Below, Stephanie Coontz shares five key insights from her new book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.
Stephanie is the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She has authored several books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the United States Supreme Court decision on marriage equality.
What’s the big idea?
Marriage and gender relationships have never been fixed or “natural” in one permanent form. Throughout history, they have changed dramatically, and understanding that evolution can help us build better relationships today.
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1. It’s not true that Americans have ceased to value marriage.
People consistently tell pollsters that marriage is the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans do marry, though at older ages than in the past, and two-thirds of people who divorce marry again. Of never-married adults aged 18 to 29, three-quarters of heterosexual and two-thirds of LGBTQ individuals say they want to get married; only eight and six percent, respectively, say they don’t. But a far higher proportion of young people than in the past say they “have no idea” whether they will ever marry, and unlike in the past, more females than males express such uncertainty.
Young people have also become less likely to express confidence that they will be a “very good” marriage partner, and that gives us a clue as to what is going on. It’s not that Americans devalue marriage. It’s that we have much higher standards for what it takes to construct and sustain a good marriage. To meet them, we must discard a lot of misconceptions about what marriage has “always” been and why.
2. Marriages come in all sorts of shapes.
The tremendous complexity and variability of marriage and male-female relations contradict much “common wisdom” about how and why our current values and arrangements evolved and what possibilities there are for changing them.
Consider:
- How recently our contemporary ideas about what is physically attractive in a man or woman developed, and why they wouldn’t have been shared by our Stone Age and Neolithic ancestors.
- Why early Christian scholars would have considered “childless cat ladies” morally superior to married women.
- What the “manosphere” gets wrong about “traditional masculinity”—and how “emotion work” got relegated to women.
- Why the prefix Mrs. originally designated a woman’s high social status rather than her marital status, and how that changed.
- When the opposite of “manhood” ceased to be seen as “childhood” and became “womanhood.” And why emphasizing masculinity instead of maturity has led some men to embrace “toxicity.”
- Why early 20th-century dictionaries defined “heterosexuality” as a “depraved” passion for the opposite sex.
- The striking parallels between the culture wars of the 1920s and the 2020s.
3. Tradwives are wrong about 1950s marriages.
Domestic violence, child abuse, infanticide, and female subordination were far more common in the 1950s and 1960s than today. Marital rape was perfectly legal. But the only thing more dangerous than indulging the mistaken nostalgia for 1950s families is ignoring the very real losses that feed it: the collapse of the widely shared economic progress that occurred between 1945 and 1974, followed by growing insecurity for the bottom 80 percent of families along with unprecedented concentration of wealth in the top two percent.
4. The two big challenges to marriage today.
The egalitarian marriages most people desire today require much more engagement, negotiation, and mutual respect (which is quite different than love) than marriages of the past, just as many of us are losing the economic security, predictability, and social support that foster resilience in coping with family demands. This helps explain the striking class difference in breakup rates among both married and cohabiting couples who originally intended to marry.
“The egalitarian marriages most people desire today require much more engagement, negotiation, and mutual respect than marriages of the past.”
But even in economically secure couples, deeply ingrained habits and expectations once taken for granted in heterosexual relationships have become sources of conflict. In the absence of historical perspective, this has led to a rise in heteropessimism, the idea that heterosexual relationships are inherently unfair—whether, as some argue, because of men’s long-standing flaws, or as others contend, because of women’s recently acquired ones.
History supports neither claim. But many of the beliefs and habits that sustained marriage systems of the past have become as much an obstacle to satisfying relationships in today’s world as the social and economic inequalities I document.
5. How the “Rules of Engagement” are changing.
In the 1950s, when a woman married after her mid-20s, her risk of divorce increased. Today, every year a woman postpones marriage up to age 34, she lowers her divorce risk, and after that the risk doesn’t rise again. Until the mid-1970s, marriages where wives did nearly all the housework were more stable (and had more frequent sex) than marriages where wives did “only” half. When a woman had more education or earned more money than her husband, the couple’s risk of divorce increased.
Since the early 1990s, all those rules have been overturned. The change that may surprise readers most: Men who equally share routine chores with their wives are just as satisfied with their marriages as men who do no housework at all, although it matters a lot how couples define and organize that sharing. The transition to parenthood, however, still triggers behavior patterns that have become a growing source of tension in marriage, and my final chapter, along with an afterword by the Better Life Lab’s Haley Swenson, outlines some of the ways we can alleviate that.
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