Marriage rates are the lowest they’ve been in decades—about 47% of U.S. households are headed by a married couple compared with 79% in 1949—and tying the knot is no longer a requirement for economic security, safety, or sexual gratification. Couples who get hitched today desire a new kind of marriage, based on personal fulfillment.
Even so, most Americans marry eventually; 87% of women have wed by age 54. In For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, historian Stephanie Coontz outlines the truths and fictions when it comes to the institution, and how the myths are polluting our ideas of what marriage should be.
Marriage today has new rules, argues Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She shows how nostalgia for the past relates more closely to economic anxiety than anything else—and how our outdated views fail to serve us. I spoke to Coontz about the state of marriage and what it really takes to make a successful union today.
Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.
Hope Reese: What is the real purpose of marriage now? Why are people getting married?
Stephanie Coontz: We are still trying to figure that out, because you don’t have to get married, and you can have a very good relationship without marriage. Women don’t need it the way they used to. Increasingly, men are prepared to do the cooking and home life and stuff that they used to marry a woman to get done for them. So what do we want from marriage? We’re getting a lot of different messages.
One message is that it should be the most important relationship in your life. You should get most of your satisfaction from it. Another is that marriage is a way of supporting each other, and bringing our separate social networks and connections to bear. In a sense, we are doing what marriage developed to be in band-level societies—creating more relatives and more social connections.
HR: Which relationships are replacing marriage?
SC: Living together doesn’t replace marriage. Very few people who cohabit think of it as an alternative to marriage. For many people, cohabitation is a prelude to marriage or a fallback after a marriage fails. We need to think about diversifying rather than replacing.
The majority of people still want to marry, but they only want to marry under circumstances that mean that they can do marriage a little differently and be more confident in it than they have been able to for the past several decades.
HR: Marriage has been transforming for a while. How can history help couples today?
SC: We have new values, but we also have problems putting them into place. A lot of things going on in the economy now really make family life more fragile, more tense, and more difficult.
It’s not new experiments with gender and sex and different living arrangements that are the problem. There are historical origins. For instance: I spent most of my career telling people they should not be nostalgic for 1950’s families. A tremendous pain and sense of loss and discouragement drives this nostalgia. But the pain won’t be solved by getting rid of new gender norms and new marriage norms.
A historical perspective can help people who support those new norms not to demonize the people who don’t––to understand where they’re coming from.
HR: Where are they coming from? What are some of these myths we’ve internalized?
SC: You hear all the time—from progressives, as well as people who oppose the changes—that “men are like this” and “women are just like this.” That women pay more attention to emotions. That men either have to adjust to our caring, or we have to adjust to their inconsideration.
But this isn’t the way it has to be. Men have been doing emotional work in many societies through the ages. They’re quite capable of it. But for at least a century and a half, they’ve been told that it makes them unattractive to women if they do it. And it makes them a target for other men. We women have only had the reputation of being altruistic for about 150, 200 years. Before that we were thought to be more ambitious and more selfish and more self-centered than men are.
HR: I found it interesting that one of the myths is that men cannot express themselves emotionally, when, in fact, they were doing that earlier.
SC: There are tons of letters from the Revolutionary era—men exchanging these letters, crying, complaining the way women are thought to complain. We also have letters that historian Richard Godbeer and others have looked at where men will write like, “I’m not hearing from you enough,” and, “don’t you care about me anymore?”
Through a whole lot of history, it was not women’s job to massage men’s egos and take care of the home. Patriarchy was brutal on women, but there was no expectation that men were not emotional, not capable of keeping track of obligations. There was no expectation that women would massage all men’s egos, even their husband’s egos.
They were partners in what was a business, whether it was a small farm or a great big political alliance. Women were considered just as shrewd and ruthless and business-like as men, not particularly that much more emotional.
HR: Really? When were women considered more selfish and ambitious?
SC: Early Christians talked about women’s selfishness, and many societies across the world have talked about women being the ones you can’t really trust, that they’re going to put their own individual and their kids’ interests first. We shouldn’t be glorifying these aspects of our personality and thinking that somehow the men need to catch up with us. We have to be patient with ourselves and our partners and those around us, because these myths have been drilled into our heads.
These are ideas that, ironically, developed with our transition to democracy. As we began to think that all men are created equal, we weren’t quite willing to let women do that. We began to develop these more benevolent excuses for the male dominance.
As men went into the labor force and women had to stay and do things around the home, there began to be this romanticization of women’s domestic expertise. A lot of women began to develop their whole ego and pride around that domestic expertise. It’s a lot to shake off.
HR: You write about the latest period of marriage starting in the 70’s. What was happening then?
SC: By the 1950’s and 60’s, people were discontented with the idea that marriage should be something where the woman was the homemaker and the man got all of his identity from being the breadwinner. As it changed, even though some women wanted to go to work and some men wanted to have more egalitarian relationships, earworms from the past were present.
Up through the 70’s, if a woman earned more money, had more education than her husband, that was a divorce risk. If a woman did less than half the housework, which is now kind of our goal, that was a risk that her marriage would dissolve.
Sexually, men and women were turned off if they had too many egalitarian roles. That showed that all of the ways that we had learned to make marriage work had been internalized in our psyches, that even our sexual ideas were reflecting it.
For complex historical reasons, men decided that they had to be the teachers. They had to be the ones who were stronger. They earned, they were the ones who gave the money. They learned to confuse showing off with showing love.
One of the good points of the changes that have been wrought by feminism and by increasing acceptance of some of the principles of gender equality is that men are beginning to not define themselves purely in terms of knowing more and earning more than their partner.
It’s no longer a divorce risk when a woman outearns her husband, or has more education. And men and women sharing child-rearing are the most sexually satisfied in their lives.
HR: What are the most important insights for couples who want a successful marriage today?
SC: Marriage does not save anyone, economically or psychologically. The most important predictor of whether you’re going to have a successful marriage is if you can organize a successful, satisfying personal life, where you have friends; you keep commitments to friends; they keep commitments to you. And you’re basically happy with what you’re doing. If you find somebody who is also happy, and with whom you enjoy doing things, you’re going to get better.
Another false belief is “cocooning.” The best way to build the kind of rich, supportive relationships we want is to go out and get outside input that you can bring back. Mounting research shows that when couples engage in such egalitarian relationships, their love grows over time instead of the tensions beginning to rise.
HR: What are the practical barriers to marriage today? How can couples make it work?
SC: Because we have much higher standards of marriage than in the past, it takes more negotiation, more time, more attention to one’s own work and expectations of support for that work and attention to your partner’s work and ideas. Marriage is much more personally involved than marriages of the past were, or had to be.
You need patience, you need time—and you need work schedules that allow you to take the time. So a lot of the barriers are in the economy. The increased work pressures that we face and the economic precarity that we face undermines those kinds of skills. Financial insecurity is a bigger predictor of negative communication in marriage than having divorced parents or what happened to you in your childhood, because it pulls your attention away from the things you need to keep going.
HR: Marriages from the 50’s didn’t have the personal satisfaction prerequisite, but the economics were easier, right?
SC: People look back to the 1950’s with nostalgia. You certainly should not feel nostalgia for any of the marriages of that period. But that was a period when real wages were rising, when every economic expansion up to the early 70’s gave 90% of its benefits to the bottom 90% of the population. The rich were not getting richer.
All of those economic and social changes that we think of as separate from our personal lives have really big ramifications now that we are trying to build personal lives that really involve this kind of patience, gratitude, love, and reaching out. A study of families and marriages during the big financial crisis and housing crisis found that domestic violence reports from the most educated, secure women soared up to the levels of their less educated and less secure peers.
HR: How can you explain the nostalgia for an earlier period? What do you make of the trad wife movement?
SC: Well, I used to be pretty contemptuous of it. But I’ve gotten softer in my old age and after seeing what’s been happening over the past 30 years or so. I’ve come to believe that this nostalgia is kind of “referred pain.”
Our brain has trouble figuring out where pain originates. It often gives us the wrong messages. It will tell us that our neck hurts, when in fact we ate too much and the stomach is pressing on the diaphragm. Physicians call it referred pain. You think it’s in one location, but treating it there is not going to work at all.
That is a delightful analogy for what’s happening with so many of the pains that people feel, and the nostalgia they feel for 1950’s families. It occurs at a deeper place in the body politic and in the economy. It occurs in these changes in the economy and in the increasing development of a K-shaped economy where the rich are getting richer and the poor and the middle class are getting poorer. With these things, it’s easy to say, “what went wrong?” and to think “maybe it’s because we don’t have those families that we used to be able to watch on TV and look at how well they organized their lives and how happy they seemed.”
HR: What does it take to build the kind of mutualistic relationship that people want today?
SC: Historical perspective and sociological perspective could be one of the best therapeutic tools that there is. We often treat our male partner as an unskilled assistant, telling him what to do. It’s called gatekeeping. I’ve talked about gatekeeping in my research all my life, but my husband still catches me doing it sometimes. He finds it easier to accept this behavior, which is quite insulting, when I explain to him what an ingrained habit it is, and that I know it’s a bad habit and am trying to shake it.
Historical perspective on where these things come from won’t solve everything, but can create a space in which you can discuss them without having to decide “is this a symptom of some deeper problem in this individual or in our relationship?” It creates space in which you can depersonalize it and say, “but what needs to change?” And let’s stop saying, “why are you doing this, you bad person?” or “you inconsiderate person.”
You are doing this because it’s been ingrained in you that you should do this.
HR: Basically, things don’t need to be as they are today.
SC: That’s the point of all historical and anthropological research. Once you examine the variety of ways that people have experienced and expressed emotions, and related to each other, it gives you a bigger sense of how much of a straitjacket we’ve been put in. Especially by the stereotypes that we inherit, that we’re dealing with now—the manosphere and ideas about toxic masculinity and all of these things—things that make it seem much more permanent and much less changeable than it actually is.