This is from Leah Libresco Sargeant in the Wall Street Journal, but I have seen similar statements from people who work directly with adolescents:
In 10 years of surveying high-school seniors, the Monitoring the Future project has found that fewer and fewer young men and women expect they will be “very good” as a spouse. It’s little wonder the share who expect to get married has plummeted in parallel.
Holding a stable job and being able to provide for one’s family is part of what it means to be a good spouse, but it flows out of bigger questions of character and how one handles responsibility. If we want to see marriages rebound, it isn’t enough to focus on expanding blue-collar work. High-school seniors need to have more faith they can handle the duties of marriage and child-rearing. Giving them more lectures on how important marriage is won’t do it—they think so highly of the institution that they judge themselves incapable of living up to it. Kids need more time away from adult supervision, pursuing projects of their own design, with the freedom to fail and to learn.
I have been wondering about this for decades. In the 1960s and 1970s we had a surge in divorce, which has since tapered off. But this seems to have left many Americans with a sense that marriage is difficult, that it is something you have to work very hard at if you want to succeed. You may have seen the sort of propaganda directed at girls and young women by Evangelical and Mormon churches, which says that you don't necesssarily need to find the right person, but you do have to be the right person.
Once upon a time marriage was just what most people did and nobody thought it required being a special sort of person. Now the message often is that marriage will require your supreme effort.
Are you the right person? Are you ready to make that supreme effort?
I have also wondered about Libresco's other argument, that young people shy away from marriage because they don't feel ready for any sort of adult responsibility. It does seem to me that adolescence keeps extending out farther and farther, and now many people seem to think that 30 is the minimum age to be a real adult.
I don't have anything profound to say about this, it just strikes me that the declining marriage rate for Americans in their 20s is related to changes in how we think about both marriage and life in your 20s.
Addendum:
The Heritage Foundations suggests "boot camps" for unmarried couples to teach them how to be married. I'm not picking on them; this is just another indication of how our whole society feels about marriage.
3 comments:
But this seems to have left many Americans with a sense that marriage is difficult, that it is something you have to work very hard at if you want to succeed.
I suppose this depends entirely on your idea of "succeed".
If your view of a successful marriage is merely people having children and being good little worker and consumer drones, then yes - it's easy.
If your of view a successful marriage is the participants actually being happy, healthy, well adjusted, and not passing on the legacy of generational trauma to the children they bring into the world... then no - it's quite difficult.
People used to be more willing to accept being trapped in awful, awful marriages John. You note that spike in divorces in the 60s and 70s - but you fail to recognize that said spike was the direct result of societal norms changing enough that unhappy people finally felt like they were allowed to leave bad relationships.
It's not that marriages were healthier prior to that. It's that it was seen as a a much bigger scandal to get a divorce, and so people didn't. The stigma toward divorce created a classic "chilling effect", keeping millions and millions of people trapped in hopelessness and unhappiness.
The divorce spike in the 60s and 70s was simply the opening of a pressure release valve, bleeding off all that pent up human misery. And the fact that divorces went down again afterwards is merely indicative of the notion that people started to be more careful about things BEFORE getting married. Why were they more careful? Particularly if divorces had become so much more acceptable, and it was theoretically less risky to get married than ever?
Because alongside changes on the view of divorce itself, people in society started to talk about and think about the challenges of marriage which had previously been taboo and non-negotiable. People suddenly were not only rethinking the acceptability of divorce, but also the necessity of marriage in the first place.
You say it yourself: "Once upon a time marriage was just what most people did and nobody thought it required being a special sort of person." The expected nature of it is what led to so many people ending up trapped in horrible, loveless, hateful, abusive marriages prior to the destigmatization of divorce.
And you want to suggest that marriage is EASY, and somehow always has been? Only if you don't give a damn about human suffering, John! It's very easy to get married - as long as you're willing to risk a lifetime of unhappiness as the price of that!
But in the past, there was expectation of happiness. Men were expected to work and pay the bills, women were expected to keep house and have children, and nobody at all was expected to be happy, of all things. Happiness was just a luxury you might arrive at if you were lucky, not something to be sought after. Happiness doesn't produce taxes and soldiers for the state, after all!
And that's the mindset you think the world should return to? One of misery and drudgery and depression? Living for the sake of Uncle Sam and the big corporations? And then you struggle to understand why people flock to get away from marriage in the modern day? Tsk.
Typo: "But in the past, there was -NO- expectation of happiness."
this is just another indication of how our whole society feels about marriage
It's a funny "whole" that somehow doesn't include all the many, many people in their twenties who don't feel the need or desire to get married.
(And this isn't even factoring all the people who want to get married, but cite issues like lack of free time or disposable income to dedicate to socializing and meeting people...)
But of course, if we don't "fix" the "problem" of all these people opting out of sacrificing their own happiness to fuel our traditional economic and political expectations, the status quo can't be maintained, so I guess we have no choice BUT to exclude the young people.
Gotta find a way to make the masses get back to having more babies, so we can keep funding our already insufficient and broken government healthcare systems off of payroll deductions alone... because that's so much more sane and sensible that finding the money elsewhere, such as the overstuffed coffers of our bloated corporations and the ultra wealthy... or reforming healthcare to a model which doesn't exist primarily to profit insurance companies rather than to promote an actually healthy population... or even simply just actively encouraging immigration to compensate for lower native birth rates...
No, clearly the only feasible solution is to figure out some way to pressure these dang kids-these-days into getting hitched more! If we can just find an argument which can convince the children that they are wrong, they'll all magically go back to the historical way we expect things to be!
Post a Comment