gold flakes across the sea, the prospect of dinner in a little fish restaurant, our beloved in a cashmere jumper in our arms… We got married to make this feeling permanent.

    Unfortunately, there is no causal necessary connection between marriage and this sort of feeling. The feeling was produced by Venice, a time of day, a lack of work, an excitement at dinner, a two month acquaintance with someone… none of which ‘marriage’ increases or guarantees.

    Marriage doesn’t freeze the moment at all. That moment was dependent on the fact that you had only known each other for a bit, that you weren’t working, that you were staying in a beautiful hotel near the Grand Canal, that you’d had a pleasant afternoon in the Guggenheim museum, that you’d just had a chocolate gelato.

    Getting married has no power to keep a relationship at this beautiful stage. It is not in command of the ingredients of our happiness at that point. In fact, marriage will decisively move the relationship on to another, very different moment: to a suburban house, a long commute, two small children. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

    The Impressionist painters of the nineteenth century had an implicit philosophy of transience that points us in a wiser direction. They accepted the transience of happiness as an inherent feature of existence and could in turn help us to grow more at peace with it. Sisley’s painting of a winter scene in France focuses on a set of attractive but utterly fugitive things. Towards dusk, the sun nearly breaks through the landscape. For a little time, the glow of the sky makes the bare branches less severe. The snow and the grey walls have a quiet harmony; the cold seems manageable, almost exciting. In a few minutes, night will close in.



    Alfred Sisley, The Watering Place at Marly-le-Roi, 1875

    Impressionism is interested in the fact that the things we love most change, are only around a very short time and then disappear. It celebrates the sort of happiness that lasts a few minutes, rather than years. In this painting, the snow looks lovely; but it will melt. The sky is beautiful at this moment, but it is about to go dark. This style of art cultivates a skill that extends far beyond art itself: a skill at accepting and attending to short-lived moments of satisfaction.

    The peaks of life tend to be brief. Happiness doesn’t come in year-long blocks. With the Impressionists to guide us, we should be ready to appreciate isolated moments of everyday paradise whenever they come our way, without making the mistake of thinking them permanent; without the need to turn them into a ‘marriage’.

    Eight: We believe we are special

    The statistics are not encouraging. Everyone has before them plenty of examples of terrible marriages. They’ve seen their friends try it and come unstuck. They know perfectly well that – in general – marriages face immense challenges. And yet we do not easily apply this insight to our own case. Without specifically formulating it, we assume that this is a rule that applies to other people.

    That’s because a raw statistical chance of one in two of failing at marriage seems wholly acceptable, given that – when one is in love – one feels one has already beaten far more extraordinary odds. The beloved feels like around one in a million. With such a winning streak, the gamble of marrying a person seem entirely containable.

    We silently exclude ourselves from the generalisation. We’re not to be blamed for this. But we could benefit from being encouraged to see ourselves as exposed to the general fate.

    Nine: We want to stop thinking about Love

    Before we get married, we are likely to have had many years of turbulence in our love lives. We have tried to get together with people who didn’t like us, we’ve started and broken up unions, we’ve gone out for endless parties, in the hope of meeting someone, and known excitement and bitter disappointments.

    No wonder if, at a certain point, we have enough of all that. Part of the reason we feel like getting married is to interrupt the all-consuming grip that love has over our psyches. We are exhausted by the melodramas and thrills that go nowhere. We are restless for other challenges. We hope that marriage can conclusively end love’s painful rule over our lives.

    It can’t and won’t: there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal in a marriage as there is in single life. It’s only from the outside that a marriage looks peaceful, uneventful and nicely boring.

    Preparing us for marriage is, ideally, an educational task that falls on culture as a whole. We have stopped believing in dynastic marriages. We are starting to see the drawbacks of Romantic marriages. Now comes the time for psychological marriages.

Beta model test

    "We're in beta right now," may one day be used to describe a newlywed couple instead of a new app. Time, on a roll this week in the love department, argues that millennials may change the game when it comes to how we approach marriage.

    This comes from a survey given in conjunction with the new USA Network drama, Satisfaction (so not exactly the Brookings Institution). Led by a team of trend researchers, the survey asked 1,000 millennials about their feelings towards, and expectations for, marriage. They also provided a number of "marriage models" and surveyed the millennials on which options they might consider. The models, which would essentially be contract agreements between couples, include:

    Presidential: Vows last for another four years, but after 8 years you can elect to choose a new partner.

    Real Estate: Marriage licenses are granted on 5, 7, 10 and 30 year terms, after which the marriage must be renegotiated to be extended.

    Beta: The union can be formalized or dissolved after a two-year trial period.

    Twenty-one percent said they would be open to the Presidential option and 36% agreed with the Real Estate model. The most popular option was the Beta model with 46% of those surveyed saying they would being willing to consider the option. One of the arguments is that since millennials are used to having many options in every other area of their lives, why would marriage be any different?

    This is a generation that is used to this idea that everything is in beta, that life is a work in progress, so the idea of a beta marriage makes sense," the study's author, Melissa Lavigne-Delville, told me. "It's not that they're entirely noncommittal, it's just that they're nimble and open to change."

    Time's William Flew also notes that with one of the world's highest divorce rates, American millennials want to avoid making mistakes.

    "Millennials aren't scared of commitment — we're just trying to do commitment more wisely," says Cristen Conger, a 29-year-old unmarried-but-cohabitating podcast host in Atlanta. "We rigorously craft our social media and online dating profiles to maximize our chances of getting a first date, and 'beta testing' is just an extension of us trying to strategize for future romantic success."

    Marriage has obviously evolved throughout history, so it certainly makes sense that a new generation would have a somewhat different approach. However, as with many issues surrounding millennials, they might be overthinking this a bit.

    The larger takeaway seems to be that in a changing world, millennials will be able make decisions about marriage that are right for them with less stigma. It's not like anyone is stopping couples from drawing up their own beta marriage contracts right now, but it would probably be met with some skeptisim. Millennials are already much more chill about things like gay marriage and premarital cohabitation so it stands to reason that eventually, a situation like a beta marriage might be more widely accepted.

    Basically, like every other generation, millennials are going to approach marriage with their unique goals and expectations in mind. Marriage is already a lot of work, no need to make it complicated as well.

C19 Marriage

    The Supreme Court declined to hear five same-sex marriage cases on Monday, thus opening the door to the expansion of marriage rights into 30 states. For supporters the decision represents an unequivocal victory for equality, while for critics, this “redefinition of marriage” marks a dismaying shift away from tradition. But this latest decision is simply a variation on a theme, continuing another chapter in the nation’s centuries-old argument over the definition of marriage.

    In her latest book, Leslie J. Harris, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, surveyed five types of 19th-century marriage controversy: domestic violence, divorce, polygamy, free love, and miscegenation. RD spoke with Harris about her project and what it reveals about our contemporary attempts to define, and redefine, marriage.

    Your book is concerned with nineteenth century marriage controversies, so same-sex marriage is seldom mentioned. But it was on my mind the whole time I was reading. Did it inspire or influence your writing in any way?

    Yes, the same-sex marriage controversy was an important factor in inspiring the book. I’ve been very interested in the issue for years, but I was particularly intrigued by the rash of state constitutional amendments in the early 2000s. I couldn’t help but wonder why marriage mattered so deeply to so many people.

    For those advocating the amendments, marriage seemed to function as a status and idea that was much larger than any particular relationship. War metaphors were common as advocates declared that marriage was “under attack” and needed to be “defended,” and marriage was commonly represented as a sacred and unchangeable institution. While the other side of the debate emphasized the huge number of laws and policies tied to marriage, simply changing laws and policies quickly became an inadequate response. Marriage seemed to function as a status that enabled full citizenship, and advocates often made the analogy to nineteenth and early twentieth-century bans on interracial marriage.

    By examining the history of these controversies we can better understand what is at stake today. In the nineteenth century the topic of marriage arose in almost every major controversy of the time including women’s rights, westward expansion, slavery, immigration, religious diversity, temperance, and state’s rights. Marriage functioned as a lens through which complex issues of belonging, identity, and status were debated.

    I’ve become convinced that today’s debate about same-sex marriage is not simply about preserving a seemingly sacred and unchanging institution, or securing particular rights and privileges. Rather, it is about negotiating the boundaries of American-ness. I reference the recent Supreme Court decisions about marriage in the book’s conclusion because they illustrate this point well.

    The court said that marriage enables “pride” and “dignity,” especially in reference to raising children (who were said to be humiliated by DOMA). Even as the Supreme Court seemed to open space for same-sex marriage, it (perhaps inadvertently) limited the acceptable gay family to one that models the traditional nuclear family.

    Contra those who claim that marriage has always been stable and static, you show that it has been controversial for a long time. Did you observe any particular consistency or development in the arguments from controversy to controversy?

    One reoccurring theme across controversies is marriage as a religious institution and the role of religion in public life. Arguments against expanding grounds for divorce, for example, consistently invoked arguments about marriage as ordained by God. If God created marriage as a permanent union between a man and woman, humans could not legitimately change the institution of marriage. Much like many current advocates for same-sex marriage, some proponents for expanding divorce laws argued that religion should be separate from politics and that marriage was essentially a civil institution.

    Religious tropes were also used in attempts to change understandings of marriage. Polygamy (nineteenth century Mormons) and free love (some groups of Perfectionists) were two dramatic attempts to change marriage that were based in religious and often explicitly biblical justifications. Religion can be a malleable tool in negotiating the meaning and significance of marriage in public life.

    The perceived connection between marriage and the future of the nation also has a long history. Commentators warned, for example, that increasing rates of divorce would lead to the fall of the United States, much like the fall of the Roman Republic. Similarly, polygamy was seen as causing social decline into barbarism. This technique of linking changes in marriage to a slippery slope to the nation’s destruction instilled fear of change. More importantly, however, these claims revealed underlying ideological norms about what constituted a “good” nation.

    Within this reasoning, the family represents a microcosm of the nation as a whole; so it was problematic if the American family replicated seemingly barbarous families of the East, which were assumed to be polygamous. If the family looked like the racial other, the nation would begin to look like the racial other—so there were racist assumptions hidden within the image of a “good” nation.

    There are, however, some temporal differences in marriage controversies. During the first half of the nineteenth century Americans were experimenting with public identity, and marriage became one site of experimentation. During this time, for example, Oneida Perfectionists practiced free love (or communal marriage) and Mormons began practicing polygamy. They were certainly controversial during their time (both groups were run out of various communities), but there seemed to be cultural space for experiments in marriage, religion, and public identity.

    On the other hand, today’s marriage controversies are not only able to incorporate the powerful rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement, but they’re further enabled by new technologies. In the nineteenth century, for example, newspapers would print vivid descriptions of individuals such as the innocent and worthy “girl” who was deceived by a violent and unscrupulous husband, which helped promote identification with audiences. Today, however, such profiles are supplemented by actual visuals. Images of hard-working and non-threatening gay couples with their children enhance that audience identification even further.

    I’m interested in your observation that religion is a “malleable tool” where marriage debates are concerned. Right now the UCC church in North Carolina and the “Sister Wives” family in Utah are using a “religious liberty” argument to oppose bans on same-sex marriage and polygamy, respectively. In doing so, they turn a popular Christian Right claim back on its makers. In your view, has religion traditionally inspired marriage activism, or has it simply provided rhetorical tools to those with other agendas? Maybe a little of each?

    The short answer is a little of each. I can think of some examples of marriage activism (such as campaigns against domestic violence) that were not clearly rooted in religion. Yet, religion has and continues to inspire marriage activism, occasionally for contradictory aims. I find your juxtaposition of the UCC and FLDS fascinating because it gets at a central conflict for me when I was writing about the nineteenth-century polygamy controversy. Marriage is a unique institution because it is always both public and private, and both religious and civil. What then are the freedoms and limitations to religious expression in marriage?

    With nineteenth-century polygamy some of the debate was over the validity of the religion and Joseph Smith as a prophet, but a significant part of the debate was about the treatment of women in polygamy. There were sensational exposés describing the degradation and abuse of women in polygamy, but at the same time women in the Utah territory were some of the first in the nation to have full voting rights, opportunities for education, and, in many cases, unusual control over their finances and homes.

    Further, some of the most vocal critics and supporters of polygamy were women, and both sides claimed to be advocating for women’s rights, protections, and Christian morality. I began my research very sympathetic with opponents to polygamy, but I came to respect the polygamist women. These women wanted the government to let them practice their religion and shape their families as they saw fit. We currently see very similar arguments with same-sex families who find themselves having to explain that they are not degraded and immoral, but they are happy and healthy.

    In reference to polygamy, the Supreme Court decided that the state could limit religious liberty, and, because marriage was a “foundation of civilization,” communities should regulate the institution. Even as the court emphasized the civil dimension of marriage, the community morals used to regulate marriage are inseparable from religion. If we accept marriage as always both civil and religious, then the possibilities for marriage activism become limited. Activists can attempt to dissociate marriage and religion (as activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton attempted in the nineteenth century), but I suspect that this strategy will have limited success because marriage and religion are deeply connected in the American imaginary.

    The alternative, then, is to control the rhetoric of religion, making marriage activism consistent with American religious norms. I’m not attempting to suggest that changing marriage simply requires an appeal to religion. It can be very difficult to argumentatively engage with moral and ethical claims because they often function as a basic premise to an argument—the “truth” on which the rest of the argument is built. An argument that appropriates the basic premise of Christian morality has more likelihood of success. While it’s difficult to know whether religion was an inspiration or tool for any given activist, in both the nineteenth century and today, much marriage activism has deep religious roots.

    Does the history of marriage controversy over the past two hundred years disclose any sort of trajectory? Do you have any predictions about where our discourse around marriage and citizenship is heading?

    Predictions are difficult, but I am willing to make a few claims. First, Americans tend to have a deep commitment to monogamy, and I do not think that this will change anytime soon. Some of the most radical challenges to marriage in the nineteenth century were challenges to monogamy, but those experiments were ultimately failures. The LDS church was forced to abandon polygamy, and free love communities such as Oneida eventually failed. Even as same-sex marriage becomes increasingly acceptable in the United States, it is framed to model the traditional nuclear family.

    Second, I do not think that marriage will go away. Marriage is an important way of structuring relationships, and in the US ways of thinking about marriage have a tendency to replicate government models (I call this the family-as-government metaphor). Because ways of thinking about family and government tend to be deeply intertwined, I think that marriage is here to stay (at least for the foreseeable future).

    Although it may be tempting to look for a clear linear trajectory with marriage controversies, the reality is more complex. Marriage is fascinating because the institution is about much more than love and personal commitment; it’s a lens through which Americans attempt to understand who we are and what we believe. Ultimately, marriage controversy is rooted in the anxieties and conflicts of a time, so the ebbs and flows of American identity become reflected back in these controversies.

Sex Every Night

    One busy wife wondered what would happen if she put sex back at the top of her “to do” list. Her findings are revealing

    There’s a statistic about marriage that has been depressing me. Sixty per cent of people in long-term relationships have sex less than twice a month (according to the mental health charity Mind). And yup, that includes me. Two children and a decade in, the days that my husband and I would jump each other a few times a week have long fizzled away. We talk, we collaborate, we’re committed. But most nights the nearest we get to sex is a murmur of “love you darling” and a tender spoon.

    How this has happened is a familiar lament of most married women I know. By bedtime we’re knackered. Now in our mid-forties, our libido is about as raging as a duck pond. We do feel bad that we are not more up for it, but with all the pressures, from family life to our careers, putting out at bedtime comes a long way down the “to do” list. For many, it appears to have fallen off the list altogether. According to recent research, two thirds of adults now believe a happy relationship is possible without sex. I never wish to find myself in that group. Aside from surely increasing the odds that my husband — or I — might be tempted elsewhere, I want to have sex in my life, in our lives. Sex is what sets you apart as a couple. Otherwise you are just friends, flatmates, co-parents.

    I turn to advice from two experts. First is leading sexologist Utta Demontis. The problem, she says, is that women like me in long-term relationships, especially mothers, cease to identify themselves as “lovers”. “With all the other demands on you, you lose your sexual self,” she says. “Then it’s a vicious cycIe, you stop having sex, your sexual energy diminishes, you stop needing it.” Thus it is key to be proactive, she says. “The more we cultivate our sexual energy, the more it stays alive.”

    The ebbing away of sex is something that Jan Day, a therapist who specialises in intimacy, sees all the time, too. “A lot of women vacate their bodies, they are just not there,” Day says. “We numb ourselves out thinking about other things — stress at work, children, that we’re out of shape.” Couples should not make the mistake of feeling that they cannot make love if they’ve had a stressful or tiring day, she says. “You don’t have to be perfectly resolved, or in a good mood. In fact it can be deeply intimate to make love when you are sad, tired or anxious.

    “Sex is like yoga,” she adds. “The most difficult thing is getting the mat out and standing on it. Then you remember how good it makes you feel and you’ll start to crave it again.”

    So with this advice, I put it to my husband that it’s time to put sex right back at the top of the “to do list”. That, according to the experts, the more I have sex, the more I’ll want. I pledged to have sex every night for a month, no excuses. My husband, who at 48 is still up for it at pretty much any moment, was delighted by the suggestion, even if it did carry the whiff of “research”. Sex every night? He was hardly going to say no.

    Week one

    It’s Sunday night, the day we are supposed to start, but my husband’s flight home from a business trip has been delayed. When he tromps in at midnight I’m almost asleep. Monday morning is looming and getting revved up for sex is the last thing I feel like. As I hear his footsteps on the stairs I decide to adjourn the project until tomorrow and pretend to be out cold. But as he kisses me hello, it’s clear that he hasn’t forgotten the plan. To fail on the first night would be pathetic, I tell myself. So I gamely pull him under the duvet as he sheds his clothes. Actually, it’s pretty romantic, reuniting in this way. It reminds me of the excitement we had in each other when we first met.

    Bolstered by this enjoyable start, the next five days are surprisingly easy. We conscientiously turn off the TV at the end of the 10 o’clock news, get into bed and begin kissing before my “can I really be bothered?” thoughts have time to surface. An American sex expert, Dr Ian Kerner, once told me that even when women don’t think they are in the mood, their underlying “receptive sexual desire” will kick in as soon as their arousal systems are targeted. And he’s right. I’ve forgotten how fun sex is once you’ve dragged yourself over the precipice of horniness; and also how relaxed it leaves you afterwards. I’m also pleased to note that it is taking a very manageable 20 minutes, so as long as we are prompt to bed I’m not losing sleep time.

    It’s also immediately noticeable how much less tension there is between us in the mornings. Those 20 minutes of pleasure we’ve shared are like credits with each other that linger when we wake. We cuddle by the kettle and tag-team the pre-school/work mayhem without bickering or blaming. I don’t feel my usual rage the day my husband announces he wants to nip out for a run, leaving me to do the breakfast and school drop-off alone.

    However, on day six we hit a problem. As we reach for each other in bed, this suddenly feels like a chore. Although he would never admit to it, I suspect my husband is now just going through the motions too. We’ve made love in almost the same way every night. Now that the thrill that we are actually having sex is wearing off, it feels, well, just a bit samey. Frankly, my nether regions need a break. We agree that oral sex counts, both glad of a change.

    Week two

    My husband is unexpectedly called to San Francisco for a six-day work trip to Silicon Valley. I tell him this is extremely inconvenient — and, frankly, typical. If we are to stick to the experiment, the only option is phone sex. The problem is I have never had phone sex — not even in my twenties. The prospect of swapping dirty talk down the phone with the man to whom I’d usually be relaying the details of our daughters’ homework feels beyond excruciating. I decide to try to get into the mood first. My husband once gave me a book of erotica published by Agent Provocateur. I flick to my favourite story: a woman dressed up for the opera is stood up by her boyfriend. Outside the theatre she spots a roguish doorman who beckons her into a heaving nightclub full of beautiful, half-naked people dancing. As she stands at the packed bar his strong body is pushed into her from behind. Suddenly she feels his hands sliding under her cocktail dress... I dial my husband’s mobile. “Hi,” I say, before I get self-conscious. “I am imagining us pressed together in a hot, sweaty club.”

    “Er, any chance we could do this in half an hour? I’m about to walk into a meeting with our backers,” he replies. It may be 11pm in London, but in San Francisco it is only 3pm.

    I’ll come clean now. The rest of the week is a write-off. One night he calls and I am already asleep. Another, he tries one sentence: “I want you to touch yourself.” To which I can only exclaim, “No, sorry, I can’t do this, I just can’t.” After that the content of our phone calls returns to drama club and hockey practice.

    Week three

    We have homecoming sex, which is fantastic. As my husband travels a lot, I realise I have been really missing a trick here. But in the days that follow we are back to the sameness problem. My husband confesses that he had anticipated that we’d find ourselves branching out more by this point. But if I am honest, I have no more desire for role play, bondage or S&M than I did when we started this experiment. I would have to be blind drunk to get over the self-consciousness of kinky sex with a man I have now been with for ten years. If I do get blind drunk these days, I pass out. Ever hopeful, my husband produces some porn on his phone one evening, but all I can think about is what would happen if my daughters saw something like this. It’s a complete mood killer.

    Week four

    This begins badly as our daughters have nits. An evening of dousing the household hair with Hedrin is not the best foreplay. We get into bed stinking of chemicals, with towels on our pillows — and give ourselves a night off. The smell aside, it feels wonderful to lie next to each other reading. As intimate as anything we’ve done in the past three weeks. But as it is our last week we do finally branch out. After supper one evening we have sex on the sofa. I confess, for me, this is a bit about getting it out of the way early while I’m buzzing off a glass of chablis. Another night we make love on the stairs — mainly because my husband has to get back to a conference call with the States.

    On the final night of week four, we make love with the triumph of long-distance runners finishing a marathon. I’ll admit that what I feel most is relief — the pressure is finally off.

    So what have we gained from our sex marathon? On the disappointing side, I am sceptical that “exercising my sexual energy” has improved my libido. I don’t spontaneously crave sex any more than I did a month ago. On the up side, I have been reminded of its virtues. Just as being disciplined enough to eat healthy food and take regular exercise pays massive dividends so, clearly, does sex. My husband and I were always close, but now we are a lot less cross with each other. Some might term this the healing power of intimacy. I think it is simply because sex is an easy and instant way of having a good time together. When you first become a couple, most of your time is spent revelling in each other’s company. Over time, that fades into an onslaught of arrangements, obligations, irritations and resentments. Just 20 minutes a day of having joyful one-to-one togetherness helps counteract all the negatives that creep into a working marriage. Put simply, it keeps us liking each other. It makes us more forgiving.

    But just like eating healthy food and exercising, it’s sticking to the programme that’s an issue. You swerve the gym a few times, or give in to a sausage roll, and you’re back to square one. A few nights off and my husband and I are already slipping back into the bad habit of staying up way too late to feel like sex, or going to bed at different times. The truth is that keeping sex in a marriage takes discipline. And I am not even talking Fifty Shades of Grey.

Mathematics of Marriage

    Once it was the stuff of poetry and dreams, but now even love has been pulled apart by scientists — who have reduced many of its mysteries to a set of key equations.

    The most important, says Hannah Fry of University College London, will tell you when to stop playing the field and start hunting for your life-long partner. Then, when you have found them, a second equation in her new book The Mathematics of Love, will tell you how to monitor a relationship — and spot when it is at risk of falling apart.

    Fry’s day job is building computer models of how humans behave in complex urban environments — and then using them to predict the behaviour of terrorists and rioters.

    Then she read a poignant research paper by Peter Backus, a fellow mathematician, entitled Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend, where he calculated that, given factors such as his age, appearance, education and pickiness, there were just 26 women in the UK with whom he might have a “wonderful relationship”.

    Fry felt sorry for him — before spotting his suggestion that only one woman in 20, in his preferred age range, would be attractive enough for him. “I thought he was being too picky, so I recalculated assuming he found a higher proportion attractive, suggesting 832 in London alone.”

    Even those odds are, however, pretty poor in a big city, so, intrigued, Fry extended her research using two new theorems, “discrete choice theory” and the “decoy effect”, to work out how people could improve their chances, especially when “out on the pull”.

    “What the equations show is that you should take a slightly uglier friend, so that you always seem like a better option,” she said.

    However, even those with a suitably hideous friend can still end up alone, a risk Fry suggests can be minimised by applying another equation, the Gale-Shapley algorithm, to compare whether it is better to approach potential partners — or wait to be approached.

    It showed that those using the classic female strategy of waiting to be asked lost out. “What that tells us is not to be passive. The maths shows that those doing the asking may risk continual rejection, but actually end up far better off than the group who sit back and await a suitor’s advances.”

    For many, however, perhaps the biggest question is just when to stop playing the field and settle down: is the person you are dating now the right one? Or might there be someone better to come?

    This question baffles most of us, but not Fry, who applied an approach known as “optimal stopping theory” to work out that we should reject outright the first 38% of our potential lovers — and then choose the next one to come along who is better than any of those.

    “If you are destined to date 10 people in your lifetime, you have the highest probability of finding “The One” when you have rejected your first four lovers. Or you can do it by time — work out how many years you want to date for and dump anyone in the first 38% of that time and marry the next one who tops your previous partners.”

    That may seem coldblooded, but Fry also says maths can help keep people together. Here, she applied James Murray’s “mathematics of marriage” equations which add up all the irritations that can build up between couples — showing that the traditional ideals of compromise and tolerance can be lethal for a relationship, while couples who air grudges early on but then work to put them right are far happier.

    Fry’s mathematical insights were, however, not much use to her in her single days; she worked them out only after she had met her husband.

    “I cannot claim to have had the best love life, and knowing this stuff doesn’t give me any mystical powers now, but I do wish I had known this when I was single — I would have been more proactive.

    “Obviously I cannot say I would have got a better husband. But being single would have been more fun.”

    As for Backus, he too has finally got married — proving perhaps that human emotions still have a few mysteries maths has not yet resolved.

The marriage squeeze

    KHAPs are informal local councils in north-western India. They meet to lay down the law on questions of marriage and caste, and are among India’s most unflinchingly conservative institutions. They have banned marriage between people of different castes, restricted it between people from the same village and stand accused of ordering honour killings to enforce their rulings, which have no legal force. India’s Supreme Court once called for khaps to be “ruthlessly stamped out”. In April 2014, however, the Satrol khap, the largest in Haryana, one of India’s richest states, relaxed its ban on inter-caste marriage and made it easier for villagers to marry among their neighbours. “This will bring revolutionary change to Haryana,” said Inder Singh, president of the khap.

    The cause of the decision, he admitted, was “the declining male-female sex ratio in the state”. After years of sex-selective abortions in favour of boys, Haryana has India’s most distorted sex ratio: 114 males of all ages for every 100 females. In their search for brides, young men are increasingly looking out of caste, out of district and out of state. “This is the only way out to keep our old traditions alive,” said Mr Singh. “Instead of getting a bride from outside the state who takes time to adjust, we preferred to prune the jurisdiction of prohibited areas.”

    The revision of 500 years of custom by its conservative guardians symbolises a profound change not just in India. Usually dubbed the “marriage squeeze”, the change refers both to the fact of having too many men chasing too few brides and the consequence of it in countries where marriage has always been nearly universal. Sex selection at birth is common in China and India. The flight from marriage—with women marrying later, or not at all—is long established in Japan and South Korea. But until recently, Asia’s twin giants have not felt the effects of sexual imbalance in marriage. Now they are.

    The marriage squeeze is likely to last for decades, getting worse before it gets better. It will take the two countries with their combined population of 2.6 billion—a third of humanity—into uncharted territory. Marriage has always been a necessary part of belonging to society in India and China. No one really knows how these countries will react if marriage is no longer universal. But there may be damaging consequences. In every society, large numbers of young men, unmarried and away from their families, are associated with abnormal levels of crime and violence.

    Missing girls, missing brides

    The roots of the current squeeze go back a generation. Sex-selective abortions became common in China in the 1990s as a result of the country’s strict (now somewhat laxer) one-child-per-couple policy and a traditional preference for sons. A few years later they became increasingly common in India, also because of a preference for sons and helped by the growing availability of prenatal tests to determine sex. In 2010-15, according to the UN Population Division, China’s sex ratio at birth was 116 boys to 100 girls; in India the figure was 111. Though these ratios have fallen a little since their peaks, they are still far above the natural rate, which is 105 to 100.

    As a result, enormous numbers of girls and women are “missing”—absent, that is, compared with what would have happened if there had not been sex selection. If China had had a normal sex ratio at birth, according to a report in 2012 by the UN Population Fund it would have had 721m girls and women in 2010. In fact it had only 655m—a difference of 66m, or 10% of the female population. India’s ratio is not quite so bad. Had it been normal, the country would have had 43m more women, or 7% more, than it actually did. Other countries practise sex selection at birth, but Asia’s giants overshadow all others. Together they account for 109m of the 117m “missing” girls and women globally in 2010. Calculations by Christophe Guilmoto of the Institute of Development Research, a think-tank in Paris, show that marriage patterns in India and China were still normal in 2010. But they will become badly distorted by 2020.

    “Missing women” are only part of the explanation. Countries with normal sex ratios can experience a marriage squeeze if their fertility rates are falling fast. Fertility is important, because men tend to marry women a few years younger than themselves. In India the average age of marriage for men is 26; for women, it is 22. This means that when a country’s fertility is falling, the cohort of women in their early 20s will be slightly smaller (or will be rising more slowly) than the cohort of men they are most likely to marry - those in their late 20s (this is because a few years will have gone by and the falling fertility rate will have reduced the numbers of those born later). This may not sound like a big deal. But in fact between 2000 and 2010 the number of Indian men aged 25-29 rose by 9.2m. The number of Indian women aged 20-24 (their most likely partners) rose by only 7.6m.

    Even if India’s sex ratio at birth were to return to normal and stay there, by 2050 the country would still have 30% more single men hoping to marry than single women. This is explained by a rapid decline in India’s fertility rate. But in China, where fertility has been low for years, the more gradual decline in fertility still means there will be 30% more single men than women in 2055, though the distortion declines after that. A decline in fertility usually benefits developing countries by providing a “demographic dividend” (a bulge of working-age adults compared with the numbers of dependent children or grandparents). But it does have the drawback of amplifying the marriage squeeze.

    The problem is further accentuated by a so-called “queuing effect”. The length of a queue is determined by how many people join it, how many leave, and how long queuers are prepared to wait. In the same way, marriage numbers are a result of how many people reach marriageable age (the joiners); how many get married (the leavers) and how long people are willing to wait. In India and China, marriage remains the norm, so men keep trying to tie the knot for years.

    Hence, a marriage queue in India and China builds up. At stage one, a cohort of women reaches marriageable age (say, 20-24); they marry among the cohort of men aged 25-29. But there are slightly more men than women, so some members of the male cohort remain on the shelf. Later, two new cohorts reach marriageable age. This time, the men left over from the previous round (who are now in their early thirties) are still looking for wives and compete with the cohort of younger men. The women choose husbands from among this larger group. So after the second round even more men are left on the shelf. And so on. A backlog of unmarried men starts to pile up. Just as you need only a small imbalance between the number of people joining a queue and the number leaving it to produce a long, slow-moving line, so in marriage, a small difference in the adult sex ratio can produce huge numbers of bachelors. They are called guanggun (bare branches) in China, malang (aloof and loopy)in Haryana and chhara (a derogatory term for unmarried men) in Punjab.

    To make matters worse (for men, anyway), in rich Asian countries women are turning their backs on marriage altogether. Women with university degrees are more likely to marry late, or not at all, than those with primary education. Women who live in cities and have jobs are marrying later, or less, than rural women or those who work at home. Everywhere, female marriage rates are declining and the age of marriage is rising. In China, as women get richer and better educated, they are starting to repeat the behaviour of their Japanese and Korean sisters, pushing up the number of unmarried men.

    Lucky man

    The combination of these factors in India and China will make their marriage squeeze especially acute and persistent—much more severe than it would have been in the case of distorted sex ratios alone. Mr Guilmoto calculates that, in China, for every 100 single women expected to marry in 2050-54 there could be as many as 186 single men; in India in 2060-64 the peak could be higher: 191 men for each 100 women. This assumes the sex ratio at birth does not change. But even if the ratio were to return to normal in 2020 (which is unlikely), the marriage squeeze would still be severe, peaking at 160 in China in 2030, and at 164 in India 20 years later.

    A marriage squeeze of this intensity would be unknown in China and India and extraordinarily rare anywhere in history. America’s Wild West (or the fracking fields of present-day North Dakota) are rare examples of a society with huge numbers of excess men.

    There may be positive side effects: a shortage of brides in India is causing dowry prices to fall in some areas, for instance. Overall, though, the impact is likely to be negative. A study by Lena Edlund of Columbia University and others found that in 1988-2004, a one-point rise in the sex ratio in China raised rates of violent crime and theft by six to seven points. The abduction of women for sale as brides is becoming more common. The imbalance is fuelling demand for prostitution.

    There are few obvious remedies. If girls married earlier, it would increase marriage rates but would impede the progress being made by women in employment and education. Brides can be found in nearby countries. There are villages in China’s south-western provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou where many of the young women are Vietnamese or Burmese because local girls have gone to work in cities. A state-run newspaper, Beijing News, recently offered advice about the ten best places for Chinese men to find brides abroad (Ukraine, apparently, is promising). But this merely transfers the problem from one place to another. China and India are so vast that no marriage migration could ever be big enough to satisfy demand.

    Bare branches on the family tree

    If - a big if - marriage pairing were to become more symmetrical (ie, college graduates marry one another, and so on), then at least the burden of non-marriage would be spread more evenly. In India and China, women tend to “marry up” - illiterate women marry men with primary education; primary-school women marry men with secondary education; and so on. As a result, men at the bottom of the pyramid, and women at the apex, find it especially hard to find spouses. So the marriage squeeze does not affect everyone equally. It disproportionately hits illiterate men and does not do much to help graduate women (shengnu, or leftovers, as they are called in China).

    But overall, changing the patterns of marriage would merely moderate a squeeze which is likely to continue for decades. China has eased its one-child policy, and the sex ratio at birth has fallen. But because the marriage squeeze is the product of other factors, too, it will continue even were the sex ratio at birth to return to normal. If that happened, Mr Guilmoto reckons, over 21% of Chinese men would still be unmarried at 50 in 2070, while in India the figure would be almost 15%. Three generations after sex-selective abortions began, their impact will still be felt.

    India and China will change hugely as they become wealthier and better educated in coming decades. But few changes will be as momentous and persistent as the one now beginning: universal marriage will become a thing of the past.

Tiny Weddings

    Emily Alt used to enjoy driving her Airstream trailer across the U.S., but these days the wedding photographer has harnessed the caravan for a growing business op: staging pop-up weddings. Alt and her husband of seven years, who acts as the officiant, offer slimmed-down wedding packages for couples who want to run away and get married in northern Michigan — $2,500 buys ’em the ceremony, a photo shoot and standing space for up to 10 guests. The whole thing takes the same amount of time as an episode of The Bachelor. Just don’t expect a cocktail hour, a reception or any awkward speeches before a 7-foot, $7,000 Kardashian-inspired wedding cake gets cut. “You should be joyful and happy and spend absolutely zero time considering anyone else’s drama,” says Alt.

    Yep, the wedding industry’s latest trend seems an awful lot like the marital equivalent of the food-truck craze. And Alt’s not the only one to have whipped up a niche business opportunity. Victoria Hogan, who runs Flora Pop, began doing floral arrangements for weddings several years ago, transporting roses around Brooklyn on her bicycle. But a move to Vegas — the quickie wedding capital of the world — got her thinking about cutting out the middleman. Now she performs weddings herself in the Nevada desert, taking couples for photo shoots with nary an Elvis impersonator in sight. Meanwhile, Maggie Winters of D.C.-based Pop Wed and her husband have been offering willing couples what they call “tiny weddings,” which start at $2,900 each.

    Pop-up elopements are especially popular among older folks or those celebrating a second wedding — people who may have endured the stress of a massive ceremony before.

    Some of the interest has been driven by younger, student-debt-ridden couples who can’t afford celebrating love in that big, big way — a wedding in the U.S. now costs a record $31,200, on average, according to a survey of 16,000 couples by wedding site the Knot. “When you think about spending $30K on a wedding, it’s just crazy,” says Winters. “Our generation is really practical.” But while there are few figures on elopements in the U.S. — most research on weddings is conducted by wedding websites, meaning the people responding care enough about their big day to be on a site that talks about hors d’oeuvres in the first place — many couples are opting out of the brouhaha. Yet they don’t want to let the day pass without capturing any memories. For these lovebirds, a courthouse, two signatures and some rock-solid conviction isn’t necessarily sufficient.

    Pop-up elopement services vary by location, but the basic premise is the same: You get professional photos, and you get to take your legal vows. If you wanted to, you could still spend $5,000 on a wedding dress for a pop-up, but the couples who want to typically don’t seek out this kind of service. Though wedding practitioners who oversee these quickie services report that couples of all ages seek them out, and that they have more demand for pop-ups than they have time, they also note that pop-ups are especially popular among older folks or those celebrating a second wedding — people who may have endured the stress of a massive ceremony before and want one that’s more private or intimate this time around.

    Romantics argue that weddings aren’t supposed to be private, and that this is the biggest day of some people’s lives. One of the reasons weddings exist, they state, is to provide a space for public declaration. “You’re making this decision to dedicate your life to somebody else, and it’s the one opportunity you get to invite everyone important to you to celebrate that,” says Kristen Maxwell Cooper, deputy editor of the Knot. There are practical considerations too — in today’s shaky global economy, young couples may depend on wedding gifts or money to get their start in life together, even if the haul doesn’t offset the cost of a wedding.

    There’s also the question of family. “Your wedding should be about you” is the constant refrain — but shouldn’t it also be a little bit about, say, your elderly grandparents? That’s why, Alt says, she talks through the elopement process with her clients, asking them, “Do you want to spend the next two to three years of your life explaining to people why they weren’t invited?” There may be practical reasons to elope, though. The more you spend on a wedding, says one study, the shorter the marriage is likely to be.

Marital Coercion

    Every day, Gemma Doherty’s boyfriend made her pound a treadmill until she’d burnt 500 calories. Once, when he fell asleep, she stopped running but on waking he just restarted the clock at zero. He made her eat only canned tuna, so she’d acquire the “ripped” body of the model Gracyanne Barbosa. He showed Gemma photographs of Barbosa: this is who I want you to be. Yet outside he insisted she wore baggy jumpers to conceal her body from other men. He took away her car, tried to stop her seeing friends, smashed her iPhone, imposed bizarre hygiene rules after sex and hired associates to watch her at work.

    Mohammed Anwaar was jailed this week in Sheffield mainly for violent assaults on Gemma but 12 months of his sentence was for an offence that came on to the statute book only in December: coercive control. If this crime seemed indistinct when Theresa May announced it, the unlikely agency of The Archers this spring has provided Britain with a masterclass.

    I could barely listen to scenes between Helen and Rob Titchener and his sickly insinuations that she should watch her weight, wear a different dress, was too emotionally fragile to work or drive, to see friends or cope with her young son: a dripdrip of confidence-destruction conducted behind doors while the world saw him as a saint for caring for such a pathetic wife, until she was utterly under his control. “You’re nothing without me, Helen.” The National Domestic Violence Helpline reports a 17 per cent rise in calls from “the Rob effect”. Women who hitherto accepted living in fear of breaching tiny, tyrannical rules, grovelling for money to buy food or handing over their social media passwords, have realised such controls are not merely the price of “love”. The foremost researcher into domestic violence, Evan Stark, at Rutgers University in New Jersey — upon whose work the UK’s coercive control law was based — likens this pattern of behaviour to hostage-taking and calls it “domestic terrorism”.

    The Anwaar case and that of Adrian Charles Lee in Merseyside, who was jailed this month after a court ruled that he “controlled every aspect of his partner’s life”, are landmark prosecutions. Domestic violence rarely starts with kicks and blows. If it did, most women would quickly flee. Mainly it begins with an obsessiveness so easily confused, especially by young women, with intense romantic love: “I can’t bear to spend a moment without you.” Then gradually, freedom is eroded — “don’t see your mates, let’s cosy up at home” — until permission is needed for every moment spent apart.

    Previously police could prosecute only when violence began. But often, as in the Helen story, actual physical injury is negligible — the odd bruise, rough sex — however grave the psychological distress. Indeed Women’s Aid hears many cases that don’t involve violence at all. Such as a nurse whose husband drove her back and forth from work, always met her for lunch, locked her in the house when he went out, made her sleep on a mattress beside his bed and yet never hit her once. His punishment if, say, she made eye contact with another man, was not speaking to her for weeks. She tolerated this for years, fearful of him but also that no one would believe her story. And her husband had, until December, committed no offence . . .

    If women can report cases of coercive control before the beatings begin, before their lives are in danger, maybe it will save some of the women — two every week — who are killed by partners or exes. It might have saved Hollie Gazzard, a young hairdresser, whose parents worried she was in a toxic relationship but could not get police to intervene. Finally, as she cut hair in her Gloucester salon, her ex-boyfriend, Asher Maslin, ran in and stabbed her to death.

    Coercive control also sets a line in the sand about how much one person may limit the autonomy of another. That line, of course, is open to interpretation, requires evidence extracted from our most intimate dealings. And many police forces are yet to be trained in how to see through arch manipulators like Rob, how to spot patterns of control. Men’s rights activists have accused the government of relationship policing: what is to stop wives getting husbands thrown in prison for the niggly rules and accommodations in any marriage?

    Undeniably this law attacks abuses of power that were normal when I was growing up. Then, a husband could oversee every penny his wife spent, forbid her from going out to the pub or declare “no wife of mine will ever work”. Indeed, these rules were easy to impose back when women had less financial independence and few could even drive, when a battered wife was a just a silly woman always walking into cupboard doors, a private not a police concern.

    Yet even now our more insular and conservative Muslim communities often deny women and girls modern freedoms. Visiting an East End sixth form recently, teachers told me they spend much time persuading parents to let very bright daughters go to university. Many are denied a social life beyond their immediate family. The line between an arranged marriage — where a girl has choice — and a forced one can be notional. Sharia courts often rule that wives must be obedient to controlling men. But coercive control now gives those wishing to escape a valuable new legal tool.

    Nothing is more mysterious than other people’s marriages. And yet that does not mean they are wholly private affairs, that the power wielded within them is beyond all public scrutiny. Generations of Helens have lived cowed and diminished by manipulative Robs. Control is not love.

Singletons Are Happier

    Do you consider life to be a continuous process of learning, where you cultivate friendships and always challenge yourself? Or did you give up years ago and are instead awaiting death as you fill your remaining years in an unfulfilling job with a dwindling circle of friends? If the latter is the case, then the chances are you are married.

    Study after study has shown that married people are healthier, wealthier and happier. But, says one psychologist, almost every one of those studies is fatally flawed for a simple reason: they forget about the consequences of divorce.

    When the risk of divorce is included, Bella DePaulo said that for many people being a lifelong singleton is a positive and rational choice. “They are not single because they are still looking for The One. They are not waiting for their dream. They are already living their dream,” she said. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Dr DePaulo, a former professor at the University of Virginia, said that careful analysis of studies comparing single and married people finds that single people exercise more, have better health and, counter to the stereotype of loneliness, have more friends.

    Other research shows that lifelong singletons have more fulfilling jobs and are more interested in self improvement, while married people are more likely to agree with the statement, “I gave up trying to make big improvements in my life a long time ago”.

    Yet, said Dr DePaulo: “We all seem to share a faith that marriage makes us happier, healthier, better integrated into society, and better off in all sorts of physical, emotional, and interpersonal ways. Some of our most celebrated academic psychologists proclaim these things to be true.” The reason for the apparent contradiction, she said, is simple: most studies are unwittingly designed to exclude all those people for whom marriage was awful, as divorced people are counted as singletons.

    “And here’s the thing: in most studies, people who get married and then get divorced end up worse off than the people who just stayed single,” she said.

    This means that studies show marriage as being better than it is and singledom – into which divorced people are generally lumped – as being worse. It is a situation that, Dr DePaulo said, would not be accepted in any other trial. She likened it to a drug trial in which the results of those who took the treatment but felt worse were excluded.

Changing Trends

    MARRIAGE idealises permanence, and yet it is changing more rapidly than at any time in its history. Almost everywhere it is becoming freer, more equal and more satisfying. As our special report this week explains, wedlock has become so good that it is causing trouble.

    The most benign changes are taking place in poor and middle-income countries (where most people live). Child marriage, once rife, is ebbing. So is cousin marriage, with its attendant risk of genetic defects, though it is still fairly common in the Middle East and parts of Asia. Relations between husbands and wives have become more equal (though not equal enough). As women earn more and the stigma of divorce fades, more men are finding that they cannot treat their wives as servants (or, worse, punchbags), because women can credibly threaten to walk away.

    In some regions change has been astoundingly quick. In India the share of women marrying by the age of 18 has dropped from 47% to 27% in a single decade. “Love marriages” remain disreputable in India, and arranged marriages the norm. But, as in many traditional societies, young people have more say. Some can veto the mates their families suggest; others choose their own, subject to a parental veto. Across the world, popular culture is raising expectations of what a good marriage is like, and dating websites are giving singletons vastly more options.

    Ring the changes

    The worrying part is what is going on in rich countries. In the West marriage is in excellent shape, but only among the well-off. Elite couples delay tying the knot to allow time to get established in a career, but they still tie it before having children. Working-class people, by contrast, are dramatically less likely to put a ring before a cradle than in previous generations. Among the college-educated in America, only 12% of births are to unmarried mothers; among those who dropped out of high school, the rate is 70%, up from 43% in the early 1980s. Similar trends can be seen across the wealthy world: the average out-of-wedlock birth rate for OECD countries is 40%.

    If marriage were just a piece of paper this would not matter. However, it is much more than that. Although a wedding cannot turn a flimsy relationship into a strong one, it adds scaffolding that can save one that is in between. Making a public, lifelong commitment to another person is not the same as drifting into cohabitation to share the rent. And this matters a lot if children are involved. One study in America found that 18% of married couples broke up within five years of a birth, compared with 47% of cohabiting couples.

    Children from stable backgrounds tend to do better in school and life—and are more likely to form stable unions of their own. Add the trend towards “assortative mating”, when high-achievers marry other high-achievers, and the gap between elite and working-class families yawns. Affluent parents intensively nurture their children for success; the offspring of less fortunate homes fall far behind before they ever set foot in a school. The marriage gap makes rich countries more unequal, and retards social mobility.

    Improbable as it may seem, this pattern is likely to reach every corner of the globe. The forces that have shaken up marriage in rich countries—rising individualism, education, women’s economic emancipation—are spreading. It is not just a Western trend. For a long time Japan resisted it: highly educated women were less likely to marry than others. Now they are more likely to (and less likely to divorce).

    The revolution in family life is largely beneficial, and there is not much that governments can do about its harmful side-effects. America has tried hard to promote wedlock among poor people since the 1990s, but failed utterly. Countries should try to ensure that their welfare systems do not penalise marriage among the poor. They should not, however, lurch in the other direction by providing tax benefits to the married. Given the growing social stratification of marriage, such measures are exceedingly regressive.

    Working-class Westerners have not given up on marriage. On the contrary, many idealise it. Rather than seeing it as the start of a couple’s journey together, as in the past, they often see it as something not to try until they arrive—with a good job, a house, financial stability and a lavish party. Many feel they are not “ready” to marry, even as they embark on parenthood. Helpfully, some European countries have begun to offer civil unions for heterosexuals. (Gay couples already had that option.) They confer nearly all the rights of marriage but entail less of the intimidating hoopla. These now account for a fifth of new formal unions in the Netherlands, and more in some working-class districts. They have not undermined marriage so far. It is a small fix for a huge problem, but it might help.

How romanticism ruined love Part 1



    (Dr Pani Farvid, a senior lecturer in psychology at AUT Auckland, writing in NZ Herald)

    "All you need is love" sang the Beatles. "What is this thing called love?" croons the famous song by Cole Porter. "Love will keep us together" declares Captain and Tennille.

    Romantic love has been the subject of music, art, literature, cinema, philosophical thought and scientific research for some time. At AUT, we recently put together a YouTube video on "The Science of Love" in order to make sense of the topic.

    The topic of love is one that fascinates us. The experience of love is one that can bring us joy, happiness or bliss, as well as pain, confusion and heartache.

    To unpack this elusive but powerful force, for the next three weeks I'm going to do a short series on rethinking love. We need to shift our expectations of how love comes together, what it feels like, and how it can work as part of a functioning long-term relationship. To do this, I want to draw on the work of contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton, as well as sharing insights from my own research.

    The way we love is heavily shaped by the outside world. It is influenced by the social, cultural and historic juncture we find ourselves in. The stories we hear about love (via media and historical narratives, for example) hugely shape our understanding and expectation of what love is, how it should unfold, and what it should feel like.

    de Botton traces our current understanding and practice of love to an intellectual movement of the late 1700s, called 'Romanticism'.

    Romanticism was heavily dedicated to the arts, poetry and literature, and it had a lot to say about love. First and foremost, Romanticism espouses that there is a 'soulmate' out there for everyone. A person who is your spiritual 'other half', and will not only complete you, but by finding them, all your problems, worries, concerns and daily burdens will magically disappear.

    Once you've found 'The One', it will fix everything from your loneliness to your daily existential crises about the true nature of the world and what you should really be doing with your life. You will live happily ever after like in the fairy tales, and this will be effortless, almost magical and largely driven by your intrinsic understanding of each other. If only. But more on that next week.

    So, how do we find this person? According to romanticism, and as deduced by de Botton, it is by mere 'instinct'. One day, somewhere in a public place, or at a party, or at work, you will meet someone and there will be a special, unexplainable feeling you get when you see them.

    This feeling is now bound up with sexual attraction, but was originally more of a spiritual union. This odd but exciting stirring is to indicate that this person could be the one for you, even if you don't actually know anything about them.

    The notion of 'love at first sight' captures the essence of the Romantics approach to love – you will one day, quite randomly meet your soulmate and you will magically know they're the one for you.

    And hopefully you find this person as soon as possible (or at least by your 30s, in contemporary New Zealand). Here blind love becomes the basis of marriage-type relationships and the way to find said love is via instinct.

    Before romanticism, marriages were focused much more on practicalities. They were about uniting certain family bloodlines, or combining certain bits of land or other resources.

    They were marriages based on 'reason' versus 'love' and we often arranged by the elders of a family. Such dynastic marriages were how lifelong partnerships were made for thousands of years, before Romanticism ushered in the mystique of what we now consider romantic love.

    What Romanticism also espouses is that you are meant to love everything about your partner, forever. You should find all their personal quirks or weird habits endearing and adorable. They should never get on your nerves or frustrate you, if you truly love them.

    Romanticism dictates that love should come together rather magically, work instinctively and be painlessly harmonious, without any deep prior understanding of the other individual, or any ongoing work on the relationship by the couple.

    Now while we gravitate to these beautiful ideals (and they are hard to fully dismiss), de Botton firmly contends that Romanticism has been an utter catastrophe for our capacity to have good long-term relationships.

    He contends, and I agree, that if we are to ever have a real chance at love, or a functioning, thriving and loving relationship, we have to let go of the many romantic notions, thoughts and feelings that got us into certain relationships in the first place.

    I know this may bring gasps of horror to some readers, but I will explain what I mean in the coming weeks. Next week, I'll offer some alternative understandings of love that can set us up to succeed much better at love and relationships.

How romanticism ruined love Part 2

    Last week I outlined how, under the tenets of Romanticism, we tend to rely on our instincts to find that special someone. Given that about half of marriage-type relationships dissolve, the way we are choosing our partners, and how we are conducting ourselves in intimate relationships, is not garnering any more success than flipping a coin.

    Romanticism will have us believe that there is a special someone out there who is perfect for us, and we perfect for them. Yet, no one is perfect and imagining that they are not only sets us up to fail, but is rather toxic.

    We are all deeply complex psychological beings who are often much more damaged than we realise. Philosopher Alain de Botton goes further to argue, not only are we damaged, but that we all 'deeply mad' in our own special way. He argues in jest, but rather accurately, that "none of us make it through the gauntlet of early childhood and adolescence, with our sanity entirely intact".

    We are all psychologically patterned in very specific ways, and not all of these are constructive. Based on our background, our childhood, and the society we are raised in, we are intricately moulded in very distinctive ways.

    If we've made it to adulthood, we are all, in one way or another, somewhat flawed. But this is not a bad thing. Instead, it makes us who we are in a rather a beautiful way, that reflects our life's journey.

    What we need to have more success in love (and life), is not only a good grasp of the ways we are psychologically patterned, but to develop the capacity to accept this, and summon the courage to share it with those close to us.

    The work we do on ourselves on understanding this patterning gives us much more self-awareness and therefore more options when it comes to the choices we make in love and life. Yet, we have very poor psychological awareness as a society. Overall, we are pretty ill-equipped to understand what resides deep in our psyches or how this shapes who we are and how we behave.

    Many of us spend huge amounts of time and energy working or attending to others' needs, without putting aside one hour a week, let alone one hour a day, to work on ourselves. Granted, self-awareness is a hard task. And I think this is why we try so hard to get away from ourselves.

    We get busy, become workaholics, we drink too much, we game too much, we watch too much TV, because it can be hard to just sit and be present with our own thoughts, feelings or face our fallibilities. We seek to avoid the discomfort that comes with being a psychologically complex, contradictory and damaged individual.

    This is why when we fall in love, via instinct, we hope that we will never have to traverse the painful world of loneliness or have to deal with the harsh realities of what it is like to be truly present with ourselves. As I noted last week, once we find 'the one', we assume that we will accept each other exactly as we are and that it will all be smooth sailing.

    In the first few months of a new romance, life is bliss. Our hopes and dreams are foisted upon this person who looks to be able to make the world and our lives a much better place.

    But, as psychoanalysis has long asserted, we don't always choose our partner because they are good for us, or because they will make us happy, but because they feel 'familiar'.

    When we fall in love, we are most likely re-creating a pattern of love we learnt during childhood that is buried deep in our unconscious. We learn about love not only from our culture, but from the first-hand experiences of love while growing up. Even if this love was problematic.

    Maybe we loved a parent who was distant or volatile, under a lot of stress, or dealing with an addiction. Maybe our parents modelled a dysfunctional relationship with little care or compassion for each other. Maybe the love we needed was not necessarily the love we got, but it was the only love we knew.

    If we don't delve into how we become patterned to 'love' and 'be loved', we are bound to re-create a pattern of love that can leave us dissatisfied. This can be why we meet someone who looks great on paper, but tend to find them a bit boring or unattractive. They are, to put it simply, probably just a bit too functional for us. They don't satisfy your particular kind of (dysfunctional) imprinted pattern of love.

    The more self-awareness we have about what makes us who we are, and what our underlying needs are in love – rather than our surface desires or fallible instincts – the more likely we are to choose a partner that is better suited to us.

    And, if you suspect that you've already chosen someone based on instinct with whom you might be recreating a familiar love, versus the love you want, don't fret or call the divorce lawyer just yet.



Other Resources

  • Books About Marriage
  • Anecdotes About Marriage
  • Quotations About Marriage

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