In his Huffington Post interview about the new Why Marriage Matters report, Brad Wilcox drew an interesting analogy:
Marriage is not just a piece of paper: it’s a social institution that is often transformative for men and women. The analogy here is that people, for instance, could contract with smart PhDs on an informal, private basis to get highly educated. And some would do just as well with that approach as people who would go to college. Nevertheless, in general, college provides people with a script and a set of norms and rituals and experience and gives them something more valuable.
Seems like a good analogy to me.
I wonder what Hanna Rosin and her Slate colleagues would say about that. In this Slate segment (skip to the 10 minute mark), they maintain that cohabitation is only a problem because it isn’t normal yet. Rosin suggests that “If we would do a better job of legitimizing cohabitation, that would be much better than constantly telling people to get married.” I wonder if  she also thinks that we should tell poor and working class Americans who aspire to a well-paying, white-collar job that they don’t need a college degree–it’s just a piece of paper after all. They can get the equivalent of a higher education through their own efforts.
Rosin concludes: ”You should focus on these serial cohabiters and what you can do to help them make their life better because that will be a much better thing than making everybody get married.” Behind assertions like this is a naive view that the poor and working classes cohabit merely because they’re the equivalent of European bohemians who are done with marriage. As Rosin asserted, “People aren’t getting married in America. So stop telling them to–it’s just not gonna happen.”
That’s extremely insulting. As the 2010 State of Our Unions issue shows (see figure 7) 75 percent of least educated Americans and 76 percent of moderately educated Americans say that marriage is “very important” or “one of the most important things” to them. As my wife and I heard in our interviews with working class young people–and as we wrote about here–working class young people desperately want a happy marriage, but many fear the prospect of divorce and are determined to make absolutely certain that their partner is the “right person.” So are we really prepared to tell these Americans that marriage for them is “just not gonna happen?” (Incidentally, Rosin acknowledges, most poor and working class people are not in cohabiting, monogamous relationships–but they will if we make it a norm. So if we can make monogamous cohabitation a norm, why can’t we make marriage a norm? Seems like a case of convenient determinism to me.)Â
Most poor and working class Americans are not cohabiting because they’re avant garde. They believe in marriage. So when we tell poor and working class Americans who aspire to marriage that they can get the goods of marriage without the institution, it’s like telling poor and working class Americans who aspire to higher education that they can get the goods of higher education without the institution.
Categories: General
[...] Some interesting thoughts about marriage from David Lapp writing at Family Scholars. [...]
[As my wife and I heard in our interviews with working class young people–and as we wrote about here–working class young people desperately want a happy marriage, but many fear the prospect of divorce and are determined to make absolutely certain that their partner is the “right person.” ]
You are assuming that poverty is the result of cohabitation as opposed to cohabitation being the result of poverty. Ms. Rosen is correct, these people are not going to marry & outcomes would be better if you spent some time making them better parents rather then simply urging them to marry.
Again, claims to care about people and their lives and troubles is not very convincing when you focus on process and not outcomes. For you the outcome is irrelevant if the process is not to your liking.
The degree analogy is not on point. Any kind of a degree is vastly different than a marriage license. A degree certifies that a credentialed institution has tested your knowledge of a subject and you passed. A marriage license certifies that you are in a group of people the state allows to marry.
“[M]ost poor and working class people are not in cohabiting, monogamous relationships–but they will if we make it a norm. So if we can make monogamous cohabitation a norm, why can’t we make marriage a norm?”
Why would most poor and working class people abandon marriage for monogamous cohabitation if the latter social structure isn’t inherently more attractive than the former? The question “[W]hy can’t we make marriage a norm?” is answered previously in its own paragraph. Right?
*sigh* Looks like I’m going to have to be blunt again.
The thing to remember about working class young people is that they become working class older people. People who’ve lived through significantly more challenges than middle class people of the same age, with a helluva lot less safety net. Ask some of these young folks what they think about marriage after they’ve been divorced.
I had to laugh at one of the articles linked in the sidebar; the one that posits making divorce harder to get as a way of strengthening marriage. Divorce is already time-consuming and expensive; make it more inaccessible, and *even more* people are going to err on the side of caution and cohabit instead.
It’s not “European bohemians who are done with marriage” or “avant garde” who are cohabiting. In the U.S., most cohabiting couples who remain together will eventually marry. While Europeans may marry less, marriage is not the road to financial stability and security the same way it is in the U.S. and therefore has a different context. So it’s not just “bohemians” who don’t get married in Europe, it’s a significant number of “regular folks.”
“So when we tell poor and working class Americans who aspire to marriage that they can get the goods of marriage without the institution, it’s like telling poor and working class Americans who aspire to higher education that they can get the goods of higher education without the institution.”
Kind of like what “we” tell a lot of same-sex couples too.
Poor and working-class Americans are legally barred from marriage?
Yes, a marriage license is like a college degree: there’s dispute about the value of each. Both marriage licenses and college degrees correlate with desirable social outcomes. But does the act of getting these pieces of paper really cause the desirable outcomes? Or are the people who are likely to achieve desirable social outcomes also the kinds of people who were likely to get married and/or get a college degree? Because we don’t distribute licenses and degrees at random, we don’t have a very good controlled experiment.
I appreciate Wilcox’s efforts to counter the “a marriage license is just a piece of paper” argument – an argument that has been more common on the left side of the political spectrum. Wilcox has identified an issue he things these people care about – education – and couching his argument in terms he imagines that they will relate to.
And I think Wilcox’s analogy has merit. Yes, I could get an education without going to college. But will I? Having the institutional norms of college – regular schedule, regular interaction with people engaged in the same pursuit, regular feedback from people more advanced than myself – is a time-tested path to intellectual improvement. Only the rare person has the discipline and intellectual capacity to achieve these same benefits without the institutional support. Similarly, while it’s possible to achieve (many of the) same benefits of marriage without actually getting a marriage license, will I? Only the rare couple manages to stand this test unaided, Wilson argues. I like to flatter myself by imagining that I am strong enough to blaze my own trail through life. But a moment’s reflection should give me humility. If I’m really, really serious about achieving something, then I should prove it to myself: commit – formally, publically – to the institutions designed to help me achieve those things.
This, however, is NOT the argument offered by Lapp. Wilcox emphasizes the importance of college as a means to gaining education. Lapp emphasizes the importance of college as a means to gaining a credential. It’s an easy analogy: See, a diploma is just a sheet of paper like a marriage license, right? But this comparison not only obscures Wilcox’s sophisticated argument, it replaces it with a facile one. Yes, college credentials open doors for certain jobs – because employers have come to regard them as marking the kind of people who would be able to perform those jobs. Rosin would simply respond that the remedy is to normalize the idea that people get their educations outside of the formal institution of college. Transcend old-fashioned thinking, and the problem is solved!
Moreover, the obstacles to getting a marriage license bear no relationship to the obstacles to a college degree. Poor and working-class Americans are not refraining from getting degrees because they don’t acknowledge a degree’s value, or because they’re afraid that they might later undergo a traumatizing “divorce” from it. Go to those couples that decline to get married and offer to sell them Bachelor Degrees for the price of a marriage license, and I bet you would not see much hesitation.
It does not surprise me that poor and working class people would value markers of success – whether that marker is a marriage or a fancy car. But it’s facile to suggest that poor and working class people could achieve the measures of success if only they got more fancy cars. I acknowledge that there is SOME feedback: a person who acquires the markers of success may feel inspired to adopt some of the behaviors of successful people, which may then actually promote success. But mostly the causation flows in the other direction: The attributes of success are what enable people to get fancy cars, and to get marriages. Give people the attributes of success, and the markers of success will follow.
David, I think you’re mixing your analogies here. “The goods of marriage” are largely achieved via higher education—not by marriage. Marriage doesn’t create stability. In the past, people were encouraged to marry *after* achieving stability, *after* getting their grounding. Yet, several times a week, there are either posts on this blog or recommended reading in the sidebar that is basically recommending that young people should get married *before* gaining a stable life first, as if marriage itself doesn’t inherently add instability to the mix (hint: it does, even in the best cases).
As a working class person myself, this doesn’t make any sense to me at all. As a parent, this makes even less sense to me. And as the parent of a daughter, it makes the least sense. I know from experience that single women have an easier time getting hired and remaining employed. A lot of what you refer to as “the goods of marriage” are only operable for men. Employers *do* privilege married men over single men, but the opposite is true for women. The health benefits of marriage are for men only; there is no health difference for women (except when comparing women in a bad marriage to single women—the physical and mental health of those married women is *worse* than that of single women). Marriage eases a lot of the life burdens for men….but frankly, it adds to the burdens of women (exponentially so in non-egalitarian marriages).
So, like almost working class mothers, I’m advising my own daughter to get her own feet on the ground first. Finish her *college* education (only having a high school diploma is the route to poverty), get established in her job and put down roots in her new community, *before* getting married. Preferably before having children as well, but if that happens, then it happens.
Because here’s the thing—women who get married before completing their education…many of them never return to school. Those that do have huge obstacles in…workplace discrimination and stereotypes (and getting hired in the first place), logistical difficulties of balancing work and home (that aren’t mitigated by a firm track record of workplace achievement), husbands that aren’t necessarily on board with the new home dynamics (and aren’t keen on shouldering “women’s work” duties they never had to do before)….and yes, women who marry young tend to have more children, in the midst of a society that frankly thinks of children as yet another consumer diversion or lifestyle choice, not as human beings. This society is largely unwilling to support even *public schools*, let alone structuring the school day and calendar to match the workday and calendar!
David, every woman I know who followed your game plan is divorced. Every. Single One. And they’ve had an immense uphill struggle for stability afterwards. Now, having an education and a career isn’t a panacea against divorce, but it unquestioningly makes life easier if it does happen….while at the same time making divorce less likely (if we are to believe statistics).
Women are better off completing their educations and postponing marriage until they have their other goals met….”god bless the child who’s got her own”, y’know?
Acck! Should say “almost all”. Phone screens aren’t like computer screens.
Thanks for all the thoughts! I want to carefully read and respond soon…have to finish up some stuff first, but look forward to reading soon : )
“So if we can make monogamous cohabitation a norm, why can’t we make marriage a norm?” Precisely. Once you start telling cohabiters all the things they should do to achieve stable cohabitation it starts sounding like, well, marriage.
Elizabeth, you know that’s disingenuous. Marriage has rights and obligations that cohabitation does not—and that’s a double-edged sword. Heterosexual cohabiting couples can rest pat in knowing that they will be treated similarly to a married couple, especially if they refer to each other as “fiance/fiancee” despite no concrete plans to marry—and if they have children together, even more so. That isn’t the case for same-sex couples, even those who have gone to the trouble and expense of having legal paperwork done.
On the flipside, marrying someone can create legal complications, too. Marrying someone with a bankruptcy or bad credit stains the previously “clean” credit of the other party. Technically, a spouse doesn’t inherit the other spouse’s debt; as a realistic matter, they do.
One of the things that isn’t mentioned by all the condescending “working class young people need to get themselves married” crowd is this—some of us have. We got married young, and got divorced young, too. And *that*, more than anything else, colors our reluctance to marry again. I’ve worked long and hard for *years* to get what relatively little I have….I’m not keen on putting that at risk.
You think an *advertising campaign* is going to trump *lived experience*? Or even the observed experience of one’s family, friends and neighbors? We can see for ourselves that marriage…..well, it’s like jobs. There are far more crappy ones than good ones. There was no better endorsement for me on the benefits of postponing childbirth than watching the trajectory of the lives of women I knew who didn’t—-upclose and personal, whether they were married or not. Remember, we’re talking about *working class* people here, the ones without a safety net. Without the gifts of housing downpayments, or paid-for tuition, or emergency money from mom and dad. People who are *already behind the eight ball*. Marriage does not remove that eight ball.
Also: “marriage” would have an easier time as an institution if it could shed the religious baggage it has picked up along the way.
[Similarly, while it’s possible to achieve (many of the) same benefits of marriage without actually getting a marriage license, will I?]
This supports Ms. Rosen’s view that what is needed is normalization of cohabitation so it will be easier for most people to achieve the benefits.
[“So if we can make monogamous cohabitation a norm, why can’t we make marriage a norm?” Precisely. Once you start telling cohabiters all the things they should do to achieve stable cohabitation it starts sounding like, well, marriage.]
Marriage was the norm, until it wasn’t. It didn’t loose it’s status at the norm for frivolous reasons. It lost its status as the norm because society changed. Those drastic changes can not be reversed short of throwing out democracy. Women now have options. As LaLuba notes working class women are not stupid they understand their choices and the risks involved. So if you care about these women and their choices your behavior doesn’t reflect it. You are ignoring what these women and showing you and telling you because you don’t approve of it. Just get married is no more a realistic solution then Just say no.
“Women now have options.” In fact I read it as describing lack of options. or at least good ones.
A recognition that traditionally they lacked more than one option?
“In the past, people were encouraged to marry *after* achieving stability, *after* getting their grounding. Yet, several times a week, there are either posts on this blog or recommended reading in the sidebar that is basically recommending that young people should get married *before* gaining a stable life first, as if marriage itself doesn’t inherently add instability to the mix (hint: it does, even in the best cases).”
Not true. The idea that you have to have a certain amount of money socked away, that you must have reached a given point in your career, that you must have a graduate degree, that you must have bought your home, etc., BEFORE getting married and having children is very new. In fact, even many of the baby boomers (my parents’ generation) got married straight out of college and built a life TOGETHER. They lived simply and saved and scrimped for the future, but they did so in large part after having gotten married and even having had children in their twenties.
Ismene, it doesn’t help your argument that you mention that your parents waited until they completed their college educations *before* getting married. What this post is arguing for is that those with a high school diploma and a low-wage, no-benefit job at a big box store (or whatever) can have successful marriages and raise a faamily with the same rate of success as those people with a college degree, a decent-paying, relatively stable, full-benefit job. And that’s not true. The statistics simply don’t bear this out.
And then had astronomical divorce rates, marriages plagued by infidelity, etc.
[...] Hanna Rosin, quoted by family scholar David Lapp on the Family Scholars blog, says cohabitation is only a problem because it is not normal yet: “If we would do a better job [...]
Once you start telling cohabiters all the things they should do to achieve stable cohabitation it starts sounding like, well, marriage.
Not quite. Marriage carries assumptions with it that cohabitation does not. This blog tends to mention the positive assumptions and neglects to mention the negative assumptions. What do I mean by negative assumptions? Well, that the woman is supposed to subsume her identity to that of the man. That in any instance of give-and-take, she is supposed to be the one giving in (for example, when discussing relocation for work purposes, the woman is supposed to be willing to compromise her career by quitting her job and packing up—she is “unsupportive” of her husband if she insists on waiting until both have the opportunity to find decent work). That the husband is the “head of the household”, the ultimate holder of authority.
Marriage isn’t just an economic relationship; it is also one where power is negotiated—and so far, marriage still carries the assumption that power rests ultimately with the husband.