Modern Marriage Commentary

On Two-Parent Privilege

I don’t think it [The Two Parent Privilege, by Melissa Kearney] is good. I think the empirical analysis is not new. We knew that married people are doing better in many ways. And their kids are doing better. So it’s sort of like saying rich people are doing better, and so the policy implication is: people should have more money. Fine, I’m in favor of that. But, you know, in the case of marriage, it was disappointing that it doesn’t seriously ask the question: Is this a legitimate policy? What kind of policy would promote marriage in a way that is not somehow harming people’s rights or shaming and stigmatizing people or blaming the victim. There’s lots of downsides. And there are no demonstrated upsides. And the book is just very incurious about the fact that there have been many, many years of people making policy statements like this, and producing no increase in marriage. And it’s just, she doesn’t seem curious about that. She doesn’t really discuss it.

Modernity and families

In the law, in the long run, we have definitely moved in the direction of treating people as individuals instead of as families. And that’s reasonable. That’s partly a gender story. In the 19th century in the US [married] women did not exist as individuals legally. The family was the legal entity under the doctrine of coverture, which was, you know, Mr. and Mrs. John Jones was the legal unit. And then there were exceptions like, “Yeah, but what if he kills her? What if he rapes her? What if he abuses her?” It was sort of this difficult thorny legal question of reconciling her legal nonexistence with the fact that she seemed to actually exist as a person. Can spouses sue each other? Is that even possible? What does it mean, anyway? So we’ve moved away from all that toward treating people as individuals. And but in our welfare policy, and in tax policy, we often still want to treat people as families. It partly has become something that people seize on, when they want to reclaim or return to a perceived better past. So it’s conservative in that sense, or traditionalists. There’s a lot of imaginary work that goes on constructing the past as better for families.

But if something is not really voluntary, if it’s not optional, like we had in the US with virtually universal marriage by age 25, in the 1950s, which was the peak of early marriage – you can’t say people are really choosing it. And so any introduction of choice, by the math of it, will lead to less of that thing. So it’s almost like the nuclear family is not declining as much people are choosing other things so the math shows a decline. For better or worse, that’s not to say that’s all good. But normally, we think the choices are good. And then having choices is normally considered to be good in modern society.

So should government be trying to put that back together again? I think what’s more important is thinking about the social functions of that family structure. And what happens in the absence of them. And how can we support children and families that are structured differently? Now, the conservative response to that is you’re paying people to not have traditional families. If you say nuclear families have all kinds of supports and single parents, or single individuals, don’t have those things, how can we help them? That’s a reasonable policy response to say, look, family structure has changed, we should consider how we can provide support people in new ways? The perception that is driving the change in family structure is mostly misplaced. Although, the fact that you can survive outside of marriage – and this goes especially for women – the fact that you can survive without being married, and have children without being married, is partly a function of welfare policy and partly a function of women having increased their education and employment opportunities, so they have more choices. So it’s not crazy to say, Oh, if we denied everybody these choices, they would be married more. But that’s just not me. I don’t think we want to really live in that society.

‘The Family’

When we speak about “the family,” we’re not talking about a particular family structure, what we’re talking about is a social space where family things happen. And the family includes all kinds of different relationships, all kinds of different structures. And the family is still very important to social life and social well being. And everybody at least comes from a family if they’re not in a family now, and a lot of families are not in one household. That’s one of the things that our census misses when they measure families only based on households. It’s a household survey. If you have family and relationships with people who you don’t live with, they don’t show up as families in the data. And sometimes that’s important. We have a growing number of couples that are living apart together, couples that have family-like relationships, people who are co-parenting, people who are semi-parenting their nonrelatives – people who have close relationships with children and other families that are very important.

It’s safe to say diversity is the new normal. And, that drives some people crazy, and there’s a perception that the government should play a role in driving people towards an ideal – there’s a conservative view that says, We should not treat all these things as equal, or take a relativist position and say everything is okay. No, the government should say, certain things are better. Children need two parents, marriage provides stability. It’s just not really as true as people think. And also it’s not government’s role to do that. In a free society, government has an important role to play, not in forcing people or coercing people into a certain family structure, but in helping them live their lives happily and productively.

A lot of people idealize marriage and the nuclear family, but they have put it on a pedestal. So they don’t get married, not because they don’t value marriage, but because they don’t think their relationship is up to the standard that is required for marriage. So there actually is a way that elevating the image and the iconic status of marriage actually contributes to the decline of marriage. You get a lot of people saying, We’re living together, we’re perfectly happy, and you know, when things settle down, and our careers are established, and when we can buy a house, then we’ll get married. That’s backwards from the way it was when we had very early marriage – when you got married and then did all those things. It’s sort of been a ratchet, which elevates the status of marriage and people feel like they haven’t reached it. Now, a lot of people are also not interested. And that’s true, too.

Families and social change

I can put people in three categories. The people who think traditional marriage and family are great, and we should have more of them. People who think traditional marriage and family are terrible, and we should have less of them. And then the growing middle ground of people who think everybody should be able to choose the kind of family they want. There’s a there, there’s a conservative argument for the first, there’s a feminist argument for the second, and there’s a middle ground that I think is approaching majority status, that it’s not the government’s job to tell you what kind of family to have. And instead, we should think about things like individual rights, and also individual benefits. If you say, the government should provide universal health care and child care, that’s independent of family structure. That’s, based on an individual’s status, even if it’s your parents who fill out the forms. It’s not dependent on the family structure. And that’s the overall direction of modern society and it’s probably healthy.

I tell my students, now that we have same sex marriage, and marriage is pretty cheap and accessible, and divorce is pretty cheap and accessible, you should probably just go ahead and marry your roommate. There’s no reason not to. You don’t have to have a big ceremony and tell everybody, but you just get some additional protections. We can have a boilerplate prenup that protects your assets. But just in case somebody needs insurance or somebody is hospitalized or something, you may as well have the protection of a spouse. Let’s use the benefits. My students are very resistant to this. They think this is a crazy idea, but I don’t see what’s wrong with it. I say you don’t have to tell anybody

Marriage has become more rarefied. It’s increasingly richer people with more education who are married and stay married and don’t get divorced, which is the opposite of what we thought would happen. Some people were very concerned that once women’s status improved, they wouldn’t need marriage anymore. And that’s been true. But the people who have exercised that option have been poor women more than rich women. They have the option to pursue life without marriage. But you end up with marriage looking increasingly like an elite status. It’s a marker of accomplishment and having a privileged background. That’s why I say it’s kind of like saying people should have more money. Marriage promotion doesn’t acknowledge the way this has been built into our status hierarchy.

It’s fascinating because marriage is basically almost free, almost anybody can get married, if they want to, as long as they have a partner who feels the same way. And yet, somehow we talk about “barriers” to marriage. And there are a lot of people who feel like they are not, or that the community, or the norms, or the culture is telling them that they’re not ready or eligible. It’s all very symbolic.

But if you’re going to talk about the general empirical pattern of married people being better off, it’s just important to stress that better off people get married. Which is not to say they don’t reap benefits from marriage, because a lot of people obviously do. That’s why they do it. But it’s very presumptuous to think that government knows better than people, whether they should marry their current boyfriend. If you’ve got a partner and you’re in a relationship, you obviously know that you could get married if you both want to. And if you’re deciding not to do that, you might know, better than the government, that that’s the right choice for you.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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