Getting Married: The Public Nature of Our Private Relationships 9781315517889, 1315517884

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Preface
1 Introduction
2 Picking a Partner
3 I Do, You Do, We All Do
4 Why Marry at All?
5 What About Love?
6 Hooking Up
7 Dating
8 The Proposal and the Wedding
9 Sleeping, Spending Time, and Having Sex
10 Sharing Children, the Work, and a Name
11 Love, Abuse, and Calling It Quits
12 Thinking About Change
13 Thinking About “Radical” Change
14 Thinking About the Rules
15 Thinking About Other Explanations
16 Conclusion
References

Citation preview

GETTING MARRIED

In Getting Married, Carrie Yodanis and Sean Lauer examine the social rules and expectations that shape our most personal relationships. How do couples get together? How do people act when they’re married? What happens when they're not? Public factors influence our private relationships. From getting engaged to breaking up, social rules and expectations shape and constrain whom we select as a spouse, when and why we decide to get married, and how we arrange our relationships day to day. While this book is about marriage, it is also about sociology. Yodanis and Lauer use the case of marriage to explore a sociological perspective. Getting Married will bring together students’ academic and social worlds by applying sociology to the things they are thinking about and experiencing outside of the classroom. This book is a useful tool for many sociology courses, including those on family, gender, and introduction to sociology. Carrie Yodanis and Sean Lauer are Associate Professors of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Yodanis does research in the sociology of the family and gender. Lauer uses institutional approaches within economic sociology and the sociology of community. For over 10 years, Yodanis and Lauer have been collaborating on research that takes an institutional approach to the study of marriage.

Contemporary Sociological Perspectives Edited by Douglas Hartmann, University of Minnesota and Jodi O’Brien, Seattle University

This innovative series is for all readers interested in books that provide frameworks for making sense of the complexities of contemporary social life. Each of the books in this series uses a sociological lens to provide current critical and analytical perspectives on significant social issues, patterns and trends.  The series consists of books that integrate the best ideas in sociological thought with an aim toward public education and engagement. These books are designed for use in the classroom as well as for scholars and socially curious general readers.

Published: Surviving Dictatorship by Jacqueline Adams The Womanist Idea by Layli Maparyan Religion in Today’s World: Global Issues, Sociological Perspectives by Melissa Wilcox Understanding Deviance: Connecting Classical and Contemporary Perspectives edited by Tammy L. Anderson Social Statistics: Managing Data, Conducting Analyses, Presenting Results, Second Edition by Thomas J. Linneman Transforming Scholarship: Why Women’s and Gender Studies Students are Changing Themselves and the World, Second Edition by Michele Tracy Berger and Cheryl Radeloff Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides?: Abortion, Neonatal Care, Assisted Dying, and Capital Punishment, Second Edition by Sheldon Ekland-Olson Life and Death Decisions: The Quest for Morality and Justice in Human Societies, Second Edition by Sheldon Ekland-Olson Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age, Second Edition by Eve Shapiro Migration, Incorporation, and Change in an Interconnected World by Syed Ali and Douglas Hartmann Sociological Perspectives on Sport: The Games Outside the Games by David Karen and Robert E. Washington Social Theory Re-Wired: New Connections to Classical and Contemporary Perspectives, Second Edition by Wesley Longhofer, Daniel Winchester, and Arturo Baiocchi

Forthcoming: Social Worlds of Imagination by Chandra Mukerji All Media are Social by Andrew Lindner

GETTING MARRIED The Public Nature of Our Private Relationships

Carrie Yodanis & Sean Lauer

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Carrie Yodanis & Sean Lauer to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yodanis, Carrie, author. | Lauer, Sean, author. Title: Getting married : the public nature of our private relationships / Carrie Yodanis & Sean Lauer. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Contemporary sociological perspectives | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016011231| ISBN 9780415634687 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780415634694 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315517896 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Marriage. | Interpersonal relations. Classification: LCC HQ734 .Y63 2016 | DDC 306.81—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011231 ISBN: 978-0-415-63468-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-63469-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-51789-6 (ebk) Typeset in Adobe Caslon by ApexCovantage, LLC

We dedicate this book to the students of FMST 322.

v

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

1 Introduction

1

2 Picking a Partner

6

3 I Do, You Do, We All Do

14

4 Why Marry at All?

22

5 What About Love?

28

6 Hooking Up

32

7 Dating

38

8 The Proposal and the Wedding

43

9 Sleeping, Spending Time, and Having Sex

48

10 Sharing Children, the Work, and a Name

55

11 Love, Abuse, and Calling It Quits

62

12 Thinking About Change

67

CONTENTS vii

13 Thinking About “Radical” Change

72

14 Thinking About the Rules

81

15 Thinking About Other Explanations

85

16 Conclusion

93

References

99

viii CONTENTS

PREFACE

This book is a collaboration between scholars and students. We have been studying marriage for decades. Over the years, we have discussed this research with the students in our Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of the Family, Sociology of Marriage, and Gender Relations courses. Through the sharing and exchange of this research with our students, this book emerged. And so, as we wrote this book, we wanted to make sure it worked equally well for both students and scholars. For students, college is often as much about their social lives as it is about studying. A book on relationships is a way to bring these two worlds together. The topics, research, and ideas presented in the book will help students learn by applying sociology to the things that they are thinking about and experiencing outside of the classroom. Students also want a book that is readable. We can blame this on Twitter and texting, but, to be honest, few people would voluntarily read a textbook. So we moved away from that model. Instead, we use the model of trade books—those books that people voluntarily read for fun. We focus on thoughtprovoking ideas. We present timely and relevant information. We keep the book and the chapters short and succinct. We worked a lot on making our writing clear and accessible. Students also want to learn. As scholars, this is our focus. We teach to share with students what we know, research, and study. A benefit of moving away from the standard textbook model is that this book can be used to teach a wide range of course materials. A class does not need to be fit to this book. Instead, scholars can fit this book to their classes, as they currently teach them. Rather than apply particular theoretical perspectives or concepts, we provide a

PREFACE ix

detailed look at marriage as a flexible example, which scholars can use to teach a wide range of theories, concepts, ideas, and knowledge. Also for scholars, this book is a reminder not to lose sight of the core of sociology in our research. We can talk about new phenomena, make new contributions, and maintain a sociological perspective. So our aim is for this to be an educational and enjoyable book. Indeed, for us, it was. We learned a lot and had a great time writing this book. It has been helpful talking about our ideas with colleagues, friends, and family. Funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported the book. But our most valuable exchanges have come in the classroom, discussing and debating these ideas with students over the years. It would have been a lesser book without their keen insights. We particularly want to thank our student, Caroline Czekajlo, who read an earlier draft of the book and provided invaluable feedback. And we want to congratulate her on her marriage.

x PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

C

atherine was late, running down the hall of her dorm, when she ran smack into Nick and fell to the ground. She got up, embarrassed, and walked away. A few minutes later, she realized that she had forgotten something and had to go back to her room to get it. Still late and running down the hall, she ran straight into Nick again, in the exact same corner of the hall. This time, they introduced themselves, both very embarrassed. Later in the term, they ended up at the same party in the dorm. Catherine was talking with a friend about how she didn’t have a date for her sorority formal. Nick, overhearing, said, “I’ll go with you!” Soon they were spending lots of time together, just studying, lounging around in sweats, and watching reality TV. When the term ended, they left campus for the summer. During her summer internship in D.C., another guy asked Catherine out. She didn’t know what to say. She called Nick to ask about the status of their relationship; were they together? Nick’s answer, “We are 100 percent dating. Tell those guys, ‘No’.” Four years later, they were married.1 Joe had seen an amazingly beautiful woman around the office. He promised himself that next time he saw her, he would say hello. In the summer of 2008, he got on the elevator and there she was. He gave himself a mental pep talk and worked up the courage to say something. What came out? “Hi, I’m Joe.” He was too nervous to think of anything else. Karen was on her phone when she heard this and looked up and saw Joe. She thought he was really cute but tried not to talk too much because she thought she looked like a mess that day. A few days later, Joe tracked down her email, asked her out for a drink, and she said yes. In the summer of 2012, Joe proposed to Karen in the elevator where they met. Again, she said yes, and the next summer, they got married. “The best thing I ever did in my life was keeping that promise to introduce myself to her,” Joe said.2 INTRODUCTION 1

Lindsay was at a party with her then-boyfriend when Dan walked in. They looked at each other and both felt something intense. “I’d never felt electrified by the sight of a perfect stranger,” Lindsay said. Dan explained, “It was almost déjà vu, like I already knew her intimate secrets.” They started talking. “Have I really found you? Are you the one?,” Dan asked her straight out. They stayed in touch but remained only friends because Lindsay was still with her boyfriend. They exchanged over a thousand texts. But then, feeling guilty, Lindsay said they should stop texting. In response, Dan sent a single text, including only one comma. “The comma was to signify that in my opinion, we were just on pause,” he explained. A few months later, he showed up to a performance she was giving. When she saw him in the audience, Lindsay knew she had to break up with her boyfriend. She did that night. And that same night, Dan and Lindsay decided they would get married someday. Three years later, they were married.3 On June 16, 2008, Del and Phyllis, who had been together for 55 years, were married in California. A little over two months later, Del died at the age of 87. Del and Phyllis were the first couple to marry when same-sex marriage became legal this time in California. In subsequent years, same-sex marriage would again become illegal in California, and then even later, again legal. But Del and Phyllis had already been through this. They had fought together for years for the right to marry and, in 2004, were actually married for the first time. But shortly after their first wedding, the California Supreme Court invalidated all same-sex marriage licenses. After continuing efforts and further changes in the law, Del and Phyllis were finally able to marry again two months before Del’s death. Following Del’s death, Phyllis, age 83, said she was devastated but took comfort in knowing that they were able to express their love and commitment by marrying before she died.4 These are all true, real-life, romantic stories of love and marriage. But they also contain interesting dynamics to investigate. Nick is one year older and taller than Catherine. They went to college together and come from similar family backgrounds. He initiated their relationship, and she took his last name when they married. Joe and Karen follow a similar pattern. Joe is two years older than Karen. They are both from New York, have advanced university degrees, and are white and Roman Catholic. He asked her out first and then he proposed. She changed her last name to his when they married. These characteristics are quite common among married couples. Dan and Lindsay are somewhat unique. Dan is 12 years older and also 4 inches shorter than Lindsay, two reasons why she said he was not her usual type. They both proposed to each other, and she kept her last name. These characteristics are uncommon. Nonetheless, they fell in love at first sight and feel like they were meant for each other. These are common ways of talking about love and whom we marry. Del and Phyllis capture the story of the long fight for same-sex marriage in the U.S. In this book, we explore who marries whom and why. We find out how people get together and how they get married. We examine what people do 2 INTRODUCTION

when they are married and when they aren’t. In some ways, this book is not so shocking. It is a study of things that nearly all people do. It is a story of people mostly acting in predictable and patterned ways. It is a book about Americans being married. Yet, this book will likely spark lots of debate and controversy. What is shocking is the extent to which our most personal relationships are not really our own. We think about our relationships, whether dating or married, as the most private and personal aspects of our lives, but in this book, we examine how these relationships are actually quite public. They are shaped by the context, time, culture, and demographic groups within which we live. There are loads of best-selling books about marriage, with titles like Mating in Captivity, Against Love, Lust in Translation, The Starter Marriage, For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage, Committed: A Love Story, Marriage Confidential, The Marriage Sabbatical, Spinster, and The Meaning of Wife. These books tend to be shorter than your usual textbook and easier to read. They do not contain a list of concepts and definitions to be included on a test. Rather, people actually voluntarily read these books because they want to. These are books that people talk about. They are debated and discussed in book clubs. They propose ideas that people remember long after the book is done. Modern Romance is one of these books. The outcome of a unique collaboration between comedian Aziz Ansari and sociologist Eric Klinenberg, Modern Romance is both a really funny and an educational book about meeting a partner, starting a relationship, and everything—texting, sexting, and not receiving a reply—that this involves. Aziz and Eric provide solid advice about dating with technology, including tips on how to write texts that will get a response and a call to spend less time searching through the endless choices online and more time getting to know possible partners in person. The book is a bit crass at times, but we strongly recommend that you read it. This book, Getting Married, could possibly be considered an unauthorized follow-up to Modern Romance. It tells an important next chapter in the story of relationships. It discusses what happens if you do meet someone online and they do text you and you do go out, get engaged, and get married. It also discusses what happens if you don’t. It provides a different angle to think about relationships. Aziz and Eric, like many others, focus a lot on how relationships today are unique from the past, particularly in how much choice we now have. As they write, “There are no longer any predetermined life paths. Each of us is on our own.” And “People who are looking for love today have an unprecedented set of options . . . We can marry pretty much whomever we want to, regardless of their sex, gender, ethnicity, religion, or race—or even location.”5 They argue that this choice has benefits but also challenges that lead to problems in our quest for love. In this, our “follow-up” book, we provide a different perspective. Throughout the book, our argument is that in our relationships, we are actually not “on our own.” We don’t have complete choice. Instead, in our relationships, we are INTRODUCTION 3

still constrained by a pretty rigid set of external rules and expectations. These social rules and expectations influence whom we select as a spouse, when we decide to get married, and how we arrange our relationships day to day. Everything in relationships—our choices, desires, and actions—is shaped by these rules.6 Like Aziz and Eric, we also argue that these rules may have some benefits but also lead to challenges and problems in our quest for love. People do decide how to act, but these decisions are made in a social context that guides and limits choice. Some people go against the rules and forge their own paths, but these deviations have consequences and thus are rare. People, through their actions, can and do change these rules and expectations over time, but change can be shockingly slow. In the end, most people follow the rules, resulting in set patterns in how people have their relationships. As a result, one couple’s relationship is a lot like another’s. As a leading scholar in the field of relationships said, “We’re remarkably not innovative about marriage . . .”7 While this book is about marriage, it is also about sociology. We use the case of marriage to explore a sociological perspective. Sociology is about understanding relationships between people, and there is no more wellknown, thought about, and written about relationship than marriage. At the most basic level, sociologists explore how individuals are influenced by living among other people. Using the example of marriage, sociology shows us that living among other people influences how we live in our private lives. We will focus a lot on heterosexual, or opposite-sex, relationships in this book. We do this because, at least for now, opposite-sex relationships dominate American culture. They are pervasive in movies, social science research, the culture of college campuses, and the rules of marriage. Our attention to opposite-sex relationships does NOT mean that they should be dominant—it merely means that because they are, opposite-sex relationships are particularly ripe for evaluation and critical analysis. Over the course of the book, we discuss a lot of different studies, articles and books, and ideas. Some of them will match your personal feelings about marriage and some will not. Some of the ideas will ring true to you and some will seem quite strange. This is true for us as well. There will be ideas that excite you, make you nod in agreement, and make you laugh. There will also be ideas that rub you the wrong way and make you angry or uncomfortable. There will be things you disagree with, as well as things you have always thought. We want you to be exposed to a range of ideas and feel free to debate and discuss them. Marriage can be a challenging topic to discuss because we all hold beliefs, ideas, and values regarding marriage. There are progressive takes and conservative takes on marriage. We try to move beyond these divisions. In this book, we are describing dominant patterns of how things are—NOT how they should be. This is not a book about what anyone should do in marriage. This is not an advice book. Sociologists are not particularly good at giving individual advice. 4 INTRODUCTION

Rather, sociologists examine and explain trends in what groups of people do. We study patterns in behaviors. It is likely that at some time while reading this book, you will say to yourself, “I don’t do that!” or “[Someone I know] doesn’t do that.” We will all know someone who has done things differently from the patterns discussed. We need to make an important point here: Even though you or someone you know may not fit the pattern, the pattern still exists. When studying the social world, 100 percent of the people never fit a pattern. We will see this in the statistics presented. When we study patterns, we examine trends in behaviors that most people follow. When your experience does not fit a pattern, this does not mean that the pattern does not exist. It simply means that your individual experience doesn’t fit the pattern. We hope that you enjoy the book, keep an open mind, and have thoughtprovoking debates.

NOTES 1. Lasky 2013. 2. Mallozzi 2013. 3. Rafkin 2013. 4. Grimes 2008. 5. Ansari and Klinenberg 2015, pp. 24, 26. 6. Lauer and Yodanis 2010. 7. Richtel 2012.

INTRODUCTION 5

PICKING A PARTNER

P

eople get married when they find someone they love more than anyone else. We marry once we find that one special person for us, the person we are meant to spend the rest of our life with, our best friend. We know there will be challenges and marriage will be hard work, but our strong and true love for each other should get us through. Three quarters of Americans believe in “one true love,” and over 90 percent of never-married women and men between the ages of 20–29 “want their spouses to be a soul mate first and foremost.” Nearly 90  percent of single women and men believe that “a special person, a soul mate” is out there to be found and that they will successfully find them when they are ready to get married.1 We expect to marry our soul mate. It would be almost unimaginable to give other reasons for marriage today. The book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough challenged this idea by encouraging women to not seek a perfect partner. The author argued that people are too picky, which leads to loneliness, unhappiness, and regret, and therefore, they should not be so picky.2 Instead, women should marry someone “good enough.” But settling for a “good enough” person to marry might seem pretty awful. The same might be true for arranged marriages. In an arranged marriage, your family would choose a spouse for you, making sure that your spouse’s family background, educational achievements, and ethnicity and religion matched yours. You would marry, and then later, perhaps, love between the two of you would grow. Such an arrangement seems strange and even wrong in our Western context. Today, people in the U.S. tend to believe it is important to marry only after they are in love with the right person. However, in our search for a soul mate, a lot more comes into play than an emotional connection with someone. 6 PICKING A PARTNER

We technically do have lots of choice in whom we marry. Our pool of potential spouses increases as we travel and live in different places, live on our own away from our parents, and use the Internet.3 Today, young people are much freer than other generations to select from a much larger pool of people to marry. So perhaps it is ironic that even with this choice, we end up picking a spouse who is not so different from the spouse our parents would have picked for us in an arranged marriage. We theoretically have the freedom to choose anyone for a spouse, and anyone we meet could be “the one.” Despite this, people follow set patterns when selecting a spouse. Go to an online dating website. Look at the questions that are asked for the profiles. What information are people asked to provide? There are questions about interests and hobbies, but there are also lots of questions about age, height, gender, ethnicity and race, religion, education, and occupation— the criteria on which we still select mates. How many men are looking for a younger and shorter woman? How many women are looking for a taller and older man? How many people are looking for someone of their same ethnicity, religion, amount of education, and similarly prestigious job? Parents aren’t arranging marriages for their children based on these criteria. They don’t have to. Matchmaking websites, with their “scientific” matching systems, are doing the job for them.4 With the use of these websites, people are being sorted and matched based on the same characteristics parents used in arranged marriages. Even outside of online dating, expectations for potential mates have remained largely the same. Finding a spouse is not just about finding a soul mate but a soul mate of a certain gender, ethnicity, education, age, height, religion, and occupation. Age plays out in two ways. First, most people marry someone similar in age. One-third of spouses are just about the same age, born within one year of each other. Over three-quarters of spouses are within five years of age of each other. Fewer than 10 percent of married couples have an age gap of 10 years or more. Second, in opposite-sex relationships, the man is slightly older and the woman is slightly younger. Of the marriages where there is an age gap, the man is older nearly 80 percent of the time. The woman is older just over 20 percent of the time.5 There are also clear patterns in the physical size of opposite-sex spouses. Men marry shorter women and women marry taller men. As with age, a very large height difference between spouses is not common. But husbands tend to be taller than wives. In fewer than 5 percent of couples is the wife taller than the husband. If women and men randomly partnered, rather than selected each other based on expectations that a husband should be taller and a wife shorter, there would be more wives who were taller than their husbands.6 Interethnic and interracial marriages are increasing. As USA Today reported in 2012, “Census shows big jump in interracial couples.” But still, Americans overwhelmingly marry within their same racial and ethnic backgrounds. In the United States, about 85 percent of new marriages and about PICKING A PARTNER 7

90  percent of existing marriages are between spouses of the same ethnic or racial group.7 Not all ethnic groups have the same rates of intermarriage. Instead, based on your ethnic or racial group, there is more or less likelihood that you will marry someone from a different ethnic or racial background. White Americans are the least likely to intermarry, with over 90 percent of white married women and men choosing to marry someone who is also white. Over 90 percent of married black women and over 75  percent of married black men married a black spouse. Over three-quarters of married Hispanic women and men chose a Hispanic spouse. About 80  percent of married Asian American men and 60 percent of married Asian American women selected an Asian American spouse. Among Native Americans, intermarriage more common than marrying within one’s ethnic group.8 Spouses also tend to have the same level of education. Education has been called the “great sorting machine of the marriage market.”9 Just over half of spouses share the same years of schooling. In nearly 90  percent of couples, spouses are close in education, within a few years difference. Looking at it another way, most college graduates marry another college graduate. Fewer college graduates marry someone with a high school education, and even fewer marry someone who has not graduated from high school.10 People are highly likely to marry someone of the opposite sex. Nearly all marriages are between a man and a woman. The number of same-sex married couples has increased substantially as same-sex marriage was made legal. Nonetheless, the number of same-sex marriages is not just a result of legal restrictions on same-sex marriage that existed in the United States until recently. Only about 1 percent of all couple households (married or cohabiting) are same-sex couples.11 Off the bat, our choice in soul mates is usually restricted to half the population. Other characteristics also matter when selecting a partner, including religion and social class. Spouses tend to share the same religion, occupational status, and income level (and credit score).12 Not surprisingly, all of these preferences are found in online dating patterns.13 As a sociologist concluded, “Technology can expand the sea of potential partners, but social biases still shape how many ‘fish’ we think are out there.”14 In online profiles and contacts, people, especially men, seem at first to be open to dating a range of people. But men and women show a preference for partners from their same racial backgrounds and exclude people from certain ethnicities.15 For example, one study by sociologists of the behavior of online daters found that white, black, Asian, and Latino online daters are all most likely to send initial messages to someone of their same racial or ethnic background, although there is some amount of variation among ethnic groups and between women and men in how strong this behavior is. When responding to messages, people are most likely to respond to someone from the same or more dominant racial group and not respond to someone from a more marginalized group.16 8 PICKING A PARTNER

When listing their preferences and contacting potential partners on online dating sites, men select women who are their own age or a few years younger, while women select men their age or a few years older. Online, women prefer men who are taller than they are and have higher body mass index (BMI) scores than they do. Men prefer women who are shorter and have lower BMIs than they have.17 Given the expectations of partnering, perhaps it is not surprising that people do not always tell the truth in their online profiles. Researchers have been comparing peoples’ online profiles to their actual characteristics. They found that over 80 percent of participants in their study lied about their weight/body type, height, or age. Men lied most about their height, reporting that they were taller than they are. Women lied most about their weight. The further a person was away from the average height or weight, the more likely they were to lie and the larger the lie was. But, overall, the size of the lies was usually small enough so that the discrepancies would not be noticeable when meeting in person.18 As we outlined earlier, people believe that their true soul mate is out there somewhere and when they find them, they will get married. They believe that an emotional connection is what leads them to select their spouses from the millions of possible choices. Yet spouses actually meet a set of predictable characteristics—age, height, race or ethnicity, education—separate from a personal, emotional connection. It can be argued that sharing a similar ethnic or racial background or the same religion and education makes it easier for individuals to connect and be soul mates. That likely explains some of the trend. But what about the few inches and years that men tend to have on women? That wouldn’t make partners more compatible. (For those who answered something related to fertility or reproduction, we will address that later.) Finding someone to marry is often described as great luck or fate. “What if I hadn’t gone to that party? We never would have met.” “What if I hadn’t introduced myself on the elevator?” “What if I hadn’t run back to my dorm room to get the book I forgot?” Marriage is often seen as the outcome of meeting that one true person. But the reality is that even if that someone had stayed home and hadn't gone to the party, or hadn’t introduced themselves, or had gone to class without the book, they probably would have married someone quite similar, whom they also felt very fortunate to have met. Finding the person whom we marry really isn’t about serendipity. To the contrary, it is remarkably predictable. Why is it predictable? In this book, we are going to look at the formal and informal social rules and expectations that direct people to behave a certain way. Marriage is more than a relationship between two individuals. It is an institution, with sets of laws, policies, norms, and expectations that guide, limit, and shape how those who marry behave. In personal and private relationships, people often do not act as independent individuals. Rather, individual actions and desires—what people do and what they even want to do—emerge within PICKING A PARTNER 9

the rules and expectations of marriage. A series of formal and informal rules and taken-for-granted assumptions constrain and shape our relationships. Let’s start with who marries whom. There have historically been and continue to be formal rules about who can marry. Until 1967, there were laws that prohibited people of different racial backgrounds from marrying. These laws were changed eventually, based on a case of a black woman, Mildred, and a white man, Richard. Mildred and Richard had known each other since they were kids. They fell in love, and when Mildred was 18 and Richard 24, they were married. A few weeks after their wedding, the police invaded their home in the middle of the night. They were arrested and sentenced to one year in jail because, at the time, interracial marriage was illegal in 24 states, including their home state of Virginia. They could avoid serving the jail time only if they agreed to leave Virginia. So they left the state. Away from their friends and family, they had and raised three children together, but it was hard. They decided to fight the ruling so that they could return home. Eventually, nine years after their arrest, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, saying that interracial marriage could not be illegal. Eight years after their marriage became legal, Richard was killed by a drunk driver. Mildred, who never remarried, lived on for more than three decades. They were buried together in the same town in Virginia where they were first arrested. It likely seems outrageous that laws could dictate which consenting adults are able to be in a relationship together, and maybe the 1960s seem like a long time ago.19 But, until 2003, it was illegal in a dozen states for people of the same sex to have sex within the privacy of their own home. One night in 1998, the police invaded the Texas home of a 55-year-old man, John, and found him with another man, Tyron, who was in his 30s. The police gave conflicting reports of what they saw, if anything at all, but John and Tyron were arrested for violating Texas laws that prohibited “deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex,” held in jail overnight, and each fined $200. They, like Mildred and Richard, fought this charge the whole way to the Supreme Court and, five years later, the court ruled that sex between same-sex couples could not be illegal.20 Even more recently, it became legal for people of the same sex to marry. But it took a long time and a lot of effort to change the formal rules to make this so. Throughout the last decade, many states held referenda, in which people were allowed to vote to determine which people are allowed to marry. In California in 2008, for example, the courts ruled that marriage between same-sex partners was legal, and thousands of same-sex couples were married. Church and interest groups who did not agree with this decision worked to get a referendum on the 2008 election ballot that would make it possible for the public to vote on whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal. Tens of millions of dollars were spent to influence the vote, and millions of people voted on who should be allowed to marry. In the end, 52 percent of these voters said that same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry, and this opinion 10 PICKING A PARTNER

became law.21 So after being legal, same-sex marriage was then again illegal in California. Court challenges, the whole way to the Supreme Court, followed. The referendum was eventually overturned, and same-sex couples were again able to marry in California. Similar processes happened in other states throughout the country. It took until a 2015 Supreme Court decision before same-sex couples in all states were able to marry. These processes clearly show that what we consider to be a private decision is actually a public decision. Public decisions—by voters and courts—set up the external rules that determined if and when couples could marry. Whom we marry is not an individual decision alone. While these formal rules have clear influence on who can marry, informal rules can be even more powerful in sending messages about which partners “should” be together. For example, North American culture assumes and privileges opposite-sex relationships over same-sex relationships.22 With some exceptions, interactions with friends, families, coworkers, bosses, neighbors, and strangers often assume that intimate relationships are opposite sex. Being gay, lesbian, or bisexual requires “coming out,” while heterosexuality is otherwise assumed. Public signs indicating “family” by including an image of a man, woman, and child assume that a family needs to include an opposite-sex couple.23 Same-sex partners don’t feel free to hold hands in public, a practice that opposite-sex couples take for granted. As one man explained, We, just like every other couple, like to hold hands . . . when we’re out for a walk or a night on the town. It’s not meant to be political, but it could be perceived as such . . . Straight people don’t have that kind of apprehension walking down the street holding hands with their loved ones.24 The ongoing message to same-sex couples that they are doing something “different” can be tiresome, stressful, hurtful, and threatening in some circumstances. If a couple fits the informal rules and social expectations of who “should” marry, there is no reaction. We don’t even notice when couples are of the same race or ethnicity, that the man is older and taller than the woman, or that one partner is a man and the other is a woman. But when there is a deviation from the informal rules, it is noticed. Think about it: Do you notice a black woman and a white man holding hands? What about a man who is much shorter than a woman? What about two women? What about an older woman and younger man? Even if we don’t realize it, our noticing is a reaction that has an effect. Even a longer glance can make a couple feel uncomfortable and send the message that they are doing something “different.” But many reactions are more critical, even hateful and violent. A sociologist studied interracial relationships on college campuses. Campuses are believed to be environments more supportive of diverse relationships. But some students, while stating support for interracial relationships in theory, were quick to say that they would not date someone from a different race. PICKING A PARTNER 11

These discussions, at times, took racist tones. At the same time, students who were in interracial relationships talked about feeling alienated on campuses, which continue to be largely racially segregated and where interracial relationships remain rare.25 Negative reactions also come during interactions with family. As the study found, in families, interracial relationships are portrayed as “different, deviant, even dangerous.” As a result, “the role of family is key and certainly influences . . . decisions not to date interracially.” Among the college students involved in the study, for example, the majority said that their parents would see it as problematic if they were in a relationship with someone of a different racial background. Managing negative reactions from those outside the relationship is an ongoing challenge facing interracial partners.26 Ultimately, living in a society with these formal and informal rules, people start to internalize these expectations and only consider potential spouses who have the characteristics that they are “supposed” to have. A woman, when choosing whom to contact online, selects an older and taller man because she is attracted to him, not consciously to avoid jokes from friends and family. White men might seem unattractive to black women because they are lacking the “swagger” that they find in black men.27 A working-class woman might not be attracted to a man who can’t build a shelf.28 A woman majoring in comparative literature might seem pretentious to a male construction worker. We learn to want certain characteristics in our partners, based on what we learn are possible mates through our experiences in society, which is saturated with rules about whom we “should” partner with. In other words, the formal and informal rules constrain the options for who can be a spouse. A large number of possible contenders are never considered because they do not fit the characteristics they are “supposed” to have in order to be a potential spouse. Rather than have unlimited options, we are still quite limited when searching for our “soul mate” or “the one.”

NOTES 1. Carlson 2001; Whitehead and Popenoe 2001. 2. Gottlieb 2010. 3. Bulcroft, Bulcroft, Bradley, and Simpson 2000; Rosenfeld 2007. 4. Bulcroft et al. 2000. 5. Gustafson and Fransson 2015; U.S. Census Bureau 2013. 6. Conley 2011; Stulp, Buunk, Pollet, Nettle, and Verhulst 2013. 7. Lofquist, Lugaila, O’Connell, and Feliz 2012; Taylor, Wang, Parker, Passel, Patten, and Motel 2012. 8. Qian and Lichter 2007; Taylor et al. 2012. 9. Cherlin 2009. 10. Schwartz and Mare 2005; Qian 2016. 12 PICKING A PARTNER

11. Lofquist 2011; U.S. Census Bureau 2014. 12. Bison, Topa, and Verdier 2004; Kalmijn 1998; McClintock 2014; Swanson 2015. 13. Feliciano, Robnett, and Komaie 2009. 14. Pepin 2015. 15. Feliciano et al. 2009; Hitsch, Hortacsu, and Ariely 2010; Sweeney and Borden 2009. 16. Lin and Lundquist 2013. 17. Hitsch et al. 2010; Yancey and Emerson 2016. 18. Toma, Hancock, and Ellison 2008. 19. The Economist 2008; Martin 2008. 20. Liptak 2011. 21. “Election Results: California” 2008. 22. Rich 1980. 23. Powell, Bolzendahl, Geist, and Steelman 2010. 24. Beilski 2013. 25. Childs 2005. 26. Childs 2005, pp. 109, 111. 27. Banks 2011. 28. Spurlock 2012.

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hose are the social processes that explain whom we marry. It is also possible to predict, with quite a bit of accuracy, when people will marry. The median age for a first marriage is now about 29 for men and 27 for women.1 People marry at these ages because the latter half of their twenties is currently the acceptable or fashionable time to marry. There is variation by class, ethnicity, and religion, as we will discuss. Still, overall, the mid to late twenties are the current intense period of marrying. Few women and men marry before the age of 20. The proportion of people marrying starts to increase during their twenties, peaking in the mid to late twenties, but then drops off during their thirties.2 In a book about relationships among young people, one woman’s marriage time frame is described this way: When I asked her what she imagined for her twenties, she mapped it out. From twenty-four to twenty-seven she would be in law school, and hoped to pass the bar exam at twenty-eight. That left her the next few years to start her career, date, fall in love with someone she wanted to marry. She hoped to have started a family by the time she was thirty-five . . . Patty knows that her plan to find Mr. Right between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty requires more than a bit of luck that he’ll actually show up on the scene.3 As this woman outlined, as with her education and career plans, she has a marriage plan that assumes that she will be married in her late twenties, the current socially acceptable age for marriage. Having this standard time frame assumes that nearly everyone finds their soul mate within the same short period of life. This would mean that today somehow the late twenties are a particularly successful time for meeting that

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one right person. This is not impossible but not likely. In order to marry at the right time, many people must be marrying the person whom they are with when the right time arrives. Or, when the right time arrives, people find a mate to marry. In a study of married women and men, people often described their spouse as the right person at the right time: “Well, because he was the one I met, I guess. I could have married someone else had I met someone else.” [married seven years] “I always assumed I would get married, there was no question about it in my mind, and I thought it was awfully late at the time . . . I felt very lonely much of the time between I suppose getting out of high school until I got married . . . I couldn’t find somebody that I was happy with. And vice versa, that she would be happy with me.” [married 17 years] “We met at a time when, I don’t know, I guess we just happened to be right for each other at the right time.”4 [married nine years] How does the “right time” of marriage get set? There are laws regulating the legal age at marriage. In the U.S., people are generally allowed to marry when they are 18. However, with permission from parents and/or court approval, people as young as 16, 15, and sometimes even younger can marry. Interestingly, laws sometimes set the legal age of marriage for boys older than the age for girls, reinforcing the expectation that if there is an age difference in marriage, the man should be older than the woman. But informal rules—enforced by our families and friends rather than the law—have a particularly strong influence on the age of marriage. The book The Starter Marriage is based on interviews with 60 young people who entered marriages that ended within a short period of time. As these young people described, reaching the socially appropriate time to marry was marked by frequent engagements and weddings among friends and expectations for them to follow suit: “Everyone was getting married all around me. I was surrounded by newlyweds. There was definitely social pressure to get married.” “There’s this sort of group thing, this new kind of status. It’s such a cute thing. This feeling like you’re this young married person and you’ve got all your young married friends.” “It’s like this snowball effect. Once one person gets engaged, everybody has to get engaged.” “Once I had on that engagement ring, I was in this total wedding zone where everything was about marriage. It was always, ‘Why aren’t you I DO, YOU DO, WE ALL DO 15

married? Are you going to get married? When are you guys getting married?’”5 In other words, people marry not simply when they are in love and have found the right person. People marry when their friends marry. Marrying later than your friends can make you feel left out. Marrying sooner, while in university for example, can be awkward when no one else you know is married and the structure of the university, such as dorm life, is not set up for married couples. These rules, however, vary among different groups within a society. Different social rules lead to different timing for marriage. At Brigham Young University, a university associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints, for example, about a quarter of undergraduates are married and over half of the students are married by graduation. At BYU, informal rules and expectations are different, which explains why people marry at a different age. The campus provides a setting in which to meet, date, and marry someone of the same religion, which has a strong focus on marriage. And there is a culture focused on marriage while in college. One student, who actually didn’t marry before graduation, had expected that she would. She said, “You just kind of come in thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll probably be married by the time I graduate.’” For many students at other universities, it might be hard to imagine being married in college because the rules are not set up for marriage so early. At BYU, it is hard to imagine not getting married. In other words, when people marry is not solely an independent, individual decision. The individual is shaped and influenced by the social rules around them.6 As people reach the “marrying period” of their lives, they start to marry. And by the end of the socially defined “marrying period,” most people will have married. Over the past decade, a stream of news articles reported that marriage is no longer so common. These articles described how, for the first time, fewer than half of American households are made up of married couples. Newspaper and magazine headlines read, “Single? So are the majority of U.S. adults,” “To be married is to be outnumbered in America,” and “Has being married gone out of style?” At the same time, however, a leading marriage sociologist called the United States “the most marrying of Western nations.”7 How can we reconcile this conclusion with the statistics showing a decline in marriage? When we hear that more than half of people are not married, that simply means that they are not currently married. Some of these people have been previously married but are now divorced or widowed. Other people are not yet married. People are now more able and willing to leave relationships through divorce than at other times, and this increases the number of currently unmarried people. People are also now marrying later, so there are more people classified as unmarried for longer. Nonetheless, many of these people 16 I DO, YOU DO, WE ALL DO

will eventually marry. If we include those who have ever married or will eventually marry, the vast majority of Americans will be married at some point in their lives. Let’s look more closely at some statistics. Census data often include individuals 15 years of age and older. Nearly 100 percent of people aged 15–17 have not married. This seems obvious. As we just covered, marrying at this age is not legal in most states without parents’ permission and marrying while in high school is generally not socially supported. And, as we also just saw, few people marry before the age of 20. If we limit the statistics to an older, more age-appropriate group for marriage, a different picture appears. Over 80 percent of women between the ages of 35 and 39 and of men between the ages of 40 and 44 have been married at some point in their lives.8 Again, an important part of this story involves variation by social class and ethnicity. Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to the fact that marriage in the United States is less common among women and men with less education and lower incomes.9 Lower-income couples feel blocked from marriage because they feel they don’t have enough money to marry. A sociologist wrote a book, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, about the experiences of working-class young adults today who are facing fewer jobs, lower paying jobs, and overall economic insecurity.10 One of the things she found is that her respondents were anxious about marriage and often put it off because of the insecurity they were facing in their lives. People believe that marriage should be a lifelong commitment but are concerned that without enough money for financial security, the marriage will not succeed. As researchers concluded, “The poor avoid marriage not because they think too little of it, but because they revere it.”11 Research does show that maintaining a relationship can be harder under conditions of economic insecurity. For example, marital quality is lower when dealing with chronic stress. And chronic economic stress makes it harder for lower-income couples to deal with and recover from the daily, short-term stressors that all couples face.12 Beyond this, however, marriage is now highly commodified. Although love is believed to be the basis for marriage, being able to buy certain things is closely associated with the process of getting married and shapes a couple’s perception of their readiness and ability to marry. A ring is central to making the engagement official. Without a ring, family, friends, acquaintances, and even the couple themselves may doubt the validity of the engagement.13 Weddings are increasingly expensive. It is estimated that an average of $31,213 is spent on a wedding now. In some cities, the average spent is even higher: New York City ($76,328), Chicago ($50,934), Philadelphia ($44,090), and Pittsburgh ($32,359).14 Couples who are getting married define decorations, flowers, and the dress as romantic, rather than purely the moments of getting married.15 Marriage is now being referred to as a “status marker,” meaning that it is something people do when they have achieved success.16 Couples marry when I DO, YOU DO, WE ALL DO 17

they have good jobs, a nice house, a car, and can afford a big wedding. As one woman explained, “We have certain things that we want to do before we get married. We both want very good jobs, and we both want a house, we both want reliable transportation.”17 So low-income couples may delay marriage until they have the things that are now socially defined as important for a successful marriage.18 Despite variation in the likelihood of marrying, everyone is affected by the rules and assumptions that marriage is an expected part of life. The message that marriage is something everyone “should” do shapes people’s experiences throughout society, even those who do not marry. People who have never married often expect, want, and feel pressure to marry. Nearly 80 percent of never-married women aged 29–37 without children say they want to marry now or in the future.19 Only 4 percent of people aged 25–54 are single and have no personal desire to marry, even if the right person came along.20 Even among the groups who are least likely to marry, the majority have a continued desire and expectation to marry. In interviews, low-income women who did not marry explained, “I wanna be married because I feel as though then it’s like [I’m on] stable ground. I know I have a partner for life that’s gonna help me through things . . . I’ll always have a companion and a love, a best friend, somebody to help me raise the kids that we have.” “I would love to have a marriage, a perfect one, like the fairy tales. I’d love to have that.” “I hope that we will be together and married [in five years].”21 Over time, people who are not married tend to do fine, and their desire to marry decreases.22 Single people, particularly those who have never married, have full social lives, strong social ties, and wide support networks—more so than married people do.23 Nonetheless, being single, particularly never married, requires a process of adjustment in a society where most people have married. One researcher interviewed single women who were over the age of 30, two times, seven to nine years apart. During the first interview, most of the women were not comfortable with being single, although they had full lives and social networks. By the second interview, most of the women who remained single were more accepting of their singleness and satisfied with their lives and families.24 Nonetheless, this “transition to singlehood” usually involves the challenge of accepting living a different kind of lifestyle.25 As the researcher explained, “Today, all long-term single women go through a process of struggle and change to craft and accept their lives. But not all single women make this transition, or they do so only with great difficulty.”26 18 I DO, YOU DO, WE ALL DO

Another study of single women, ages 28–34, found that the women felt anxiety about themselves and their lives because they weren’t married. They were able to “retrain their thinking” to find positive aspects of being single at this age, especially compared to being in bad relationships or divorced. Yet they said that they would prefer to be married, took steps to get married, and while they tried to remain optimistic, they worried that they might never marry: “You feel like you kind of got this time frame, it is not set in stone . . . but it is kind of always in the back of your mind. Like if you do the math: I want to get married and have kids and it is not going to be okay forever . . . I’m thinking ‘okay, I’m almost 30 and my eggs are dying slowly . . .’” “Sometimes you question yourself because you are thinking, ‘Why is it that I am 32 and I can’t seem to find someone?’ So that is the hard part because then you start thinking, ‘Well, maybe something is wrong with me because I can’t find someone.’” “I think almost unfortunately we end up telling ourselves if you are not married, you almost feel like you are not normal.”27 Today, a sense of self-worth, inclusion, and status can still come from being seen as attractive to others and being in a relationship.28 For the book Is Marriage for White People?, the author interviewed Rachel, a successful 37-year-old African American woman who was not married, who told the story of running into a friend on the train who was married with children. She explained her reaction, “I just thought, ‘That’s the life I should have.’ How is it that she gets to go home to her husband and I come home alone, go to the gym, and make dinner for myself ?”29 There is some evidence that single men experience this pressure too, although studies are more likely to focus on single women. A reporter talked with men in their forties who were not married, and their comments were not so different from those of the women included in research studies. One man said, I just turned 40. Thinking about the math, the longer I wait to start my own family, you start to think, “When I consider someone to marry, I have to find someone young enough to have children. And the age difference. What’s acceptable? What’s O.K.?” Another single man explained how he no longer has interest in his single life: Everyone has kids. I know everybody’s in bed, so who do you call? . . . When you’re 27, there’s no tomorrow . . . At 42, today’s tomorrow. Going home to kids and a family, you’re creating something. You’re building something.30 I DO, YOU DO, WE ALL DO 19

A sociologist wrote a book called Going Solo, about the increase in people who are living alone. He interviewed people who live alone, which involves not marrying, and found that people enjoy living alone, including the independence and time to themselves that living alone provides. At the same time, the people who were interviewed showed a sense of worrying about the future— will they always be alone and what will that be like over the course of their whole lives? Living alone is viewed as fun and advantageous, but also often temporary. A good example from Going Solo is Sasha Cagen, founder of the movement, Quirkyalone. According to the website, “Quirkyalones are people who enjoy being single (but are not opposed to being in a relationship) and prefer being single to dating for the sake of being in a relationship. It’s a mindset.”31 The whole thing started with an essay, in which Cagen declared, Being quirkyalone can be difficult. Everyone else is part of a couple! Still, there are advantages. No one can take our lives away by breaking up with us. Instead of sacrificing our social constellation for the one all-consuming individual, we seek empathy from friends. We have significant others.32 The essay led to a book, a website, and a movement, which involves, among other things, declaring February 14th International Quirkyalone Day, a do-it-yourself celebration of romance, friendship, and independent spirit . . . If you are single, International Quirkyalone Day is a call to arms to celebrate the possibilities available to single people today. If you are partnered, IQD is a vital reminder to value yourself and develop your individuality even when in a couple. Yet when interviewed for the book, Sasha said, Now I’m ready for a different experience. I’ve lived alone for a long time, and at this point in my life I’d grow a lot more if I were partnered. To be honest, I worry that if I keep on making this the center of my life I’m going to wind up being single forever.33

NOTES 1. Manning, Brown, and Payne 2014; U.S. Census Bureau 2011. 2. Elliott and Simmons 2011; Thornton, Axinn, and Xie 2007. 3. Watters 2003, p. 181. 4. Swidler 2001, p. 120. 5. Paul 2002, pp. 55-6. 20 I DO, YOU DO, WE ALL DO

6. Christensen 2012; Clark 2005. 7. Cherlin 2009. 8. Copen, Daniels, Vespa, and Mosher 2012; Kreider and Ellis 2011; Kreider and Simmons 2003; Lewis and Kreider 2015; Manning et al. 2014. 9. Goodwin, McGill, and Chandra 2009; Pew Research Center 2010. 10. Silva 2015. 11. Edin and Kefalas 2005, p. 207. 12. Bradbury and Karney 2004; Burton and Tucker 2009. 13. Schweingruber, Anahita, and Berns 2004. 14. PRNewsWire 2015. 15. Boden 2003; Otnes and Pleck 2003. 16. Cherlin 2004. 17. Smock, Manning, and Porter 2005, p. 690. 18. Cherlin 2004; Edin and Kefalas 2005. 19. Lichter, Batson, and Brown 2004. 20. Mahay and Lewin 2007; Saad 2006. 21. Edin and Kefalas 2005, pp. 129, 120, 133. 22. Mahay and Lewin 2007. 23. Gerstel and Sarkisian 2006; Musick and Bumpass 2012; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2015. 24. Trimberger 2005. 25. Term coined by Davies (2003) in her study that reached similar conclusions. 26. Trimberger 2005, p. 88. 27. Sharp and Ganong 2007, p. 837; Sharp and Ganong 2011. 28. Hamilton 2007; Illouz 2012. 29. Banks 2005, p. 13. 30. Pappu 2016. 31. Retrieved February 19, 2016, from http://quirkyalone.net 32. Retrieved February 19, 2016, from http://quirkyalone.net/index.php/about-2/theoriginal-essay/ 33. Klinenberg 2012, p. 111–12.

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ather than it being strange that some people do not marry, maybe it is odd that so many people do. The vast majority of Americans agree, at least in theory, to spend the rest of their life living with, sleeping with, and being legally bound to one person. Perhaps some people find the right person to do this with. But nearly everyone? It seems like actually finding a soul mate and agreeing to enter a lifelong union with them should be the exception rather than the rule. People do doubt if they should get married. In one sample of newlyweds, nearly half of men and 40  percent of women said they were, at some point, uncertain or hesitant about getting married.1 Still they did. In America, no one will be arrested if they don’t get married by a certain age. People can have sex, long-term relationships, and children outside of marriage without formal punishment. Yet there are still social rules and expectations that strongly encourage, if not coerce, people to marry. Governments have always been involved in shaping marriage.2 Recently, some governments have been promoting marriage as a way to increase births. In countries where birth rates are low, governments want to increase the number of births so that there are enough people in the next generation to ensure sufficient numbers of workers paying taxes and thus funding social programs. The government in Singapore formed the Social Development Unit (SDU), which worked to “(1) increase single graduates’ awareness of the importance of marriage, [and] (2) provide opportunities for them to meet,” and later the Social Development Network (SDN) to “facilitate marriage and to nurture a culture where singles view marriage as a top life goal.”3 The SDN lets single graduates know about dating events and gives every graduating student a copy of Duet magazine, which provides “grooming tips, stories about singles, and tips about how to prepare for dates.”4 In South Korea, the government’s 22 WHY MARRY AT ALL?

Ministry of Health and Welfare promotes marriage through hosting and funding dating parties. Local governments can receive funding from the Ministry to hold activities that encourage marriage and eventually children. These events include speed dating, dinners, and chocolate give-away gatherings for single people who didn’t get chocolate on Valentine’s Day.5 The Japanese government funds Konkatsu, or “spouse hunting” events, programs, and online services, to encourage marriage and ultimately increase the birth rate.6 The United States government also promotes marriage. The goal is to reduce poverty. Single mothers are more likely to be poor than married couples. Therefore, it is believed that if women and men would get married or stay married, single motherhood and thus poverty, or at least the need for government aid to alleviate poverty, would be reduced. This strategy has been criticized because it doesn’t address the root economic causes of poverty.7 It has also been argued that marital practices themselves may contribute to, not solve, economic inequality. As we saw earlier, two people with advanced educations and high status, high paying jobs are likely to marry each other. When they do, they end up having a lot more income than other people, contributing to economic inequality. As an economist described, These days, an investment banker may marry another investment banker rather than a high school sweetheart, or a lawyer will marry another lawyer . . . rather than a secretary . . . These matches are great for those individuals who can build prosperous and happy family alliances, but they also propagate inequality across the generations. Of all the causes behind growing income inequality, in the longer run this development may prove one of the most significant and also one of the hardest to counter.8 From this perspective, marriage does not solve the core causes of economic inequality.9 Nonetheless, Bill Clinton’s welfare reform policies included marriage promotion as a key strategy for reducing the need for government support among the poor. The bill opens with the following statement: “The Congress makes the following findings: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” One of the goals of the funding given through the bill was to “end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage” (emphasis added).10 George W. Bush took government marriage promotion efforts to the next level. $700 million was given in grants to social services, churches, and community organizations, often used by those who need of income assistance, to encourage couples to marry and stay married. The Obama administration added additional funding.11 Governments, workplaces, and many other institutions, from hospitals to zoos, also advantage married people over those who are not married.12 Hundreds of rights and benefits are only available to people who are married. WHY MARRY AT ALL? 23

If a U.S. citizen meets and falls in love with a citizen of another country while traveling abroad, they have to get married in order to live together in the United States. A best friend from another country cannot immigrate. A couple often has to be married in order to have access to each other’s workplace benefits, such as health care and pensions. People have to be married to share federal government benefits, such as social security. All of these benefits cannot be shared with a brother, sister, or aging parent. A couple has to be married in order to live together on a military base or travel together on a Fulbright scholarship. A couple has to be married to guarantee visitation rights in the hospital, medical leave from work to care for each other, and the ability to make medical decisions for each other in the case of an emergency. A boyfriend, girlfriend, or best friend cannot fill this role. A spouse is not required to testify against a spouse in court, but a cohabiting partner or best friend has to. Rental agents overwhelmingly favor married couples over single renters.13 Married men are perceived more favorably as job applicants, viewed as more dedicated employees, and earn more than single men.14 Single people pay more per person than married couples do for a range of services, including zoo memberships, car rentals, and insurance.15 Traveling alone on a cruise, for example, can cost a single person over $1,000 more than coupled passengers pay per person.16 Married people can save on taxes by filing as a couple and have IRA benefits that single people don’t.17 It has been estimated that having the rights and benefits of marriage saves a married couple, compared to an unmarried couple, as much as half a million dollars over a lifetime.18 It has also been estimated that a single woman, depending on her income, pays over her lifetime between nearly half a million dollars to over a million dollars more than a married counterpart.19 These rules that favor the married over the single have been called discriminatory.20 Or as some conclude, “No matter which way you read the numbers, the final assessment remains the same: Singles get screwed.”21 Marry and no one asks questions. Not marrying, in contrast, raises all kinds of questions about potential problems. People try to figure out why single people aren’t married. In a study of never-married women, one woman explained how people say to her, “You are cute and you have such a great job and you got so much going for you, I can’t understand why you can’t find someone.”22 Single people are perceived more negatively than married people on a wide range of qualities. Single people are believed to be “less extraverted, less agreeable, less conscientious, more neurotic, less physically attractive, less satisfied with their lives, and having a lower self-esteem” in comparison to people in relationships, even though there are no actual differences between single and partnered people on these measures.23 It is often assumed that today single people are being too picky and thus aren’t able to choose a partner to marry. They are believed to suffer from “commitment phobia,” avoiding a relationship because they are concerned that they will regret any choice they do make if a better option comes along.24 A 24 WHY MARRY AT ALL?

researcher studied online posts, which discussed single women’s selectiveness when choosing a partner. As women age out of the socially appropriate age of marriage, they are described in these posts as overly selective, needing to make a choice, and even pathological. The very idea of being “too picky” assumes that people “should” be making a choice and “should” be marrying.25 Single women get messages all the time that they “should” be married. People act shocked upon learning that a women isn’t married. Single women get lots of unsolicited advice for how to meet someone, and people try to set them up. And some people are just ignorant, like the father who said “That’ll be the day” when one single woman was asked when she was getting married.26 Even on TV and in movies, being single is portrayed as a problem to be solved. As one researcher noted, “There are no real single people out there— they’re all just waiting for the chance to find that special someone, sometime soon. Everyone is pre- or postcouple. No one is really supposed to be single.”27 Messages that the single “should” marry are also common in academic and public discussions. The authors of the book The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially argued just that. Married people, they reported, are more satisfied with their lives, live longer, and are richer than people who are single, divorced, and widowed.28 And we often hear about these benefits of marriage. For example, we Googled “never married consequences” and the first result was to a story entitled, “Never-Married Penalty: Early Death?”29 A few years later, we Googled it again, and an article citing a research report declared, “Delaying Marriage Has Serious Consequences for Some, New Research Reveals.”30 Even more recently, the search resulted in an article that reported, “Study finds more reasons to get and stay married.”31 These articles exclaim, if you are not married, you are more likely to be depressed, isolated, alone, poor, sick, and less satisfied with your life. The consequences of not marrying appear quite serious. There is research, however, that challenges these findings.32 For example, after a “honeymoon period,” the health and happiness benefits of being married compared to being single may be short lived.33 Single people have stronger social ties with family and friends than married people do.34 Married people tend to exercise less and weigh more than single people.35 It is also possible that the discrimination against single people may actually be a cause of the inequality between the married and single. For example, married people are often entitled to the health insurance of their spouses, and, as a result, they have better health care, a factor in being healthy. As researchers concluded, “the package of entitlements that go with [marriage]—including health insurance for spouses—may explain the better health of the married.”36 There are also lots of studies showing potential problems associated with marriage. Marriages can be conflict ridden and stressful, or even physically and emotionally violent. Marriages are often unequal. Heart disease, illness, and overall decline in reported health are consequences of living in unhappy and unhealthy marriages.37 Yet these are rarely considered to be signs that WHY MARRY AT ALL? 25

people should not marry. Instead, people are encouraged to find better marriages. There is an ongoing message that being married is good for you. In this context, when most people are marrying and we are told we should marry, there is a perceived risk and uncertainty in not marrying. What will your life be like if you are different from everyone else? What if your different choice is the wrong choice? People tend to avoid risk.38 One way to reduce risk is to follow what most other people have done, including getting married.39 Faced with uncertainty, marrying like most people do, even to someone “good enough,” can seem like a more certain path. Indeed, studies found that people believe in the importance and necessity of committed relationships because being in relationships increases the amount of predictability, stability, order, and control people perceive they have over their lives. In other words, “believing in traditional relationship ideology may represent a useful means of protecting oneself from uncertainty and randomness.”40 Marriage appears to be the safe route, and so people follow it, even if another direction would ultimately provide a better outcome. But more than an outcome of avoiding risk, marriage becomes part of our view of the world. It simply becomes something that we do. We don’t even think about doing something different. We can’t even conceive of a different path. Marriage becomes a taken-for-granted assumption about what we and everyone else wants to do at a certain stage in life. Ask someone who is engaged why they are getting married. They might respond that they are marrying because they are in love. To this you can respond, “Yes, but why are you marrying because you are in love?” This is a tougher question. They probably will not say, “I am doing it for the government or workplace benefits,” “so that I am happier, healthier, and better off financially,” or “because everyone else is.” They might be aware of these pressures but are unlikely to consider them to be the explanation for their decision to marry. Maybe they will not know what to say. They will be confused by the question. Marrying is just what people in love do. We don’t question it. We just always knew we would marry someday. We internalize the social rules and expectations that we should marry, and eventually, we take it for granted.41

NOTES 1. Lavner, Karney, and Bradbury 2012. 2. Cott 2000; Davis 2010. 3. Leong and Ang 1993, p. 560; Strijbosch 2015; Sun 2012, p. 1109. 4. Strijbosch 2015, p. 1107. 5. Lee 2013. 6. Ansari and Klinenberg 2015; Ujikane and Shimodo 2014. 7. Avishai, Heath, and Randles 2012; Cherlin 2003. 8. Cowen 2015. 26 WHY MARRY AT ALL?

9. Cohen 2011. 10. H.R.3734 — Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. 11. Avishai et al. 2012. 12. DePaulo and Morris 2005. 13. Lauster and Easterbrook 2011; Morris, Sinclair, and DePaulo 2007. 14. Cheng 2016; Jordan and Zitek 2012. 15. DePaulo 2006. 16. Rosenbloom 2013. 17. Arnold and Campbell 2013. 18. Bernard and Lieber 2009. 19. Arnold and Campbell 2013. 20. DePaulo and Morris 2005. 21. Arnold and Campbell 2013. 22. Sharp and Ganong 2011, p. 967. 23. Greitemeyer 2009, p. 373. 24. Gottlieb 2010; Illouz 2012. 25. Lahad 2013. 26. Sharp and Ganong 2011, p. 970. 27. Cobb 2012, p. 5; Taylor 2012. 28. Waite and Gallagher 2000. 29. DeNoon 2006. 30. Migdo 2013. 31. Miller 2015. 32. DePaulo and Morris 2005. 33. Musick and Bumpass 2012. 34. Gerstel and Sarkisian 2006; Musick and Bumpass 2012; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2015. 35. Nomaguchi and Bianchi 2004. 36. Musick and Bumpass 2012, p. 13. 37. Liu and Waite 2014; Umberson, Williams, Powers, Liu, and Needham 2006. 38. Kahneman and Tversky 1979. 39. DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Lauer and Yodanis 2010. 40. Day, Kay, Holmes, and Napier 2011, p. 298. 41. DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Lauer and Yodanis 2010.

WHY MARRY AT ALL? 27

WHAT ABOUT LOVE?

T

he social constraints encouraging us to marry are hard to see. We rarely think about them. Instead, we continue to think about marriage as a personal and private relationship. When people are asked why they got married, love is the number one reason given, with over 90 percent of married people saying that love is a very important reason for marriage.1 But, as we will argue here, even love is not personal and private. Rather, it is the socially acceptable motive to give for marriage. It is part of the rules, expectations, and taken-forgranted assumptions of marriage. Sociologists have argued that the motives people give for what they do are shaped by external expectations and constraints. And like behaviors themselves, certain motives are considered socially acceptable and expected. Only some motives are defined as legitimate for given situations and at certain points in time. Others are not. We use the acceptable motives to explain and justify our behaviors, regardless of our actual reasons for behavior, because when we do, our behavior is accepted.2 Today, individualized motives are socially acceptable in the United States.3 Americans cherish the ability to act on their own as individuals—to succeed or fail on their own terms. Americans believe in individual choice and individual responsibility for the choices they make. Americans, as compared to people from other cultures, are more likely to believe that they have choice and control over their situations, even to the point of believing they have more choice than they actually have.4 Researchers asked American and Japanese students to list all of the choices they made the day before. The American students reported that they made 50 percent more choices than the Japanese students reported, although their days were actually quite similar. During another study, Eastern European participants were asked to choose 28 WHAT ABOUT LOVE?

between seven sodas. The Eastern European participants responded that they had no choice—they were all soda. In comparison, Americans saw choice in objectively similar options. In products such as bottled water and makeup, we believe we have choice. In the end, however, “though we may feel steeped in variety, we actually have far fewer qualitatively different options than we realize.”5 Yet it is important for us to believe that we have choice in order to believe that we are acting as free individuals. As one author wrote in a book on sexual relationships, Of all the convictions that govern sexual conduct in the secular West, perhaps the most important is that there are no longer any rules. To suggest otherwise is to challenge the very fabric of how we perceive ourselves: as free, self-actualized individuals carving out our destinies from a sea of limitless options.6 Love is the primary socially acceptable motive for marriage. It is a motive that emphasizes personal choice and freedom. People say they are marrying because they want to, because they are in love. But love is not merely a personal feeling. It is part of the rules and expectations of marriage. When people say that they are marrying because they are in love and are soul mates, the decision to marry and the quality of the marriage are accepted and unchallenged. Other motivations, particularly those related to constraints, lead to questions and concerns. For example, these were the vows imagined by Dev, Aziz Ansari’s character in his show, Master of None: Rachel, I’m . . . not 100% sure about this. Are you the one person that I’m supposed to be with forever? I don’t f *cking know. And what’s the other option? We break up? That seems shitty too. And I love you. I do . . . I don’t know, I guess . . . getting married just is a safer bet at this point. [sighs] Sorry, I was just thinking about other paths my life could have taken. Dev, you’re a great guy. You really are. But you’re right. Are we supposed to be together forever? [inhales sharply] I don’t know . . . And I’ve basically invested two of my prime years with you, so I should just go all in. That’s just math. So let’s do this. Quickly. Do you, Dev, take Rachel to be your partner in a possibly outdated institution in order to have a “normal” life? Are you ready to give up an idealistic search for a soul mate and try to make it work with Rachel so you can move forward with your life? I do. And do you, Rachel, promise to make a crazy eternal bond with this gentleman who you happen to be dating at this stage in your life when people normally get married? I do. I now pronounce you two people who might realize they’ve made an unfortunate mistake in about three years.7 WHAT ABOUT LOVE? 29

Imagine if these were real vows at a wedding. The celebratory atmosphere of the wedding would quickly turn sour, and guests may regret giving gifts to the now perceived-to-be unhappy couple. In fact, it can even be considered fraud to marry without love. For example, it is illegal to marry someone for the purpose of immigrating to the country, and so immigration officers search for proof of love between partners before approving the visa of an immigrating spouse.8 When we use love as a motive for marriage and an explanation for when and whom we marry, we downplay or dismiss the constraints, rules, and expectations that shape our behavior. Instead, we emphasize individual choice. We marry because we are in love, we explain, not because marriage is required by the government and the church, or because of social pressure from your grandmother, or because of the risk and uncertainty of ending up 40 and not married. Instead, we claim it is all about love. Yet the rules, expectations, pressures, and constraints are still there, shaping and guiding what we do—even the motive we give for getting married. In the book Talk of Love, a sociologist studied how couples talk about love. She found that people hold onto and discuss romantic notions of love despite the fact that they see these ideas as largely myths and unrealistic to their own marriages. The romantic love persists, the author concluded, because it helps us to act within the constraints of marriage, “recasting them as matters of individual volition.”9 The mythic, romantic love, common in popular culture, is based on the idea that love is obvious and sure. It involves the idea that love can happen “at first sight,” that there is “one true love” for everyone, that love can “conquer anything,” and that love lasts and a couple can “live happily ever after.” The concept of the “soul mate” is rooted in these ideas of romantic love.10 These ideas of romantic love persist, the author argued, because they parallel the rules and expectations of marriage and help us to make the otherwise overwhelming decision to marry. Marriage is a daunting thing to do. Think about it for a minute. You are supposed to select, from all of the people out there, only one person to marry. You are supposed to be married to this person for the rest of your life. Yet nearly everyone makes the decision to get married and about whom to marry in a relatively short period of their lives. People use cultural ideas of romantic love to make the decision and action of getting married easier. We tell ourselves that we know that we have successfully found our soul mate—our one true love. Our love will endure and will help us overcome challenges that come along, and we will be happy together for the rest of our lives. Telling ourselves these things, based on the notion of romantic love, helps us to enter marriage, with its requirements, in what would otherwise be an overwhelming act: The love myth answers that question, “What do I need to feel about someone in order to marry [commit myself to] him or her?” . . . In order to 30 WHAT ABOUT LOVE?

marry, individuals must develop certain cultural, psychological, and even cognitive equipment. They must be prepared to feel, or at least convince others that they feel, that one other person is the uniquely right “one.”11 By this point, you may be thinking that sociologists aren’t a romantic group of folks. We wouldn’t say that, overall. Like everyone, sociologists feel and express love with intimate partners. They just also critically examine the context in which this love is felt and expressed. It may be best to describe sociologists as analytically romantic, which adds a whole new interesting dimension to love!

NOTES 1. Pew Research Center 2010. 2. Mills 1959. 3. Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton 1985; Cherlin 2009; Wuthnow 1991. 4. Iyengar 2010. 5. Iyengar 2010, p. 156. 6. Hills 2015, p. 57. 7. Master of None 2015. 8. Satzewich 2014. 9. Swidler 2001, p. 118. 10. Swidler 2001. 11. Swidler 2001, pp. 130–1.

WHAT ABOUT LOVE? 31

HOOKING UP

W

hat happens on the dance floor at a college party? Maybe you don’t see the patterns at first, but think about it for a minute. What do women do? What do men do? How do people approach each other? An undergraduate sociology student conducted and published a study of heterosexual dancing at college parties. She found that there is a clear script that women and men follow.1 Women do not directly initiate dancing with men. Remaining with their groups of female friends, women may dance provocatively, encouraging men’s attention, but they wait for men to approach them. Men approach women. But they usually do not ask a woman to dance. Instead, a man just starts to dance with a woman, often grinding from behind her. It is hard to imagine this behavior in any other context—in a classroom, in line for coffee, or at the post office. But on a dance floor, it is normal, common, and expected. A woman accepts the invitation to dance from a man by dancing more actively with him. She rejects the invitation by dancing uninterestedly or bringing in her friends to dance with them, before eventually returning to dancing with her friends without the man. While the scene at a party may at first appear chaotic and haphazard, there are actually clear scripts, patterns, and rules for how people interact. There are scripts in all aspects of relationships, from the time a couple dances at a party to when they are dating, getting engaged, getting married, being married, and getting divorced. These scripts, or patterns in behaviors, reflect the social rules we are supposed to follow. Following the scripts is expected and deviating from the scripts has penalties. Let’s start with a discussion of meeting a partner and the start of the relationship. Hooking up, whether at a party or another spot, has gained recent interest for sociologists. One sociologist studied hooking up by interviewing 32 HOOKING UP

students at two universities—one a large state public university and the other a private, Catholic university. In her book Hooking Up, she reported on the sexual scripts that exist in hook-ups.2 She said that people often have trouble articulating what happens during a hook-up because the behaviors become so taken for granted. But the students were eventually able to explain what goes on and patterns appear. In the book, she contrasted the hook-ups of today with dating during the 1950s. In dating culture, the rules and expectations were that a man asked a woman out to dinner, movie, or some other event. Only the two of them went out together. Then, maybe at the end of the date or after later dates, there would be sexual interaction, but it was not guaranteed. Hooking up is different. Hook-ups begin in larger social gatherings with other people, from which the two people hooking up pair off. The interaction between the two people starts with a sexual interaction, ranging anywhere from kissing to sex. The level of sexual interaction is not related to the level of commitment between the partners. A series of hook-ups may turn into a relationship, but this doesn’t happen often and isn’t guaranteed. Once a relationship has been formed, the two people may go on a date together. Dating and hook-ups are basically the inverse of each other. Dating involves going out, developing a relationship, and then maybe sexual behavior. Hooking up is sexual behavior and then maybe developing a relationship and going out. In dating culture, there is verbal interaction. In opposite-sex dating, for example, a man asks the woman out on a date. Hook-ups, in comparison, involve primarily nonverbal cues. The two people decide that they are attracted to each other and will often hook up without actually asking each other directly. Instead, eye contact, dancing, and other nonverbal communication are used to express interest. Think about it: What would happen if someone came up to you at a party and asked, “Would you like to hook-up with me?” That may seem odd given the current rules of the hook-up culture. But trying to arrange everything nonverbally is actually problematic, given the need for open communication for consensual and satisfying sex. California recently passed a law requiring explicit, affirmative consent during sex on college campuses. Saying nothing is not consent. And it is no longer OK to assume consent until someone says “no.” Instead, “yes means yes.” Pretty simply—you know that someone wants to have sex when they say “yes,” they want to. This is actually a “saner—and sexier” approach to hooking up.3 As scholars explained, “Since when is hearing ‘yes’ a turnoff ? Answering ‘yes’ to, ‘Can I touch you there?’ ‘Would you like me to?’ ‘Will you [fill in the blank] me?’ seems a turn-on and a confirmation of desire . . . Actually, ‘yes’ is perhaps the most erotic word in the English language.”4 Hooking up is guided by a range of rules that are learned by students over time. Students closely monitor each other to make sure the rules are followed. The author of Hooking Up wrote, HOOKING UP 33

Students were also monitoring one another’s sexual relationships . . . during college, men and women are highly aware of what their peers are doing sexually . . . Sexual behavior, far from being a private matter, is happening under the watching eyes and curious ears of all who inhabit the college campus.5 This monitoring of others constrains what people do during hook-ups, and it reinforces the rules, expectations, scripts, and patterns. While the hook-up culture might seem like the modern and progressive version of traditional, heterosexual dating culture, gendered rules remain remarkably firm. When hooking up, women are controlled and constrained to limit their sexual activity. Men, on the other hand, are pressured by their male friends to be sexually active, at times more so than they want to be. This is the double standard. Women are expected to restrict how many and which partners they have and how far they go sexually. Men are expected to have few restrictions, wanting to go as far as they can, as often as they can, with nearly anyone.6 Neither of these expectations fits reality. Students believe that everyone else is hooking up far more than they actually are. Women and men dramatically overestimate the number of times other students hook up and how often their hook-ups include sex. For example, a sociologist, who specializes in the study of men and masculinities, found that men in college, when asked, typically say that they think that about 80 percent of guys on campus are having sex on any given weekend.7 In actuality, survey data show that 80  percent is the number of senior men who have ever had sexual intercourse. Any given weekend, only about 5–10 percent of men on a college campus have sex.8 Another sociologist surveyed more than 14,000 students at 19 universities and colleges to learn more about hooking up. Hooking up does not happen all that often (about 80 percent of students average less than one hook-up per semester). And hooking up often does not involve sex.9 Women enjoy hooking up. However, sex with a man is much better for women in relationships than in hook-ups. Women are more likely to have an orgasm and report more sexual satisfaction in a relationship than when hooking up. When in an opposite-sex relationship, men are more focused on a girlfriend’s experiences and are more concerned that she is satisfied. In comparison, during a hook-up, men are not as concerned about a female partner’s satisfaction. Women, on the other hand, are equally concerned about the satisfaction of a male partner, whether a hook-up partner or boyfriend.10 For example, during hook-ups, men are more likely to receive oral sex from women than women are to receive oral sex from men. In relationships, the giving and receiving between women and men are more equal. In their most recent hookups, 19  percent of women had an orgasm, in comparison to 44  percent of men.11 This inequality, the sociologists concluded, is part of the double standard that still results in the judgment, criticism, and devaluing of women who are hooking up. The same judgment is not applied to men.12 This devaluing 34 HOOKING UP

of women results not only in a lack of interest in women’s sexual satisfaction, but also in sexual assault. For example, men’s use of alcohol to reduce women’s ability to consent (behavior that is legally rape) happens when men do not see women as equal sex partners.13 Because of the continuing double standard, women are somewhat more likely to want relationships than men are. Relationships provide freedom for women to have sex without stigma. Nonetheless, a substantial number of women don’t want a relationship after a hook-up. And a substantial number of men do want a relationship. After a hook-up, just under half of women were interested in a relationship and over a third of men were. And overall, by the time of graduation, nearly 70 percent of heterosexual students had been in a relationship for at least six months.14 Relationships, in comparison to hook-ups, can be very time-consuming. Relationships can distract students from time with friends and meeting new people.15 Spending time on relationships can lead to less time studying. Relationships are also settings of possible inequality, jealousy, and control, where individual behaviors can be monitored and limited by a partner. As sociologists noted, “it is no wonder that young women sometimes opt for casual sex.”16 Hooking up frequently with a friend has become a common practice because it is a good middle ground between a hook-up and a relationship. For women, in particular, a regular hook-up partner provides access to sexual activity along with freedom from the constraints of relationships. This also allows women to limit their total number of sexual partners, thus not violating the double standard.17 College today is the perfect setting for hook-ups. There are a number of reasons for this. First, college brings together many people of similar age, education, and family backgrounds. As we saw earlier, these are the people we select as potential marriage partners. But because the fashionable time to marry is well after college, students are usually not looking for a spouse or permanent relationship quite yet. Today, sex without marriage is more accepted within society. And during college, many people are living away from their parents. All of these factors work together to construct the hook-up culture on campus. As the author of Hooking Up concluded, “Environment has a major impact on how we conduct our sexual and romantic lives.”18 And the environment of the college campus is ripe for the hook-up culture. Yet not everyone on campus wants or feels comfortable participating in the hook-up culture, which has been criticized as being most welcoming to white, wealthy, heterosexual students.19 With a focus primarily on sex between women and men, gay and lesbian students are excluded from and often shunned as part of the dominant hook-up culture.20 There are alternative social scenes, but being excluded from the dominant hook-up culture means being excluded from some of the main social networks and scenes on campus.21 Furthermore, too much focus on hooking up during college can lead to a boring life after college, particularly for less wealthy students. A study found HOOKING UP 35

that women sometimes chose easy majors and deemphasized their education to focus instead on being attractive to men in a modern version of the MRS. Degree.22 This is not such a problem for the rare woman who comes from a family wealthy enough that she will be supported financially and can use family connections to find a good job after graduation, even if her major was easy and uninteresting, and she had poor grades. But for most women who have fewer resources at their disposal, spending time at university succeeding in being attractive to men rather than succeeding in an interesting major can lead to dead-end, low-paying jobs, moving back home, and fewer options for partners after graduation. For example, one woman who experienced depression as she looked for a job for seven months said, [My GPA] was a 2.8, which I’m a little upset about because I totally could have had a 3.0 if a few semesters in there I would have worked a little harder . . . some places I looked deny you right away if you don’t have a 3.0. In other cases, “A year out of college, Blair was cold-calling for a sales company . . . Crystal was working in a gated community for $13 an hour.” And, Most women who selected easy majors could not afford to live in major urban centers where the men they wanted to marry worked and socialized . . . As Nicole bemoaned of her hometown, “None of the boys [who are still here] have steady jobs . . . One just got a job in a delicatessen at a Shop Rite kind of place, a supermarket.”23 After college, hooking up starts to be replaced by dating. The author of Hooking Up interviewed alumni after college and found that they are no longer hooking up. Women and men are more likely to be looking for a potential spouse, and this means dating.24

NOTES 1. Ronen 2010. 2. Bogle 2008. 3. Kimmel and Steinem 2014. 4. Kimmel and Steinem 2014. 5. Bogle 2008, pp. 73–4. 6. Bogle 2008; Hills 2015; Kimmel 2008. 7. Bogle 2008; Hills 2015; Kimmel 2008. 8. Hills 2015; Kimmel 2008. 9. Armstrong, Hamilton, and England 2010. 10. Armstrong et al. 2010. 36 HOOKING UP

11. Kimmel 2008. 12. Armstrong et al. 2010; Hamilton and Armstrong 2009. 13. Bogle 2008; Boswell and Spade 1996. 14. Armstrong et al. 2010; Bogle 2008. 15. Armstrong et al. 2010; Kimmel 2008. 16. Armstrong et al. 2010. 17. Armstrong et al. 2010; Bogle 2008. 18. Bogle 2008, p. 53. 19. Bogle 2008; Hamilton 2014; Hamilton and Armstrong 2009; Kimmel 2008. 20. Hamilton 2007. 21. Bogle 2008; Hamilton and Armstrong 2009. 22. Hamilton 2014. 23. Hamilton 2014, pp. 254–5. 24. Bogle 2008.

HOOKING UP 37

DATING

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ow do people meet people to date? A sociologist conducted a national survey to see how people met their partners and how these practices have shifted over time. Over the past 60 years, family members have been steadily less involved in helping people find a spouse. Friends, in comparison, seem to have replaced family, becoming increasingly more important up until the 1990s. But more recently, friends are playing a less central role. Since the 1990s, meeting a partner online is becoming more and more common, appearing to replace the matchmaking of friends. Today, among opposite-sex couples, finding a partner online is almost as likely as meeting through a friend. Among same-sex couples, online is now the most common way to meet a partner.1 For solid advice on how to better maneuver this emerging online world of dating, we recommend the book Modern Romance. The use of the Internet does free people from the influence of family and community when choosing a partner, which may explain some of the increase in partners of the same sex and of different ethnicities.2 Nonetheless, as we saw earlier, even with the use of the Internet, people are still largely selecting partners based on predictable gender, age, race and ethnicity, and educational criteria. While it might not change the outcome of the search, it is interesting to see that there are social trends in how people meet their partners. If you met your partner in the 1950s, your family probably had a lot to do with it. In the 90s, your friends probably had a lot of influence. Today, people are actively searching for partners themselves online. There are also social trends in what people do on dates. A New York Times article reported patterns in what people do on dates based on data from a website on which 7,000 people posted information on their 10,000 dates.3 “Not

38 DATING

only do many people plan similar dates,” the article reported, “but like lemmings, they also collectively migrate from one theme to the next.” The article went on to describe the trends: In March, scores of New Yorkers opted to have their first dates over tacos . . . But by month’s end, tacos went out of vogue, and fondue became the fare of choice for first dates. In mid-April, singles relinquished their cheese forks and embraced bring-your-own-beer dates instead. A few weeks later, outings for lobster rolls were all the rage. By mid-May daters cooled on lobster rolls and were eating oysters. A professor cited in the article, who has done his own research on dating websites, said, “While people think their tastes are distinct, most everyone’s profile says they like fine dining, movies and long walks on the beach.” He concluded, “The way that we try to show that we’re special and unique is that we like to do things just like everyone else.” What we want to do and actually do on dates is not merely personal. It is social. There are also trends in how women and men are supposed to act when they are dating. After years of hooking up during college, women and men return after college to the traditional, gendered dating practices of the 1950s. In opposite-sex dating, the man asks the woman for her phone number and asks her out. A woman may try to express her interest in a man and encourage him to ask her out but rarely does the asking directly.4 The man drives, unless they are meeting somewhere. And the man pays, although women have their own salaries. Sexual interaction doesn’t happen until they know each other, and sex itself doesn’t happen until a series of dates. The double standard still exists, and women’s sexual behavior is still judged more harshly than men’s. In dating culture, a woman is supposed to make sure she does not go too far too soon if she wants a relationship.5 In studies of opposite-sex dating, the vast majority of women said that the men paid on their first dates. Women and men begin to share the expense of going out only later.6 And they hold many conflicting ideas about paying on dates. Most women offer to pay. However, many of these women said that they would prefer that men did not accept their offer and that the man paid instead. Indeed, some women were bothered when men expected them to pay. On the other hand, the majority of men thought that women should contribute, and nearly half of men said that they would not continue dating a woman who never paid. At the same time, three-quarters of men felt guilty if a woman did pay.7 Who pays for dinner is tied to beliefs about gender roles in opposite-sex relationships. The more egalitarian and the less conventional the woman and man are, the more likely they are to split the bill on dates early in the relationship. The more conventional, the more likely the man is to pay. Indeed,

DATING 39

respondents in a study on dating, whether conventional or egalitarian, believed that who pays for the date reflects ideas about women’s and men’s roles in relationships. People who believe that men should pay for dates associated this behavior with women having less power and being taken care of by men in relationships. As a 25-year-old woman said, Paying is a display of chivalry. Women want to be taken care of . . . because in today’s world women have more power more often. They want the opportunity to not have power and the safest place to do this is in a relationship, with someone you trust. A 31-year-old man explained why he pays for dates, “My father always told me to you treat the woman like a princess and you take care of her.” Women and men who think that the cost of the date should be split believe that sharing the expenses is associated with egalitarian ideas and behavior in relationships. A 26-year-old woman said, “I think if you expect equality in your relationships, then there should be equality when paying for dates.” A 25-year-old man expressed the same point, “If the relationships are supposed to be 50/50 then each partner is expected to invest in the partnership financially.” Women and men in the study had different views about what is the appropriate behavior related to paying on dates, but they agreed that who pays for the date reflects gender dynamics in the relationship.8 Women and men who want egalitarian relationships, nonetheless, often follow traditional gender practices in their relationships, including men asking women out, men paying, and men proposing. Women and men explain this contradiction as their personal choice. They say they simply want to act traditionally because these are nice and polite things to do. But as a researcher explained, by describing their traditional behavior as a personal choice, women and men are able to define themselves as acting as independent individuals, even when they follow a script. They are also able to deny that their dating practices are unequal, even when they are. In other words, “narratives of choice serve as a form of ideological work to justify unequal outcomes while preserving egalitarian identities.”9 And “narratives of empowerment based on ideologies of individualism can be used to conceal the continuation of male privilege in ways that make individuals feel good about their conformity.”10 In the 1990s, The Rules was a wildly popular book.11 It was discussed extensively in the news and spawned Rules-based dating workshops and coaching. The Rules told women how to behave if they want to get a man to marry them. Some of the Rules involve being unique, but many of the Rules are about women not being the initiator. A journalist writing about self-help culture attended The Rules seminar in 2006.12 She and the other women attendees were told by The Rules instructors, “It never works to approach a man. He has to walk over to you . . . When you speak to a man first, it’s over for him . . . It 40 DATING

is completely wrong to pursue a man.” The Rules instructor explained her logic based on her own experience: You want a man to be obsessed with you? . . . Marry you? Disappear between dates . . . when I was dating my husband, he couldn’t talk to me more than five minutes a day. Now he can call me twelve times a day. But he gave me rings, he bought me a house; he owns me now, so it’s okay.13 The authors of The Rules provide further consultation for $350 an hour, $250 for a half hour, answer one email question for $150, or provide a whole online course for $800.14 In 2012, there was a call for the rejection of The Rules. Today, it was argued, we should embrace the Gaggle.15 As the authors of this new book explained, “We’re dealing with a different generation of men. We’re dealing with technology. We’re dealing with changing norms.” More specifically, following the hook-up culture, it is a “post-dating world,” in which the “pick-you-up-athome-and-go-to-dinner” traditional date is gone. This all requires, they argued, new trends in how to act to meet a partner. Rather than waiting around for one particular man to show interest in them, women should maintain a large circle, or “Gaggle,” of men in their lives—some just friends and some hookup partners. It is through these countless and varied interactions, dates and nondates and unsure-if-they-were-a-date experiences, that women learn what they want in a partner and eventually find love.16 The best approach for becoming a couple can be debated, but what is interesting is the way in which very personal behavior—how to act when finding a partner—is actually defined and shaped from the outside. We don’t merely decide ourselves how to act. Instead, there are rules that define what is appropriate behavior in our private lives. These rules ebb and flow, change and return, come in and out of fashion, but they are constantly shaping how we behave. For example, “living together” as a stage in a relationship is quite a new practice. But within a few decades, cohabitation moved from quite rare to the expected norm. Today, most couples live together before marrying. Sociologists interviewed couples who were living together to learn why they chose to cohabit. Interestingly, couples most often gave practical reasons. People said they moved in together because they were already spending so much time together, to save money on rent, or because a roommate had moved out. At the start, few couples mentioned that living together was a “trial marriage.” For many couples, cohabitation is an “advanced stage of dating.”17 Yet it is a socially expected next stage in the progression of the relationship, and the quality and future of the relationship are evaluated based on the eventual likelihood of marriage.18 Talk of marriage tends to get more serious after a couple has lived together for awhile and as partners reach the socially appropriate age of marriage, meet their educational and occupational goals, and save enough money for a house and ring.19 DATING 41

NOTES 1. Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012. 2. Rosenfeld 2007. 3. Rosenbloom 2010. 4. Lamont 2014. 5. Bogle 2008. 6. Lamont 2014; Lever, Frederick, and Hertz 2015. 7. Lever et al. 2015. 8. Lamont 2015; Lever et al. 2015, pp. 7–9. 9. Lamont 2015, p. 288. 10. Lamont 2014, p. 207. 11. www.therulesbook.com 12. Lamb-Shapiro 2014. 13. Lamb-Shapiro 2014, pp. 54, 66. 14. Lamb-Shapiro 2014. 15. the-gaggle.com 16. Swarns 2012. 17. Kuperberg 2012; Sassler 2004. 18. Ocobock 2015. 19. Sassler 2004; Sassler and Miller 2011.

42 DATING

THE PROPOSAL AND THE WEDDING

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etting engaged is one of the most exciting and memorable moments in life. It is a moment of heartfelt expressions of love, devotion, and happiness. It is also one of the most scripted moments in our lives. One proposal looks a lot like any other. Sociologists conducted a study of opposite-sex marriage proposals, interviewing men and women about their experiences getting engaged.1 They found that most couples who get engaged had already talked about marriage and knew that they were going to get married. Still, they held the proposal. The setting and how the question gets asked can vary. The proposal can take place in a park, on a bench recently dedicated to the soon-to-be fiancée; or after a morning run; or on a decorated rooftop; or on a television show; or while snorkeling; or during a hot-air balloon ride; or during a routine trip to the grocery store on Sunday morning.2 But the proposal follows a clear observable script. The question needs to be asked in a romantic way. It needs to happen with a setup and setting which are considered romantic to the couple. The romance can be personalized but often includes set romantic signs, such as getting down on one knee to do the asking. It needs to be a surprise by the man to the woman, even though the engagement is well planned and decided upon in advanced. The surprise aspect, along with the romantic elements, are central parts of the story that is retold to friends, family, and coworkers as the news about the pending marriage is announced. There needs to be a ring because that, along with the story, is the evidence that there will indeed be a marriage. But only the woman gets the ring; the man does not.3 Men do the asking in just about all proposals.4 In their study of couples who were living together, sociologists found that men have more control than women have over the relationship’s progression to marriage. As some men THE PROPOSAL AND THE WEDDING 43

said, “She’s waiting for, itching for that [proposal]” or “If I walked up to her and said, ‘Let’s get married tomorrow,’ she’d get married.”5 This doesn’t mean that women don’t have extensive influence on the fact that the couple will get married, when they will get married, what the ring will look like, and how the proposal will happen. Many women influence all of these things. However, they do so in the background. As with dancing and dating, women influence men indirectly, but they do not do the direct asking.6 Women are often limited to encouraging the proposal by hinting or “joking” about it. As a man explained, “We were at the mall the other day, and she was like, ‘Oohh, look at these rings,’ and she keeps saying stuff like, you know, ‘My birthday’s coming up pretty soon. I’d like some jewelry.’”7 Some women are more forceful. A respondent in one study explained the ultimatum she gave her boyfriend: I was fed up with him for not figuring out what he wanted. I felt like he didn’t appreciate me and wasn’t making me feel good about myself. I confronted him and told him I was sure I wanted to marry him, but if he wasn’t, I was done waiting and suggested we see other people. He freaked out and brought out a ring and said he wanted to marry me. Yet this part of the engagement story, which violated the script, was kept secret. As the woman explained, I didn’t tell any of my friends what actually happened. I told him to put the ring away so he wouldn’t feel like he was backed into a corner. I said he should do it the way he wanted to and that I would say yes. He proposed three weeks later on a boat. That’s the story our friends know.8 In the rare cases that the woman did propose to the man, it was often considered funny and a joke and was redone later with the man asking the woman.9 The script of the proposal is so widely known that it may seem strange to even analyze it. And imagining another way to get engaged may be hard to do. A same-sex couple discussed struggling to come up with a different routine: Having marriage be legal has made my girlfriend and I really seriously consider getting married . . . But, we now have a problem: getting engaged. Both of us want to be surprised by a romantic proposal and get a diamond ring, and of course neither of us wants to be the one asked after the other. We both want to be the “girl” in the traditional engagement story. Obviously we can’t pull that fairytale engagement off, but we are having a hard time coming with an equally romantic alternative.10 As with most couples, both partners already know they are going to get married. They have talked about it for a while and have already decided that they 44 THE PROPOSAL AND THE WEDDING

would get married. Yet they still want to go through the script—the same script that everyone else does.11 Like the proposal, couples really want their wedding to be unique and special to them. But also like proposals, weddings are tightly scripted. These patterns have been well documented. Often the focus is on the extreme planning and cost of weddings, captured in stories of the “Bridezilla.” At the foundation of this seemingly irrational behavior are attempts to follow the clear, expensive, and rigid script of the wedding.12 Wedding planners, magazines, and guidebooks outline this script in their advice, articles, and “to do” checklists. There is some amount of choice, but the choice is seriously limited by social rules and expectations. The following are some of the socially expected components of an opposite-sex wedding: The ceremony with the audience in seats facing the bride, groom, and officiant in front; the groom standing at the front first, the bride walking up to him; attendants of equal numbers in the bridal party; the women in dresses; the bride with flowers; an exchange of vows, holding hands, exchange of rings (handed to the groom from the best man); a kiss; photographs; a reception with food, centerpieces, toasts, cake, the ceremonial cutting of the cake, and dancing.13 People can choose the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses, but there are bridesmaids and they wear dresses. People can choose the location of the ceremony and reception, the centerpieces, the music, the food and cake. Again people can be creative to a point—the centerpieces can involve live fish and cupcakes can replace a layer cake, but all of these—reception, centerpieces, and cake—are expected to be present in some form. The ceremony doesn’t have to be in a church, but regardless of where the ceremony takes place, an aisle is created so that the bride can walk down to the groom.14 In Vancouver, where we live, so many couples and their wedding parties have their pictures taken at the beaches on summer weekends that a line-up can form. The photographs are supposed to mark the special day for the couple, but in the end, the special day for everyone waiting in line will be captured in the same way—the same angle, poses, and jumps. The patterns of weddings are clear. Like the engagement, one wedding is a lot like the others. There are rules for just about everything, large and small—including the rings. Men are not supposed to wear engagement rings, although women are. The New York Times reported on a variation on this script—men’s engagement rings.15 It was interesting enough to be newsworthy, although the article reported, “The number of ‘mengagements’, in which men are symbolically declaring themselves off-limits, is so small, no one seems to be counting.” A man featured in the article who wore an engagement ring said, In this day and age, we have an equal partnership in this relationship— we’re in it together. It seems weird to have an imbalance, to say to Edith, “You have to wear a ring to keep those guys away, but I have to go around as if I’ve not made a major life commitment.” THE PROPOSAL AND THE WEDDING 45

Another man asked, “Why would one person wear a ring and the other not? It may seem novel now, but I would hope it’s becoming more normal.” Not long after, there was another article about a different ring-rule violation—men not wearing wedding rings. It all started when news broke that Prince William would not be wearing a ring after his wedding to Kate. There were all kinds of discussions and controversy. What did this mean? Was he not committed? Was the relationship going to end badly like his parents’ did? At the same time that it seems alarming for men to wear an engagement ring, it is also alarming for a man to not wear a wedding ring. This was not always the case. In the 1930s, it was rare for a man to wear a wedding ring. By the end of the 1940s, both spouses wore a ring in the vast majority of couples. Advertisers and jewelers worked hard to encourage men to wear wedding rings and succeeded. A similar campaign encouraged men to wear engagement rings, but that trend never took off.16 Today it is expected that both women and men wear a wedding ring.17 It doesn’t matter that Prince William and the other men discussed in the article are uncomfortable wearing rings and don’t want to. Regardless, they are supposed to wear a wedding ring. As one woman explained, “Why would I make the man I love do something that makes him uncomfortable? . . . It’s a symbol that shows he is devoted to me.”18 Something as simple and small as wearing a ring or not is not a personal choice. It is a social rule. Maybe the most obvious but overlooked evidence for the public nature of marriage is the fact that weddings are important to family, friends, and religions, but in most states, a couple is not married until they sign and submit the proper government forms. In the past, couples were considered married when they exchanged vows privately and declared they were married.19 Today, no matter how married the couple feels or how many vows they have exchanged, they are generally not married until the marriage is granted by an officiant licensed to marry people and they register their relationship with the state. Marriage is not merely a private relationship but a public, state-managed one. Finally, there is the honeymoon. Sociologists have also studied this. The trip together is a romantic time for the new spouses to relax and share intimate moments. This often occurs in an exotic location, like a tropical island. While meant to be romantic, the all-inclusive trip includes an extensive range of activities, such as snorkeling, golfing, and sightseeing, to keep the couple busy. And while meant to be intimate, these honeymoons often occur among a large group of other newly married couples. And while meant to be exotic, the setting is often controlled and contrived. In honeymoon resorts, the beaches may be man-made; the palm trees shipped in; the fish, turtles, and dolphins held in captivity; the waterfalls built on fake rocks; and performances choreographed to provide “local culture.” This setting provides the image of a romantic, exotic trip without the risk of a truly exotic trip, which would leave open the possibility of injury, accident, disaster, or food poisoning.20 There are lots of rituals around marriage—the proposal, wedding, honeymoon, and the bachelor (and bachelorette) party and the bridal shower—all of 46 THE PROPOSAL AND THE WEDDING

which are equally scripted.21 Even if scripted and predictable, however, these events are fun. We love the script of weddings—as guests, we all know what is going to happen and look forward to our favorite parts. Bridal showers may be a bit boring, but the bachelor and bachelorette parties are a blast and the honeymoon relaxing after all the stress. But more than being fun, these scripts provide the rituals for entering into marriage. The rituals make it clear to everyone that two individuals are getting married and are married.22 Following these scripts transitions men and women into their new socially expected behaviors of husband and wife. For example, a number of studies have considered how the wedding and honeymoon display, teach, and reinforce gendered rules in opposite-sex marriage. Women do the majority of the work related to planning and carrying out the wedding, symbolizing the start of the expectation they will do the majority of the housework once married.23 In other words, following the scripts of the wedding prepares couples for following the scripts of marriage. And these rituals are, if anything, increasing, not diminishing in scope.24

NOTES 1. Schweingruber, Anahita, and Berns 2004. 2. Mallozzi 2015. 3. Schweingruber et al. 2004. 4. Cass 2014; Lamont 2014; Schweingruber et al. 2004. 5. Sassler and Miller 2011, p. 496. 6. Lamont 2014, 2015; Schweingruber et al. 2004. 7. Sassler and Miller 2011, p. 496. 8. Lamont 2014, p. 202. 9. Sassler and Miller 2011; Schweingruber et al. 2004. 10. Lannutti 2007, p. 146. 11. Sassler and Miller 2011; Schweingruber et al. 2004. 12. Ingraham 2008; Mead 2007. 13. Otnes and Pleck 2003. 14. Personal communication with Maureen Baker, February 2014. 15. Shattuck 2010. 16. Howard 2003. 17. Jellison 2008. 18. Copage 2011. 19. Coontz 2005. 20. Bulcroft, Smeins, and Bulcroft 1999. 21. Otnes and Pleck 2003. 22. Baker and Elizabeth 2013; Kalmijn 2004. 23. Bulcroft et al. 1999; Humble, Zvonkovic, and Walker 2008. 24. Kalmijn 2004; Mead 2007; Otnes and Pleck 2003; Sniezek 2005. THE PROPOSAL AND THE WEDDING 47

SLEEPING, SPENDING TIME, AND HAVING SEX

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iven the rules and expectations that shape behavior prior to marriage, it might not be surprising that married couples continue to follow scripts for how to behave when married.1 There is a long list of behaviors, large and small, that couples are supposed to follow. A good example of the expectations comes from an advice column in a newspaper. A man wrote asking for advice on his relationship. He and his wife lived in different countries because they both had jobs that they loved. They were thinking about having children. The advice columnist responded by saying that not only was this a bad idea, he went further: I’ve received my fair share of weird letters . . . But your letter, sir, might just take the cake . . . I’m sorry to say this, but yours seems like a bit of an open-and-shut case . . . you were never really married. At least, not in any sense I understand. Marriage, to me, is about many things. It’s about sex . . . It’s about raising kids together, if you have them. It’s about seeing each other every day, helping each other through life’s ups and downs, sleeping in the same bed, having dinner together. . . .2 The message sent is clear: living apart, not having sex, not supporting each other, sleeping apart, or not having dinner together violates the rules of marriage and leads to serious speculations about the quality of the marriage. In fact, according to the advice columnist, doing things differently makes the marriage not “real.” There is the occasional news story about “commuter couples,” couples who live apart for work reasons. One article reported on new U.S. statistics with the

48 SLEEPING, SPENDING TIME, AND HAVING SEX

headline, “Commuter marriages on the rise.” In the article, they cited census statistics showing that 3.5 million married people now live apart from their spouse for reasons other than separation. That sounds like a lot. But, in reality, 3.5 million is only about 3 percent of married people. In other words, over 95 percent of spouses live together.3 Couples who live apart are reminded that they are violating the rules of marriage. A man who lives apart from his wife for work reasons explained, “People think we’re weird . . . When you’re married, you’re supposed to live together. It just freaks them out.”4 Married couples are supposed to not only live together but sleep together as well.5 Couples often prefer to sleep together, believing that they sleep better when they do. However, studies monitoring sleep show that disturbances by a partner actually make the quality of sleep poorer.6 One-quarter of married or cohabiting partners said that they lose sleep because of their partner’s sleeping problems, with these people reporting losing nearly an hour’s sleep on average a night.7 Sleep problems can cause problems in the relationship, including lower marital satisfaction.8 Couples need to negotiate a wide range of challenges when sharing a bed, including but not limited to negotiations on the temperature, TV and reading, the covers, work schedules and sleep patterns, and illness and injuries. As a researcher who studied how couples sleep together wrote, “Sharing a bed is an achievement that not infrequently is based on considerable struggle, inventiveness, compromise, and problem solving.”9 A sociologist in the U.K. found similar results. Couples, over time, tend to get used to each other and adapt. As one woman explained, “I am used to your snoring and your jumping out of bed, in the same way that you are used to my twitching and getting up and going to the loo.”10 Still couples face ongoing disturbances and embarrassments related to sounds and smells created during sleep. One woman explained that she thinks her husband listens to her talk in her sleep, “in case I . . . come up with the wrong name or something.” In return, her husband’s noises disturb her, and she reacts by, in turn, disturbing him: “He smacks his lips and it really pisses me off . . . if I am asleep it wakes me up. It drive me crazy . . . I poke him.”11 Given this, why don’t more couples sleep apart? Many couples do enjoy sleeping together and the intimacy involved, but there are also pressures and constraints that explain why so many couples sleep together, even when it takes a toll on their sleep and relationships. For example, a New York Times article highlighted the potential risk to couples of not sleeping together. The author wrote, “In an age when partners no longer eat together, exercise together or pray together, sleeping together may be the last bastion of togetherness in American relationships. If pillow talk dies, can throwing in the towel be far behind?”12 In one study, a woman who decided to sleep separate from her husband explained,

SLEEPING, SPENDING TIME, AND HAVING SEX 49

We both came . . . into this relationship with a sense of very much wanting to sleep together and to share a bedroom . . . It was very symbolic to us of having a warmer, closer relationship . . . So . . . when we decided to try this new thing, it was a bit like, “O-oh (a worried sound). I know there’s good reason to do this, but . . .13 Sharing a bed is socially defined as the “ideal,” “sleeping apart would be a failure . . . a denial of their couplehood.”14 These beliefs are so powerful that one woman, who was woken constantly by her partner, defined these disturbances as a sign of affection. She explained, He starting shouting in his sleep. So literally each night he woke me up at least four or five times a night, and so I came into work Monday and somebody said to me “God you look really tired” and I said “I haven’t slept for three nights”. But, she added, It is actually quite flattering because [he thought he was] trying to save me from being crushed.15 Over time, these rules become internalized. Married couples don’t even consider doing something different. As a researcher explained, it becomes, unthinkable to sleep apart . . . Sharing a bed seemed so basic . . . so much taken for granted that [the study respondents] could hardly find words to explain why they shared a bed. It is as though they were asked why they kept on breathing. “Breathing? I don’t think about it. I just do it.”16 Living, sleeping, and spending a lot of time together in general are considered cornerstone behaviors of marriage today. On an average day, about two-thirds of women’s and men’s leisure activities, including going to a movie or cultural event, out for dinner or a drink, spending time with friends, doing hobbies, watching TV, and listening to the radio or music, are done in a presence of their partner.17 Another study found that spouses share nearly 70 percent of their friends, over half of spouses who belong to clubs or associations belong to at least one of these together, and two-thirds of spouses almost always eat their main meal together (this increases to over 80 percent if considering couples who “almost always” or “usually” eat their main meal together).18 In a study of Dutch couples that had similar findings, the authors concluded, “A large majority of couples we studied always go on vacation together, visit friends and family members together and spend much of their leisure time with one another . . . social dependencies in contemporary unions are strong.”19 50 SLEEPING, SPENDING TIME, AND HAVING SEX

Technology, rather than taking couples into separate worlds, seems to keep them more connected. Analyzing cell phone records in Australia, researchers found “contacting family and friends is the overwhelming use” of cell phones. And among calls to family members, both men and women are most likely to call and text their spouse. Three-quarters of respondents said contact by phone is important for the quality of their relationship while apart.20 In a study of texting, the researcher found similar results in the United States. Romantic partners text frequently to show affection and maintain closeness. Texting allows them to do this privately, even if other people are around. As people explained, “In our relationship, just like a quick ‘I love you’ or something, that is always nice,” “I think it’s just nice to get little messages throughout the day . . . to let your significant other know that you care about them,” and “The most significant thing I ever got via text is probably just her telling me that she loves me every day.”21 Time together for a couple is great. But an interesting thing to consider is how even a short amount of time apart for a married couple is viewed as problematic. The book The Marriage Sabbatical recounts the experiences of 55 women who left home and their husbands for as long as two years or as little as one month in order to have a new experience with work, school, or life in general. These marriage sabbaticals were different from trips for work because they were optional and were made for personal growth and experiences rather than necessity. No affairs were involved and all of the women returned home, often happier and healthier. Yet these women experienced resistance and negative reactions: A thirty-year old artist, Megan, had been with her husband for six years (living together five, married for one). She was still noticeably in love with the man in her life, and she had left him twice for two months to paint. Her first time away evoked shrugs; her second, disapproval . . . The second time . . . she was wearing a wedding ring. That changed everything. Her best friend said, “Don’t you think that’s a long period of time to be away from Jeff ?” A second girlfriend said, “What are you doing going away? Are you hiding something?” Her sister said, “Can’t you go for a shorter period of time?” Her mother said, “You are making a big mistake.” . . . What caused her both stress and distress were the way others jumped to conclusions, assumed wrongdoing, predicted disaster, and communicated a narrow band of thought: Married women shouldn’t leave home.22 Couples are advised to spend time together, sharing hobbies and interests, in order to maintain a close and lasting relationship. Common interests and shared experiences do contribute to positive outcomes for the quality of relationships. But some people report valuing and needing more independence and time alone than the rules and expectations of marriage require. In the book Going Solo, a single woman explained, “I’m a free spirit. And when I got SLEEPING, SPENDING TIME, AND HAVING SEX 51

married, I suddenly felt like I had to report where I was going, who I was with, what time I was going to be home. It was like being a child again.” Another woman said that she would need to have more independence in a relationship: There’s such a thing as too much togetherness. If I were to find a relationship, we wouldn’t have to do everything together, we wouldn’t have to share friends. And I never again want anybody living with me, nor do I ever want to live with someone else.23 Indeed, excessive time together has been argued to be associated with irritation and disappointment between partners. One sociologist concluded that “institutionalized closeness and intimacy” explain why “modern every life is such fertile grounds for ‘gripes’.”24 The social rules and expectations for closeness include, reducing the distance between two persons; revealing the deeper layers of the self; telling each other one’s innermost secrets . . . sharing the same bedroom and bed, and, mostly, using the sphere of leisure as common ground to spend time together and share the same space . . . familiarity and closeness are the main goals of couplehood and intimacy. . . . But familiarity and closeness, I argue, counter-intuitively, are actually conducive to greater gripes.25 Long-distance dating relationships can actually be more stable and satisfying than ones close in proximity.26 Partners who spend time apart have more romantic, idealized images of each other, and their communication focuses on positive expressions of love rather than day-to-day routines and conflict. A study of long-distance couples found that when the partners moved close to each other, many of the relationships ended within a few months. Partners were unhappy with their decreased autonomy, the negative attributes of their partners, and increased jealousy and conflict.27 The fear of time apart is often tied to the fear of affairs. What will happen if spouses spend time apart? Will they be tempted by someone else? Monogamy is a strong, nonnegotiable rule of marriage. Researchers who studied affairs found that 99 percent of married women and men expect their spouse to have sex with only them and assume that their spouse expects the same.28 And affairs are actually pretty rare. It is estimated that the vast majority of married people—over 90 percent in a given year, about 90 percent in their current marriage, and over 75 percent in their lifetimes—are monogamous.29 The author of the book Lust in Translation traveled the world studying different attitudes toward and practices in marital infidelity. Through her interviews, she found a wide range of attitudes and practices about who can have sex outside of marriage, how much spouses should tell each other, and what sex outside of marriage means for the marriage. In the U.S., she found that the rule of 52 SLEEPING, SPENDING TIME, AND HAVING SEX

monogamy is particularly strong. Having an affair is a deal breaker, the expected end to marriage. She also found that Americans follow this rule and “for the most part, [Americans are] as boringly monogamous as we appear.”30 There are some couples who agree among themselves to have an open marriage and not be monogamous. This is quite rare, with an estimated 4–5  percent of people in such an arrangement.31 A sociologist did a study of polyamory, the practice of multiple adult partners being in a relationship together. This is different from polygamy, with one husband with multiple wives, because it is more gender egalitarian, with the possibility of having not just multiple women but multiple men in the relationship as well. While this may seem shocking since relationships are expected to be monogamous, the sociologist found that polyamorous adults find benefits to their relationships. The respondents said that having more adults in the relationship provides more emotional and financial support and more people to help with the caring and cleaning work. This, they said, makes their lives easier. Yet they often face social disapproval for these arrangements.32 Finally, there are also rules about how and how often married spouses are supposed to have sex with each other. Couples who have had sex less than 10 times in the past 12 months are considered sexless.33 The book The Sex Myth examines the social pressures for couples to have particular types of sex, in certain ways, at certain times. Rather than sexual behaviors forming within a couple, couples face external expectations on their intimacy. Not having intercourse, to orgasm, often enough is believed to be a sign of problems in the relationship, regardless of what a couple actually desires.34

NOTES 1. Yodanis and Lauer 2014. 2. Eddie 2009. 3. Brambila 2012; US Census Bureau 2012. 4. Brambila 2012. 5. A few years ago, newspaper headlines reported that now nearly a quarter of couples sleep in separate beds. These findings were based on a survey by the National Sleep Foundation (2005). However, the survey questions actually focused on the sleeping  arrangements of the couple when one partner is having sleeping problems. So sleeping separately is not necessarily a permanent, preferred arrangement for these couples but for many is likely a temporary solution to a tossing, turning, and snoring spouse. 6. Pankhurst and Horne 1994. 7. National Sleep Foundation 2005. 8. Strawbridge, Shema, and Roberts 2004. 9. Rosenblatt 2006, p. 198. 10. Meadows, Arber, Venn, and Hislop 2008, p. 84. SLEEPING, SPENDING TIME, AND HAVING SEX 53

11. Meadows et al. 2008, p. 82. 12. Feiler 2010. 13. Rosenblatt 2006, p. 182. 14. Rosenblatt 2006, p. 179. 15. Meadows et al. 2008, p. 85. 16. Rosenblatt 2006, p. 178. 17. Voorpostel, van der Lippe, and Gershuny 2009. 18. Amato, Booth, Johnson, and Rogers 2007. 19. Kalmijn and Bernasco 2001, p. 652. 20. Wajcman, Bittman, and Brown 2008, p. 640. 21. Pettigrew 2009, pp. 710–11. 22. Jarvis 2000, pp. 85–6. 23. Klinenberg 2012, pp. 113–14, 92. 24. Illouz 2012, p. 220. 25. Illouz 2012, p. 221. 26. Illouz 2012; Stafford and Merolla 2007. 27. Stafford, Merolla, and Castle 2006. 28. Treas and Giesen 2000. 29. Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels 1994; Treas and Giesen 2000; Whisman, Gordon, and Chatav 2007; Whisman and Snyder 2007. 30. Druckerman 2007, p. 51. 31. Conley, Ziegler, Moors, Matsick, and Valentine 2012. 32. Sheff 2013. 33. Hills 2015. 34. Hills 2015.

54 SLEEPING, SPENDING TIME, AND HAVING SEX

SHARING CHILDREN, THE WORK, AND A NAME

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arried couples are having fewer children today overall. And they are having their first children later.1 More people are having children outside of marriage, often in cohabiting relationships. But given all of this, marriage and children are still closely linked—once married, the vast majority of couples have at least one child. Voluntary childlessness is rare for people who are married. Among currently married women, ages 35–44, only about 4  percent are voluntarily childless, meaning that they have no children and do not expect to have any, although they are physically able to. Nearly 90  percent of currently married women have children, 3  percent are unable to have children but want to, and 4  percent expect to have children in the future.2 In studies that examined changes in women’s and men’s decisions to remain childless, researchers found that the strongest predictor of changes in childbearing are being married and getting married.3 In a study of couples living together, the researchers found that marriage and children are “inextricably linked and often mentioned in the same breath.” As one man in the study explained, “I’m in no rush to get married, because everyone I know says that once I get married I’m going to probably have kids.”4 The rare married men and women who break this rule and decide not to have children face consequences. A study explored strategies people without children use to manage the stigma they face. Women and men often avoid telling other people that they decided not to have children. Instead, they say “not yet” or “someday.” Or they falsely imply that they are infertile and unable to have children, with comments like, “I don’t think it’s in the cards for us.” They do all of this, as one man explained, “because in society I’d be labeled

SHARING CHILDREN, THE WORK, AND A NAME 55

a bad person” for not having children.5 People who don’t want children talk about being labeled as selfish or uncaring, even though, as they note, people often have children for selfish reasons and there are a variety of ways to care and contribute to society. Their decision to not have children is challenged by others and they are pushed to justify their position, although people who have children are never pushed to explain their decision to have them. One man, when asked why he doesn’t have children, will turn the question around and ask people why they have children: “They’ll look at me strangely. ‘I didn’t decide to have children; you get married, you have kids!’”6 Having children in marriage is a rule so internalized, that it may no longer even be considered a decision. When the children arrive, so does a more unequal division of labor between married women and men. The division of labor is one of the most commonly discussed changes in marriage today. And it is true that in comparison to previous generations, women are more likely to work for pay outside the home and men do more of the childcare and household work than they had. At the same time, one of the most documented patterns in social science research is the extent to which a gendered division of labor continues in opposite-sex marriage. Men continue to be seen as primarily responsible for the paid work, and women continue be primarily responsible for the unpaid work. This imbalance remains, although women and men report that their ideal relationship is one in which both partners share the housework, child care, and paid work equally.7 A sociologist studied what kind of marriages young women and men, between the ages of 18 and 32, want. The vast majority of these young women and men, even those from traditional families, prefer an egalitarian relationship. This meant that they want both themselves and their partner, regardless of gender, to have satisfying work and lots of time with their family.8 The young people realize that this might be hard to achieve and studies show that it is. Even as men do more around the house, wives still do much more, averaging nearly double, of the housework and childcare that husbands do each week.9 The amount of housework done by single women and men is not so unequal. The gap comes with the formation of relationships.10 When cohabiting, women tend to do more housework than men do. When married, women do even more housework than men do. And when kids arrive, the gap between women and men gets even bigger. A recent study tracked how opposite-sex couples spent their days following the birth of their first child. Focusing on couples in which both partners were highly educated and had careers, the researchers found that nine months after the child was born, women and men typically continued to work the same number of hours in their paid work. However, while men’s overall work (including paid work, housework, and childcare) increased 12.5 hours a week once the child arrived, women’s overall work increased by 21 hours a week. In

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other words, women’s overall work increased 8.5 hours (a full workday) more than men’s each week. Men actually did fewer hours of housework once the child arrived, while women did the same amount of housework but added more hours in childcare.11 Studies also show that even when women have careers, husbands are still treated as the primary earners. Husbands’ careers are prioritized over the wives’.12 As a result, husbands are expected and supported to work more hours, take on more work responsibilities and promotions, and earn more income than wives.13 High-earning women with prestigious careers are more likely than men to leave their work for family responsibilities. A sociologist interviewed women who were highly achieving in their careers but had resigned from their jobs to be full-time mothers. They, like their husbands, graduated from the best universities, held advanced degrees, and were promoted far along career tracks. These women loved and succeeded in their work. Yet it was the women, not the men, who left jobs because of family responsibilities. This was not a free choice. Instead, the study showed that social pressures, including workplaces with inflexible work demands and husbands not being willing to sacrifice their own careers, gave women no choice but to leave their paid work. These women then became stay-at-home moms, and their husbands became the sole income earner, not because this is what the women wanted, but because this was the only option. The same was not asked of men.14 Yet these women who left the workforce talked about their decision as their own personal choice, ignoring the constraints that pushed and pulled them away from the careers that they enjoyed and in which they succeeded. As the sociologist who conducted the study explained, the women used the “rhetoric of choice” so that they could continue to define themselves, not as powerless or failing, but as still highly successful and in charge of their success, which had merely taken a new direction.15 Similarly, men explain and justify their lack of work at home as a merely matter of choice and preferences. One man explained, “She loves a clean house. I like a clean house, but I’m willing to let things go much longer than she is.” Another man said, “I don’t like cooking . . . [she] loves to cook, she cooks all the time.”16 There are increasing numbers of opposite-sex couples in which the wife earns more than the husband does. Yet in these couples, the gendered divisions in housework and paid work do not reverse or disappear. Instead, couples act in interesting ways to recreate traditional divisions of labor. Studies found that when the wife earns more than the husband does, both husbands and wives act in ways that establish the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the housekeeper and caregiver, even though she is earning more than he is. They do this by defining the man’s income and work as necessary for the family and the woman’s as secondary, even when the woman’s work is more

SHARING CHILDREN, THE WORK, AND A NAME 57

prestigious and provides higher income. And women, when they are earning most of the income, do more of the housework and childcare and men tend to do less.17 These couples, while not actually following the conventional rules of marriage, act as if they are. Powerful evidence for the strength of the gendered rules for the division of labor comes from research examining what happens when opposite-sex couples try to go against the rules and have an equal division of labor. Studies focusing on married couples who strive to share parenting equally show that couples find it a challenge to maintain a true 50/50 sharing of work and family responsibilities.18 To share parenting equally, men, as well as women, must make sacrifices in their paid work and women, as well as men, must give up sole control over raising the children. Some couples succeed and some fail, but most couples find challenges with the equal arrangement, especially at first. Women feel guilty and pressure to do more than 50 percent of childcare. Husbands feel emasculated by and tried to hide their 50 percent involvement in housework and childcare from other men, who ridicule them. One man, when he was asked by coworkers to go out after work, explained he couldn’t saying, “Man, I’ve got a ton of things to do, I really can’t.” When they asked what he had to do, he explained, “Well, I might be vacuuming or grocery shopping.” He said they responded with “Oh, for crying out loud!” The message is clear—for a man, household work should not be a priority. Another woman explained that her husband took a plane trip alone with their son, who was “screaming his head off.” A passenger’s reaction was, “What’s wrong with this child’s mother? Why doesn’t the mother take care of this baby?”19 The message again is clear—men can’t parent and children are the mother’s responsibility. There is often discussion in the media of an increase in stay-at-home dads. In actuality, fewer than 1  percent of married-couple families with children under 15 years of age include a father who is not employed, not because he lost his job or was looking for another job, but because he chose not to work so that he could care for his child.20 Studies focusing on men who are the primary childcare providers in the family found that these men often feel odd and like outcasts for caring for their children rather than being employed.21 One stayat-home dad explained, On more than one occasion when I would be walking the stroller home, and women would actually cross the street to avoid passing me. It was bizarre . . . They are pushing the stroller, I‘m pushing a stroller. For the most part, there is a sense that if a man stays home there is something wrong with him, he’s lost his job, or he’s a little off kilter. It’s not his job. He shouldn’t be there.22 Other stay-at-home dads described being rejected from playgroups, on playgrounds, for play dates, and at school events. One man explained that 58 SHARING CHILDREN, THE WORK, AND A NAME

he tended go with his son to “neutral” public places like the zoo and library because, It’s always moms and tots, moms and this, moms and that, right? And it’s just, can I go to this? And I’m thinking, no, because . . . it’s something that these women have set up . . . [so] that they can get together and socialize between themselves, right? I think they would be put off by having a guy there.23 Men said that this did change slowly over time as they gained acceptance and when there were more men who cared for their children during the day. Nonetheless, this treatment makes it hard to be a stay-at-home dad. At the same time, the moms said they experience criticism for not being at home. Even though the dads are there to provide care, the women feel guilty for not being the primary caregiver.24 Thus, there are still strong social rules and expectations about the work that married women and men “should” do. Some opposite-sex couples accept these external rules. Other couples try to fight against them. But the challenges these couples face when going against the rules and expectations show just how rigid the rules and expectations remain. As one mother explained, “It takes conscious work all the time to not fall into what were very well-ingrained patterns.”25 Gendered inequality exists in other opposite-sex marital behaviors as well. For example, the vast majority of women still change their last name to their husband’s when they marry. A study using the most representative data found that over 90 percent of women take their husband’s last name. About 1 percent hyphenated their last name with their husband’s, and about 5  percent kept their own last name. Women with the highest levels of education are more likely to keep their last name. Yet the majority of women with professional and doctoral degrees still take their husband’s last name.26 Sharing a last name is socially defined as a sign of commitment and togetherness.27 Yet husbands rarely take their wife’s name. This imbalance is a result of the informal rules, which dictate that women change their name to their husband’s, not the other way around. In a study of attitudes toward name change in marriage, three-quarters of respondents thought it was better if a woman takes her husband’s last name. In comparison, nearly half of respondents thought it wasn’t acceptable for men to take their wife’s name.28 Men may realize the imbalance involved in the practice but be too uncomfortable with a different approach.29 One man who took his wife’s name recalled, Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought it would have caused as much of a stir as it did. We knew people might be surprised, but . . . get on with it. Three months later, I’m still taking [flak] from one of my college roommates.30 SHARING CHILDREN, THE WORK, AND A NAME 59

The gender difference in name changing is also part of formal rules. In the study of name-changing attitudes, half of respondents thought it is a good idea for women to be legally required to change their name to their husband’s.31 While not legally required, forms and bureaucracy are set up so that women can easily change their name when filing for marriage. In comparison, few states allow men to change their name as easily as women can. In 2013 in Florida, a man, who wanted to change his last name to his wife’s, was accused of “obtaining a driver’s license by fraud” when he followed the procedures that women use to change their name on ID after marriage. He was told by the DMV, “That only works for women.”32 Men usually have to go through a more expensive, court-based legal procedure, separate from the marriage process, in order to take their wife’s name. Married couples not only often share the same last name, they also share the same bank account. Over 80 percent of spouses pool all of their money. Fewer than 10 percent keep all of their own income separate.33 Those couples who start off wanting to keep their money separate in order to maintain economic independence often end up pooling their money shortly after marriage, regardless of their original intentions.34 There are expectations that couples who love and trust each other would not want anything separate. Like sharing a last name, pooling resources is also defined as a sign of togetherness and commitment in marriage and thus can be considered an essential foundation for a couple.35 And indeed, formal rules often define property in marriage as joint property. Regardless of whether spouses keep their money separate or pool it together, legally, the money can be considered the property of the couple.36

NOTES 1. Hayford, Guzzo, and Smock 2014. 2. Martinez, Daniels, and Chandra 2012. 3. Heaton, Jacobson, and Holland 1999; Koropeckyj-Cox and Pendell 2007. 4. Sassler and Cunningham 2008, p. 15. 5. Park 2002, pp. 32, 33. 6. Park 2002, p. 36. 7. Lamont 2014. 8. Gerson 2011. 9. Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie, and Robinson 2012; Pew Research Center 2013. 10. Bianchi et al. 2012; Gupta 1999. 11. Yavorsky, Kamp Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015. 12. Pixley 2008. 13. Moen and Sweet 2002; Raley, Mattingly, and Bianchi 2006. 14. Stone 2007a. 15. Stone 2007b. 60 SHARING CHILDREN, THE WORK, AND A NAME

16. Lamont 2015, pp. 286–7. 17. Brines 1994; Greenstein 2000; Tichenor 2005. 18. Deutsch 1999; Ranson 2010. 19. Deutsch 1999, pp. 90, 87. 20. Fields 2003; Kreider and Elliot 2009. 21. Doucet 2006. 22. Doucet 2006, pp. 132–3. 23. Ranson 2010, p. 71. 24. Doucet 2006, p. 172. 25. Deutsch 1999, p. 167. 26. Gooding and Kreider 2010. 27. Hamilton, Geist, and Powell 2011; Lamont 2015. 28. Hamilton, Geist, and Powell 2011. 29. Lamont 2015. 30. Friess 2007. 31. Hamilton et al. 2011. 32. Adams 2013. 33. Lauer and Yodanis 2011. 34. Burgoyne, Reibstein, Edmunds, and Routh 2010; Burgoyne, Reibstein, Edmunds, and Dolman 2007. 35. Burgoyne et al. 2010; Singh 1997. 36. Carter 2015.

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LOVE, ABUSE, AND CALLING IT QUITS

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early every behavior in relationships, from love to abuse, from getting together to breaking up, follows clear patterns. As we discussed earlier, a sociologist studied how couples talk about love. She found two basic ways that people talked about love.1 First is romantic love, including the belief that love happens “at first sight,” there is “one true love,” love can “conquer anything,” and love lets people “live happily ever after.” Most people are very familiar with this idea of love. And, as we discussed, it is closely tied to the belief in finding a “soul mate” to marry. However, there is also a second way to talk about love, particularly after being married a few years. This is a practical way to talk about love. From this perspective, love is not sudden but grows over time. Love is not based on passion but rather on practical traits and a good fit between life partners. Love is about staying together through hard times. It is about working on the relationship and compromising. It is about hard work and sticking it out.2 Both of these types of love are portrayed and reinforced through popular culture. Romantic love is probably most well known in Hollywood. In a book called I Do and I Don’t, a professor examined patterns in how marriage is portrayed in movies. She concluded that very few movies are about the day-to-day life of marriage. This is because actual marriage is not a very exciting story. Everyone knows the story so well and day-to-day marriage is quite boring. So instead, romantic movies end with the wedding, two people just getting married. This way, romantic love—passionate, sure, “happily ever after” love for one person—is the takeaway story.3 A film critic for The New York Times had a different take. He argued that practical love is becoming more common than romantic love in movies and on

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TV. He concluded that marriage is now portrayed as hard work, even in the most romantic films. He wrote, “In film and television, work and wedded bliss are now synonymous: the harder marriage is, the more romantic it seems.” But he agreed that marriage, without challenges, is not an interesting story: “Wedded bliss is a nice idea, but it does not usually produce a satisfying narrative.”4 Thus, both types of love that couples talk about are also the love we watch in the movies. And, like the movies, how we talk about love in our relationships follows a script. It is not individual and unique. Instead, there are clear patterns in how people talk about love at different points in their relationships. People talk about love the way that other people talk about love. On the other extreme, abusive behavior in relationships is also patterned. Cases of abuse are often labeled as crimes of passion in the media, as if the abuse emerged from a sudden outburst of emotion that was uncontrollable and unpreventable. Yet, from decades of research, social scientists know that abuse in relationships does not happen this way. Far from being unpredictable, abuse in relationships actually follows patterns that are documentable over  time. Individual cases of abuse are serious and individually damaging, but they are not all that unique from each other. For example, one form of abuse, patriarchybased violence, follows what have been called “cycles” or “wheels” of patterned abusive behavior. These patterns involve controlling behavior and isolation, in which the husband limits the wife’s access to friends and family. He monitors where she goes, what she does, and who she is with. He controls all things that provide freedom—money, the car, phone. The husband also uses violence and threats of violence to instill fear in his wife, to further control her and limit her freedom. She is told that if she does not behave in a certain way or tries to leave, he will hurt or kill her. The husband tells her that she is to blame for his abusive behavior. Putting the blame on her allows him to excuse his behavior and to further control hers. He argues that it is her inability to do as he wants that leads him to be violent. If she would only follow his rules, he says, he would not have to be abusive. Finally, when the husband perceives that he is losing control, despite all of these abusive efforts to maintain it, violence escalates to a life-threatening point.5 Thus, abusive marital behavior is far from sudden and random. It is patterned and predictable. Finally, divorce. For many decades, divorce rates increased. However, there is now evidence that divorce may be becoming less likely among younger generations.6 People assume that their marriage is for life. In one study, only 3 percent of newly married women thought they would not be together with their husband for life.7 Interestingly, people continue to assume that marriage is for life, even when they are divorcing. In a study of divorcing people, the vast majority said things like, “Marriage is supposed to be something that is forever” and “I went into marriage fully committed, fully focused on making it last forever.”8 Even in a context where divorce is common, “most people only begin a marriage if they expect it to last.”9

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This may not be all that surprising given that legally, marriage is based on the assumption of permanence. There is no need to renew a marriage. Once married, a couple is legally married for life until they go through another legal process of divorce. But some people have suggested that maybe marriage should not be permanent but instead be based on fixed-term, renewable contracts. A German politician, for example, suggested that it would be more realistic to have marriages last seven years, at which time the couple could decide to renew the union or not. If they decided not to renew the marriage, it would dissolve without the need for divorce.10 In Mexico City, politicians proposed a similar change to marriage laws. Couples, they suggested, could decide the length of their marriage contracts, with a contract being a minimum of two years. After the two years, the couple could either renew their contract or let it dissolve.11 This is a different approach to marriage—one in which the rules and expectations are that marriage is a temporary rather than a life-long union. These proposals may seem outrageous. But reactions against these proposals demonstrate how strongly embedded the formal and informal rules and taken-for-granted assumptions of marriage are. Changing the rules seems funny, strange, or completely wrong. As with getting married, people are more likely to get divorced when other people they know are getting divorced. As researchers found, “Having a friend or sibling who has divorced or is experiencing a divorce is strongly related to the probability of experiencing a divorce oneself.”12 More recently, researchers again found that “divorce can spread between friends.”13 The breakdown of a marriage, like the start of a marriage, is social, not merely individual. When there is an end to the marriage, the process of breaking up also has an observable pattern. Couples often conform to a script as they divorce. In the 80s, the book Uncoupling outlined the uniform way that people break up.14 Nearly two decades later, another study showed that similar patterns continue to exist.15 Here is how it goes. There is usually one initiator of the breakup. The other spouse often has little or no knowledge of the possibility of breakup. The initiator, in preparing for the end, begins to define the marriage as bad, focusing on the problems. The marriage has been bad, they often argue, not just recently but from the very beginning. The relationship was always flawed, they say. They were never in love. This, however, is often a reinterpretation of the marriage, by focusing on the bad times and erasing the good times. This reinterpretation is useful for the initiator because it allows them to act to end the relationship without rejecting or giving up on the institution of marriage. It is not marriage, in general, that is the problem, they argue. They just never had a real marriage. The other spouse, upon hearing the initiator’s focus on only the bad and the rejection of their marriage as not “real” and never based on love, is justifiably angry and acts as such. The initiator can then point to their spouse’s furious reaction as evidence of their irrational behavior and why divorce is necessary. The noninitiating spouse is then left to believe that their marriage was a “big lie.” They were deceived by their spouse, who they now “learn” never loved them 64 LOVE, ABUSE, AND CALLING IT QUITS

and never wanted to marry them (even though this is a new interpretation of the marriage by the initiator). Their spouse, they “learn” after all of these years, is actually manipulative, untrustworthy, and a liar. This whole process leads to the conflict that is present in many divorces.16 As an individual going through this painful process, it feels very personal. But when sociologists can track the same pattern, across couples, across decades, it is clear that these behaviors are not individual. Rather, they are set scripts that people follow. We have covered a wide range of marital practices. What we see when we examine significant and mundane behaviors is that most married couples behave in similar ways. There is little creativity in how married couples act. Intimate relationships follow a script. When getting together, getting engaged, planning weddings, taking names, managing money, arranging housing and sleeping, spending time together, dividing the work, having sex, having a child, describing love, and breaking up, couples do not invent their own unique behaviors. There is too much consistency in these behaviors across couples for this to be the case. And the reactions are still too strong when a couple tries to do something different. Rather, these are expected behaviors for couples, women and men, husbands and wives. There are many formal rules guiding this behavior. There are countless efforts to enforce informal rules, strongly encouraging couples to behave in a certain way. Yet we don’t often talk about these rules and expectations. Instead, we emphasize individual “choice” as the motive for our behaviors. We say we are doing these things because we want to. Choice is the acceptable motive to explain why we are doing what we are doing. Yet no matter how much we describe our motives for doing something as individual choice, the social constraints shaping, limiting, and guiding our behaviors remain. As we noted before, couples often do want the traditional proposal and wedding, they want to live and sleep together, they want children and to spend time together. We are not disputing that. But how do so many people end up wanting to do the same thing? Our point is that these desires, so similar across so many couples, are shaped by and emerge from the formal and informal rules for what is expected of married couples. It may seem strange that we are even discussing these behaviors. You might be thinking, “Of course married couples do these things!” These behaviors have become part of what it means to be married. But the fact that we do tie these behaviors so closely with marriage shows the extent to which our private relationships are shaped by social rules and expectations. Married people are supposed to do certain things. These behaviors are learned, reinforced, and eventually accepted as “normal” and “natural” for married couples. In summation, we internalize the rules and expectations of relationships, often don’t consider or conceive of alternatives, and then call them individual choice. But it is important to recognize the rules and expectations that constrain our behaviors so that we can understand them and, when necessary, work to change them. LOVE, ABUSE, AND CALLING IT QUITS 65

NOTES 1. Swidler 2001. 2. Swidler 2001, p. 120. 3. Basinger 2014. 4. Scott 2013. 5. Johnson 2008. 6. Stevenson and Wolfers 2007; Kennedy and Ruggles 2014. 7. Campbell, Wright, and Flores 2012. 8. Hopper 2001, p. 433. 9. Cherlin, Cross-Barnet, Burton, and Garrett-Peters 2008, p. 931. 10. Connolly 2007. 11. Leff 2011. 12. Booth, Edwards, and Johnson 1991, p. 216. 13. McDermott, Fowler, and Christakis 2013, p. 491. 14. Vaughan 1986. 15. Hopper 2001. 16. Hopper 2001.

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THINKING ABOUT CHANGE

I

n 1972, Jessie Bernard, a sociologist, predicted that the future of marriage would be a range of possible marriages. Anything would be possible, she wrote. Traditional marriages would continue, but they would exist alongside marriages, which included: • No children • More than two spouses • Open sexual relationships • A “free-wheeling” emphasis on spouses’ individuality and independence, including partial commitment, maintaining separate households, and having “weekend marriages.” • “Temporary permanent” relationships, in which couples would outline how long the marriage would last and opt for an extension if desired. In other words, Bernard predicted there would not be an established way to be married. Rather, people would be free to develop their relationships as they see fit and “tailor them to their circumstances and preferences.”1 Social scientists, in a range of fields, have argued that essentially this future has arrived. For example, a psychologist wrote an interesting book, The Paradox of Choice, about the problems of having too much choice. His basic argument is that when people are faced with too many choices, they end up being dissatisfied with any choice they make or become unable to make a choice at all. He used a wide list of examples, including choice in salad dressing, phone plans, health care, and jam. He also highlighted relationships as an example of increasing choice. He wrote,

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In the past, the “default” options were so powerful and dominant that few perceived themselves to be making choices . . . The anomalous few who departed from the pattern were seen as social renegades, subjects of gossip and speculation. These days, it’s hard to figure out what kind of romantic choice would warrant such attention. Wherever we look, we see almost every imaginable arrangement of intimate relations . . . Today, all romantic possibilities are on the table; all choices are real.2 In other words, he concluded that there are no longer established ideas about how relationships “should” be and so people need to constantly make choices about what kind of relationship they want. Even some sociologists have argued that people are free from social constraints in the modern world because social rules and expectations have weakened.3 As a result, individuals can and indeed must figure out for themselves how best to organize their love lives and relationships. Now is the era of “do-it-yourself ” biographies, they say. Anything is possible. Everything is acceptable. Again, the choices are unlimited. As one author noted, Of all of the dreams today’s young Westerners are sold about what our lives could look like, the biggest is that we have limitless opportunities, that we are free to pursue whatever work, relationships, and ways of being we like.4 Other sociologists have been critical of this idea.5 Indeed, at its core, sociology focuses on how individuals can’t and don’t act completely independently of social forces. The sociological imagination involves understanding that an individual’s experiences are shaped by the time and place within which their experiences occur. Put another way, there is a connection between private or individual troubles and public or social issues.6 Take the example of marital problems and divorce rates. When a couple is constantly arguing, they experience that as a private problem. If divorce rates are high, however, that is a public issue. The marital problems of the couple and the divorce rate are linked. A couple who is constantly arguing may divorce, but only if they live in a time and place in which the social rules make divorce a possible and likely outcome of marital problems. Historically, there have been significant jumps in divorce rates right after laws were changed to make it easier to get a divorce. This does not mean that all of sudden, once divorce laws changed, couples no longer got along. Rather, prior to changes in divorce laws, couple could argue all the time but could not divorce because getting a divorce was too hard to do. External social forces shape what people do in their most private relationships. As we saw in this book, this holds true not just for marital troubles but for all kinds of marital behaviors, including selecting a partner, getting engaged, and having children. We are not the first to make this point. Many others have made this same argument for a long time.7 However, this point often gets lost in the emphasis 68 THINKING ABOUT CHANGE

on individual choice and freedom. As one author described it, the “shell” of marriage may have changed giving us, in theory, the potential to be more creative in our lives and relationships, yet the soul of marriage—its dreams, conscience, ethics, and rules— hasn’t necessarily evolved to keep up. Instead we follow viscerally many of the same premises and orthodoxies as our parents, as if marriage is a Procrustean structure to which we must conform ourselves, rather than the other way around.8 People do decide how to act. But these decisions and actions never happen in isolation. Every person is surrounded by other people within a society, and people together create the social forces, processes, structures, rules, and expectations that are the contexts within which each individual person acts. Individuals have agency to act, but any action does not emerge purely from within an individual. Rather action is an outcome of the individual’s interaction with the social world, including the rules, opportunities, and constraints that are built into a society. Individual action is never wholly determined by social structures, but, at the same time, the individual, necessarily a part of society, can never act completely free of their social context. We are all actors acting within social contexts, which guide, shape, and limit our behaviors. Even when an individual goes against the social rules, breaks down social barriers, or leads a social movement to dramatic change, social rules still shape how they behave, including the need to react against the rules and expectations. There are people who forge their own paths and are exceptions to the general patterns. This is certainly true today and has always been in the past. The book Uncommon Arrangements, for example, documents the creative living and loving arrangements of some couples between 1910 and 1939. These couples had open sexual relationships with same- and opposite-sex partners, welcomed friends and lovers into their families and households, had children with lovers, and lived oceans apart, often maintaining caring and loving relationships with each other all the while.9 Another book Spinster discusses two terms that described women who didn’t marry more than 100 years ago. In 1895, the term “bachelor girl,” discussed in a Vogue column of the same name, referred to a woman who lived alone and supported herself by getting an education and having a career. Around the same time, the term “new woman” also referred to independent, self-sufficient, and sexual women who were pursuing careers. As one man described in a letter to his mother in 1898, There is a girl in N.Y. who has been much more to me than any other girl I ever knew. We are not engaged and it is practically sure that we never shall be. She is a “new woman,” ambitious and energetic, a hard worker . . . she has no idea of getting married, at any rate to me.10 THINKING ABOUT CHANGE 69

There have always been people who have done things differently. Nonetheless, doing something different can require managing ongoing disapproval from family, neighbors, friends, coworkers, and strangers. And even if some individuals do not follow the social rules and expectations, the rules and expectations are likely to persist—constraining and shaping the behaviors of others—despite the actions of these individuals. Social rules, expectations, and assumptions do change and evolve over time. Individuals create the rules and so they can change them. Marriage is not exactly the same as it was 100 years ago or 50 years ago. This is because the rules and expectations for how to have relationships shifted, as did patterns in marital behaviors. Yet as the rules and expectations change, this does not mean that rules and expectations completely disappear. Instead, new rules and expectations replace old ones. Change does not mean anything goes. It means that something else goes. We can think about our relationships following trends.11 There are trends in nearly all parts of relationships. Dating trends change over time, including the order in which couples go to dinner and have sex. Even what a couple does on a date is shaped by trends. The age when people marry follows trends. And there are trends regarding how couples act in marriage. Having separate bedrooms, a practice that was recently called a new trend, is not new at all, but was practiced in the past. When we are living in a particular moment and place, with particular rules, we tend to follow these rules and be on trend. In another time or place, with different rules, we would follow those trends and behave differently. It is often easy to get caught up in and fixate on the change, missing the larger picture. The story of change is exciting. Change can appear to be quite large and dramatic. It elicits shock and surprise, exciting news headlines, and juicy gossip. But the story of change has two parts. The first part asks, what do people do differently? The second part asks, what do most people continue to do? As we discussed earlier, people are marrying later today and are less likely to marry today than in the past, but the vast majority of people still marry at some point in their lives.12 Interracial marriages are more common now than in past decades, but the vast majority of marriages are still between couples of the same racial background.13 Cohabitation has increased dramatically since the 1970s, but the vast majority of couples in the United States are still married rather than cohabiting.14 There is unquestionably change in marriage. Yet the majority of people continue to do things the same way. Also, change over time is not always in a clear direction. Whether looking at the age of first marriage, the proportion of people who marry, or childlessness, change ebbs and flows overtime. Behaviors increase and decrease, rates go up and down, practices go back and forth rather than going in a straight line toward a clear direction.15 For example, women and men were older when 70 THINKING ABOUT CHANGE

they married in 1890 than they were in 1950.16 More women and men never married in 1920 than in 1980.17 Women born in 1910 were more likely to be childless than women born in 1960.18 Marriage is changing today, but marriage has always changed. For example, in what year do you think this statement was made? “A woman may now refuse to marry at all, and earn her own living in singleness.” Answer: 1891.19 In other words, more than 100 years ago, there was talk of change in the institution of marriage—change that actually seems a lot like the change we talk about now. In 100 years from now, what will we think of the quotes made about marriage today?

NOTES 1. Bernard 1972, p. 302. 2. Schwartz 2004, pp. 38–9. 3. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Cherlin 2004; Giddens 1992. 4. Hills 2015, p. 49. 5. Gross 2005; Jamieson 1999; Lauer and Yodanis 2010; Smart and Shipman 2004. 6. Mills 1959. 7. Baker 2014; Eekelaar 2007; Heaphy, Smart, and Einarsdottir 2013; Kingston 2004; Manfield and Collard 1988; Smith 1993; among many others, included those cited throughout this book. 8. Haag 2011, p. 20. 9. Roiphe 2007. 10. Bolick 2015, p. 100. 11. Aspers and Godart 2013. 12. Goldstein and Kenny 2001; Manning, Brown, and Payne 2014. 13. Rosenfeld 2007; Taylor, Wang, Parker, Passel, Patten, and Motel 2012. 14. U.S. Census Bureau 2014. 15. Yodanis and Lauer 2014. 16. Elliott, Krivickas, Brault, and Kreider 2012; Fitch and Ruggles 2000. 17. Elliott et al. 2012; Fitch and Ruggles 2000. 18. Kirmeyer and Hamilton 2011. 19. Campbell 1891; Smock 2004.

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eturning to the idea that “Today, all romantic possibilities are on the table,”1 is it really hard to imagine romantic choices today that would lead to gossip and speculation? What about Jessie Bernard’s examples? If a friend of yours decided to have an “open marriage,” would you be surprised? Would you talk to your other friends about it? Would you wonder if the couple were still in love? What if a friend, prior to his wedding, set a date with his wife to end their marriage in seven years? Would you find that odd and talk with others about it? Would you wonder about the quality of their relationship? Even less dramatic deviations from marriage rules lead to gossip and speculation. A number of years ago, a friend of ours was showing us around his new house. “This is my bedroom,” he explained, and then we walked further down the hall and he added, “This is my wife’s bedroom.” We didn’t say anything at the time, but we talked about it after. We instantly turned to talking about the nature and quality of their relationship. Did they have a “real” relationship or was it more of a professional partnership or a partnership to raise their child? Other mutual friends, who had the same tour of his house when they visited, also brought it up with us. The conversation again turned to analyzing their relationship. A relatively small, private, and personal behavior of a married couple—where they sleep—was so notable and curious that we remember it years later. Research on change in marriage often focuses on people’s opinions on marital behavior. For example, what percent of people agree that it is OK for people to not marry? Is it OK for people to marry someone from a different race? Is it OK for married people to not have children? But there are problems with using opinions. People may say that certain behaviors are acceptable, but

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be reluctant or unable to try less common behaviors themselves. And while they may say that certain behaviors are OK, they may react, even unconsciously, against them when other people actually do them. How do married people actually behave? When we observe the world around us, do we “see almost any imaginable arrangement?” Do statistics show couples behaving in a wide array of ways? As we saw earlier, people rarely follow different options for marriage, like those outlined by Jessie Bernard. Instead, most people tend to act in marriage as other people do. As a result, it is hard to conclude that all possibilities are on the table and that all choices are real. This is even clear when we consider relationships that are considered new and controversial. Today and throughout history, there were times when significant alternative forms of relationships could have happened. But most of these relationships ended up following most of the rules and expectations of marriage and thus were not really alternatives at all. In other words, the rules and expectations of marriage not only constrain people who are married, but can also constrain the ability to pursue and maintain alternative relationship forms. Let’s start with a recent heated debate—same-sex marriage. One of the big concerns in the debate about same-sex marriage was the extent to which women marrying women and men marrying men would change, disrupt, or even “destroy” the institution of marriage. It is interesting to step back from the heated rhetoric and ask, what has actually happened? Has same-sex marriage actually changed the “traditional” rules and expectations of marriage? Sociologists have been studying this topic. In some ways, same-sex couples are trying to approach marriage in a new way.2 For example, same-sex married couples, particularly lesbian couples, are striving for a more equal division of labor. And studies found that samesex couples do tend to have a more equal and flexible division of labor than opposite-sex couples.3 Still, there is evidence of inequalities in the amount of housework and childcare among same-sex partners, based on factors such as partners’ income contributions.4 Yet overall, studies have not found dramatic changes to marriage with the legalization of same-sex marriage. Instead, there is evidence that marriage is becoming assumed, taken for granted, and expected in same-sex relationships.5 Marriage is becoming the standard by which the success and progression of same-sex relationships are evaluated. Same-sex couples who got together after same-sex marriage was legalized reported that marriage has become “necessary for them to feel secure and confident in their relationships. They usually needed some reassurance that their partners wanted to marry in order to trust the longevity of the relationship and invest in it.”6 Some same-sex couples now feel pressure to marry from friends and family. One man described how his partner’s aunt suggested they get married

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because she saw marriage as now part of the “natural progression” of their relationship, as in all relationships: She wanted to dance at our wedding. (laughs) . . . She also said that we should adopt children . . . But I think she’s just like most older Greek women [who] see that as a natural progression for anyone. That you get married and have children, gay or straight it doesn’t matter, it’s just part of the process.7 Being able to marry is increasing the acceptance of same-sex relationships because marriage is so familiar to people. When a same-sex couple marries, family, friends, coworkers, and strangers often follow the same script they use to interact with any married couple. Marriage tends to mean marriage, even to those who say they oppose same-sex marriage.8 As one woman explained, “People know what to do when you say you just got married: ‘Congratulations!’ No matter who you tell, it doesn’t matter. You say you got married, they understand the concept. It’s not something you have to explain to anybody.”9 As it becomes a marker of relationship progression, marriage is also increasing a sense of commitment among same-sex married couples.10 As one study respondent in a same-sex marriage explained, I think that prior to being married . . . if you were in a disagreement about something, you know, there was always an easier way out. Whereas the commitment is definitely more . . . I think it’s just the sense of commitment that you feel. You’ve made a vow. Another respondent in a same-sex marriage said, [Marriage] is really life-changing and relationship-altering. It advances the relationship so much higher . . . the marriage has made just the commitment even more solid. We talk about where we will be buried together and stuff [laughs], where we will retire and what our retirement will be like.11 Indeed, same-sex and opposite-sex marriages are equally stable, sharing similar break-up rates.12 Within this context of marriage, same-sex married couples share resources and raise children together. They integrate resources by owning homes together and having joint bank accounts.13 One of the reasons couples give for choosing to get married is having and/or raising their children.14 As a sociologist concluded, To the extent that social conservatives extol the virtues of (heterosexual) marriage in terms of deepening commitment between partners, increased social support, and the facilitation of a reproductive, nuclear family, these 74 THINKING ABOUT “RADICAL” CHANGE

effects are consistent in the ways in which same-sex married spouses experience, conceive of, and talk about their marriages.15 Thus, despite all of the alarm voiced in the debates about same-sex marriage, same-sex married couples are actually not so different from any other married couple.16 It might seem hard to believe, but cohabitation or “living together” used to be as hotly discussed as same-sex marriage. In the early 1990s, when we were in graduate school studying the sociology of the family, we read articles that discussed the deviance of cohabitors. People who lived together without being married were believed to be troubled, drug-using, anti-social people. Today, when cohabitation is a common, and even typical, experience for couples, this seems ridiculous. When cohabitation was a relatively new and rare phenomenon, it was believed, and at times it is still believed, that the practice and rise of cohabitation could lead to the breakdown and demise of marriage. Yet living together is often not that different from marriage. For most couples, cohabitation is merely an advanced stage of dating or a stage before marriage, not a substitution for marriage. Many couples who are living together break up instead of marrying because they decide that the relationship is not working out. But many cohabiting couples eventually marry.17 One survey found that about 45 percent of cohabitors said they will definitely marry. Another 45 percent said that there is a 50/50 chance or they will probably marry. And only 10 percent said that they do not intend to marry.18 Cohabitation is common among younger people, but marriage eventually overtakes cohabitation as people progress through their twenties. Specifically, 18- to 20-year olds are more likely to live together than be married. In their early twenties, the percentage of people living together and married becomes more equal. By the mid-twenties, however, marriage becomes more common than cohabitation and becomes increasingly so. By the end of the twenties, marriage is nearly four times more common than living together.19 Overall in the U.S., of all couples, fewer than 15 percent are cohabiting. Over 85 percent are married.20 Even while cohabiting, however, couples report that in the routine aspects of their daily lives, they act a lot like married couples.21 In a study of cohabitors, one woman explained, I don’t think it would be any different [if we were married] because we already act like we are married. We live in the same house. We sleep in the same bed. We, you know, we eat—sometimes from the same plate. Another woman said, It’s like we’re married now anyway because we live together, and we help each other out with the bills, and if he needs something I’m there for him THINKING ABOUT “RADICAL” CHANGE 75

to buy him something. He’s there for me. We have a child together. It’s kind of like being married . . .22 Many of the behaviors common in marriage are common among cohabiting couples as well.23 For example, moving in together leads to an unequal division of housework, maybe not as unequal but similar to the division in marriage.24 Cohabiting men tend to do less of the housework than cohabiting women do.25 And the longer a couple lives together, the more traditional gender roles become.26 While living together often seems like a progressive alternative to marriage, studies actually show that “cohabitation . . . does not actively challenge conventional patterns typically found in traditional marriage.”27 Couples who live together do note differences from marriage, particularly related to the level of commitment.28 But when considering certain aspects of commitment, such as sexual monogamy, there is not much difference between cohabitation and marriage. One study comparing affairs among married and cohabiting couples found that, liked married couples, the overwhelming majority of cohabiting couples expect and practice monogamy.29 Cohabitors are also increasingly having children. There has been a lot of talk in the media about children being born outside of marriage. This seems to imply that many single women are having children. However, many of these children born outside of marriage are being born to cohabiting, just not married, couples. Cohabitors have fewer children than married couples do, but about one in six children in the U.S. are born to parents who are cohabiting.30 People are increasingly having children while cohabiting, cohabiting in response to a pregnancy, and remaining cohabiting, rather than marrying, after the birth of the child.31 One researcher noted, “Cohabitation and marriage have become increasingly similar to each other with respect to the normative acceptability of childbearing.”32 We don’t want to overstate our point. There are differences between cohabitation and marriage. Most importantly, people cohabit at many different stages in life and for different reasons.33 Yet today overall, cohabitation is far from deviant. Rather, in practice, it is looking more and more like marriage.34 In other words, rather than cohabitation changing or demolishing the institution of marriage, cohabitation often becomes marriage, or at least closely follows the rules and expectations of marriage. Overall, living together and same-sex marriage might not be as radical as previously thought. But what about the radical time of the 1960s? Surely, those were times of alternatives to marriage. Communes seem to be the antithesis of marriage— large groups of people living together, pooling resources, raising children collectively, and having sex with each other. However, the evidence available shows that this was largely never the case and is increasingly less so today. In the 1970s, sociologists gathered data from members of 60 urban communes with diverse goals and philosophies. The members were young (median 76 THINKING ABOUT “RADICAL” CHANGE

age 26 years), unmarried, and were looking for a consensual community among people who shared their beliefs and values. Relatively few members joined communes for alternative family arrangements. In fact, the vast majority of commune members had never engaged in unconventional sexual behaviors, and they were even less likely to do so after joining communes.35 In communes—what were believed to be vehicles for the most nontraditional relationships—relationships were pretty conventional. The only practice that increased with membership to communes was celibacy. As one researcher wrote, “Forty-two percent of communitarians were not involved sexually with any other commune members. Of those who were, some form of monogamous pattern was clearly the norm.”36 Communal living started to grow in popularity again in the 1990s after a period of decline, although still making up only a tiny fraction of all living arrangements.37 A new communal living form is called cohousing. Cohousing involves a community of housing owned by private families, often with an interest or identity in common. The goal of cohousing is to develop a community and ties with neighbors. While the houses are designed with shared living space for environmental benefits, helping each other with chores and childcare, and spending time together, cohousing remains a collection of independent intimate relationships and families, each with their own separate property and privacy.38 As a journalist described, “The new breed of cooperative living . . . is far from radical.”39 The editor of the Communities magazine, “the quarterly bible of the intentional living movement,” explained, “These days, you don’t have to live in the boonies, chop wood, walk around nude, and pool all your money to live an alternative lifestyle.”40 This has been called the “mainstream” option or “a growing niche that purist communitarians jokingly refer to as the ‘Republican’ branch of the movement.”41 A potential variation on the commune movement is today’s “urban tribes.”42 Ethan Watters described this phenomenon in his book Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment. Speaking from his experiences in his own urban tribe and from information learned through interviews with hundreds of members of other tribes, Watters argued that urban tribes are an alternative way of living for never-married 20- and 30-year olds who are working and living on their own in cities. Away from their families, these young people develop a network of friends who function similarly to a family or even a group marriage. Members spend a huge amount of time together and support each other in a wide range of ways. They are often roommates and have frequent social gatherings and regular dinners. They provide financial support, including paying medical bills or rent, when a member is not employed. They exchange skills, helping with remodeling, hobbies, or work projects. They provide emotional support when a parent dies or a relationship falls apart. While some tribe members have sexual relationships with each other, many do not. As one tribe member described, “We are soul mates without sex.”43 THINKING ABOUT “RADICAL” CHANGE 77

The tribe also helps never-married people feel okay about not being married as they enter their thirties. As members of the tribe expressed, “Not being married at thirty or thirty-five or forty suddenly seemed less of a failure.”44 As Watters described, The feeling of coming home to my urban tribe was the feeling of stepping back into the comfort of my skin . . . It didn’t hugely matter how being single was portrayed in the press or in television shows, the most important fact in my sense of being single was that among my friends it was considered normal.45 But, ultimately, the urban tribe is not an alternative to or a replacement for marriage. Rather it is a temporary arrangement prior to marriage. Watters himself ultimately moved to marriage away from the tribe. He described his transition as follows: Despite all the good things that have happened to me in the last twenty years, that sense of progression is one thing that my life has decidedly lacked. With each year, even as I became more comfortable with my social life in the tribe, I developed a greater thirst for that elusive forward momentum—a desire not just for change but for a next stage, marriage, which would lead to the next stage, children.46 By the time of his honeymoon, Watters said that his tribe was a “distant third” behind his marriage and work. He wrote, “The ‘us’ in my world has shrunk to mean Rebecca and me.”47 As other tribe members likewise explained, “I think the main purpose of our group is that it provides us with people to hang out with until we get married,” “You can’t have your tribe and husband too,” “[Marriage] kills [the tribe]. They leave,” “Marriage is the ticket out of the tribe,” and “Those who’ve gotten married or paired up tend to drop into the background or stop visiting completely.”48 In the end, as with other communal living arrangements, urban tribes aren’t a “redefinition” of family or relationships. As a scholar of communes concluded, “Communal groups of the 1960s and 1970s, like those of today, were more interested in creating consensual communities than in developing new family forms.”49 As with many “alternatives,” marriage isn’t destroyed. Instead, it takes over. Even people who divorce often return to marriage. Just about half of men and women remarry within five years of being divorced.50 In 1956, a sociologist predicted that this would happen because being married helps adults relate to each other and as a result, leaving marriage completely is not easy.51 So, people may leave one marriage but then, after, enter another. Remarried couples often face more challenges, conflict, and tension than first-time married couples.52 It has been argued that remarried couples face 78 THINKING ABOUT “RADICAL” CHANGE

these problems because remarriage does not have a clear set of rules to follow like marriage does.53 For example, how should stepparents interact with stepchildren? How do the new spouses interact with the ex-spouses? Who gets the money? Who spends holidays with whom? Remarried families don’t know what to do in many situations, it is argued, and, as a result, problems arise. The source of the problem, however, may not be a lack of rules. Remarried couples are following rules—just rules that don’t fit. Remarried couples are following the rules of marriage and the rules of marriage continue to specify the behaviors for only two spouses and their own children. Remarriage, meanwhile, involves ex-spouses and stepchildren. These additional people don’t fit neatly into the rules of marriage. Trying to fit people into rules that don’t accommodate them may be the cause of the problems, conflict, and stress on the new relationships.

NOTES 1. Schwartz 2004, pp. 38–9. 2. Badgett 2009; Green 2010; Kimport 2013; Lyon and Frohard-Dourlent 2015; Ocobock 2015. 3. Biblarz and Savci 2010; Kurdek 2007. 4. Biblarz and Savci 2010; Goldberg, Smith, and Perry-Jenkins 2012. 5. Ocobock 2015, p. 43; Lannutti 2005, 2007. 6. Ocobock 2015, p. 47. 7. Lyon and Frohard-Dourlent 2015, pp. 413–14. 8. Badgett 2009; Kimport 2013. 9. Kimport 2013, p. 109. 10. Green 2010; Kimport 2013; Ocobock 2015. 11. Green 2010, p. 411. 12. Rosenfeld 2014. 13. Badgett 2009; Kimport 2013; Ocobock 2015; Rothblum, Balsam, and Solomon 2008. 14. Badgett 2009; Kimport 2013; Lyon and Frohard-Dourlent 2015. 15. Green 2010, p. 410. 16. Badgett 2009; Lannutti 2005. 17. Guzzo 2014. 18. Kuperberg 2012. 19. Saad 2008. 20. U.S. Census Bureau 2014. 21. Nock 1995. 22. Reed 2006, pp. 1125–6. 23. Kerr, Moyser, and Beaujot 2006. 24. Gupta 1999; Kuperberg 2012; Smock and Gupta 2002. 25. Davis, Greenstein, and Gersteisen Marks 2007; Gupta 1999. THINKING ABOUT “RADICAL” CHANGE 79

26. Miller and Sassler 2010. 27. Miller and Sassler 2010, p. 696. 28. Reed 2006. 29. Treas and Giesen 2000. 30. Kuperberg 2012; Cherlin 2009. 31. Musick 2007; Raley 2001. 32. Sweeney 2010, p. 1167. 33. Kuperberg 2012; Sassler 2004. 34. Kiernan 2004. 35. Aidala and Zablocki 1991; Zablocki, 1980. 36. Aidala and Zablocki 1991, p. 170. 37. Ellikson 2008; Smith 2001, 2002. 38. Smith 2001. 39. Jacobs 2006. 40. Jacobs 2006. 41. Kershaw 2003; Melzer 2005. 42. Heath 2004. 43. Watters 2003, p. 185. 44. Watters 2003, p. 54. 45. Watters 2003, p. 135. 46. Watters 2003, p. 210. 47. Watters 2003, p. 213. 48. Watters 2003, pp. 70, 198. 49. Smith 2002, p. 126. 50. Kreider 2006. 51. Goode 1956. 52. Coleman, Ganong, and Fine 2000. 53. Cherlin 1978.

80 THINKING ABOUT “RADICAL” CHANGE

THINKING ABOUT THE RULES

A

re the rules of marriage good or bad? In an interesting book entitled Against Love, the argument is made that marriage and its many rules are a form of social control. In making her case, the author listed all of things that people can’t do when they are in relationships. On the list, which continues for eight pages, she included, You can’t leave the house without saying where you’re going. You can’t not say what time you’ll return. You can’t stay out past midnight, or eleven, or ten, or dinnertime, or not come right home from work. You can’t go out when the other person feels like staying home. You can’t go to parties alone . . . You can’t be impulsive, self-absorbed, or distracted. You can’t take risks, unless they’re agreed-upon risks, which somewhat limits the concept of “risk”. You can’t just walk out on your job or quit in a huff . . . You can’t eat what you want . . . You can’t drive too fast, or faster than the mate defines as fast.1

Because of these restrictions, the author concluded, “who needs a policeman on every corner? How very convenient that we’re so willing to police ourselves and those we love, and call it living happily ever after.”2 Indeed, married people are less likely to commit crimes. Being married prevents people from committing crimes, even if they had been involved in crime before marriage.3 Decreased crime seems like a good outcome of the rules of marriage. On the other hand, marriage also decreases genius and creativity. A study of the biographies of scientists found that married scientists tended to

THINKING ABOUT THE RULES 81

experience a drop in scientific achievement with age. But for those scientists who never married, “expressions of genius . . . do not decline sharply.”4 Marriage, and the associated reduction in risk taking, may lead not only to more law-abiding behavior, but also to less innovation, discovery, and new opportunities. The social rules tied to marriage have some benefits but also costs. Many of our behaviors are habits, or routines based on taken-for-granted assumptions about how to act over the course of a day or life. It is estimated that as much as 40 percent of our actions on any given day are habits. In these actions, we don’t decide what to do. We don’t even think about what to do. We just act in certain assumed ways in a given situation.5 There are benefits to following taken-for-granted behaviors. It is easier to simply follow assumed and established behaviors and routines—to not even think about what to do, just do what most people are doing and have done before. It would be overwhelming to have to consciously decide what to do every time we acted and face the uncertainty of taking a new, uncharted path.6 Following taken-for-granted assumptions for behavior also reduces uncertainty during interaction with others. As a sociologist who studies relationships explained, rules are “the medium through which actors relate to each other, build expectations about each other, and trudge well-known paths with each other . . . [and] ward off anxieties created by uncertainty.”7 In other words, following taken-for-granted assumptions lets us know what to do and what to expect from others. For example, the marriage proposal ritual is a script that everyone follows and, as a result, the script makes it clear to family, friends, and indeed the couple themselves that they are in fact getting married. There is no confusion or misinterpretation. By following certain established behaviors, the next behaviors are clear.8 Deviation from the script, such as not having a ring, the woman asking, or no engagement story to share, leads to uncertainty about if there will actually be a wedding. Following taken-for-granted behaviors and doing what others have done can make things easier. But there are also disadvantages. Doing what others do to reduce uncertainty can take meaning out of the experience. While the proposal script takes the uncertainty out of starting the marriage process, it is also routinized and leads to everyone having nearly the exact same experience, rather than a truly unique one.9 There are also benefits to having formal and informal rules constrain some behaviors. Take the example of rules for age at marriage. In some countries in the world, the majority of girls are married before the age of 18, many before the age of 15. Girls’ education, opportunities, and freedom are restricted by early, often forced, marriage. Poverty and a lack of education for girls contribute to early marriage, and early marriage, in turn, reinforces these problems, as well as a range of other health problems.10 International organizations and local grassroots organizations within countries where early marriage occurs are fighting against this practice. 82 THINKING ABOUT THE RULES

Another good example of the need to have formal and informal restrictions on behavior is violence in marriage. Before the 1970s in the United States, there were few laws and little social stigma punishing physical or sexual assault against a spouse. Violence in marriage was considered a private matter between spouses, and thus neighbors, police, and courts rarely did anything to intervene. Movies, books, TV shows, and jokes commonly referenced assaults as expected, funny, and even romantic. It was only after long and ongoing efforts by women’s organizations to redefine marital violence as a crime that police were willing to arrest someone for spousal abuse.11 Now violence in marriage is more often viewed as unacceptable. Having some rules is necessary, but many of the rules that shape our behaviors are not helpful for individuals within society. In 1963, a book called The Feminine Mystique revealed how women were suffering under rules that required them to stay at home and clean and raise children, even if they wanted to have careers. Depression and the wide use of Valium were consequences of being trapped under rules that dictated that all women, regardless of their individual interests or desires, behave in one way.12 Decades later in 2012, a sociological study confirmed that when mothers want a job or career but are blocked from doing so, they experience higher levels of depression.13 In other words, some individuals will not thrive when everyone is forced to live under one set of rules. Rules can also create and reinforce inequality. As we discussed, many of the rules and expectations of opposite-sex relationships and marriage are based on and reinforce inequality between women and men. The scripts for dancing, dating, and proposing put men in the powerful position of asker. Women, in comparison, are limited to indirect influence in the background rather than having direct power to do the asking.14 As a result, when a woman doesn’t dance, date, or marry, people assume that no one asked her. When a man doesn’t dance, date, or marry, people assume he didn’t want to. The rules define men as the actors and women as passive. The rules of marriage are full of gender inequality, as we will discuss in more detail. Not everyone within a society has equal say in setting the rules. For example, white, middle-class, heterosexual behaviors in marriage have historically been the standard that everyone else is supposed to follow. Couples from other ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds and sexualities who did things differently were, and still can be, seen as doing things insufficiently, wrong, or even “pathological.” For example, in 1965, an otherwise progressive senator from New York wrote a report arguing that the increase in African American families headed by single women was a problem because it violated the white, middleclass standards of marriage and male dominance in the family. Here is some of the text from the report: In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and THINKING ABOUT THE RULES 83

imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well. There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage . . . There is much evidence that a considerable number of Negro families have managed to break out of the tangle of pathology and to establish themselves as stable, effective units, living according to patterns of American society in general.15 The report clearly notes that there is nothing inherently wrong with variation in marital practices. What is judged and criticized is that some groups are not following the rules and expectations of the dominant group. In sum, social rules, while being necessary and beneficial at times, can also be seriously problematic, leading to inequality and injustice. Yet we don’t often hear critiques of the rules of marriage. The rules are so pervasive that they seem just like the right, best, and natural way to do things. In fact, this is exactly what a number of other perspectives argue.

NOTES 1. Kipnis 2003, pp. 84–92. 2. Kipnis 2003, p. 94. 3. Laub, Nagin, and Sampson 1998; Sampson, Laub, and Wimer 2006. 4. Kanazawa 2003, p. 267. 5. Duhigg 2012. 6. Duhigg 2012. 7. Illouz 2012, p. 29. 8. Schweingruber, Anahita, and Berns 2004. 9. Bulcroft, Bulcroft, Bradley, and Simpson 2000. 10. Kristof and WuDunn 2009. 11. Gordon 1988. 12. Friedan 1963. 13. Usdansky, Gordon, Wang, and Gluzman 2012. 14. Lamont 2014. 15. Moynihan 1965. 84 THINKING ABOUT THE RULES

THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS

T

he common behaviors we observe in marriage are often believed to be the best behaviors. It is argued that people choose to do the same thing in relationships because these are the most efficient arrangements for saving time, money, and effort. For example, living together saves money because people can pool their resources into one living space rather than two. Sharing a bedroom saves space in the house. Dividing the housework along gender lines allows husbands and wives to specialize in certain tasks and frees one person to focus their efforts on a career and making as much money as possible rather than having both partners juggle work and family responsibilities. All of this sounds logical, and there are definitely efficiencies in some common practices of marriage.1 On the other hand, there are also an awful lot of inefficiencies, but people follow the common behaviors anyway. Some marital behaviors are simply costly and a bad return on your investment. Take, for example, having children. The U.S. Department of Agriculture regularly calculates the cost of raising a child. A recent estimate is that parents will spend about $245,000 to feed, transport, clothe, and care for a child until the age of 18. The amounts vary between $175,000 and more than $400,000, depending on the parents’ income.2 This does not include the cost of college or university, which, as you know, costs parents a lot. A New York Times writer revisited this estimate, making it more realistic for her circumstances. She added the higher cost of day care in her area, the increased costs of moving to a safer home with good schools, and increases to the cost of health insurance and the cost of braces. She extended the age of financial support to 25, “since we would probably not cut off our child financially” once they were 18. She included half the price of tuition to a four-year public university and also included the cost of grandchildren, THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS 85

which has been estimated by other studies to cost over $8,000 every five years. Her new estimate is $1.8 million to have a child.3 One potential benefit of having children is that they will care for you in your old age. But the amount spent on children, if invested over 18 or 25 years, would provide quite luxurious assisted-living accommodations for the last years of life and provide more money for travel and luxury items for the many decades before assisted living is necessary. In the past, children cost a lot less and were actually highly productive members of the family, working along with other family members to contribute to the family income.4 Today, this is rare. Children are a lot of things—cute, a joy, fun. Without a question, children can provide meaning and love. But, by any measure, they are not a good economic decision. Yet, as we saw, the vast majority of married couples have or want children. Common marital behaviors, while saving some monetary costs, can lead to constant and ongoing problems and arguments that drain time, energy, and satisfaction. We already saw how a spouse can lose sleep because of a tossing, turning, and snoring partner, but the couple will still sleep together, even though this can lead to decreased relationship satisfaction and happiness.5 In another study, spouses were asked to keep a diary about what they fought about.6 Children were the most common topic of conflict. Indeed, children are also associated with a decline in reported relationship satisfaction and happiness.7 Nonetheless, again, nearly all married couples have or want to have children. Spouses’ disagreement over the amount and approach to chores and household responsibilities was the next most common topic of conflict. Although somewhat less frequent, conflicts about money were also common and were reported to be particularly intense, significant, and hard to resolve. It is quite possible that for at least some couples, deviating from the marital script of living together and pooling income would end these conflicts. Maintaining close but separate residences would allow spouses to decide for themselves when and how to clean. Maintaining separate bank accounts would give each spouse more control over how to spend their own money. This may cost extra money. Yet some couples may ultimately save a lot of time and energy that is wasted on fighting. Nonetheless, nearly all married couples pool their money and live together not merely because these behaviors are efficient economically, but rather, because these behaviors are associated with trust and commitment in marriage, are expected by others, and thus, are hard to change.8 So spouses, despite the fact that alternative arrangements may be more efficient, follow the rules. The inequality between women and men that is created and recreated through opposite-sex marital behaviors is particularly costly for woman. As we saw earlier, men’s incomes tend to increase when they are married and increase even further when they have children.9 Married men are often viewed as more committed workers and indeed have more time to be committed to work if they have a spouse doing the caring, laundry, and cooking at home. Women 86 THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS

have a different experience. Married women can be perceived as less dedicated to work and earn less.10 Women also face a “motherhood penalty,” earning less when they have children.11 They experience stress from trying to balance housework, laundry, childcare, and daily management of the household, along with work. Faced with these conditions and seeing no other options, women— even those who have graduated from top schools, such as Stanford Business School and Harvard Law School—are much more likely than men to leave the workforce all together.12 Thus, marital behaviors are not always efficient, economical, or beneficial for both spouses. When deciding how to act when married, people do not always choose the option with the most benefits. There are too many serious downsides to some behaviors for this to be true. Instead, spouses follow the social rules and expectations tied to marriage, even if it leads to costly behavior. Another common argument is that marital behaviors are “natural,” that humans are “hardwired” to act as they do, and that biological sex shapes the roles people play in relationships. For example, it is commonly believed that men have a stronger sex drive and therefore have more sexual partners, on average, than women do. Indeed, on surveys, men consistently report more opposite-sex sex partners than women do.13 But as statisticians have long known, this gender difference in the number of opposite-sex sex partners is mathematically impossible.14 Someone is lying. Studies have been done to test women’s and men’s honesty related to sexual experiences. In one set of tests, students were asked to report on their sexual behavior, including how many sexual partners they have had. One group was told they were hooked up to a lie detector, and the other group was not. The women who thought they are being monitored for lying reported more sexual partners than the other women did. Men, on the other hand, reported fewer sexual partners when they thought they were attached to a lie detector. The results are, as the researcher concluded, “strongly suggesting that cultural stereotypes or expectations played a role in the self-reports of the men and women regarding certain aspects of sexuality.”15 In another series of studies, women and men watched sexual images while hooked up to devices that monitored their sexual arousal, and they were also asked to report on how arousing the images were to them. Men’s reports matched their physiological arousal—when they were aroused, they said they were. Women’s didn’t. While women were physically turned on as much as, if not more than, men were by watching the sex scenes, they did not report that they found the images arousing. Women are no less sexual than men are—they merely report that they are.16 Women are not supposed to be as sexual as men are, and so they report according to the social rules and expectations rather than what is actually occurring. As the author of the book What Do Women Want? concluded, If promiscuity were considered normal in teenage girls and not in teenage boys, if it were lauded in girls and condemned as slutty and distasteful THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS 87

in boys, if young women instead of young men were encourage to collect notches on their belts, how might the lives of females and males . . . be different?17 It has also been argued that the practice of pairing older men with younger women developed and continues because it is beneficial for breeding, because younger women are more fertile. But again, there are problems with this argument. For many years, research only considered women’s age in fertility. As a result, it was commonly believed that the chances of complications or infertility increased only if women waited “too long” to have children. Men, it was believed, could have children for as long as they wanted. New and growing pools of research debunk this. Men are significantly less fertile after age 35 and the quality of their sperm also decreases with age, contributing to an increase in miscarriages and health problems in children.18 It is interesting to consider, from a sociological perspective, why, given this, don’t we talk about men’s biological clocks ticking? What about having children at all? Unquestionably, humans need to have children to ensure continued survival as a species. But if women and men were driven to have children purely to ensure their genetic survival or to ensure their own replacement, they would be having more children than they are. In order to replace the population, each woman would need to have about 2.1 children, on average. However, the current fertility rate is just under 1.9 children per woman in the U.S. Some groups have even lower rates of fertility.19 Overall, people are having children but not enough to replace themselves. Social factors explain the number of children that people have. As discussed earlier, children are increasingly expensive.20 It is hard, if not impossible, to afford sports equipment, music lessons, and college for too many children. In addition, standards of parenting have intensified over the past generations. Parents are now expected to spend a lot time with their children, playing, reading to them, planning birthday parties, driving them to play dates, and helping them with their homework.21 The amount of time now required for this new “intensive parenting” reduces the number of children that couples can have. Social processes can explain what may appear to be people going against a biological interest. It is also argued that women have a “maternal instinct,” because they are biologically able to give birth. As one woman explained, “I think the mother is connected just by being the vessel that the child is carried in.”22 Women, because of their sex, are believed to be instinctively drawn to, invested in, and able to care for children and others. They are believed to be naturally nurturing. But fathers can and do “mother.” Studies of stay-at-home and single dads show that men demonstrate a strong ability to nurture their children. When men are responsible for the care of their children and spend lots of time with them, men are as nurturing as women are. They get up in the middle of the night when they hear the baby crying. As one father explained, 88 THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS

A really interesting thing happened when I started to stay home. Up until that point, I would . . . do the night feeding and then go to bed. If the baby woke up after that point, [my wife] would hear it and would get up . . . After two months of me staying home, she no longer heard when he woke up. It was me getting up.23 Men who provide primary care for their children anticipate and “intuitively” know their children’s needs. They know their baby’s different cries and what they mean. They have special languages and special bonds with their children. A stay-at-home father said, “I have changed from being at home . . . it’s brought out some nurturing side of me. I mean, I knew it was there, but I didn’t know to what extent.”24 One mother described the strong relationship between her husband, who stays at home, and their child: Georgia would always go to Daddy when she slipped and fell and hurt herself . . . I was so happy to have [my husband] take care of her, but when I heard the words, I suddenly realized that there is this special bond between [my husband] and Georgia that was not there for Georgia and me.25 Another mother described the bond that her husband and infant son had together, “Daddy and Blake, Daddy and Blake. It was like an entity.”26 When parents equally spend time with a child, the child is equally attached to both parents.27 What matters is not an innate difference between women and men in ability to care, but the difference in the amount of time that women and men spend caring. Time spent caring, regardless of gender, leads to a close relationship between parent and child. But socially, as we saw earlier, women are encouraged and even pressured to care for children, while men are encouraged and pressured to care less for children. As a result, women tend to spend more time with their children and men less. This results in women having closer relationships with their children than men do. Caring and bonding are not “maternal instincts”—they are about time spent with children, which is socially defined. As a researcher summarized, “Maternal bonds don’t arise automatically. They are created in the work and attention required by the everyday care of children . . . the attachments of children reflect the arrangement of parents.”28 She found that opposite-sex couples who claim that their children were “naturally” more attached to their mothers overlooked the ways in which the mothers did more and the fathers did less with the children. The parents used biological explanations to justify the unequal time they spent with and caring for their children.29 Similarly, breastfeeding is used as an excuse for the unequal division of labor. Today, over 75 percent of mothers initiate breastfeeding.30 But at many points in history, it was uncommon for women to breastfeed their children. In 1971, for example, 75 percent of mothers never breastfed their children.31 Still, THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS 89

fathers were even less involved with their children then. Even today, when breastfeeding is more common than in the 1970s, the practice drops off dramatically before the child is 6 months old. Among the women who do some breastfeeding, most use some formula within the first weeks and months. Few women breastfeed for the officially recommended time of one year.32 Breastfeeding can’t explain the continuing gender gap in parenting. In a study of opposite-sex parenting, men who slept through the night and were less involved in the care of the child explained that they couldn’t do more because they could not breastfeed. Women similarly retained “the most important role” in the childcare by insisting that only they could provide the primary care because they were breastfeeding. Nonetheless, parents who were committed to shared parenting did not see breastfeeding as a deterrent. Among these couples, breastfeeding did not prevent the father’s involvement. Instead, fathers got up in the middle of the night, fed the child with breast milk from a bottle, and were in every way involved in the lives of their children. They were also very close to their children.33 From a sociological perspective, equal parenting and nurturing break down not because of natural drives, internal instincts, or biology but because of the social rules and expectations that falsely assume that women can care and men cannot. We often hear these arguments that people are “hardwired” to act a certain way or that people simply choose the “best” behaviors. But, in this book, we provide a different perspective from which to understand our intimate relationships—a sociological one. Overall, we tend to be quick to conclude that what is common or persistent is natural and innate. But as we see throughout this book, social rules and expectations can also lead to common and persistent outcomes. Like biology, social rules and expectations are slow to evolve and change. And they can be just as rigid and powerful in constraining our range of possible behaviors. Maybe the best evidence for a sociological explanation comes from the people in different cultures who live successfully by very different rules and expectations for intimate relationships. The book Sex at Dawn describes a range of cultures in which “marriages” are quite different from ours. These include cultures where women marry several men before having a long-term relationship, where couples enter the relationship with a predetermined end point (ranging from a few minutes to a few years), and where couples do not have sex, do not live together, and may never see each other again after the wedding.34 Judith Stacey, a sociologist, traveled the world studying different relationship forms and found variations in relationship practices that work successfully.35 For example, she described the Mosuo families in China, which are structured around living with the maternal family. Adult children live together with their mother and their mother’s blood relatives, including their grandmother, aunts, and uncles on their mother’s side. Their father does not live with them. All of these maternal relatives jointly own the property, divide 90 THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS

the labor, and together raise all of the children born to the women. Sexual relationships are separate from this family. Members of the family are free to have sex with outsiders. In fact, women have their own rooms in the house and can have male visitors whenever they want, but the male guests leave and return to their own mother’s house by the morning. These sexual relationships can be short term or long term, but the male sexual partners do not become part of the family. The children born to a woman are considered fully hers, regardless of whom the father is. This arrangement has worked well for generations.36 Still, social pressure over time is changing the Mosuo family. At different points in time, the Chinese government, working to “modernize” their society, tried to change the Mosuo family. They led marriage campaigns encouraging and requiring monogamous marriage in which the husband and wife would live together with their children. In 1975, the “one husband, one wife” campaign required marriage between sexual partners and placed guards to “ambush men en route to visit their lovers.” Couples were pulled naked out of their beds. The government required houses to be built for couples to live in together. Rations were withheld from children if their mothers did not name their biological fathers. All of this had an effect and marriage increased among the Mosuo people. But by 1981, the state allowed Mosuo families to return to their previous practices and marriage became less common as people returned to living in maternal homes. But pressures toward conforming to marriage still impact Mosuo families and they are starting to use terms like “husband” and “marriage” to describe long-term “visiting” intimate relationships.37 Nonetheless, the Mosuo family continues as a successful alternative to the institution of marriage as we know it, with its own rules and expectations. The existence of this alternative arrangement shows that how we act in marriage is not the only, best, or natural way to behave. It is just simply the way we have developed the social rules and expectations for how to have relationships.

NOTES 1. Adshade 2013. 2. Lino 2014. 3. Taha 2012. 4. Zelizer 1985. 5. Meadows, Arber, Venn, and Hislop 2008. 6. Papp, Cummings, and Goeke-Morey 2009. 7. Umberson, Pudrovska, and Reczek 2010. 8. Burgoyne, Reibstein, Edmunds, and Routh 2010; Singh 1997. 9. Antonovics and Town 2004; Cheng 2016; Hodges and Budig 2010; Kallewald 2013. 10. Cheng 2016; Jordan and Zitek 2012. 11. Budig and England 2001; Budig and Hodges 2010. 12. Stone 2007a. THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS 91

13. Chandra, Mosher, Copen, and Sionean 2011. 14. Kolata 2007. 15. Fisher 2013, p. 411. 16. Chivers, Seto, Lalumière, Laan, and Grimbos 2010. 17. Bergner 2013. 18. Fisch and Braun 2005. 19. Martin, Hamilton, Ventura, Osterman, and Mathews 2013. 20. Kornrich and Furstenberg 2013. 21. Hayes 1998. 22. Doucet 2006, p. 122. 23. Doucet 2006, p. 107. 24. Doucet 2006, p. 128. 25. Doucet 2006, p. 173. 26. Doucet 2006, p. 173. 27. Ranson 2010. 28. Deutsch 1999, pp. 123. 29. Deutsch 1999. 30. Jung 2015. 31. Badinter 2012; Blum 1999; Wolf 2003; Wright and Schanler 2001. 32. Wolf 2003; Wright and Schanler 2001. 33. Deutsch 1999. 34. Ryan and Jetha 2010. 35. Stacey 2011. 36. Stacey 2011. 37. Stacey 2011, p. 170.

92 THINKING ABOUT OTHER EXPLANATIONS

CONCLUSION

B

efore Carrie left for graduate school at the University of New Hampshire, her aunt told her that she had a good feeling about her choice of schools. “I think there is a bigger reason that you are going there,” she said. On the first day of the semester, Carrie walked into the auditorium of the old lecture hall where orientation was being held. Sean was standing at the door. They were introduced. Carrie and Sean talked every day from that point on. They went grocery shopping together, out for beers, and drove to the mountains to see the autumn leaves. They worried about the statistics course they were taking together, making plans for what they would do if they failed the course and were kicked out of the program. Carrie called Sean crying when a professor yelled at her. Sean sent Carrie the tackiest postcards he could find from each stop on a summer trip across the country with his brother. Sean remembers what Carrie wore on the first day of classes. Carrie remembers the first time she held Sean’s hand at a campus memorial event. They were best friends—only friends—for years. Then something changed. Carrie called her friend Mary, “I have to talk to you about something.” “You like Sean,” Mary instantly guessed. Sean’s brother, Brian, reacted the same way. No one was surprised. Not the other students in their program. Not the professor who worked their relationship into his annual Christmas poem to the department. Not their parents. They were meant for each other. Carrie remembered her aunt saying there was a reason for her to pick New Hampshire—maybe Sean was the reason. Carrie and Sean were part of a cohort of eight students in their program. Sean was one of two men in the cohort—the other man was gay. Of the six women, only Carrie and one other woman were not in relationships. Among

CONCLUSION 93

this limited selection, Carrie and Sean were “meant for each other,” in that they had very similar backgrounds. They were both from Pennsylvania and had great-grandparents who immigrated to Pennsylvania from the same region in Europe. They were drawn to school in New England because they had both worked summers there—Sean at an ice cream shop in Maine and Carrie cleaning and hosting for wealthy families on Cape Cod. They are from similar class backgrounds, have the same level of education, are white, and were raised Catholic. Sean is about 6 inches taller and three weeks older than Carrie. Their relationship turned romantic when they were both 25, perfectly timed for the fashionable marrying age. Thus, it is actually not at all surprising that they ended up together. Carrie and Sean fit the pattern that most people fit. Yet that doesn’t negate or diminish the love they have—and more than 20 years later still have—for each other. At the same time, their love does not diminish or negate the fact that their relationship is not all that unique. To the contrary, it is quite predictable. What is more unique about their relationship is the fact that they never got married. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason they didn’t marry. They have a realistic view of marriage. They know that no marriage is perfect, some are unhealthy, and many are very happy. They don’t demonize or romanticize marriage; they just didn’t want one for themselves. They wanted to have their own personal and private relationship rather than follow all the rules and expectations, large and small, shaping what people are supposed to do when they are married. To this day, Sean says he knew Carrie was the one for him because she was more reluctant to marry than he was. So Sean did not ask and Carrie didn’t want him to. They are both products of strong, stable marriages. And their parents wanted them to marry. Over the years, there have been a few discussions, some heated, but mostly encouraging jokes. But in reality, their not being married doesn’t make things easy for their families. It is challenging for their parents to describe their relationship to distant relatives or friends, whose children have nearly all married. What do they say when, inevitably, people ask, “Is Carrie married?” Their moms explain that while they have never married, their relationship has lasted longer than many marriages. It can also be awkward for Carrie and Sean. On a trip across the U.S. border to visit Sean’s mom, they were waiting in line to have their passports checked at customs. Sean went first, explained the purpose of the trip, and passed through. Carrie went next, and the border guard, looking at her passport, asked the purpose of her visit. When Carrie gave the same reason as Sean, the guard asked her why, if they were traveling together, didn’t they go through customs together? “We aren’t married,” Carrie explained. The guard started to bond, “Is this the first time you will meet his mother?” 94 CONCLUSION

“Oh, no,” Carrie said, “We’ve been together twenty years.” Looking at Carrie’s finger, she asked, “What’s the problem? He won’t ask?” Carrie and Sean’s parents were also justifiably worried that their relationship did not have legal recognition. As a result, they would be limited in their rights as a couple if one of them became sick or injured. Coincidentally, Carrie and Sean now live in Canada, a country where they don’t have to marry to have rights as a couple. Common-law relationships are formally recognized. They immigrated together, will share pensions and social security, can make emergency medical decisions for each other, and have all the legal rights and benefits of marriage without marrying. But to get these rights and benefits, they have to act a lot like a married couple. To obtain permanent residence in Canada without marrying, for example, they had to demonstrate that they live together, have a joint bank account, file taxes together, and otherwise live “as husband and wife” in a “marriage-like” relationship. Over time, Carrie and Sean have continued to slowly become more “married.” When they first became a couple, Carrie and Sean would spend long stretches of time living apart from each other for one reason or another. They would spend months away to do research. Carrie moved to Europe for her first job a year before Sean moved there. When Sean then got a job at a university in Vancouver, they assumed without much thought that he would move halfway around the world without any immediate plan for Carrie to follow. A year later Carrie joined him when she got a job at the same university, teaching and doing research on the institution of marriage. (“Marriage?” her dad teased, “What do you know about marriage?”) Since settling in Vancouver, they haven’t been apart for more than a few weeks at a time. Job opportunities for one of them have come up, but they turn them down. It’s easier and more comfortable to share everyday life. Their daily lives are now completely intertwined. They live together. They teach in the same department and have offices right next to each other. Over the years, their research interests merged, and they now do research and write together. They have joint bank accounts and plan for retirement together. They send Christmas cards together. They used to argue a lot over the housework until they worked out a division—Carrie does the cleaning and laundry, while Sean cooks most dinners, which they nearly always eat together. They spend their weekends seeing the same movies, going to yoga, meeting up with their shared group of friends, and going to the restaurants they like—agreeing together on which dishes to order and then sharing them. They jointly tell stories when out with friends and can run out of things to talk about when they are out to dinner alone. They’ve made the same stupid jokes for years and have the same stupid fights. They have been told that they look alike. CONCLUSION 95

Today, rather than explain why they haven’t married, they often have to explain that they aren’t married. A friend introduced them to one of his friends, “This is Sean and his wife, Carrie.” Carrie felt compelled to add, “Actually, we aren’t married.” It immediately sounded silly. It was totally irrelevant. Carrie and Sean are following the rules and expectations of marriage and as a result have become indistinguishable from a married couple. They thought they were doing something different and for a while, they kind of were. But now, they are living like most married couples. Sociologists try to understand—why are we doing this? There are formal rules, like from Canada’s immigration procedures, that require certain behaviors. There are also informal rules, like friends, family, and the border guard expecting certain behaviors. And for the most part, we started to do these things without thinking about them. It is hard to imagine another way of having a relationship. And we want to live together, spend time together, share a bank account. We are comfortable doing these things. But as sociologists emphasize, what we want and what we ultimately do is social. We internalize the social rules and expectations of being in a relationship. Doing something else could lead to problems but so can following the rules. But mostly, we don’t usually consider or even conceive of other options. Yet there are some ways in which we don’t fit the rules and expectations of marriage. For example, we have chosen not to have children (Interesting test: Stop and think. Having never met us, what do you think about us given that we don’t have children?). Just because we don’t have children, however, doesn’t negate the fact that over 90 percent of women have or want to have children. The pattern exists. We just don’t fit the pattern. A number of years ago, when we started this book, our niece caught her finger in the car door. She was fine but a bit traumatized. To calm her down, her grandmother said, “Don’t worry, you’ll be better before you get married.” Admittedly, this is an odd expression but one that was used when she was growing up. Our niece didn’t quite get it. Realizing that she would be fine soon, she panicked. She thought this meant that she would be getting married soon. She was shocked, “I’m getting married?!?” Her mom and grandmother laughed. “No,” they said. They explained marriage is a long way off, “First you have to go to high school, and then you have to go to college, and then get a job.” Her grandmother added, “Then, after all of that, you still have to ask Aunt Carrie if it is OK.” This was a great joke, and we laughed really hard. But this book is what we would want to tell her. We wouldn’t say that she has to marry. At the same time, we wouldn’t tell her that she shouldn’t get married. Insisting that no one marries is no better than insisting that everyone does. What we would say is, think about what works for you. Think about how to live your life. Think about how to have your relationships. Think about how social rules and expectations are shaping what you are doing. A basic point, really . . .

96 CONCLUSION

think. Because of the powerful and ubiquitous rules and expectations of marriage, we often don’t think. Uncritically following social rules, expectations, and taken-for-granted assumptions can make our lives simpler. But not necessarily better. Marriage, we believe, is too significant of a decision to do without thought.

CONCLUSION 97

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