Becky and Rick have been dating off and on for the past ten years. They have two children and rent a home together.

Here’s what Becky has to say about marriage:

What about getting married? Is that something you want to do at all?

“Oh yeah. We’re getting married in a couple of years. In 2012.”

What would you say that marriage means to you?

“I don’t know.  I mean because technically me and Rick…I mean, we aren’t married but pretty much we are….To be married I think you need to love somebody and want to spend the rest of your life with them and commit to them and be in everything with them 100%, but I mean, you can have that without marriage. You know what I mean?”

So it’s not that necessary.

“Yeah. You can have it without marriage. Without the paper.”

So why do you think it is that you guys eventually want to get married?

“Ummm…just because it’s like time, I guess. I kinda feel like it’s time to do it. Umm…just because we feel like it’s time to do it. You know, we’ve been together so long, we’ve got two kids, it just…You know? Yeah.”

So it just feels like it’s the next thing to do, but you wouldn’t recommend to do it until you’re like really sure?

“Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I’ve still got two years to double check myself, you know what I mean? You should always make sure before you put yourself in that situation. Always.”

I’ve noticed an inconsistency in the way some women think about cheating. When I ask about views on cheating, I hear the usual: “It’s unjustifiable, it makes you feel worthless, it’s grounds for divorce.”

But then, almost in the next breath, an affair that the married woman is having is excused by this logic: “In my mind, the marriage is over.”

All that to say that while cheating is largely agreed to be one of the most cruel things you could do to a partner, it also seems fairly common to hear someone say that if one partner decides that the marriage is no longer worth fighting for, then finding a new partner, even before filing for divorce, is not cheating.

In other words, a person can choose when she is married, and when she is not, regardless of legal standing. I recently spoke with a woman who is now talking marriage with a boyfriend while her estranged husband posts messages about missing his wife and baby on his Facebook wall, like desperate shout outs to her, hoping that she’ll return. And, yet, in her mind, she is not cheating on him. The marriage was over months ago. (No matter what the government thinks. Marriage is a private relationship. Or so the thinking goes.)

And speaking of Facebook, it’s interesting to think about how this new technology allows a kind of autonomous decision making about marriage that is both separate from any kind of institution or law and yet exudes a kind of public legitimacy. Sarah was able to change her Facebook name from Clark (her married name) to Noble (her maiden name) as soon as she felt like the relationship was over. And while her husband’s status read “married” even after the separation, hers read “single.”               

While Sarah hopes to marry again and says that marriage is a “special bond” unlike any other, she also feels like she has the authority to say that her marriage with her husband is no longer a marriage at all. In her words, “it’s just a piece of paper.” And therefore, there is no longer any husband to cheat on.

A Washington Post article yesterday (Number of long-lasting marriages in U.S. has risen, Census Bureau reports) reports that 75% of couples who married since 1990 reached their ten year anniversary. This is a three percentage point rise from those who married in the early 1980s.

Unfortunately, this might not mean much, since an increasing number of high school educated couples (who are three times as likely to divorce in the first ten years of marriage than their college educated peers) are choosing to cohabit rather than marry. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox explains:

“Marriage has become a much more selective institution in today’s society. People who are college-educated, more affluent or more religious are more likely to get married and stay married. People who are not are less likely to get married in the first place, and if they do marry, they’re more likely to divorce.”

Today I was prepping for some follow-up interviews that I will be doing this summer with some of the participants in the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project. While browsing Facebook to find out who is still in Maytown for the summer, I found myself holding my breath with each profile page visit. All too often, my stomach fell, and then clenched into a knot, and then fell again—as if I were plunging headfirst down Cedar Point’s Millenial Force.

Todd and Becky—the young couple that invited us to their backyard wedding and then postponed it because Todd’s dad couldn’t get off work—relationship status: single. I want to protest: “But they were the ones who had let us borrow their copy of Nights in the Rodanthe with the promise that they would come visit us in New York sometime and get it back then.” I thought for sure that they’d be coming—they seemed so happy together, and I just couldn’t imagine them breaking up. They are both such nice, interesting people. Good natured, calm, hard-working, with plans for college and dreams of leaving their grocery store clerk and construction jobs. I think of the time that David and I hung out at their place for drinks and a movie, and I wonder who got their “baby” (the chocolate lab puppy they shared). 

Troy and Suzanne—the couple who both came from divorced homes and fiercely told us that they were going to get married and stay married because they didn’t want to do what their parents did. Relationship status: single. The wedding was supposed to be this summer. The Facebook album that Suzanne entitled, “My Soulmate,” and filled with pictures of her and Troy swapping saliva is deleted. Now the only pictures on Suzanne’s profile are of her daughter. 

Matt and Kristin—the couple whose wedding we attended and whose baby is now a month old. Relationship status: separated. She’s found someone else. He’s devastated, but she ignores his calls and wants him to stay away from their newborn daughter.

Mike and Brittney—the cohabiting couple with two toddler sons and a sunny yellow ranch that they rent each month. Relationship status: It’s complicated.

And, unfortunately, I could go on. With each relationship that shatters, I’m saddened. I feel like burrowing under my bedcovers and crying like a little girl who wants to live in a world of rainbows but only sees a cloudy, tear-streaked sky.

It’s especially hard to hear such news because I witnessed some of the beauty in each relationship, and the potential. I saw these couples when they were giggling, holding hands, vowing their love, flaunting their inloveness. They loved each other, they wanted to make it work, they had high hopes for the future. They weren’t dealing with situations of abuse, or complete incompatibility. Rather, they struggled to pay their bills (and yet were bombarded with messages about buying flat screens and iphones and new cars on credit). They struggled with personal demons and the fears they bring: absent fathers, painful divorces, cynical families. They struggled to stay faithful to the young families they’ve formed in a world with easy access to sleazy clubs and risqué internet sites.

So many beautiful things are also fragile: a blue robin’s egg splattered on the pavement, my grandmother’s antique vase in pieces on the floor, a child’s bird-like bones fractured in a lime-green, Sharpie stained cast. And that’s why we have nests, and china cabinets, and elbow pads. And it’s also why we have marriage, with its mores of commitment. We protect what is sacred by building a safe place for beauty to thrive, despite its fragility.

David and I wrote this article to address the skepticism we’ve encountered about the institution of marriage, and to answer the question, “Why does marriage matter?”

The words that we use to name something matter. Names are our attempt to capture the essence of a thing (or sometimes to obscure it, as in the case of euphemisms like “ethnic cleansing”).

Given this, I’m interested in what young adults call their long-term, live-in partners. With this query in mind, I combed through some transcripts and reflected on past conversations, and I’m starting to notice a pattern that’s very interesting if it holds true—many unmarried couples that live together and plan on being together for the long-term think of each other as husband and wife instead of using innocuous terms like “significant other” or “partner.” Committed couples (who may or may not be planning a wedding anytime soon) often say that they are for all practical purposes already married: “We already act like we’re husband and wife. He calls me his wife. I call him my husband. So, we’re pretty much married just minus my ring,” says one twenty-two year old.

So why does this matter?

The fact that some young Americans who are choosing cohabitation over marriage still think in terms of “husband” and “wife” when they think of long-term commitment suggests that marriage as a concept still holds sway in the American imagination. While some young adults are rejecting the legal and religious aspects of marriage, they are not necessarily rejecting the idea of marriage. In an interview, one young man got angry about the role that society, religion, and the government play in marriage, yet he still upholds the ideal of marriage: “I don’t give a s*** if you’re ordained….I’m married if I say I’m married.” The interesting thing is that he didn’t just say, “I don’t give a s*** if I’m married.” He wants to be married. He just doesn’t think it’s anybody else’s business to decide whether or not he is.

Rather than throwing the names husband, wife, and marriage out with the legal ceremony, many couples claim that these words meaningfully describe their relationship—not because of any public recognition, but because of their strong private love. To me, this clinging to the terminology of marriage suggests that young adults are not giving up so easily on the ideal of marriage, even while they are introducing the claim that they—apart from legal or religious authority—are the arbiters of their own marriages. The question is, can marriage maintain any coherent meaning when severed from its public aspects?