The Limits of Marriage : Why Getting Everyone Married Won't Solve All Our Problems 9781498512930, 9781498512923

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The Limits of Marriage

The Limits of Marriage Why Getting Everyone Married Won’t Solve All Our Problems Gary R. Lee

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lee, Gary R. The limits of marriage : why getting everyone married won't solve all our problems / Gary R. Lee. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4985-1292-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4985-1293-0 (electronic) 1. Marriage. 2. Families. 3. Marriage--United States. 4. Single people. 5. Families--United States. 6. Single people--United States. I. Title. HQ503.L44 2015 306.81--dc23 2015003872 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Naomi, for a lifetime of a wonderful marriage and To Louis, for a lifetime of friendship

Contents

Tables and Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Part I: Marriage in Modern Times 1 The Marriage Conundrum 2 The Retreat from Marriage

1 13

Part II: Married People Really Are Better Off 3 Marriage and Psychological Well-Being 4 Marriage and Physical Health 5 Marriage and Economic Well-Being 6 Marriage and the Well-Being of Children

31 53 71 85

Part III: Why the Decline in Marriage? 7 Who Is Not Marrying? 8 Demographic and Economic Explanations 9 Why Did This Happen?

103 123 151

Part IV: What Do We Do? 10 Choices We Make vs. Choices We Have

173

References

191

Author Index

213

Subject Index

221 vii

viii

About the Author

Contents

229

Tables and Figures

Figure 2.1

Women’s Marriage Rate, 1890–2011

14

Table 2.1

Marital Status of the Population Age Fifteen and Over, by Sex, 1950–2013

17

Table 2.2

Median Age at Marriage, by Sex, 1890–2010

18

Table 2.3

Marital Status of the Population Age Fifteen and Over, by Race and Sex, 1950–2013

19

Table 2.4

Births per 1,000 Unmarried Women Age Fifteen to Forty-Four, by Race and Hispanic Origin of Mother, United States, 1980–2011

21

Table 2.5

Living Arrangements of Children under Eighteen Years Old, 1960–2013

23

Table 2.6

Living Arrangements of Children under Eighteen Years Old, by Race and Hispanic Origin, 2013

24

Table 3.1

Personal Happiness by Marital Status by Year, Young Adults Age Twenty-Five to Thirty-Nine, General Social Survey

34

Table 4.1

Age-Adjusted Prevalence of Various Health Conditions by Marital Status and Sex, American Adults Age Eighteen and Over

56

Table 5.1

Median Income of Families by Type of Family, 2013

72

Table 5.2

Family Income by Family Type and Presence of Children under Eighteen, 2012

74

Table 5.3

Poverty, Receipt of Food Stamps and Public Assistance for Children under Eighteen Years by Living Arrangement: United States, 2013

76

Table 7.1

Marital Status by Sex, Age, and Race/Ethnicity, 2013

105

Table 7.2

Marital Status by Age, Sex, and Education, 2013

109

Table 7.3

Marital Status of Men, by Age, Race/Ethnicity, and Income, 2013

114

ix

Acknowledgments

A lot of people have helped me write this book, although some of them don’t know it. First, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my many colleagues in the Department of Sociology here at Bowling Green State University. I have benefited enormously from both their counsel in innumerable conversations, and from their research and scholarship, which is among the best in the world in this subject area. Susan Brown, Steve Cernkovich, Al DeMaris, Steve Demuth, Wendy Manning, Laura Sanchez, and Ray Swisher, among many others, have listened to my arguments, argued right back at me, and provided support and advice all the way through this project. I am grateful to have been a small part of such a wonderful department. Another of my colleagues, John Hoag, gave me great feedback on the parts of the book that draw on economists’ research and helped me avoid a few truly egregious errors. My doctoral students, too numerous to list individually, have been a great source of inspiration to me over the years. I’m proud of every one of them. One in particular, Krista Payne, provided invaluable assistance with some data analyses and preparation of tables and figures. The book is better because of her help. As we approach our forty-seventh anniversary, my wife Naomi is a continual reminder of how wonderful marriage can be and how lucky I am to be married to her. In addition, she read every page of this manuscript multiple times and gave me some excellent suggestions for improvement. I absolutely could not have written this book without her. I’m eternally grateful. The rest of my family—Laura, Danielle, and Mark—are amazing sources of support and great people. Having them in my life is an enormous stroke of good fortune.

xi

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Acknowledgments

Finally, my friend Louis—it’s been far too long since I heard your voice, but you are an inspiration to me every day. A good friend, like a good spouse, is priceless. You were the best. All of these people, and many more I haven’t mentioned, helped with this book with substantive advice and moral support. They made it better. Any errors or shortcomings that remain are, of course, my responsibility alone.

Part I

Marriage in Modern Times

Chapter One

The Marriage Conundrum

Marriage has been in the news a lot lately. It has attracted attention for two very different, and somewhat paradoxical, reasons. On one hand, many gays and lesbians want to marry their partners, or at least want to have the right to marry their partners. Many other people think they shouldn’t have this right, and many states have passed legislation or constitutional amendments that restrict marriage to the union of a man and a woman. But these laws are rapidly being overturned by courts, and public opinion is turning in the direction of favoring gay marriage. At this writing, thirty-five states permit marriages between same-sex couples, reflecting a recent upsurge of support for gay marriage by legislators, courts, and the general public. Still, a great many people around the country who want to marry are prohibited from doing so, and a substantial fraction of the population agrees with the prohibition. On the other hand, a much larger number of people for whom there are no legal or cultural barriers to marriage are not marrying. As we’ll document below, a lower proportion of American adults is married today than at any point in our recorded history. More people are remaining unmarried throughout their lives. Many people who do marry are marrying later in their lives than ever before, remaining single until ages when previous cohorts would have been well along in their married lives. Many people who do marry are divorcing, and remaining divorced rather than remarrying; although the divorce rate has declined slightly over the past couple of decades, the postdivorce remarriage rate has declined more steeply (Brown and Lin 2013). The proportion of unmarried adults in our population has been increasing, and the proportion of married adults declining, since about 1970. As we’ll see shortly, these are not small changes; the marital status distribution of our population is amazingly different today than it was forty or fifty years ago. 1

2

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This is due largely to the declining marriage rate—the number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried women aged fifteen and over per year. In 1970 the marriage rate was 76.5; in 2013 it was 31.2 (Payne 2014a). There has been a rapid, large-scale “retreat from marriage” among the heterosexual population, which shows little sign of abating. Furthermore, an increasing number of today’s unmarried adults have children. There are more single-parent families now than ever before. Many of these families are consequences of divorce (and the slowing rate of remarriage), but a growing number are due to the rising incidence of childbearing among never-married women and, to some extent, formerly married women. Perhaps more accurately, there are more unmarried adult women now, and a high proportion of them have children. As we’ll show in the next chapter (see table 2.5), today nearly a quarter of all American children live with their mothers only, and over 4 percent live with their fathers only. That’s over twenty million children who live with a single parent, and the number continues to increase. This is due directly to the declining prevalence of marriage among American adults. WHY DO WE CARE? This trend is interesting in part because of the overwhelming evidence that married people are, in a great many ways, better off than unmarried people. Data from across the social sciences show quite conclusively that married people are happier, healthier, and wealthier than all flavors of unmarried people, including the never-married and cohabiting as well as the divorced and widowed. In fact, one doesn’t need advanced training in the social sciences to realize this; almost everyone knows it from their own personal and/ or vicarious experiences. And, of course, the children of married parents are much better off than those of single or divorced parents, on all of the dimensions mentioned above plus many others such as behavior problems (or the absence thereof), school performance, occupational attainment, and their own family lives as adults. We’ll spend a substantial proportion of this book documenting the advantages of married people and their children. There are some exceptions, nuances, and complications in the details, but there’s relatively little disagreement on the general principle: Married people (and their kids) really are better off. Because of this, many scholars, editorialists, and others argue that we would be better off as a society if we returned to the marital status profile of the country in, say, 1970 or so. More adults would be happy and healthy, more families would have adequate incomes, and more children would have two parents and therefore happier, more secure lives. Increasing the marriage rate is seen by many as a solution to a large number of individual difficulties and social problems.

The Marriage Conundrum

3

MARRIAGE AND AMERICAN CULTURE Why, if the advantages of marriage are so extensive and so obvious, are we marrying less today than ever before? This is a question that has been addressed more and more frequently in both the scientific literature and the popular press. There has been a spate of books in the past couple of decades that examine this issue (e.g., Blankenhorn 1995; Carlson 2005, 2007; Carlson and Mero 2007; Cherlin 2009; Edin and Kefalas 2005; Institute for American Values 2005; Sawhill 2014; Waite and Gallagher 2000; Whitehead 1996; J. Wilson 2002). So why do we need another one? At the risk of some overgeneralization, it’s reasonably fair to say that most of the other books that have tackled this question have posed an answer in terms of a change (some say “decline”) in our value system. Americans, in brief, don’t value marriage as much as they formerly did. We’re not marrying because we don’t think it’s important; because we believe we can have satisfactory lives without marrying; because we’ve become too selfish to share our time and resources with others; because the cult of personal fulfillment tells us to do whatever makes us happy as individuals; because we have lost the sense of responsibility and obligation to others, including spouses and children. One of the most comprehensive, best-documented, and in some respects best-reasoned of these books is Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s (2000) The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better off Financially. It has also been the most influential, at least in the social science community. Waite and Gallagher do a masterful job of reviewing the research showing statistical associations between marriage and mental health, physical health, longevity, income and wealth, and the well-being of children. They conclude that married people and their families are advantaged in almost every way that matters, and they are quite correct. Their causal attributions, as I will argue throughout this book, are much more suspect. They see the decline in the prevalence of marriage as primarily a matter of a changing culture; we marry less because we value marriage less. Our fragile families are at least partly the consequence of a certain set of interrelated cultural ideas—about the importance of fathers, the nature of sex and commitment, the obligations of parents to each other and to their children—that are relatively recent and hardly inevitable. We can change our minds if we choose. (Waite and Gallagher 2000, 187)

The first solution they recommend to the problem of marital decline is to “get the message out” (p. 188). Make sure people know how important marriage is to their well-being and that of their children. If people only realized the many benefits of marriage, the assumption seems to be, they

4

Chapter 1

would certainly get married and stay married. As they said (p. 187), “We can change our minds if we choose.” Have Americans really chosen not to marry? In a sense, of course, they have—although as we’ll see in later chapters, many people face a very restricted range of choices. But the presumption behind the question, as Waite and Gallagher ask it, is that we have chosen not to marry for reasons contrary to our own self-interests. After all, if people are choosing not to marry even though marriage would greatly improve their lives, they must not know how beneficial marriage is. We must tell them. Waite and Gallagher (p. 191) urge readers to buy a copy of their book and give it to unmarried children, siblings, and friends. Their motive here, I’m sure, really isn’t to increase their royalty income, but to convey their message that marriage is a very good thing and that people who marry will be better off because of it. If people find this out, Waite and Gallagher believe they will behave accordingly and get married. A similar approach to the problems posed by the declining marriage rate is taken by David Popenoe and his colleagues in the National Marriage Project, formerly based at Rutgers University and more recently at the University of Virginia (National Marriage Project 2006, 2007; Institute for American Values 2012). Among other publications, they produce a report each year on “The State of Our Unions: Marriage in America.” They do an excellent job of assembling and reporting data on marriage behavior, which are becoming increasingly difficult to find due to cutbacks at the Bureau of the Census. Some of the best and most accurate recent statistics on marriage, cohabitation, divorce, and attitudes toward these phenomena are found in their reports. But again, their causal analyses and explanations are worthy of some debate. Popenoe (2007) attributes falling marriage rates to the rise and spread of an ideology he terms “secular individualism.” He defines this in a number of ways, including “the gradual abandonment of religious attendance and beliefs, a strong leaning toward ‘expressive’ values that are preoccupied with personal autonomy and self-fulfillment, and a political emphasis on egalitarianism and tolerance of diverse lifestyles” (p. 9). At another point he refers to the “dominant thrust” of secular individualism as “the excessive pursuit of personal autonomy, immediate gratification, and short-term personal gain” (p. 12). These are the changes in values that Waite and Gallagher (2000) also implicated, without giving them a distinctive name. The ideology of secular individualism, in Popenoe’s analysis, has caused people to choose not to marry, to bring children into the world without the aid and assistance of a spouse, and in general to turn away from traditional families. “An established empirical generalization is that the greater the dominance of secular individualism in a culture, the more fragmented the families” (Popenoe 2007, 9).

The Marriage Conundrum

5

Unfortunately he provides no citations to any evidence documenting this established generalization, but he assures us that it is established. Again without documentation, Popenoe identifies the causes of secular individualism: “So far in the Western experience, at least, the dominant sociological factors associated with secular individualism are that the higher the educational and income levels of a population, and the more urbanized it is, the greater the degree of secular individualism” (Popenoe 2007, 11). It’s not clear what it is about education, income, or urban life that leads to secular individualism, but Popenoe is quite emphatic about the connection. There’s a pretty direct implication here that, if we were only less educated and less wealthy, we’d be better off because we wouldn’t be afflicted with secular individualism, which is antithetical to marriage. We would then be more likely to marry, which would make us wealthier because marriage is associated with greater income and wealth. So, by this logic, decreases in education, income, and wealth will lead to increases in income and wealth, through the magic of increased rates and prevalence of marriage. Confused? Me too. But wait, there’s more! Popenoe (2007, 6) has previously noted, quite correctly, that marriage rates have been declining and divorce rates increasing almost entirely among the less-educated segments of our population. There is a growing “marriage gap” between college-educated people, who are marrying quite regularly (although at later ages, we should note) and divorcing less often, and those without a college education, who are marrying less and divorcing more (see Goldstein and Kenney 2001; Pew Research Center 2011b; Schoen and Cheng 2006). It is people on the lower ends of the education and income distributions who are spending more and more of their lives unmarried, and who are also more likely to have children outside of marriage. So, to recap the logic: The declining rate of marriage is caused by the rise of secular individualism, which in turn is caused by increasing levels of education and income. But the marriage rate is actually declining primarily among people with lower levels of education and income; the better-educated and wealthier are much more likely to marry and less likely to divorce. Unless we want to argue that some people’s education and income cause other people to avoid marriage (an argument that, to my knowledge, no one has made), there’s a direct contradiction here that Popenoe appears not to see. He does not explain how a phenomenon allegedly caused by education and income occurs most often in their absence. We’ll see shortly that this conundrum is endemic to cultural explanations of the retreat from marriage. Although many cultural arguments are more nuanced than Popenoe’s, they all bump up against the problem of predicting that marriage should be declining among the wealthy, when the clear reality is that it is declining among the poor.

6

Chapter 1

Nonetheless, Popenoe offers a solution that is very similar to Waite and Gallagher’s (2000). We need to promote marriage in families, schools, churches, and government. We need to make young people aware of the benefits of marriage. “The empirical evidence is now strong and persuasive that a good marriage enhances personal happiness, economic success, health and longevity. This evidence should become a regular part of our educational programs and our public discourse” (Popenoe 2007, 11). The logic expressed by these scholars is already a very visible component of our public discourse on marriage. Nowhere is this more evident than in our concern over the welfare of children of single parents. As one example, the editorialist Kathleen Parker wrote a column in December of 2012 about the travails of the children of single mothers: “Children who grow up without fathers tend to fall into patterns of destructive behavior—from drug use and truancy to early promiscuity, delinquency, and, in many cases, incarceration. Children raised in fatherless homes are more likely to grow up in poverty, which is no fault of their mothers but is a fact.” She’s right, and there is a veritable mountain of research that supports her conclusions. Children who grow up in single-parent homes do experience the problems she lists, and many more, at higher rates than children from twoparent families. We’ll examine some of the evidence on this in chapter 6. But there are two issues in this editorial, and indeed in almost all of the debates we have conducted for years about single-parent families, that concern me. One is the assumption, evident throughout the article, that the absence of fathers is the cause of the children’s problems. No one denies that the children of two-parent families are better off, but it simply does not follow that adding a father to a mother-child family solves all those problems, or even mitigates them substantially. It certainly might be very helpful in some cases, but in others perhaps not so much. It is perfectly possible that both children’s problems and father-absence are consequences (or “symptoms”) of other problems and issues, which might make it impossible for fathers to be there, or mean that the father’s presence might actually exacerbate the family’s problems if he were there. We need to inquire carefully into what other causes there might be, because we’re not going to ameliorate the symptoms without addressing the causes. The other issue is the remedy Ms. Parker proposes to the problem of father-absence. She suggests that President Obama use the authority of his office to encourage unmarried fathers to take responsibility. She urges him to say something like the following: “Men, be men. Marry the mother of your children. Be a father to the children you sire. Go home and stay there.” So what we need to do to solve the problems of single-parent families is to ensure that a second parent is added, and we do this by having an authority figure tell single fathers to take responsibility. The solution to the problem of

The Marriage Conundrum

7

single-mother families is to have the president give single fathers a good scolding. The implication of both Waite and Gallagher’s (2000) and Popenoe’s (2007) analyses and Parker’s (2012) editorial is that young adults need to be informed and convinced that marriage is a good idea. If they realize this, and thus see the personal benefits of being married for themselves and any children they may have, they will change their behavior and embrace marriage. Marriage, from this point of view, is a choice we can all make, and we need to be encouraged to make the “right” choice, for our own benefit and the benefit of our children. I disagree. I don’t disagree about the value of marriage, nor do I disagree with the contention that married people and their children are better off than unmarried people and their children. They are, and we’ll document the advantages of the married throughout this book, although we’ll also see that some important qualifications are necessary. What I disagree with is the idea that we can effect major changes in the marriage behavior of our population by simply convincing people that marriage is a good idea. We’d be wasting our breath; people know it already. In spite of this, they are marrying less often. Explaining this seeming paradox is not a simple task, and it requires reviewing and synthesizing a lot of evidence, but we can do it. Trying to solve the problems of single-parent families by telling people to behave themselves and take responsibility for their children is unlikely to succeed. This strategy completely ignores the possibility that the behavior of single parents may have causes other than the choices they make. In fact, I’ll suggest at several points in the pages that follow that not marrying the mothers of their children may be a responsible thing for some men to do under certain circumstances. Marriage is a very good idea for most people—but, under current conditions, not everyone. The benefits of marriage are contingent on many things—including, certainly, the kinds of spouses available. And, for an increasing proportion of our population, marriage is not a “choice” they actually have, but rather an ideal they cannot attain. Although there has been some increase in the normative acceptance of non-marriage in recent years (Pew Research Center 2011a; Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001), Americans still very much value marriage. There are some people who see marriage as legalized prostitution, as a means of subjugating women to men, and/or as an unnecessary impediment to personal freedom and fulfillment—but not many, and I am certainly not among them. The vast majority of young adults both wants and intends to marry (Cherlin 2005; Hill and Yeung 1999; National Marriage Project 2007; Pew Research Center 2010; Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001); this has changed very little over the years. The vast majority of people who get married want to stay married; virtually no one enters marriage with a divorce plan already formu-

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lated. And almost everyone understands that married people have better lives, and that their children have many advantages over those of unmarried parents. Few people aspire to be single parents—although some see it as the best choice they have, and some see marriage and parenthood as separate issues and separate decisions. Our marriage rate is declining in spite of widespread positive attitudes toward marriage and nearly universal desires to marry. I’ll argue here that we won’t actually increase our marriage rate by trying to convince people to do something they already want to do. In other words, while our culture may have accommodated to our declining marriage rate in many ways (e.g., increasing tolerance for non-marriage in most segments of the population), I don’t believe the ultimate causes of that declining marriage rate are cultural. There are some compelling and sophisticated analyses of cultural influences on marital behavior, which call attention to the rise of individualism and individualistic values in America. Lesthaege’s (1995, 1998; Lesthaege and Niedert 2006) conceptualization of the “second demographic transition” attributes trends such as decreasing marriage rates, declining fertility, and increased tolerance for nonmarital childbearing and cohabitation to the declining influence of religious and political institutions, which in turn promotes an increased emphasis on individuality. Lesthaege posits that, when meeting material needs is no longer the dominant concern of most people, values change to emphasize “higher-order needs” such as self-actualization. This promotes the primacy of the individual, and de-emphasizes the value of social ties such as marriage and obligations to others, including spouses and children. Lesthaege’s theory identifies a cause similar to Popenoe’s (the widespread satisfaction of material needs, or a generally high standard of living; Popenoe simply called it education and income), and bumps up against the same problem that Popenoe’s (2007) argument does: If the cause of declining marriage rates is increased prosperity, why should the decline in marriage be most evident among the least prosperous? Andrew Cherlin (2009), one of our leading family demographers, attributes the changes in marriage behavior to the rise of what he calls “expressive individualism,” a concept similar to Popenoe’s secular individualism. The ideology of expressive individualism gives primacy to self-development. Marriages are no longer evaluated according to whether they contribute to the production and support of children (“institutional marriage”), or to the sharing of life experiences with one special person (“companionate marriage”), but instead in terms of their contributions to the development of the self, individual growth, and personal fulfillment (“individualized marriage”). Cherlin focuses much of his explanatory efforts on how expressive individualism has contributed to the increasing fragility of marriages and high rates of switching partners, but the concept applies equally well to the issue of declining marriage rates: People who value personal growth and fulfillment

The Marriage Conundrum

9

above all else will be motivated to marry only if they see marriage as contributing to these objectives, which may be attained in many ways other than marriage. Cherlin dates the emergence of expressive individualism to the 1960s, and connects it clearly to other cultural changes of the time such as the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, and the feminist movement (Cherlin 2009, 88–90). In turn, he sees the emergence of these cultural changes at this particular time as consequences of the rapidly increasing prosperity of the 1950s; when people didn’t need to worry so much about their economic subsistence, they could turn their attentions to issues of social justice and personal fulfillment. In this sense, Cherlin’s causal attributions are similar to both Popenoe’s and Lesthaege’s: Widespread prosperity leads to rampant individualism (secular or expressive; either will do), which in turn causes people to devalue marriage. They share a similar problem: If people turn away from marriage because they can afford to focus on personal fulfillment, we should expect marriage rates to decrease most rapidly among the most prosperous. We’ll show throughout this book that precisely the opposite has occurred; it is people who have to worry about where their next meal is coming from who are least likely to marry. There is a second, related problem that all of the cultural arguments face, which we will delve into rather deeply in subsequent chapters. Actually, it’s the same problem but on the “macro” or societal level rather than the “micro” or individual level. The decline in marriage has been quite precipitous since about 1970. This is a period of our economic history during which prosperity has not increased, at least for the great majority of our population. In fact, there is abundant evidence (see chapter 9) that we are, on average, considerably less prosperous now than we were during the middle decades of the twentieth century, when we were marrying at much higher rates. If “secular individualism,” “expressive individualism,” and the second demographic transition are all brought about by increasing prosperity and the satisfaction of material needs, why has one of their alleged consequences (the declining marriage rate) appeared amid declining prosperity? We’ll show in later chapters that, at the time in our history when we were on average most prosperous, we were marrying at record rates, and that the decrease in marriage rates corresponds quite closely to decreases in prosperity among the general population. MARRIAGE AS A PERSONAL CHOICE People do indeed choose whether or not to marry. But they make these choices not in the abstract, between marriage as a social institution and singleness as an idealized representation of personal freedom, but rather in

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the context of the real-world options that are actually available to them. We will show later that some people (primarily poor, minority women) cannot marry because there are not enough potential spouses in the population; you can’t choose to marry someone who doesn’t exist. For some unmarried people potential spouses are available, but the “quality” of those potential spouses, specifically in economic terms, is such that marrying them may not result in the benefits that are statistically associated with marriage. Finally, when economically attractive spouses are available, there is competition for them—one must convince them (or at least one of them) that one is an attractive spouse oneself. As frustrated suitors of both sexes have known since time immemorial, marriage is not a unilateral decision; the cooperation of a willing partner is required. People who remain unmarried aren’t merely exercising poor judgment. This explanation for the declining marriage rate is much too simplistic. Nor is it logical to assume that unmarried people are making choices that are contrary to their own best interests. Undoubtedly this is true in a few individual cases, but a rash of poor judgment can’t explain a 19 percent drop in the proportion of adults who are married since 1960 (see table 2.1). I will argue in this volume that, while we have certainly seen some changes in our culture that involve marriage, these changes are largely secondary to demographic and economic changes that have limited both opportunities to marry and potential gains to marriage (that is, benefits experienced by married people due to the fact that they are married) among large segments of the population. In other words, more people are unmarried because the choice of marriage is not available to some people, and for other people the choices with which they are actually confronted are such that marriage would not materially improve their lives and remaining unmarried (or cohabiting) is actually the best option for them. We won’t reverse the decline in marriage until we address the demographic and economic factors that have created this situation. Some years ago as an undergraduate, I was trying to choose my academic major and, as many students do, was debating the merits of psychology versus sociology. I wasn’t sure I entirely understood the difference, so I asked a number of my professors—several from each department—how they distinguished the two disciplines. I got strikingly different answers from different people, most of which I don’t remember at all. But the one I do remember, which has struck me over the years as increasingly insightful, came from a sociology professor named Virgil Kroeger. After prefacing his statement with the qualification that the differences between the disciplines were many, complex, nuanced, and subtle, he said (and I remember this verbatim): “Psychology is about the choices we make; sociology is about the choices we have.”

The Marriage Conundrum

11

Experts will certainly disagree over the merits of this as a means of differentiating the two disciplines, but it has frequently caused me to ponder over the role of choice in human lives. We may wonder why some people don’t make the choices we or others have made, particularly when we see or believe that desirable consequences have followed from those choices. If others don’t experience those desirable consequences, we often attribute this to their failure to choose correctly. Several years ago, as part of a program my university was conducting at the time, I led a class of incoming freshmen in an exercise in “values clarification.” The objective was to show students that they have values that influence their lives and their behavior, and that others may have different values. Students were presented with sets of opposing statements and asked to agree with one or the other statement in each pair. Then, when the students had sorted themselves into groups depending on the statement each one chose, a few students were asked why they picked one or the other. One pair of statements involved health care. Students were asked whether or not they would be willing to pay higher taxes so that everyone could receive health and medical care; this was prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act, so the topic had not been in the news as much as it has been recently. About two-thirds of the students said yes, and the remaining onethird said no. The “yes” group offered several reasons for their answer, most of which centered on the idea that health care should be a basic human right. The most interesting rationale, though, was provided by a young woman in the “no” camp. She said she wasn’t motivated to pay for health care for people who chose not to take jobs with benefits, because she was not responsible for their “stupid choices.” Is it really the case that millions of people have the option of taking a job that provides health care, and choose not to take it? Of course not. The number of such jobs has always been limited, and has been shrinking for decades. (As of this writing, the “employer mandate” of the Affordable Care Act won’t kick in for another year or so, and even then won’t pertain to all employers.) Receiving employer-provided health care is not a choice people have failed to make, but rather a choice that many people don’t have. The difference is critical. We can encourage and persuade people to make sensible choices when they have them; we cannot persuade people to choose an option that isn’t actually available to them. We live our lives in different circumstances. Options that are available to some of us simply don’t exist for others. And making apparently similar choices may have hugely different consequences for different people, depending on their circumstances. Rather than asking why so many people are making the “wrong” choices, perhaps we should ask whether the “right” choices are possible for them, and whether making those choices (if they have them) would lead to the same consequences for them as for those who

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have actually made those choices. Rather than asking why so many people are choosing not to marry, we need to ask whether marriage is a realistic choice for everyone, and whether those who do not marry would actually benefit from marriage if they would (or could) choose to marry. We’ll begin our exploration of these issues by examining the evidence on changing marital patterns in the United States since the middle of the last century, with a brief look at some other countries as well. In subsequent chapters we’ll investigate both the causes and the consequences of these trends.

Chapter Two

The Retreat from Marriage

The objective of this chapter is to describe the marriage behavior of contemporary Americans, and to make sense of it by putting it in a historical and comparative context. It’s not my intent to go too far back in history; the great changes in marriage that I address throughout this book have occurred in my lifetime—in fact, since my marriage in 1968. But it is difficult to understand contemporary marriage patterns without comparing them to those of previous cohorts of Americans, or those of other societies. How have we changed in recent history, and how do these changes (and our current patterns) compare with the rest of the world? The ultimate objective of this book is to explain the changes. MARRIAGE RATES IN AMERICAN HISTORY Figure 2.1 is a graph of the refined marriage rate in the United States from 1890 through 2011. The rate is “refined” because it reports the frequency of occurrence of the event it indexes (marriage) among people who are actually eligible to experience the event. “Crude” rates tell us how many people per so many total population (usually 1,000 for statistics such as marriage rates) experience an event. These rates standardize for population size, so that large and small populations can be directly compared. However, they don’t account for population composition. With respect to marriage rates, the crude rate will be artificially low if a population contains unusually high numbers of children or people who are already married, because these people appear in the denominator (total population) but cannot appear in the numerator (people who get married). In the United States, for example, the crude marriage rate dropped precipitously between 1950 and 1960, not because marriage suddenly became less popular, but because the population of young 13

14

Chapter 2

children was expanding rapidly due to the baby boom, and in 1960 these children were too young to marry. The refined rate is a much better indicator of the propensity to marry because it counts only people who are eligible to marry in the denominator. In this case, the denominator consists of unmarried women aged fifteen and older. The numerator is the number of marriages per year. Figure 2.1 shows that the refined marriage rate in the United States varied considerably from 1890 through the middle of the twentieth century, rising sharply after both world wars and dropping during the Great Depression. In 1970, 76.5 of every 1,000 unmarried women married, a figure that approximates the long-term average. But the rate dropped by more than half (actually 59.3 percent) between 1970 and 2011, by which time only 31.1 of every 1,000 unmarried women married. By any standards, that is a remarkably steep decline. There is absolutely no wonder that a change of this magnitude, in such a short period of historical time, is a cause for concern. The most recent data (Payne 2014a) show that, by 2013, the refined marriage rate in the United States had increased to 31.2. This actually represents just a couple years of stability rather than a turnaround, of course, and may be a consequence of the gradual recovery from the Great Recession of 2007–2009. It would be highly premature to suggest that the period of declin-

Figure 2.1. Women’s Marriage Rate, 1890–2011. Taken from Marriage: More Than a Century of Change, a publication of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research (2013). Used here by courtesy of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research.

The Retreat from Marriage

15

ing marriage rates is over. Even if we do stabilize at this point, Americans are still marrying at extremely low rates by historical standards. MARRIAGE RATES AROUND THE WORLD Our focus in this book is on what is happening in the United States, but we should recognize at the outset that America is not at all alone in the experience of declining marriage rates. Kalmijn (2007) showed that total firstmarriage rates (the proportion of women who ultimately marry during their lifetimes) decreased substantially between 1990 and 2000 for a sample of thirty-seven European nations. Geist (2010) analyzed changes in crude marriage rates for twenty-three countries from the early 1960s to the mid-2000s, and also found substantial overall decreases in marriage rates. In fact, averaging rates across all years, she found that the United States had the highest marriage rate in her sample. The lowest rates were found in Eastern European and Scandinavian countries. Geist’s (2010) analysis was based on crude marriage rates, which have the advantage of being fairly widely available. However, as we noted above, crude rates can vary according to population composition as well as according to the propensity to marry. Lee and Payne (2010) compared the refined marriage rate in the United States to the same rate in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Japan, looking at changes from 1970 through 2008. This is the period during which the marriage rate in the United States declined from 76.5 to 34.8 (figure 2.1). Over the same time frame, the number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried women decreased from 66.9 to 30.8 in Japan, from 34.0 to 21.9 in Sweden, and from 59.5 to 19.7 in the United Kingdom. The marriage rate in 2008 was higher in the United States than in any of these countries, and the pace of the decrease in the United States was comparable to Japan and slower than the United Kingdom. The decline was more rapid than Sweden’s, but Sweden’s marriage rate was already very low in 1970. Obviously America is not unique in terms of changes in marriage behavior. In fact, we are actually marrying at higher rates today than are people in most other similar nations. The phenomenon we’re examining here is, if not worldwide, at least very widespread among contemporary societies. Lee and Payne (2010) argue that the generality of declining marriage rates suggests that explanations involving cultural causes are not highly credible. Of course nations around the world could be experiencing similar cultural changes, but this doesn’t seem likely given that marriage rates are decreasing in societies as diverse as Eastern Europe, the United States, and Japan. In the analyses that follow we’ll be looking almost exclusively at evidence from and studies done in the United States, but we need to remember that similar things are

16

Chapter 2

happening in many other countries. It is likely that at least some of the causes are similar as well. MARITAL STATUS IN THE UNITED STATES In the United States, the declining marriage rate has caused a substantial change in the marital status distribution of the population. In proportional terms, fewer American adults are married today than at any time in our recorded history. The percentage of the American population that is married reached a peak in about 1960, and began to decline around 1970. The decline continues today. Table 2.1 shows the percentage of Americans age fifteen and older by marital status for census years from 1950 to 2010, and for 2013. The separated are included with the married in this table, but constitute a very small percentage in each year. In 1960, nearly 70 percent of men and over 65 percent of women were married. By 1970 these percentages had begun to decline, and the decrease has been quite steady since then. Today 54 percent of men and about 52 percent of women are married. This is also a substantial change in a relatively short period of time. Some of the decrease in the proportion of the population that is married is attributable to the rising divorce rate, and the consequent growth of the divorced population. The crude divorce rate actually peaked around 1981 at 5.3 per 1,000 population (National Center for Health Statistics 1985), and has slightly and gradually declined since then to 3.4 per 1,000 population in 2009 (Tejada-Vera and Sutton 2010). However, the remarriage rate among divorced persons has also decreased in recent decades (Brown and Lin 2013; Cherlin 2010; Lamidi and Cruz 2014), meaning that divorced people stay divorced longer, so in consequence we have more divorced people in the population. In 1960 only 1.8 percent of men and 2.6 percent of women were divorced; by 2013, 9 percent of men and 11.2 percent of women were divorced. That’s a big increase. But in absolute terms the growth of the never-married population has been just as large, increasing from 25 percent of men and 19 percent of women in 1960 to 34 and 29 percent, respectively, in 2013. The decrease in the married population is due as much to the greater number of never-married persons as to the higher number of divorced persons (Lamidi and Payne 2014). Of course, many people who have never married at one point in time will have married by a later point in time; the percentage of people who will spend their lives without marrying is a small fraction of the percentage that has not married at any single time. But comparing snapshots of the population at different points in historical time tells us a lot about how marriage behavior has changed.

The Retreat from Marriage

17

Table 2.1. Marital Status of the Population Age Fifteen and Over, by Sex, 1950–2013 MALES Year

N (1,000s)

Married

Singlea

Widowed

Divorced

1950

54,601

67.5

26.4

4.1

2.0

1960

60,273

69.3

25.3

3.5

1.8

1970

70,559

66.8

28.1

2.9

2.2

1980

81,947

63.2

29.6

2.4

4.8

1990

91,955

60.7

29.9

2.5

6.8

2000

103,114

57.9

31.3

2.5

8.3

2010

117,686

54.8

34.2

2.5

8.5

2013

121,067

54.0

34.4

2.6

9.0

FEMALES

a

Year

N (1,000s)

Married

Singlea

Widowed

Divorced

1950

57,102

65.8

20.0

11.8

2.4

1960

64,607

65.9

19.0

12.5

2.6

1970

77,766

61.9

22.1

12.5

3.5

1980

89,914

58.9

22.5

12.0

6.6

1990

99,838

56.9

22.8

11.5

8.9

2000

110,660

54.7

25.1

10.0

10.2

2010

124,364

52.5

27.4

9.1

11.1

2013

128,826

51.5

28.6

8.7

11.2

“Single” refers to never-married individuals.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (2013b, table MS–1).

Table 2.1 includes people as young as age fifteen, and of course no one expects very many teenagers to be married. Much of the growth in the nevermarried population, in fact, is due to a rapid increase in average age at first marriage that began about 1970. Median ages at first marriage are shown in table 2.2 for census years from 1890 through 2010, separately for men and women. The lowest median ages at first marriage were actually recorded in 1956: 22.5 years for men, 20.1 years for women. Over the next fifty-four years, the medians increased by 5.7 years (25.3 percent) for men and 6 years (29.9 percent) for women. These are amazingly rapid increases. The inclines have been particularly steep since 1970. The fastest change occurred in the 1980s, but the pattern continues even today. Americans are marrying later than ever

Chapter 2

18

Table 2.2. Median Age at Marriage, by Sex, 1890–2010 Year

Men

Women

1890

26.1

22.0

1900

25.9

21.9

1910

25.1

21.6

1920

24.6

21.2

1930

24.3

21.3

1940

24.3

21.5

1950

22.8

20.3

1960

22.8

20.3

1970

23.2

20.8

1980

24.7

22.0

1990

26.1

23.9

2000

26.8

25.1

2010

28.2

26.1

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (2007, table MS-2); and Elliott et al. (2012).

before, and especially later than they did in the 1950s and 1960s (see also Pew Research Center 2011b). The upshot of these changes is that, compared to the adult population of the United States around the middle of the last century, we have proportionally fewer married persons, and proportionally more never-married and divorced adults. (Because of increasing life expectancies, and the increase in divorce, there are also slightly fewer widowed persons today.) We’ll examine possible causes of these changes in later chapters. At this point, however, we should also note that these trends have proceeded much more rapidly and dramatically among blacks than whites. Table 2.3 shows changes in the marital status distributions of the black and white populations in the United States since 1950. For both men and women, the marital statuses of whites and blacks were quite comparable in 1950. A few more whites were married, and a few more blacks were never-married and widowed, but the differences were small. The percentages of whites who were married increased by 1960, while for blacks the decline had already begun, along with increases in the never-married (especially for men) and divorced (especially for women) categories. Since 1960 the decline in the married population has been much sharper among blacks, as has the increase in the never-married population. Except for the decade of the 1950s the trends have been similar for the races in terms of direction, but much stronger for blacks than whites.

The Retreat from Marriage

19

As of 2013, the marital status distributions of blacks and whites were remarkably different. One way of looking at this is to note that, for people age fifteen and over, nearly twice as many white men were married (57.7 percent) as never-married (29.3 percent), and white women were well over twice as likely to be married (54.8 percent) as never-married (23.4 percent). Among blacks, there were substantially more never-married than married men (48.1 percent vs. 39.9 percent) and women (46.2 percent vs. 33.3 percent). Many more whites than blacks are married today, and almost all of the difference is due to the greater proportions of blacks who have never married. Table 2.3. Marital Status of the Population Age Fifteen and Over, by Race and Sex, 1950–2013 (in percent) MALES Married

Never-Married

Widowed

Divorced

Year

White

Black

White

Black

White

Black

White

Black

1950

67.8

64.4

26.1

28.5

4.0

5.2

2.0

1.9

1960

70.3

60.9

24.5

32.4

3.4

4.8

1.8

2.0

1970

68.0

56.9

27.2

35.6

2.7

4.4

2.1

3.1

1980

65.0

48.9

28.1

41.1

2.3

3.7

4.7

6.3

1990

62.8

45.1

28.0

43.4

2.4

3.4

6.8

8.1

2000

60.0

42.8

29.1

44.9

2.5

2.8

8.4

9.5

2010

56.9

39.3

31.8

48.8

2.6

2.7

8.7

9.1

2013

57.7

39.9

29.3

48.1

2.9

2.6

10.1

12.2

FEMALES Married

Never-Married

Widowed

Divorced

Year

White

Black

White

Black

White

Black

White

Black

1950

66.2

62.0

19.9

20.7

11.5

14.6

2.4

2.7

1960

66.6

59.8

18.7

21.6

12.3

14.3

2.5

4.3

1970

62.8

54.1

21.3

27.7

12.4

13.8

3.4

4.4

1980

60.7

44.6

21.0

33.3

11.9

13.0

6.4

8.7

1990

59.1

40.2

20.6

36.9

11.6

11.3

8.6

11.2

2000

57.4

36.2

22.1

42.4

10.2

9.6

10.2

11.8

2010

55.3

33.3

24.3

45.2

9.3

9.1

11.2

12.4

2013

54.8

33.3

23.4

46.2

9.9

8.3

11.9

12.2

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (2007, table MS-1); (2010b, table A1); and (2013b, table A1).

20

Chapter 2

It is interesting to note that there was a slight uptick in the percentages of both black and white men who were married from 2010 to 2013, and small decreases in the percentage who had never married during the same period. White women also showed a small decrease in the percentage never-married. This reflects the very small uptick in the marriage rate in the last few years we noted earlier (Payne 2014a). Of course the time period is much too short, and the changes much too small, to indicate a reversal of the long-term trends; even suggesting a plateau is probably too optimistic. It is more likely that these minor changes reflect our gradual recovery from the 2007–2009 Great Recession. Later on we’ll spend several chapters on the connection between marriage rates and the economy. THE GROWTH IN NON-MARITAL CHILDBEARING The bottom line here is that fewer adults are married now than was the case in the mid-twentieth century. This is a matter of concern for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is the fact that an increasing proportion of unmarried adults (both never-married and divorced) have children. This is in large part a direct consequence of the fact that more people are staying unmarried for longer portions of their adult lives, including their childbearing years (Gray, Stockard, and Stone 2006). The percentage of children born to unmarried mothers in the United States has increased from 10.7 percent in 1970 (Hamilton, Martin, and Ventura 2009) to 40.7 percent in 2011 (National Center for Health Statistics 2013). Years ago, concern over the problems faced by children living in singleparent families was pretty much equivalent to concern over the consequences of divorce. Now, many children living with single parents are living with never-married mothers. The rate of births to unmarried women has gone up quite dramatically over the past several decades, as shown in table 2.4. This table shows the number of births per 1,000 unmarried women from 1980 through 2011, for the total population and for whites, Hispanics, and blacks. The “white total” column includes Hispanic whites, who were not differentiated from non-Hispanic whites until 1990, although their rates of nonmarital childbearing are radically different. Table 2.4 shows several interesting and important patterns. First, considering all races together, the rate of non-marital births increased rapidly during the 1980s, but only modestly since then, and has stabilized since 2005. Since 1990, the only population category that has shown an increase is nonHispanic whites, from 24.4 in 1990 to 32.3 in 2011 (a slight decrease from 32.9 in 2010). The non-marital birth rate peaked for blacks in 1990 at 90.5, and has declined quite sharply since then to 63.7 in 2011. The rate for Hispanics peaked later, at 96.2 in 2005, but also dropped abruptly after that,

The Retreat from Marriage

21

Table 2.4. Births per 1,000 Unmarried Women Ages Fifteen to Forty-Four, by Race and Hispanic Origin of Mother, United States, 1980–2011 Non-Hisp. Year

All Races

White Total

White

Hispanic

Black

1980

29.4

18.1

——

——

81.1

1985

32.8

22.5

——

——

77.0

1990

43.8

32.9

24.4

89.6

90.5

1995

44.3

37.0

28.1

88.8

74.5

2000

44.1

38.2

28.0

87.2

70.5

2005

47.2

43.2

30.4

96.2

67.2

2010

47.5

44.5

32.9

80.6

65.3

2011

46.0

42.7

32.3

75.1

63.7

Source: National Center for Health Statistics (2013), table 16.

to 75.1 in 2011. So we are not seeing a pattern of unrelenting increase across the population, and even the increase among non-Hispanic whites has been fairly modest. Nonetheless, over 40 percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, a figure that has quadrupled since 1970. The percentage of non-marital births has risen much more rapidly than the rate. This is because the overall birth rate, including the rate of births to married mothers, has declined even more from previously low levels. The National Center for Health Statistics (2013) reports that the general fertility rate was 63.2 per 1,000 women aged fifteen to forty-four in 2011, the lowest ever recorded in the United States. So because married women are having fewer children, the children born to unmarried women constitute a higher percentage of all births. In addition, as we’ve seen, unmarried women make up a larger proportion of the population than they did in prior years, so they contribute a higher proportion of births. The consequence is that, while rates of births to unmarried women have decreased in recent years, the percentage of all births that are to unmarried women has increased. The fact that four out of ten babies born in America are born to unmarried mothers is, for many reasons, a cause of great concern. TRENDS IN CHILDREN’S LIVING ARRANGEMENTS In consequence of both high rates of births to unmarried women and the high divorce rate, over the past several decades there has been a dramatic increase in the proportion of children living with only one parent. Trends in living arrangements of children from 1960 to 2013 are shown in table 2.5.

22

Chapter 2

In 1960 nearly nine of every ten children lived with two parents. By 2013 this proportion had decreased to just over two-thirds, with the percentage living with one parent (usually the mother) increasing from 9 percent to 28 percent. This is a statistic, however, for which the racial gap is enormous. Nearly three-quarters of white children today live with both parents. This is down from just over 90 percent in 1960, but the decline has been fairly gradual. In contrast, the proportion of black children who live with both parents decreased from about two-thirds in 1960 to less than 40 percent in 2013. Approximately half of all black children lived with their mothers only in 2013, compared with about one-fifth in 1960. Note that the increase in the proportion of children living in mother-only families occurred primarily (for whites) or entirely (for blacks) between 1960 and 1990; the percentages have stabilized since then. But they’re showing no signs of declining. Having large numbers of children living in single-parent families has become an enduring characteristic of American society, particularly for blacks, among whom it has been the majority pattern for the past couple of decades. Table 2.6 provides some recent data categorized in a slightly different way. These data are from 2013. They provide no historical perspective, but they do separate Hispanics from non-Hispanic whites, distinguish between biological parents who are married versus cohabiting, and give more detail on the marital statuses of single parents. There are a couple of important patterns in this table. First, black children are far less likely than white children to live with married parents, as we saw in table 2.5; they are also less likely to do so than Hispanic children, although the difference is a bit smaller. But this table also shows that black children who live with their mothers only are four times as likely to live with a never-married mother as a divorced mother. White children are nearly as likely as black children to live with a divorced mother, but one-eighth as likely to live with a never-married mother. Hispanics are intermediate between whites and blacks, but Hispanic children are over twice as likely to live with a never-married mother as a divorced mother. So among minority children, the great majority of those who live with their mothers only live with mothers who have never been married. Second, relatively few children live with cohabiting parents. But this is a single-point-in-time snapshot, and cohabitation is a highly transient status. Kennedy and Bumpass (2008) estimate that 40 percent of all children experience parental cohabitation prior to age twelve. They also show that just over half of all non-marital births are to women who are cohabiting; births to cohabiting couples as a proportion of all births have increased substantially in recent years (Monte and Ellis 2014). Many of these cohabiting relationships, however, either break up or lead to marriage in fairly short order, so relatively few children are living with cohabiting parents at any single point

The Retreat from Marriage

23

Table 2.5. Living Arrangements of Children under Eighteen Years Old, 1960–2013 (in percent) ALL CHILDREN Two

Mother

Father

Neither

Year

N (1,000s)

Parents

Only

Only

Parent

1960

63,727

87.7

8.0

1.1

3.2

1970

69,162

85.2

10.9

1.1

2.9

1980

63,427

76.7

18.0

1.7

3.7

1990

64,137

72.5

21.6

3.1

2.7

2000

72,012

69.1

22.4

4.2

4.2

2010

74,718

69.4

23.1

3.4

4.1

2013

73,910

68.5

23.7

4.1

3.7

WHITE CHILDREN Two

Mother

Father

Neither

Year

N (1,000s)

Parents

Only

Only

Parent

1960

55,077

90.9

6.1

1.0

1.9

1970

58,791

89.5

7.8

0.9

1.8

1980

52,242

82.7

13.5

1.6

2.2

1990

51,390

79.0

16.2

3.0

1.8

2000

56,455

75.3

17.3

4.3

3.1

2010

56,416

74.9

18.3

3.5

3.4

2013

54,277

74.3

18.5

4.0

3.2

BLACK CHILDREN Two

Mother

Father

Neither

Year

N (1,000s)

Parents

Only

Only

Parent

1960

8,650

67.0

19.9

2.0

11.0

1970

9,422

58.5

29.5

2.3

9.7

1980

9,375

42.2

43.9

1.9

12.0

1990

10,018

37.7

51.2

3.5

7.5

2000

11,412

37.6

49.0

4.2

9.2

2010

11,272

39.2

49.7

3.6

7.5

2013

11,086

38.8

50.5

4.6

6.1

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (2007, tables CH-1 to CH-3); (2010b, table C3); and (2013a, table C3).

Chapter 2

24

Table 2.6. Living Arrangements of Children under Eighteen Years Old, by Race and Hispanic Origin, 2013 (in percent) Non-Hisp. All Races

White

Black

Hispanic

N (1,000s)

7,3910

38,880

13,132

17,709

Both Parents

(68.5)

(77.4)

(41.1)

(65.1)

64.4

74.4

36.3

58.2

Married

4.1

3.0

4.8

6.9

Mother Only

Unmarried

(23.8)

(15.2)

(48.5)

(27.9)

Spouse Absent

1.2

0.6

1.6

2.2

Widowed

0.7

0.6

0.9

0.7

Divorced

7.1

7.5

8.2

6.2

Separated

3.4

2.1

5.0

5.3

Never Married

11.4

4.4

32.8

13.5

Father Only

(4.1)

(4.3)

(4.7)

(3.2)

Spouse Absent

0.2

0.1

0.2

0.2

Widowed

0.2

0.2

0.2

0.1

Divorced

1.8

2.4

1.2

0.8

Separated

0.7

0.7

0.8

0.7

Never Married

1.2

0.9

2.3

1.4

3.7

3.0

5.9

3.9

Neither Parent

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (2013a); calculated from table C3.

in time. Living with cohabiting parents is most common among Hispanic children (6.9 percent), and least common among non-Hispanic white children (3.0 percent), with black children (4.8 percent) intermediate. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (2010, 2011c) asked Americans to evaluate a number of trends in family behavior according to whether they represent a good thing for society, a bad thing for society, or make no difference. The trends included such things as “people living together without being married,” “unmarried couples raising children,” “gay/lesbian couples raising children,” and “women not ever having children.” Of the seven trends evaluated, only one, “single women having children,” was con-

The Retreat from Marriage

25

sidered to be a bad thing for society by a majority of respondents; nearly seven out of ten (69 percent) evaluated this trend negatively. Americans’ concerns about changes in family behavior are clearly focused on their consequences for children, especially those children who live with only one parent. However, over four in ten people thought that cohabitation, cohabiting couples raising children, and gay/lesbian couples raising children were bad for society as well. CONCLUSION We have indeed witnessed tremendous changes in the institution of marriage in the United States over the course of the past half-century or so. There is no doubt whatsoever that Americans are marrying less often, marrying later in their adult lives, divorcing more often (at least compared to 1970 and prior years), remarrying less often after divorce, and, for all of these reasons, raising children in single-parent families much more often than was the case in the middle of the twentieth century. Many people, including some scholars, evaluate these trends negatively; they represent changes in the way we live our lives that many of us perceive as undesirable, particularly insofar as they are believed to affect children. And the reasons for this perception are also pretty clear. Some people have moralistic concerns; these are not the subject of this discussion. But from an objective point of view, there is no doubt that married people and their children are better off than unmarried people and their children in a great variety of ways. On this I am in complete agreement (well, almost) with Waite and Gallagher (2000), Popenoe (2007), and many other authors who have addressed this issue. In part 2 of this book we will examine the evidence supporting this generalization. In those chapters we’ll show what the differences are between married and unmarried people in terms of psychological health, physical health and longevity, economic status, and the well-being of their children; in each case the differences favor the married. We will also begin the process of attempting to understand the causes of the differences between married and unmarried people. One perspective which has a certain appeal, closely aligned with the cultural explanations discussed in chapter 1, says that married people are better off than unmarried people because they are married. (Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? That’s part of its appeal.) In other words, the advantages of married people are caused by their marriages. It follows from this that, if those unmarried people only got married, they too would experience the benefits and advantages of marriage: greater happiness, improved health, longer lives, higher standards of living, and well-adjusted children who do better in school and prosper as adults. In this view, the decline in marriage is the consequence of a self-destructive

26

Chapter 2

culture change (e.g., the rise of “secular individualism”), and we counteract it by spreading the word about the benefits of marriage. If people only knew how much better off they’d be if they were married, why would they ever remain unmarried? In the pages that follow I will offer a different perspective. This perspective suggests that many of the advantages of married persons reflect characteristics of people who are able to marry, which they bring with them into their marriages. Marriage is an almost universally desired goal, as much so, or nearly as much so, as at any point in the past. However, because of demographic and economic changes, it has become increasingly difficult for many people to attain this goal. On the demographic side, we have imbalanced sex ratios in some segments of our young-adult population, particularly African Americans, making marriage literally impossible for large numbers of black women. On the economic side, the real wages of less-educated men have fallen since 1970; many have very low incomes or none at all, making them poor prospects for marriage. Marriages to men with very limited economic prospects are unlikely to improve the economic circumstances of poor women and their children. Marriage works well for those who can find economically attractive spouses. However, one must be economically attractive oneself to succeed in the competition. A major reason, although certainly not the only reason, why married people are better off than unmarried people is that better-off people are more likely to be able to marry. It would be convenient if the retreat from marriage were due to some kind of cultural malfunction. We could then constructively address the problem by education, information dissemination, and persuasion, for example by passing out copies of pro-marriage books, as Waite and Gallagher (2000) suggested. And in consequence, those who are convinced to marry would then become happier, healthier, and wealthier because they have made the right choice, and their children would benefit enormously. This would be a relatively inexpensive way to ameliorate all manner of social problems, including poverty. As someone who has spent a lifetime in the education business, I like it when we can suggest education as a way to solve our problems. But to the extent that the retreat from marriage is rooted in demographic and economic realities that prevent people from marrying, we won’t change the marriage behavior of our population without changing these fundamental underlying realities. This will be more expensive, and much more difficult. This perspective suggests that the retreat from marriage is not an ultimate cause of poverty, but rather a symptom of a changing economic landscape that has put many Americans in a situation where marriage is either impossible or very risky. The next four chapters will examine the evidence we have on the advantages of married people. We’ll look at psychological well-being, physical health and longevity, financial and economic status, and finally the well-

The Retreat from Marriage

27

being of children. In each case it is quite clear that married people and their children are advantaged over both the never-married and the formerly married. But in each case there are also important qualifications. It will also become clear that with regard to marriage, as well as everything else, correlation does not prove causation. Demonstrating that married people are, on average, better off than unmarried people does not necessarily mean that all unmarried people will experience these same advantages if they marry. Understanding how and why this is true is essential if we are to understand why so many people today are remaining unmarried.

Part II

Married People Really Are Better Off

Chapter Three

Marriage and Psychological Well-Being

As we have noted in the first two chapters, married people are better off than unmarried people in a great variety of ways. One of the advantages of married persons involves psychological well-being. Dozens of studies show that, on average, married people are happier, less distressed, less depressed, more satisfied with their lives, and generally in better mental health than unmarried people. An increasing number of longitudinal studies (those that follow the same individuals over time) show that people’s psychological well-being seems to improve after marriage; these studies are more convincing than those that report average differences between married and unmarried people because they show how the same people change from before marriage to after marriage. This evidence has led many scholars to conclude that marriage causes improvements in psychological well-being and mental health; married people are better off because they are married. Waite and Gallagher (2000, 77) are representative of this position: “The married really are emotionally healthier than their single counterparts because they’ve chosen to live in this particular type of committed relationship.” In other words, people who choose marriage experience a variety of psychological benefits that people who have made other choices fail to experience. We will review some of the evidence that supports Waite and Gallagher’s conclusion in this chapter; there is a lot of it. But we’ll also deal with some important qualifications. First, not all of the evidence is consistent with the conclusion that married people are better off psychologically. Second, the psychological benefits of marriage don’t accrue to everyone who marries; some benefit more than others, and some don’t benefit at all. Third, several studies suggest that the benefits of getting married may be temporary, and may dissipate over time. Fourth, those who marry run the risk of having their 31

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marriages end, and the consequences of marital termination can be devastating. Finally, there’s a very real possibility that married people are happier (for example) than unmarried people because happy people are more likely to get married. This is called a “selection effect.” To the extent that selection effects are responsible for the apparent advantages of the married, those advantages are not caused by marriage; instead, marriage is at least in part a consequence of those advantages. In spite of the qualifications noted above, there is relatively little doubt that married people actually are psychologically healthier than unmarried people, on average. The causal question is much more difficult and complex. Cause can only be inferred, it can’t be observed. There are many reasons why married people might be better off psychologically than unmarried people, and the fact that they are married is only one of those reasons. THE BENEFITS OF MARRIAGE There is a huge research literature, extending back for many decades, showing that married persons are happier, better adjusted, less depressed, and psychologically healthier in general than those who have not married. I have contributed a small amount to this literature myself. There is no point in reviewing all the studies here, but we’ll hit some of the highlights. One of the simplest indicators of psychological well-being is a single item used on the General Social Survey (GSS), conducted every year or two since 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. It is a measure of personal happiness, phrased as follows: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Although far from a sophisticated measure in psychometric terms, it is highly correlated with other measures of psychological well-being and behaves similarly to those measures in relation to many other variables. It also has the advantage of having been used in every GSS since 1972, as well as in many other studies, so we can compare findings across studies and over time. Norval Glenn, probably the country’s leading analyst of the GSS published a study in 1975 using the earliest GSS data showing that, indeed, married persons are considerably happier than unmarried persons. However, Glenn and Charles Weaver (1988) discovered over a decade later that the “happiness gap” between married and unmarried persons appeared to be declining. Using data from 1972 through 1986, they showed that the advantage of the married had not disappeared, but had certainly decreased, by the mid-1980s in comparison to the early to mid-1970s. Among young adults ages twenty-five through thirty-nine, for example, they found that 34 percent of married men, but only 13 percent of never-married men, reported them-

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selves to be very happy in 1972–1976. By 1982–1986, the percentage of very happy married men had dropped to 30, while the percentage for never-married men had increased to 24. There was a comparable change among women, although in both time periods the proportion of married women who considered themselves to be very happy was higher than that of men. They found two patterns underlying the overall decrease in the “happiness gap”: increasing happiness of never-married men, and decreasing happiness among married women. Glenn and Weaver made the argument, echoed by many observers since, that marriage is losing some of its uniqueness. Regular sexual relations are available outside of marriage, particularly to young adults, in cohabiting and other romantic (and even non-romantic) relationships. Because divorce has become relatively easy and common, marriage no longer offers the security it once did; it can be ended by either spouse virtually at will. And they cited an influential book by Robert Bellah and colleagues (1985) that argued that Americans had become “increasingly individualistic and less committed to social groups of all kinds” (Glenn and Weaver 1988, 323), implying that people would invest less in their marriages because they were committed to advancing their own interests, whether or not those interests were consistent with their spouses’. This idea is very similar to Popenoe’s “secular individualism” and Cherlin’s “expressive individualism” we discussed in chapter 1. Glenn and Weaver concluded (1988, 323) that “. . . in an increasingly individualistic and hedonistic society, an increasingly hedonistic form of marriage is having diminished hedonistic consequences for those who participate in it.” Far from an argument that marriage is really nothing special, no different from other relationships, their point was that as the differences between marriage and other relationships diminish, its potential to contribute to human happiness diminishes as well. Several years later, two colleagues and I (Lee, Seccombe, and Shehan 1991) began what we intended to be a more intensive analysis of the causes of the decline in the “happiness gap” between married and never-married persons. We had the advantage of three more years of data from the GSS, extending through 1989. We expected to see a continuing narrowing of the gap between the married and the never-married, and planned to systematically search for possible causes. Instead we found that, by the late 1980s, the gap had widened again. For the years 1987 through 1989, fully twice as many married as never-married young men said they were very happy, and the gap was nearly as large among women. The evidence suggested that the “effect” of marriage on happiness (the quote marks are there because this is really just a correlation) in the late 1980s was substantially larger than it had been in the early 1980s, and nearly as large as it was in the early 1970s. If marriage had indeed weakened, perhaps it was strengthening again.

Chapter 3

34

But we had only three more years of data than did Glenn and Weaver, hardly a sufficient basis to establish a new trend. As we had suggested in 1991, perhaps the early 1980s were aberrational, increasing the happiness of never-married men (the rising tide of cohabitation?) and decreasing the happiness of married women (role conflicts and pure exhaustion from their rapid movement into the labor force?) in ways that diminished once the novelty of the new behavior patterns wore off. Or perhaps the late 1980s were aberrational, with the happiness of married persons increasing because of the widening economic advantage of two-earner households (more of that later). Several years ago, another colleague and I decided to examine the most recent data on this issue (Lee and Bulanda 2005) to see whether the “happiness gap” had changed in the direction predicted by Glenn and Weaver. We used the GSS data from 1972 through 2002, the latest year available at the time of our analysis. We grouped the data into roughly five-year periods in order to smooth out some of the random year-to-year fluctuations and maintain comparability with the earlier studies. Table 3.1 shows some of the results of this study for young adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine; results for the entire sample were comparable. In each time period and for both sexes, married persons were happier than never-married persons. As Glenn and Weaver (1988) reported, these differences were smaller for the 1982–1986 period than for the prior years, especially for men. However, the differences grew again in subsequent years, and by the most recent period (1998–2002) were virtually as large as they were in 1972–1976. The apparent benefit of marriage certainly has not disappeared.

Table 3.1. Personal Happiness by Marital Status by Year, Young Adults Ages Twenty-Five to Thirty-Nine, General Social Survey (percent “very happy”) Men (N = 5,483)

Women (N = 6,270)

Years

Never-Married

Married

Never-Married

Married

1972–1976

13.2

33.7

13.7

42.9

1977–1980

20.0

31.0

25.9

41.9

1982–1986

24.5

30.7

25.2

37.3

1987–1991

20.2

39.5

25.0

40.9

1993–1996

21.7

35.8

18.3

38.0

1998–2002

20.2

44.3

22.0

44.3

Note: Data for 1982 and 1987 are weighted to correct for the oversampling of African Americans. All differences between never-married and married persons are significant at p < .01. Source: Lee and Bulanda (2005: Table 2).

Marriage and Psychological Well-Being

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We do not know what caused the difference in the happiness of nevermarried and married people (particularly men) to be so small in the early to mid-1980s, and in fact we don’t know if this represented a real change or random fluctuation. Part of the explanation for the relatively small difference in 1982–1986 is that never-married people were considerably more likely to be happy then than ten years earlier, a trend that very slightly reversed itself in later years. Average ages at marriage were going up at this time, and being unmarried in early adulthood was statistically more normal and socially more acceptable in the 1980s than the early 1970s. Perhaps the never-married young adults of the 1980s were a little less concerned about ever finding a spouse because fewer of their age-peers had married yet. If one compares the earliest period in table 3.1 with the latest, one notices immediately that the happiness of all four gender/marital status categories has increased, and increased quite sharply for all except married women. But even married women are just as likely to be very happy as married men, and twice as likely as never-married women. According to the most recent data (see also Weinke and Hill 2009), the advantage of the married is substantial, and almost identical for men and women. And this isn’t something recent, or unique to the contemporary United States. Steven Stack and Ross Eshleman (1998) used data on personal happiness from the World Values Surveys, conducted in the early 1980s, for seventeen nations. They found married people to be happier than nevermarried people in all but one (Northern Ireland, where the difference was in the expected direction but not quite statistically significant). Diener et al. (2000) found similar results for a sample of forty-two countries. It’s fairly safe to conclude that married people are happier than those who have not married. And a recent comparative study involving thirty European nations (Soons and Kalmijn 2009) shows that, in almost all these countries, married people are also happier than people who cohabit. However, as we noted earlier, personal happiness as indicated by a single item is not a very sophisticated measure of psychological well-being. Are married people better off than unmarried people when more complex, nuanced, and reliable measures are used? Most studies show that they are. A long research tradition has examined marital status differences in depression and related indicators of mental health (e.g., Gove 1972; Gove and Tudor 1973; Warheit et al. 1976). One of the more influential early studies in this vein was by Pearlin and Johnson (1977). They discovered that married persons were substantially less depressed than unmarried persons, in part because married people were less likely to experience problems such as social isolation or poverty. But Pearlin and Johnson’s greatest contribution was the discovery that, when married people did experience these kinds of problems, they were less likely to be depressed by them than were unmarried

36

Chapter 3

people. Marriage, in other words, served a “buffering” effect against the strains caused by social and economic problems. Several more recent studies have also shown that married persons are, on average, significantly less depressed than those who have never married (Brown 2000; Hopcroft and Bradley 2007; Hughes and Waite 2002; Ross 1995; Simon 2002; Wu et al. 2003). Other studies have employed longitudinal data to follow people over time, assessing states of mind such as depression prior to and after their marriages. The considerable majority of these studies (Barrett 2000; Blanchflower and Oswald 2004; Blekesaune 2008; Frech and Williams 2007; Horwitz, White, and Howell-White 1996; Joung et al. 1998; Kim and McKenry 2002; Lamb, Lee, and DeMaris 2003; Marks and Lambert 1998; Simon 2002; Simon and Marcussen 1999; Williams 2003; Williams and Umberson 2004) show that young adults, at least, score lower on established measures of depression after marriage than they did before marriage. This is true both with and without other variables controlled. The study I did with two colleagues (Lamb et al. 2003), while not particularly better than the others, is illustrative (and I have the advantage of knowing it better). We used data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), which was at the time a two-wave longitudinal study with data collected in 1987–1988 and again in 1992–1994. We used a subsample of 722 young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five at Wave 1 who had never been in either a cohabiting relationship or a marriage at that time. We followed them at Wave 2, an average of five to six years later, and compared changes in depression among those who married (and remained married to their original spouses) with those who were continuously unpartnered. Our measure of depression was a twelve-item version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) developed by Radloff (1977), a widely used measure that has identical psychometric properties for men and women (Ross and Mirowsky 1984). This scale is not appropriate for identifying or diagnosing clinical depression, but is very useful for gauging variation in depressive symptoms in the general population. Over the time period between waves, we found that those who married (without prior cohabitation) experienced an average decrease of 5.36 scale points in depression in comparison to those who remained unpartnered. This is a substantial reduction on a scale where the overall mean at Wave 1, prior to anyone’s marriage, was under seventeen. Getting married seems to reduce depression. Of course, in a study such as this, those who married had done so fairly recently, and some of this reduced depression may be attributable to the excitement of the event and the assumption of a new life as a married person. Perhaps the benefit wears off with time; we’ll return to this question shortly.

Marriage and Psychological Well-Being

37

Another interesting aspect of our findings corresponds with those of the majority of other studies in this area. Entering a cohabitation relationship didn’t have the same salutary effect as getting married (see also Brown 2000; Horwitz and White 1998; Institute for American Values 2005; Kim and McKenry 2002). Those who were cohabiting at Wave 2 were no different in depression than those who remained unpartnered. In fact, those who cohabited prior to marriage didn’t seem to get the same benefit from marriage as those who married directly, without first living together. Those who cohabited first, then married their cohabitating partner, experienced an average reduction of 3.85 points between waves, compared to the 5.36-point reduction for those who married without cohabitation, and even that reduction became statistically insignificant when race was controlled. These results are not atypical, but there is not perfect consensus on the effects of cohabitation on psychological well-being. A number of studies have found that cohabitors are little or no different than unpartnered persons on dimensions such as depression (Booth, Rustenbach, and McHale 2008; Horwitz and White 1998; Marcussen 2005; Mastekaasa 1994; Stack and Eshleman 1998; Williams, Sassler, and Nicholson 2008), although Booth et al. (2008) and Horwitz and White (1998) found no real effect of marriage either. Others have found cohabitors to be in between unpartnered and married persons—less depressed than the unpartnered, but more depressed than the married (Brown 2000; Kamp Dush and Amato 2005; K. Lee and Ono 2012; Weinke and Hill 2009). A few (Blekesaune 2008; Wu et al. 2003) have found the benefits of cohabitation to be comparable to those of marriage. The latter two studies were conducted in Britain and Canada, respectively, where cohabitation is somewhat more common than in the United States. Soons and Kalmijn (2009), in their study of European nations, found that the difference in well-being between married and cohabiting persons was smallest, and in a few cases nonexistent, in countries where cohabitation is most common and institutionalized. Overall, there’s a lot of evidence that married people experience higher levels of psychological well-being than the never-married, including people who cohabit, and there’s also a lot of evidence that psychological well-being improves after people marry. Is this evidence sufficient to document conclusively that marriage causes better psychological well-being? Not completely. There are at least five kinds of reasons why that conclusion may be both premature and simplistic: (1) The evidence isn’t completely consistent; some studies disagree. (2) There’s some evidence to the effect that the apparent benefits of getting married for psychological well-being may be temporary. (3) While marriage may benefit many people, it apparently doesn’t benefit everyone who marries, and the exceptions to the “rule” are very informative. (4) Those who marry run the risk of having their marriages end, and marital termination is painful in many ways. (5) People who marry may have had

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higher psychological well-being than others prior to their marriages, and simply brought their advantage with them when they moved from the unmarried to the married state. We’ll discuss each of these possibilities in the following sections. REASONS FOR CAUTION The Evidence Isn’t Unequivocal Several studies have not supported the hypothesis that marriage reduces depression or other forms of psychological distress. In an early longitudinal study, Horwitz and White (1991) found negligible differences between young adults who married and those who didn’t. Using cross-sectional data from the 1995 National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS), Bierman, Fazio, and Milkie (2006) found higher levels of psychological distress among the formerly married than the married, but no differences between the married and the never-married. Two studies employing data from many waves of the British Household Panel Survey (Blekesaune 2008; Wade and Pevalin 2004) also found elevated distress among the formerly married, but no effect of marrying compared to remaining single. Booth et al. (2008) reported that family transitions experienced prior to age twenty-two among women, including cohabiting and giving birth as well as getting married, had no effects on depression (except for entering an unstable cohabitation, which increased depression). Amato and Kane (2011), in a study we’ll discuss in more depth below, found that young women who married were less depressed than single mothers, but more depressed than young women who remained unpartnered, had not had children, and entered the labor force after completing college. An intriguing study by Schnittker (2008) took advantage of the fact that the MIDUS study mentioned above contained an over-sample of twins. Schnittker looked at the relationship between marital status and happiness for three subsamples from MIDUS: the general sample of unrelated persons; a subsample of siblings; and a smaller subsample of monozygotic twins. In the sample of unrelated persons he observed a fairly strong positive relationship between marital status and happiness—that is, married persons were happier than unmarried persons. This relationship also appeared, and was in fact slightly stronger, in the subsample of siblings. But it disappeared in the twin subsample; twins who were married were no happier than their identical twins who weren’t married. Schnittker’s interpretation is that there are genetic factors that are antecedent to both the propensity to marry and the propensity to happiness. If this is correct, the correlation between marital status and happiness is spurious, without causal meaning. A problem with his analysis, however, is that his

Marriage and Psychological Well-Being

39

marital status variable distinguished only between married and unmarried persons, so the latter category included both never-married and formerly married persons. This makes it difficult to separate the effects of being unmarried from the effects of marital termination. Also, if his interpretation is correct it would imply that people who marry were happier prior to marriage, because both the propensity to marry and their higher levels of happiness have genetic bases. As we will see shortly, this is not consistent with some of the relevant evidence. The study of differences between married and cohabiting persons across thirty European countries by Soons and Kalmijn (2009) offers an important insight. They found that the advantage of married persons on their measure of psychological well-being was smallest in countries where cohabitation was most common and well-established. In other words, the more widespread the practice of cohabitation and the longer it has been established in a country, the more it comes to look like marriage, at least in terms of its implications for psychological well-being. This does not suggest that marriage begins to lose its ability to make people happy, because average levels of happiness were found to be higher in countries where cohabitation was widely practiced. In a study using longitudinal data from the Netherlands, Soons, Liefbroer, and Kalmijn (2009) found beneficial effects of cohabitation on subjective well-being that were very similar to, and virtually as strong as, those of marriage. This is consistent with the findings of Blekesaune (2008) and Wu et al. (2003). These studies both found no differences in well-being between married and cohabiting persons. They were conducted in England (Blekesaune) and Canada (Wu et al.), countries in which cohabitation is more common than it is in the United States. Perhaps as cohabitation becomes more “normal,” in both cultural and statistical senses of that term, its consequences come to resemble those of more institutionalized forms of partnering such as marriage. A recent study by Musick and Bumpass (2012) in the United States sheds a little more light on this issue. They used the same data set we (Lamb et al. 2003) did in our earlier study, the first two waves of the NSFH, but with several critical differences. Instead of beginning with a sample of young adults who had never cohabited or married, they started with currently (as of Wave 1 in 1987–1988) unpartnered people ages eighteen to fifty, regardless of prior history. This gave them a larger (over 2,700) and more diverse sample, and allowed them to include people who entered unions that subsequently ended and to assess the effects of union duration (more of these issues below). They also used measures of global happiness (the GSS singleitem indicator) and self-esteem as dependent variables in addition to depressive symptoms.

40

Chapter 3

As we did, Musick and Bumpass (2012) found that getting married decreased depression; it also increased happiness. Unlike our results, however, they found that cohabiting had beneficial effects on depression similar to those of marrying, and that entering marriage directly resulted in smaller gains in happiness than cohabiting did, whether or not the cohabitation was followed by marriage. In addition, cohabitation increased self-esteem; marriage didn’t. The differences between our findings and theirs are probably attributable primarily to the differences in the samples we employed. They included older people, and people who had previously been in marriages or cohabiting unions that had dissolved; we began with only young adults who had never been in a union. Both studies show that marriage reduces depression; the main difference is in the effect of cohabitation. We found that cohabiting didn’t reduce depression significantly, and also muted the effect of subsequent marriage. They found that cohabitation reduces depression comparably to marriage, and increases happiness and self-esteem more. The indicated conclusion here is that the benefits of partnering are not restricted to legal marriage when the entire population of unpartnered persons is considered; cohabitation may have beneficial effects on the psychological well-being of older and previously partnered people. So while most studies show that married people are happier, less depressed, and less distressed than those who have not married, the evidence is far from overwhelming. There are enough contrary findings to suggest some degree of caution in our conclusions. And we can learn a great deal by ascertaining more precisely when, where, and among whom the greatest benefits of marriage occur. This leads us to our next point. Is the Effect of Marriage Permanent? The most convincing evidence that marriage improves psychological wellbeing comes from longitudinal studies that compare married people to themselves prior to marriage. These studies show that psychological well-being changes (increases) from before the event of marriage to after. This is stronger evidence in favor of the benefits of marriage than cross-sectional data, which compare people who are married with other people who are not. There are many things that might create differences between those two categories, not all of which can be statistically controlled in any given analysis. Most of the studies we cited above that show improvements in psychological well-being surrounding the event of marriage were conducted using data from the first two waves of the NSFH (e.g., Frech and Williams 2007; Lamb et al. 2003; Marks and Lambert 1998; Musick and Bumpass 2012; Simon 2002; Williams 2003). The first wave was collected in 1987–1988, and the second in 1992–1994. On average, then, about six years separated the first

Marriage and Psychological Well-Being

41

and second sets of observations. In our study (Lamb et al. 2003), for example, we began with the set of people who met our age criteria and were unpartnered at Wave 1. We then charted changes in depression according to whether these people remained unpartnered, entered a cohabiting relationship, or married by Wave 2. This is typical for studies of this type. Obviously the maximum possible length of marriage for our respondents, in our study and others conducted on this data set, was approximately six years. In our sample the average length of marriage, for those who married between waves, was a bit less than three years. So our married respondents, who were less depressed at Wave 2 than those who had not married, had all been married for a relatively short period of time. Does the effect of marriage last throughout the life of the marriage? From our analysis and those of similar studies, we don’t know. We do know, from a very large number of studies (e.g., Glenn 1998; Umberson et al. 2005; VanLaningham, Johnson, and Amato 2001), that measures of marital quality tend to show decreases as length of marriage increases. To the extent that the psychological benefit of being married depends on the quality of the marriage (we’ll discuss this issue shortly), this would suggest a declining effect over time. On the other hand, studies based on data sets such as the GSS (e.g., Glenn and Weaver 1988; Lee et al. 1991; Lee and Bulanda 2005) show differences between the married and the nevermarried, and their samples of married persons include the entire range of marital length and proportionally few respondents who are recently married. (Unfortunately the GSS does not contain a useful measure of length of marriage, so we can’t control for its effects statistically.) One of the most comprehensive studies of the effects of marital status on psychological well-being was published by Marks and Lambert (1998). Unlike most studies that deal with single types of marital transitions and/or specific dependent variables, this one examined virtually every possible type of transition, along with eleven different indicators of well-being. Like many other studies, Marks and Lambert used the first two waves of the NSFH, giving them a large sample and a space of five to six years between the first and second observations. They included in their comparisons people who stayed continuously in the same marital status (married, never-married, separated/divorced, or widowed) and people who transitioned between two or more statuses over the course of the study. They found, as predicted, that married people were generally better off across multiple dimensions. Compared to the never-married, married people were happier, less depressed, less hostile, had more positive relations with others, and were more self-accepting. Most of these advantages pertained to both men and women equally. But people who married for the first time during the course of the study were even better off on these dimensions than those who were continuously married. In other words, the recently married

42

Chapter 3

clearly experienced the greatest benefits of marriage. Like any exciting and life-changing event, the effects of marriage moderate (dissipate?) somewhat over time; those who have been married for a while aren’t as advantaged by it as those who have married recently. Musick and Bumpass (2012), in their analysis of NSFH data, were able to separate those who entered unions less than three years prior to Wave 2 from those whose unions were older than three years. They found that those in the more recent unions, whether cohabitations or marriages, were significantly happier and less depressed than those whose unions were older. They conclude that the salutary effects of both cohabitation and marriage diminish over time. Three longitudinal European data sets allow a longer-term perspective on the psychological consequences of marriage than we can get from the NSFH. One, the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP), provided fifteen years of data to Lucas et al. (2003), seventeen years of data to Stutzer and Frey (2006), and eighteen years of data to Lucas and Clark (2006) and Zimmerman and Easterlin (2006). The dependent variable in this study is a simple scale on which respondents rate their overall satisfaction with life from zero (low) to ten (high). All four of these studies found that life satisfaction tends to peak in the two years or so surrounding marriage, increasing up to that point but declining thereafter. Comparing people who married to themselves prior to marriage, Lucas et al. (2003), Lucas and Clark (2006), and Stutzer and Frey (2006) found that by roughly two years after marriage average life satisfaction had returned to premarital levels, although there was a lot of individual variation—some people ended up higher, but just as many people found less satisfaction with life after marriage than they did before. Zimmerman and Easterlin (2006) controlled for more variables and didn’t find that the married returned quite to their pre-marital level, but nonetheless observed a significant reduction in the effect of marriage over time. Blekesaune (2008) analyzed data covering fifteen years from the British Household Panel Survey. His dependent variable was a twelve-item count of symptoms of psychological distress. He found that entering a union (cohabitation and marriage had similar effects in this study) resulted in a reduction in distress, but average distress levels began to increase again shortly thereafter; the reduction surrounding marriage was temporary. Soons, Liefbroer, and Kalmijn (2009) used data from the Panel Study of Social Integration in the Netherlands, which began with a sample of young adults aged eighteen to thirty-six in 1987 and followed them until 2005. They also found that the effect of marriage on subjective well-being gradually diminished over time, although those who married (or cohabited) didn’t return to their pre-union levels until about fourteen years after union formation. The appropriate message here is that we need to be cautious in our conclusions. We have a great deal of evidence that marriage is associated with

Marriage and Psychological Well-Being

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higher levels of psychological well-being. But this doesn’t mean that everyone who marries will experience everlasting happiness. Over the long run the psychological well-being of married and unmarried persons may converge. Certainly, the bulk of the evidence suggests that married people are advantaged over the unmarried on multiple dimensions of psychological wellbeing, but most of the evidence also suggests that these advantages dissipate over time. Those wishing to extol the benefits of marriage need to qualify their enthusiasm appropriately. Not Everyone Benefits from Marriage As with all other sociological generalizations, the differences between married and unmarried people in terms of happiness, depression, and other dimensions of psychological well-being are averages. The same is true of the changes reported in these measures from before to after marriage. Averages can cover up a lot of underlying variation. While it is likely true that married people are, on average, better off psychologically than unmarried people, it doesn’t follow that this is true for everyone. A long tradition of sociological research and theory, dating to the work of Jessie Bernard (1972) and Walter Gove (Gove and Tudor 1973; Gove, Hughes, and Style 1983), suggested that marriage benefits men more than women in psychological terms. The argument here is that women’s marital roles (housekeeping, childrearing, and resulting role overload, especially if combined with paid employment) are inherently unsatisfying and more costly than rewarding, while men benefit in multiple ways from the presence and services of a spouse. More recent research, however, has generally found that getting married benefits men and women roughly equally (Blanchflower and Oswald 2004; Lamb et al. 2003; Marks and Lambert 1998; Musick and Bumpass 2012; Simon 2002; Soons et al. 2009; Williams 2003). Women tend to be more depressed than men, but this appears to be true regardless of marital status (Hopcroft and Bradley 2007; Marcussen 2005). However, most of these studies were conducted on recently married, relatively young populations. Our studies of the psychological consequences of widowhood among older persons (Lee and DeMaris 2007; Lee et al. 2001; Lee, Willetts, and Seccombe 1998) have found that, in this population, married men are much less depressed than married women. Widowhood appears to be a greater psychological problem for men than women, in large part because older married men are so much less depressed than comparable women prior to widowhood. In fact, differences in depression between married and widowed women tend to be fairly small. This raises the possibility that marriage becomes progressively more advantageous to men, or less advantageous to women, over time. We certainly need more direct evidence about this, but at this point it appears to be worth further investigation.

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At least two studies (Wade and Cairney 2000; Williams et al. 2008) have found small or nonexistent effects of getting married on the psychological well-being of single mothers. Wade and Cairney found no effects of marrying at all for single mothers. Williams and colleagues found that marriage reduced depression for single mothers if the marriage was stable, but single mothers were much more likely than childless women to form marriages that ultimately turned out to be unstable. This is partly because single mothers are more likely to be from disadvantaged backgrounds, and to marry men who are also from disadvantaged backgrounds and who have prior histories of marital or relationship instability (Lichter, Graefe, and Brown 2003). Since single mothers and their children are the focus of much of the attention on the “retreat from marriage,” this is an important qualification. Perhaps the most important qualification on the psychological benefits of marriage, though, is a rather obvious one. Marriage appears to improve psychological well-being if and only if the marital relationship is a happy and satisfying one. In other words, the quality of the marriage matters. Many studies show strong positive correlations between measures of marital quality and measures of overall psychological well-being (Beach, Fincham, and Katz 1998; Beach et al. 2003; Cano, O’Leary, and Heinz 2004; Easterlin 2006; Fincham and Beach 1999; Glenn and Weaver 1981; Karney 2001; Kim and McKenry 2002; Kurdek 1998; Ross 1995; Whisman 2001; Whisman and Bruce 1999). Williams (2003) found that marriage reduced depression only for married persons who scored above average on a measure of marital quality. Proulx, Helms, and Buehler (2007) did a meta-analysis of ninety-three studies of the relationship between marital quality and personal well-being, and found substantial positive effects of the former on the latter across these studies. So not any old marriage will do. A happy marriage has clear benefits; an unhappy marriage can be very costly to one’s mental health. Fortunately the great majority of married persons report that their marriages are happy, so on average marriage is an advantage for psychological well-being. But the misery entailed by an unhappy marriage is very familiar to a significant minority of the married population. The Consequences of Marital Termination Many of the marriages we were just talking about, those characterized by conflict and strife, end in divorce. While divorce is often perceived as a social problem, most people who get divorced probably see it as a solution to their marital problems. But divorce is painful in many ways. Literally hundreds of studies show that divorced persons have, on average, lower levels of psychological well-being than married people and, in almost all studies, never-married people as well (e.g., Amato 2000; Bierman et al. 2006; Blekesaune 2008; Hopcroft and Bradley 2007; Marks 1996; Marks and Lambert

Marriage and Psychological Well-Being

45

1998; Simon 2002; Wade and Cairney 2000; Wade and Pevalin 2004; Williams and Dunne-Bryan 2006). Musick and Bumpass (2012), in the study of the NSFH data discussed above, found that including people who entered and exited either cohabitations or marriages between waves of the study substantially reduced the apparent benefits of marrying. So while getting married certainly appears to increase psychological well-being (at least in the short term, and possibly in the long term for some people), terminating a marriage seems to reduce well-being. And, of course, only married people are at risk of divorce. However, as we’ve just seen, marital quality is a strong positive predictor of psychological well-being among the married, and it’s unlikely that very many people who divorce had high-quality marriages prior to the divorce. Almost every cross-sectional study of the psychological consequences of divorce compares divorced people to continuously married people, most of whom report their marriages to be happy. How do people who divorce compare to unhappily married people who stay married? Is it worse to end an unhappy marriage, or to stay in it? That’s a very complex question, and there certainly isn’t one right answer for everyone. Every miserable marriage is different, in different ways and to different degrees. Scholars differ in their interpretations of relevant data. Waite and Gallagher (2000) report that the vast majority (86 percent) of unhappily married persons in the first wave of the NSFH who remained married until the second wave (roughly five to six years later) said their marriages had become happier. They present this as an argument against divorce: Unhappy marriages are likely to become happier over time, thus reducing depression. In a later study of the first two waves of the NSFH, Waite, Luo, and Lewin (2009) found that divorcing did not reduce psychological well-being among people who reported that their marriages were unhappy at the first wave. Divorce did have a variety of adverse consequences among those who initially reported their marriages to be happy. One wonders, though, whether those who divorced after reporting that their marriages were happy were being unrealistic, or perhaps were not the ones who initiated the divorce. Waite and her colleagues are adamant that they found no evidence showing that any dimension of psychological well-being improved after divorce. This is important, because if divorcing people expect the divorce to solve problems and improve their lives this should be reflected in higher postdivorce levels of well-being. However, the interval between waves in the NSFH was only five to six years, and all the subjects in their analysis were married at the time of the first wave. This means they could study only the relatively short-term consequences of divorce. They did divide their sample into those who had separated more and less than two years prior to the second wave, and found small advantages on some dimensions for those who

46

Chapter 3

had separated longer ago, but real adjustment to divorce may take longer than this time frame allows for many people. An earlier analysis of the same sample by Amato and Hohman-Marriott (2007) came to a different conclusion. They used a much more sophisticated method involving multiple measures of marital quality at the first wave to separate those who divorced between waves of the study into “low-distress” and “high-distress” categories; Waite et al. (2009) used only a single item assessing global marital happiness. Amato and Hohman-Marriott used only a single item measuring global personal happiness as their dependent variable. However, they found that spouses from high-distress couples who divorced between waves experienced increases in global happiness, while those from low-distress couples experienced declines. This suggests that people in truly miserable marriages become happier after terminating the relationship, while those whose marriages were less turbulent may feel a sense of loss. A number of other studies show that divorce ultimately results in improved psychological well-being for people who were highly distressed while married (Amato 2000; Aseltine and Kessler 1993; Kalmijn and Monden 2006; Prigerson, Maciejewski, and Rosenbeck 1999; Williams 2003). Interestingly, Amato and Hohman-Marriott also report that those who remained married to the same spouse experienced a significant decrease in global happiness between waves; this is consistent with the idea that the effects of marrying on psychological well-being dissipate over time, as we noted above. Hawkins and Booth (2005) used data from four waves of the Marital Instability over the Life Cycle study, with the initial wave of data collected in 1980 and the last in 1992. They found that married people who scored below the mean (2.15 on a three-point scale) on a measure of marital happiness at each of the four points in time were much more distressed than others who were continuously married, and lower on life satisfaction and self-esteem than those who divorced. Their conclusion is that “. . . remaining unhappily married rather than divorcing is never beneficial on average to the psychological well-being or overall health of the individuals in this study” (p. 464). In addition, many studies report that the adverse consequences of divorce for psychological well-being appear to be temporary (Blekesaune 2008; Booth and Amato 1991; Gardner and Oswald 2006; Hope, Rogers, and Power 1999; Lorenz et al. 2006; Soons et al. 2009; Wade and Pevalin 2004). Divorce is a crisis, but most people ultimately recover, either by repartnering or by adjusting to their changed circumstances. Waite and Gallagher (2000), as we noted, report that most unhappy marriages get better with time. However, their calculations were based only on those who remained married; this certainly doesn’t prove that the marriages of those who divorced would have improved if they had remained married. It’s evident that remaining in a marriage that is consistently unhappy has adverse consequences for psychological well-being. In fact, there are few

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things more distressing than continuous marital discord. At this point, the evidence is quite clear that the salutary effect of marriage on psychological well-being depends heavily on the quality of the relationship, and that a marriage characterized by conflict and strife is worse than no marriage. Unhappy marriages are distressing, and ending an unhappy marriage by divorce is distressing. Fortunately, the great majority of married people in every known study of the subject report their marriages to be happy. But simply getting married is no guarantee of lifelong happiness. Selection Effects In our study of marriage and depression discussed earlier (Lamb et al. 2003) we attempted to address an issue that has been a concern of scholars working in this area for decades that involves the actual causal role of marriage in reducing depression. If we simply compare married with never-married people on depression (that is, if we do a cross-sectional analysis) and find that married people are less depressed, there are two possible broad categories of causal processes that could be at work. One is what we (Lamb et al. 2003) have called the “relationship effect,” and others (e.g., Simon 2002) have called “social causation.” This is what almost everyone thinks of first if asked to explain why married people are less depressed: They benefit from their relationship with the spouse. Husbands and wives provide love, support, affirmation, a sexual partner, companionship, quite possibly additional income, and a variety of other benefits that, presuming the relationship is reasonably harmonious, should improve the quality of their lives. So, according to this logic, married people are better off because of the benefits they experience from their relationships with their spouses (hence the term “relationship effect”). This includes Pearlin and Johnson’s (1977) discovery that marriage buffers spouses from the adverse effects of social and economic problems. But second, perhaps less depressed people are more likely to marry. This may be true because depression causes people to avoid social relationships, and/or because depressed people are not terribly attractive spouses to others. This is the “selection effect”: People with certain characteristics such as low depression select marriage rather than singlehood, and are selected by others as spouses. The advantage of married over never-married people in depression may predate the marriage. In other words, as less depressed people select (or are selected) into marriage, they bring their lower depression scores with them. This doesn’t change any individual’s depression score, but it decreases the average depression of married persons by adding those with low scores to the category. At the same time it increases the average depression score among the unmarried because low scores are removed from the

48

Chapter 3

population of unmarried persons through the marriages of the less depressed, while the higher scores remain in the unmarried column. If a selection effect were entirely responsible for the lower depression of married persons, then marriage would not play the causal role that so many scholars (and others) have attributed to it. A “pure” selection effect would imply that married people were less depressed before their marriages, and simply brought their lower depression levels with them when they married. But if this were true, we would not see the reductions in depression that follow marriage that so many longitudinal studies have shown. In reality, this isn’t an either/or choice. There’s no reason whatsoever that relationship effects and selection effects can’t be operating simultaneously, with each process responsible for some fraction of the advantage of married persons over the never-married. Support for one type of effect does not constitute disproof of the other. In the case of the association between marriage and depression, the weight of the evidence suggests that relationship effects are much more important. The longitudinal studies cited above all show that average depression scores were lower for people who married after they married than they were before marriage, and that people who remained unmarried did not experience comparable reductions in depression over the course of the studies. The reduction in depression for individuals who marry that these studies observed cannot be explained by selection. But this doesn’t mean that selection might not also be operating. In our study (Lamb et al. 2003), we also tested for selection effects by using individuals’ depression scores at time 1 to predict whether or not they entered into marital or cohabiting relationships by time 2. It didn’t work; there was no effect of time 1 depression on the odds of marrying or cohabiting by time 2. Other studies employing the NSFH agree (e.g., Kim and McKenry 2002; Simon 2002; Simon and Marcussen 1999; Williams et al. 2008): The evidence for a relationship effect is much stronger than the evidence for a selection effect. This gives us some confidence that the lower depression of married people compared to never-married people is actually, to a considerable degree at least, a consequence of marriage and the advantages it brings. But we cannot dismiss selection effects entirely as partial explanations for the advantages of the married over the never-married in psychological wellbeing. Horwitz et al. (1996) found that depression did predict subsequent marriage (negatively, of course) for women, but not men, in their sample of New Jersey residents. Mastekaasa (1992) discovered that a measure of life satisfaction positively predicted eventual marriage for a longitudinal sample of young Norwegian adults. Marcussen (2005) found that some of the differences in depression between people who married and people who cohabited in the NSFH are due to differences in social and demographic characteristics,

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with the married more advantaged. Musick and Bumpass (2012) observed, in their analysis of NSFH data, that depression at Wave 1 did not predict subsequent marriage, but both global happiness and self-esteem did. Both Lucas et al. (2003) and Stutzer and Frey (2006), with their data from Germany, found that among unmarried persons life satisfaction is a strong positive predictor of subsequent marriage. And, as we noted earlier, Schnittker (2008) found that the overall positive relationship between being married and happiness disappeared in a subsample of identical twins. If his conclusion that there are genetic causes of both marital status and happiness is correct, then people who marry would have had higher levels of happiness prior to marriage. In other words, genetic causation implies a selection effect. A recent study by Amato and Kane (2011) provides some of the strongest support for a selection effect that’s been found so far. They used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (“Add Health”) data set, which followed a sample of adolescents who were in grades 7 through 12 in 1994–1995. They were reinterviewed in 1996 and in 2001–2002, by which time they were between eighteen and twenty-five years old. Amato and Kane used data from young women between the ages of twenty-three and twentyfive in Wave 3 for their analysis. Rather than simply comparing the trajectories of those who married with those who didn’t, as most of the other studies we’ve reviewed did, they identified seven different “pathways” from adolescence to young adulthood, including “college to employment with no family formation” (the most common), “high school to employment with no family formation,” “married mothers,” “single mothers,” and cohabiting with and without children. Their dependent variables included depressive symptoms, along with self-rated health, self-esteem, heavy drinking, and participation in illegal behavior. On their measures of psychological well-being (depressive symptoms and self-esteem), they found that women who had gone to college and then into employment were better off than others, including those who had married, at Wave 3. Married women were less depressed than cohabitors and, particularly, single mothers. But this was also true at Wave 1, when these young women were in high school and prior to any union formation or childbearing. Changes from high school to young adulthood were very similar for these women regardless of what they did after high school—whether they married, cohabited, remained unpartnered, or had a child without marrying. Amato and Kane conclude clearly and strongly that the differences between young women, in depressive symptoms and other measures, according to their family transitions reflected selection effects, not consequences of differences in their pathways to adulthood. Prior analyses (Amato et al. 2008) had shown that women who went to college and remained unpartnered until Wave 3 came from relatively privileged backgrounds, single mothers came from more disadvantaged backgrounds, and those who married were intermediate.

50

Chapter 3

Amato and Kane (2011) argue that the same background factors that caused women to follow different pathways to adulthood also caused the observed differences in psychological well-being according to family status. This is clearly a selection effect. There are a couple of important limitations of this study, however. One is that the oldest respondents in the survey were twenty-five at the time of the last observation. Because the median age at marriage for women was nearly twenty-six when these observations were made, all marriages in their data set were “early” marriages. We know that people who marry young are more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds, to form marriages that eventuate in divorce, and to generally have more difficulties than people who marry at later ages. It may be that we would observe different results if we could follow these women until, say, age thirty, which would allow us to capture the effects of later marriages. Second, there were not enough young women in this sample who married without having children to form their own category. The fact that marriage didn’t appear to elevate psychological well-being in this study may be because marriage and childbearing were confounded. Perhaps women who marry young but don’t have children right away benefit from marriage; we can’t determine that from Amato and Kane’s analysis. Nonetheless, this study provides some fairly strong evidence that selection effects play a role in the higher levels of psychological well-being typically found among married persons. It also shows us clearly that the married/unmarried dichotomy is too simple to capture the full story of psychological well-being among young adults. Some women who remained unmarried (e.g., those who went to college and then into the labor force) were less depressed than those who married, while others (single and cohabiting mothers) were more depressed. All of the studies addressing the issue of relationship versus selection effects do not yet form a clear picture of the psychological consequences of marriage. While the weight of the evidence certainly favors the relationship effect explanation, we need to remember that relationship and selection effects can, and undoubtedly do, coexist. We certainly should not conclude that selection effects have nothing to do with the apparent advantages of married persons. With some exceptions, the evidence does show that most people who marry are better off psychologically than most people who don’t. The conclusion that marriage itself is the sole, or even primary, cause of this difference is premature given the current state of the evidence. To this point, we’ve addressed the question of whether people are selected into marriage based on their premarital levels of psychological wellbeing. We also need to ask whether psychological well-being might be a factor that selects people out of marriage via divorce. Here the evidence is more consistent; married persons who divorce have higher levels of depression and other forms of psychological distress than those who remain mar-

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ried prior to their divorces (Blekesaune 2008; Hope et al. 1999; Mastekaasa 1997; Simon 2002; Stutzer and Frey 2006; Wade and Pevalin 2004; Williams and Dunne-Bryant 2006). Stutzer and Frey (2006) even found that people who divorced had lower levels of life satisfaction before they married than did people who did not divorce. So married people may have higher levels of psychological well-being than others in part because people with lower wellbeing either don’t marry in the first place, or exit the married state via divorce. We must also remember that none of the survey data sets used by these researchers gives a good window on the effects of true clinical depression. People who are extremely depressed, or highly distressed in other ways, are unlikely to show up in sample surveys in sufficient numbers to allow accurate predictions of their behavior. Survey research deals best with averages and normal variation around those averages, not with extremes, because we don’t get enough extreme scores in sample surveys to allow confident assessment of their relations to other variables. Depression may not predict marriage well over most of its range, at least to a degree that inspires statistical confidence, but this doesn’t mean that the truly clinically depressed are as likely to marry as others. Selection effects may operate at the extremes in ways that survey research can’t detect. The evidence in favor of selection effects as the cause of married persons’ advantage over the unmarried in depression or other dimensions of psychological well-being is somewhat equivocal. However, this does not mean we can eliminate selection effects as potential causes of other apparent advantages of the married. Each criterion variable—happiness, depression, other measures of psychological well-being, or more tangible advantages such as physical health or economic security—needs to be evaluated on its own merits. We’ll address physical health and economic or financial criteria in subsequent chapters. Further, in each case we need to evaluate the degree to which any advantage of married persons may be due to selection effects versus relationship effects. Other recent analysts of marriage (e.g., Waite and Gallagher 2000) have tended to dismiss selection effects as irrelevant if the preponderance of the evidence favors relationship effects. This doesn’t follow. In each case, it’s important to know the extent to which any advantages observed among married people are due to the fact that they married, or were brought with them into marriage from a previously advantaged state that made them more likely to marry and/or more attractive to potential spouses. CONCLUSION There is an enormous amount of evidence to the effect that married persons are happier, better adjusted, less depressed, and less distressed in psychologi-

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cal terms than unmarried persons. They compare favorably to never-married as well as formerly married persons, although their advantage over the latter is greater. While a few studies don’t find the married to be advantaged, the great majority does; this fact is not in serious dispute. The question is, what does it mean? Does it follow from this that unmarried people will all be happier if they marry, and married people will be happier if they stay married? Not necessarily. In brief summary, there are at least five reasons to be cautious in our conclusions. First, as just mentioned, not all the studies agree. This tells us that the advantage of the married may be rather small and inconsistent. Second, there may be a beneficial effect of marrying that doesn’t last forever; the effects of getting married may be temporary. Third, the psychological benefits of marriage clearly depend to a large degree on the quality of the marriage; unhappily married persons may indeed be worse off than the never-married, and perhaps worse off than the formerly married. Fourth, those who marry run the risk of divorce, which is very painful for most people, although perhaps less painful than remaining in a truly bad marriage. Fifth, some of the advantage of the married may be due to the possibility that psychologically healthier people are more likely to get married and remain married; these people would be less depressed, for example, even if they didn’t marry. For all these reasons, we cannot conclude that marriage is either necessary or sufficient for happiness or other forms of psychological health. This doesn’t change the fact that married people are, on average, happier, less depressed, and so forth, than unmarried people. It’s the translation of this generalization to individual cases that is problematic. It does not necessarily follow from it that, if you marry, you will be happier. The odds may be in your favor, but there’s no guarantee. We also need to remember that, when we compare married people to others, or even to themselves before they married, we’re looking at people who chose to marry, in all probability because they thought it would make them happy. They found the person they wanted to marry, and their circumstances were such that marriage was a viable option. In other words, they made a decision that they felt was in their best interests. Does it follow that the same decision is the right thing for everyone else? Of course not. Some people of marriageable age haven’t found another person they want to marry, or haven’t been able to interest a person they want to marry in marrying them. Others are in circumstances in which the realistic possibilities for marriage may be more costly than they are rewarding. We’ll talk about these circumstances in later chapters. In the next chapter we will examine the relation between marriage and indicators of physical health and longevity.

Chapter Four

Marriage and Physical Health

In addition to their emotional and psychological advantages, a great deal of research shows that married people are better off in terms of physical health than all varieties of unmarried people. Married people live longer, and they tend to be in better health during their lives. We’ll begin by reviewing the evidence showing the advantages of marriage. THE BENEFITS OF MARRIAGE Being married is related to lower levels of mortality, both overall and with respect to many specific causes (Carr and Springer 2010; Gardner and Oswald 2004; Gordon and Rosenthal 1995; He et al. 2005; Hemstrom 1996; Hu and Goldman 1990; Lillard and Panis 1996; Liu 2009; Manzoli et al. 2007; Minino et al. 2002; Rendall et al. 2011; Rogers 1995; Ross, Mirowsky, and Goldsteen 1990). Lillard and Waite (1995), in one of the best studies of the effects of marital status on mortality, found that the odds of surviving from age forty-eight to age sixty-five were over three times as high for married as unmarried men, and twice as high for married as unmarried women. Catherine Ross and colleagues (1990), in their review of research on family and health in the 1980s, estimated that mortality rates are about 50 percent higher for unmarried than married women, and about 250 percent higher for unmarried than married men. In a fascinating study using data from a group of male graduates of Amherst College who were born in the nineteenth century, and who therefore were practically all deceased by the time of the study, John Murray (2000) found that those who had married lived considerably longer than those who had not. This historical perspective is valuable because it allows us to observe the entire lives of people who had different marital trajectories, and 53

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because it shows that the apparent benefits of marriage have been consistent over time, at least until recently. Norman Johnson and colleagues (2000) used the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (based on the Current Population Survey) to assess mortality risks for people of different marital statuses. Again, they found that unmarried people are at greater risk of death than comparable married people, although the differences they observed were smaller than those found in many of the other studies. For example, among white males, never-married men were 1.58 times more likely to die in any given year than married men in the forty-five to sixty-four age range, and 1.15 times more likely to die among those sixty-five and over. But there was still no doubt that the risk of death is greater for unmarried than for married persons in their data. Two recent studies employed data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to assess the relation between marriage and longevity. Kaplan and Kronick (2006) studied respondents between the ages of nineteen and eighty-five, and followed them to track mortality from 1989 to 1996. They ascertained marital status only at baseline (1989), so couldn’t account for any changes in marital status after that point; this undoubtedly introduces error into their estimates. Nonetheless, in comparison to people who were married in 1989, the odds of mortality over the ensuing eight years were 58 percent higher for the never-married, 27 percent higher for the divorced or separated, and 39 percent higher for the widowed. Being married was clearly a substantial advantage in this analysis. Liu (2009) used NHIS data on people aged forty and over from 1986 through 2000, predicting mortality within a two-year time frame based on marital status at the beginning of the interval. She found married people were less likely to die in any given two-year interval than never-married, divorced, or widowed people. The odds of death generally decreased over the time period of the study, and those odds decreased more rapidly for married than for widowed people, resulting in a widening gap. Liu speculates that mortality rates among widowed persons declined more slowly because widowhood is occurring at increasingly older ages. But the advantage of the married over those of all other marital statuses was clear. Research in Europe (Martikainen et al. 2005; Valkonen, Martikainen, and Blomgren 2004) also shows slightly widening gaps in mortality rates between married and unmarried persons, mostly because mortality rates are declining more rapidly among the married. Elwert and Christakis (2006) compared only married and widowed persons, and restricted their analysis to non-Hispanic whites and blacks aged sixty-five and over in 1993; their subjects were followed until 2002. Mortality rates were much higher for those whose spouses had died than for those who remained married. This was particularly true in the first few months

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after the spouse’s death, but mortality rates remained higher for widowed persons than comparable married persons at all post-widowhood intervals. Finally, a recent study by Rendall et al. (2011) used data from the annual Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), matched with administrative records from Social Security and other sources, to predict death during each year based on marital status at the end of the prior year. They found a clear and strong advantage for married people compared to all categories of unmarried people. The advantage of the married was reduced by controls for race, education, earnings, and employment and disability status, but was still significant. Moreover, this study found that mortality rates did not differ among divorced, widowed, and never-married populations; all were higher than married people, and indistinguishable from one another. The evidence regarding marital status and mortality is quite strong: Married people live longer than others. The evidence is similar for physical health, including both serious conditions that lead to death and the less serious that may be disabling, onerous, or simply irritating (Hughes and Waite 2009; Lorenz et al. 2006). Pienta, Hayward, and Jenkins (2000) used the Health and Retirement Study to examine the prevalence of a variety of diseases, functional problems, and disabilities among a sample of over 9,000 people between the ages of fifty-one and sixty-one. They found that married people had the lowest rates of virtually all diseases, health problems, and disabling conditions. Never-married people differed little from the married in the prevalence of fatal chronic diseases, but reported higher rates of non-fatal conditions than the married. Williams and Umberson (2004) analyzed the Americans’ Changing Lives surveys, with data collected in 1986, 1989, and 1994, to study how changes in marital status affected self-reported health. Although their measure of the dependent variable was a simple five-point scale where individuals rate their health from “poor” to “excellent,” research has shown this measure to be quite accurate and a very useful indicator of people’s overall health status (e.g., Ferraro and Farmer 1999). Williams and Umberson found that people who married for the first time reported better health after marriage than before, although the change was statistically significant only for men. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) issued a report in December 2004 relating Americans’ health to their marital status. The data for this analysis were collected between 1999 and 2002 and come from the NHIS, over 127,000 Americans were asked about many aspects of their health, including a self-assessment on the traditional five-point scale; questions about activity limitations; limitations in their ability to work; limitations in activities of daily living (ADLs, including bathing, dressing, and other self-care tasks); limitations in instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs, such as shopping, housework, etc.); and limitations in physical or social functioning (walking, climbing stairs, carrying packages). Table 4.1 is

Chapter 4

56

a replication of a part of a table from this publication (Schoenborn 2004) showing age-adjusted estimates of the prevalence of each of these conditions by marital status, separately for men and women. Adjusting for age is important because both health and marital status are related to age. Failing to take age into account would mean, for example, that never-married persons would appear to be in better health than the married simply because they are younger, and widowed persons would appear to be in worse health because they are older. Of the ten comparisons across marital statuses one can make from table 4.1 (five health conditions for each of the sexes), married people rank first on eight of them. The two exceptions are ADL and IADL limitations for men, where the married rank just behind the cohabiting, and limitations in physical or social functioning for men, where the married fall just behind the nevermarried; the differences, however, are trivial in each case. In all other comparisons married people fare best, and often by considerable margins.

Table 4.1. Age-Adjusted Prevalence of Various Health Conditions by Marital Status and Sex, American Adults Age Eighteen and Over (in percent) Sex and Marital Status

Men

Fair or Poor Health

Any Activity Limitation in Limitation in Limitation Work ADL or Activity IADL

Limitation in Physical or Social Functioning

11.4

14.6

11.3

3.2

26.7

Married

10.4

12.3

9.2

2.3

26.5

Never Married

12.4

20.2

16.6

5.5

25.5

Cohabiting

13.8

15.3

12.2

2.2

30.0

Divorced/ Separated

16.1

22.1

18.2

4.9

30.8

Widowed

18.5

24.7

20.1

6.9

31.9

12.3

15.6

11.9

4.6

34.5

Married

10.5

12.0

8.8

2.9

32.7

Never Married

12.7

18.6

14.1

6.1

34.3

Cohabiting

14.4

17.7

13.4

3.6

39.3

Divorced/ Separated

17.3

22.8

18.7

6.6

40.5

Widowed

20.1

26.4

21.8

8.5

41.5

Women

Source: National Health Interview Survey, reported by Schoenborn (2004).

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So the facts of the matter appear to be quite clear: Married people are healthier than others, and they live longer, at least according to the evidence we’ve reviewed thus far. The question, of course, is how this can be explained. Does marriage actually cause improved health? Will never-married people be healthier if they find a spouse and marry? Will they live longer? How about cohabitors? Will their health improve if they tie the knot? Will married people experience health problems if they divorce? And will widowed and divorced persons be healthier and live longer if they find new spouses? For Waite and Gallagher (2000, chapter 4), the answer to all these questions is clearly a resounding “yes.” They suggest that the Surgeon General announce that “Not being married can be hazardous to your health” (p. 47). They note an estimate to the effect that divorce elevates one’s risk of mortality about as much as a pack-a-day cigarette habit; the implication is clear that refraining from divorce will have an effect on one’s health comparable to quitting smoking. Referring to evidence on mortality such as we’ve discussed, they ask: “How much can getting married do for you?” The answer: “Sometimes, it can literally save your life” (Waite and Gallagher 2000, 47). Is this an accurate and useful interpretation of incontrovertible evidence, or shameless hyperbole? In reality, it’s probably somewhere in between those two extremes. Waite and Gallagher cite research showing that spouses can, and often do, take an active role in improving and maintaining each other’s health (DiMatteo 2004). People who marry often change their behavior to follow more healthful lifestyles (Lillard and Panis 1996; Sherbourne and Hays 1990). This appears to be particularly true of men, in part because single men are more likely to smoke, drink heavily, and engage in other risky behaviors (what Waite and Gallagher [2000, 55] call “stupid bachelor tricks”); and in part because wives are likely to encourage their husbands to eat better, drink less, see the doctor more, and generally behave in healthier ways (Duncan, Wilkerson, and England 2006; Umberson 1992). This is often called the “protective” function of marriage. And it may also be the case that having a spouse, and perhaps a family, encourages people to take more responsibility for themselves because they know others are depending on them. This is the “social integration” function of marriage. It is also clear that the economic benefits of marriage (of which we will have much more to say shortly) contribute to the better health and greater longevity of married persons, although they are not the entire story (Benzeval 1998; Carr and Springer 2010; Hughes and Waite 2002; Johnson et al. 2000; Rogers, Hummer, and Nam 2000; Waite and Hughes 1999; Waldron, Hughes, and Brooks 1996). But does being unmarried cause poor health in the same way that smoking causes lung cancer? Can people improve their health and longevity by marrying? An objective examination of the evidence does suggest that mar-

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riage plays a causal role, but it is neither as self-evident nor as strong as authors like Waite and Gallagher would have us believe. There are at least five reasons for some caution here. Not surprisingly, these are the same five reasons why we expressed caution over the causal role of marriage in promoting psychological well-being in the previous chapter: (1) The evidence isn’t completely consistent; some studies disagree. (2) There’s some evidence to the effect that the apparent benefits of getting married for physical health may be temporary. (3) While marriage may benefit many people, it apparently doesn’t benefit everyone who marries, and the exceptions to the “rule” are very informative. (4) Those who marry run the risk of having their marriages end, and marital termination has adverse effects on health. (5) People who marry may have been in better health than others prior to their marriages, and simply brought their advantage with them when they moved from the unmarried to the married state. As we did in our analysis of psychological well-being, we’ll examine each of these possibilities in turn. REASONS FOR CAUTION The Evidence Isn’t Unequivocal Several of the studies we have already reviewed actually found that differences in health according to marital status are relatively small and inconsistent. This is particularly the case with regard to differences between married and never-married people. As we noted, Pienta et al. (2000) found virtually no differences between the married and the never-married in the prevalence of fatal chronic diseases. Williams and Umberson (2004) found the same two categories to be indistinguishable in terms of self-reported health in their cross-sectional analysis, although they did find that getting married seemed to improve men’s health (more of this below). Cwikel, Gramotnev, and Lee (2006) found that never-married older women were similar to married women on physical health, and substantially better off than formerly married women. The data from the NHIS analyzed by Schoenborn (2004) and reported in table 4.1 above show minimal differences between the married and the never-married on self-reported health and limitations in physical or social functioning, although the differences are wider on the other three indicators of functional health. The study by Amato and Kane (2011) we discussed in the previous chapter found that married mothers reported worse self-rated health than did single, employed college graduates. Several studies have found minimal or nonexistent differences between married and never-married persons in mortality rates. Hayward and Gorman (2004) used the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Men, consisting of men aged forty-five to fifty-nine in 1966 who were followed from 1966 through 1990. They found that men who lived in intact families at age fifteen

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had lower mortality rates than others, largely due to differences in their adult years in socioeconomic status and lifestyle (smoking, obesity, etc.). However, they also found that the mortality rates of married and never-married men were indistinguishable from one another. And Smith and Zick (1994) found that divorce was related to higher mortality rates for women, but lower mortality for men. These findings are certainly contrary to those of other studies such as Kaplan and Kronick (2006), Lillard and Waite (1995), Liu (2009), Murray (2000), and Rendall et al. (2011), but the evidence certainly isn’t unanimous. Lund et al. (2002) analyzed a Danish sample of men and women who were between the ages of fifty and seventy in 1990, and were followed to 1998. People who were living with anyone were more likely to survive to 1998 than those living alone, as were people who were cohabiting. But differences in survival between married people and people living alone were weak and statistically insignificant. In other words, living with a spouse was less protection against mortality than living with anyone else, including a cohabiting partner. In a similar study using Danish data, Drefahl (2012) found that cohabiting men had mortality rates indistinguishable from those of married men once socioeconomic factors were controlled, and that among the well-educated both cohabiting men and women actually had lower mortality rates than their married counterparts. A number of longitudinal studies show similar results with respect to indicators of physical health. Dupre and Meadows (2007) examined differences in the incidence of diabetes, cancer, heart attack, and stroke according to marital status and transitions between statuses with data from the Health and Retirement Survey. In general, never-married people were no worse off on these indicators than the continuously married. Michael et al. (2001) analyzed data from a sample of over 28,000 female nurses, begun in 1976 and continuing through 1996. They found that married women had better health than those who lived alone in cross-sectional analyses, but over time women who lived alone experienced less age-related decline in health than did married women. Amato and Kane (2011) found that the self-rated health of young women improved as they moved from adolescence to young adulthood, but those who married experienced no greater improvement than those who didn’t. Zhang and Hayward (2006) observed no relation between marital status and the incidence of cardiovascular disease for men, although married women were less likely than their divorced or widowed counterparts to have cardiovascular problems. Wu and Hart (2002), using data from a Canadian study that followed people for two years, found no effect of entering either a cohabiting union or marriage on individuals’ health. And several studies (Eng et al. 2005; S. Lee et al. 2005; Sobal, Rauschenbach, and Frongillo 2003) show that getting married is related to subsequent moderate weight gain. So while the majority of studies conclude that marriage is related to

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better health, there are enough contrary findings to caution us against overenthusiastic conclusions. A recent study by Liu and Umberson (2008) suggests a possible cause for discrepancies in findings. They used data from the NHIS extending from 1972 through 2003, and charted changes over time in self-reported health according to marital status. They found that the advantage of married over never-married men decreased dramatically over this period, due primarily to improving health among never-married men. They didn’t observe a similar narrowing of the gap among women, but it was always smaller for women than men. The generalization that married people are in better health than unmarried people may simply be less true today than it was in the past. Liu and Umberson (2008, 252) conclude by saying that their “. . . results show that the self-rated health status of the never-married has improved for all race and gender groups examined, and is more similar to the married for men now than ever before, which suggests that encouraging marriage in order to promote health may be misguided.” Is the Effect of Marriage Permanent? In their analysis of longitudinal data from the Americans’ Changing Lives survey, Williams and Umberson (2004) found, as noted above, that getting married was related to improved health for men. Further, this effect didn’t attenuate over the three to five years between waves. But among those who remained in the same marital status during the time between waves of data collection, there were no differences in health between the married and the never-married. This suggests to the authors a “honeymoon period” in which recent marriage improves men’s health, but eventually the effect of marriage dissipates and those who married become similar to those who didn’t. This is consistent with some studies of mortality such as Rendall et al. (2011), who found that the beneficial effect of marriage on mortality rates diminished with advancing age and thus, presumably, with length of marriage. Again, it is important to distinguish the effects of getting married from the effects of being married. If Williams and Umberson are correct, the former is much more consequential for health than the latter. Changes in lifestyle that follow marriage, the monitoring of health behavior that spouses do for one another (particularly wives for husbands), and feelings of responsibility for family members that cause married persons to take better care of themselves may gradually dissipate with time. Also, as Meyler, Stimpson, and Peek (2007) point out, spouses tend to share health behaviors, including destructive behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and unhealthy diets. Married people who engage in these behaviors may reinforce them in their spouses, leading to health problems over time.

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Not Everyone Benefits from Marriage The study of the effects of widowhood on mortality by Elwert and Christakis (2006), which found a strong positive effect of widowhood on the odds of death, found that effect only for whites. Blacks who were endogamously married (that is, married to other blacks) experienced no elevation of the risk of mortality following widowhood. Since blacks constitute a disproportionate share of the unmarried adult population, this is an important qualification. As we mentioned earlier, Williams and Umberson (2004) found that, in terms of self-reported health, only men benefited from marrying for the first time. Liu and Umberson (2008), though, observed declines over time in the health advantage of married over unmarried men. Married women’s advantage over their unmarried counterparts was stable over the period of their study (1972 to 2003), but much smaller than was the case among men. These recent studies add to a long list that show that marriage has much stronger effects on men’s than women’s health, although that difference may be diminishing with time. Williams, Sassler, and Nicholson (2008) used the first two waves of the NSFH to study the effects of marriage on the health of single mothers. This is, of course, a particularly important population for the current debate surrounding the benefits of marriage. Williams and colleagues found that, while childless women’s health benefited from getting married (at least if the marriage endured), women who had borne children prior to marriage did not experience any improvement in health following marriage. A subsequent analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) by Williams et al. (2011) focusing on the health of single mothers showed a small positive effect of marriage to the child’s father for the total sample. However, after using a sophisticated methodology (propensity score matching) to eliminate selection effects, the authors found no effect of marriage for black single mothers. So a population that appears most vulnerable, and which many people believe is most in need of a spouse, actually doesn’t benefit from marrying in terms of health according to this study (see also Meadows, McLanahan, and Brooks-Gunn 2008). This is a pretty serious exception to the “marriage is good for you” rule. Williams et al. (2008) show that single mothers who subsequently married reported higher levels of marital conflict, lower marital satisfaction, and a greater likelihood of marital instability than did childless brides. This may be because single mothers’ choices of husbands are more limited, and they are thus more likely to marry disadvantaged men (Graefe and Lichter 2002; Qian, Lichter, and Mellott 2005). But these indicators of marital quality were also positively related to health. One reason that single mothers who married reported poorer health than did women who married before having children was that the single mothers also reported lower levels of marital quality. This

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suggests that marital quality may influence physical health in the same way that it influences psychological well-being. Many studies support this hypothesis. Wickrama et al. (2001) found that marital stress significantly increases the odds of hypertension, particularly among women. Gallo et al. (2003) also found strong negative relations between marital quality and multiple measures of cardiovascular health among women. Robles and Kiecolt-Glaser (2003) report that marital conflict can have consequences such as increased cardiovascular reactivity, impaired immune response, and even slower rates of wound healing. Coyne and colleagues (2001), in a study of survival rates among congestive heart failure patients, administered a measure of marital quality to both the patients and their spouses. They found that marital quality predicted survival (positively, of course) just as well as did a clinical measure of the severity of the patient’s illness. In brief, other things being equal, patients with better marriages survived longer. A review of research by Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton (2001) concluded that married people are, on average, in better health than unmarried people. However, they review literally dozens of studies that show that, among married persons, marital quality is strongly related to health in general and a great number of specific health outcomes and indicators of physiological functioning. They make it very clear that, in many cases, a poor marriage has stronger adverse consequences for health than does being unmarried. They also show that the effects of “negative” dimensions of marital quality such as conflict are stronger than the effects of “positive” dimensions such as marital satisfaction. Stressful, conflict-ridden, or abusive marriages clearly take their toll on married persons’ health, as well as their psychological well-being. A bad marriage hurts more than a good marriage helps (see also Carr and Springer 2010). As we concluded in the previous chapter, in terms of improving health, not just any marriage will do. The quality of the relationship between spouses is very important. A bad marriage is harmful and destructive in a variety of ways. Interestingly, it appears that marital quality is considerably more important to women’s health than men’s (Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton 2001; Wickrama et al. 2001; Williams and Umberson 2004). Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton argue that women are more sensitive to relationships, and particularly to conflict in relationships such as marriage. So while being married is more important for the health of men than women, the quality of the marriage is more important for women’s health than men’s. Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton conclude very clearly that, for women at least, no marriage is better for their health than a bad marriage. Recent longitudinal studies by Umberson et al. (2006) and Miller et al. (2013) show that marital quality at one point in time predicts self-rated health at later points in time. The Umberson study covers an eight-year period using

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the Americans’ Changing Lives data set, while the Miller study covers a twenty-year period with the Marital Instability over the Life Course data. Each study shows that both positive and negative dimensions of marital quality matter for self-rated health. People with better marriages are in better health, and changes in marital quality are followed by changes in health in the same direction. Finally, an ingenious study by Choi and Marks (2013) examined the effects of marital quality on health using all three waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). They found that, overall, changes in marital quality over time were modestly associated with changes in measures of health in the expected direction, although many relationships were not significant. But they also found that increased marital happiness led to improved self-rated health only for highly-educated people, and increases in marital conflict over time resulted in greater functional health limitations primarily for low-income respondents. They suggest a “cumulative advantage” explanation, whereby more advantaged people are most likely to benefit from good marriages and less advantaged people are more likely to be adversely affected by bad marriages. The less advantaged are the ones we’re primarily concerned about here, because they’re least likely to marry and most likely to have problematic marriages if they do marry. Encouraging them to marry doesn’t automatically mean that they will experience the same beneficial consequences as their better-educated and wealthier counterparts. In summary, the evidence is suggesting that marriage is related to better health and improved longevity, but not for everyone and not under all conditions. And there are indications that the people who are least likely to marry are least likely to benefit from marriage if they were to marry. Huston and Melz (2004), among many others, have argued that the assumption that marriage benefits everyone equally is naïve and unjustified by the weight of the evidence; this certainly seems to be the case with regard to physical health. The Consequences of Marital Termination A glance back at table 4.1, showing results from the NHIS reported by Schoenborn (2004), shows clearly that when all marital statuses are considered it’s the divorced and, particularly, the widowed who consistently report the worst health. For both sexes and all five indicators of health (a total of ten comparisons), widowed persons have the worst health in all ten cases, followed by divorced/separated persons in nine cases (the sole exception is that never-married men are slightly more likely than divorced men to report ADL or IADL limitations). Remember, these percentages are adjusted for age, so the greater prevalence of health problems among the widowed is not because they’re older than others. It’s fair to conclude from these data that health problems are considerably more common among the formerly married than

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among married, never-married, or cohabiting persons. Many other crosssectional studies (e.g., Gallo et al. 2003; Pienta et al. 2000) yield similar findings. Liu and Umberson (2008), in their study of changes in the relationship between marital status and self-rated health, found that the gap in health between the married and the never-married has narrowed over the past thirty years, as we noted above. However, they found that the advantage of the married over the formerly married (especially widows) has increased. They conclude their study by noting (p. 252) that, “In fact, getting married increases one’s risk for eventual marital dissolution, and marital dissolution seems to be worse for self-rated health now that at any point in the past three decades.” Liu (2009) also found that the advantage of the married over the widowed in mortality rates has been increasing since 1970, although as we noted above this may be simply because widowhood is occurring at older ages in recent years. Should married people, then, do whatever is necessary to remain married in order to protect their own health? Widowed people, who consistently experience the worst health outcomes in table 4.1 above and many other studies, obviously don’t have this choice; widowhood is involuntary. Our focus here should be on divorce, which involves at least an element of discretion. In the case of divorce, though, the simple comparison between divorced and married people (even when adjusted for age, as in table 4.1) isn’t as revealing of the consequences of divorce for health as one might first believe. Both marital status categories are internally diverse, containing people with characteristics so varied as to make straightforward comparisons potentially deceiving. Most married people report themselves to be happily married. As we saw in the previous section, marital quality is clearly related to physical health; people in unhappy, conflict-ridden marriages are in worse health than those in happy marriages. Very few divorced people had the option of remaining in a happy marriage. As was the case for psychological well-being (chapter 3), the relevant comparison here is between people who divorce and people who are in unhappy marriages, a small subset of the overall category of married persons. Unfortunately relatively few studies make this comparison. One study that does is the examination of the effects of both marital status and marital quality on cardiovascular functioning by Gallo and colleagues (2003). They divided their sample of 493 middle-aged women into marital status categories (married, never-married, divorced, widowed), and further divided the married into three categories based on marital satisfaction. On the cardiovascular measures they studied, the divorced and the least-satisfied married women were worse off than all other categories, and indistinguishable from each other. This is a small study with a limited range of dependent variables and a restricted sample. But its findings are consistent with the

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hypothesis that a poor marriage has adverse health consequences whether or not it eventuates in divorce. It may not be the divorce itself that adversely affects health, but the marital conflict that precedes it. Another, perhaps more generalizable study, is the analysis of the first four waves of the Marital Instability over the Life Cycle sample by Hawkins and Booth (2005). They followed a sample of people who were married in 1980 through 1992, tracking those who divorced as well as those who remained married, with measures of marital quality and self-rated overall health at each wave. To be classified as unhappily married, respondents had to be continuously married with scores below the sample mean on an eleven-item marital happiness scale at all four waves. The relevant outcome variable here was self-assessed health in 1992; the same measure in 1980 was used as a control variable, which means that the dependent variable is actually change in health. Unhappily married people were compared to other continuously married people, those who divorced and remarried, and those who divorced and remained divorced. Of these four categories, those who remained in unhappy marriages reported significantly worse overall health by 1992 than the other three. Hawkins and Booth actually found trivial and statistically insignificant differences between the (happily) continuously married and the divorced (whether or not the divorced remarried), but the unhappily married were clearly in worse health than others. These findings suggest that, from the point of view of physical health, divorce may help ameliorate problems caused by marital stress. Williams and Umberson (2004) followed people in the Americans’ Changing Lives survey from before they divorced to after. On a cross-sectional basis, divorced and widowed men and divorced women were in worse health than their married (or never-married) counterparts; widowed women, interestingly, were similar to the married. But when individuals were followed over time, divorce was associated with improved health among younger men and women of all ages; only older men experienced a decrease in health following divorce. Again, this suggests that ending a conflictual, stressful, or unhappy marriage may have beneficial effects on health. In another longitudinal study, Dupre and Meadows (2007) used data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the effects of marital status and marital transitions on the incidence of diabetes, cancer, heart attack, and stroke. Divorce increased the risk of experiencing one or more of these serious health conditions for women, but not men; only widowhood elevated men’s risk of health problems. The population of divorced persons is also internally diverse, of course. One axis of differentiation is the length of time that people have been divorced. One of the debates in the literature, as is the case for psychological well-being, is whether divorce constitutes a “chronic strain” or a “crisis” (see, for example, Amato 2000). If divorce is a chronic strain, then once a

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person experiences a divorce he or she enters a state that has long-term, perhaps permanent, deleterious consequences. Living as a single person, after a split that may well have been acrimonious, may be problematic in many ways, not the least of which is diminished financial resources. Raising children as a divorced parent is stressful. Not having a partner to share troubles with, or to encourage one to take care of oneself, may be problematic. In other words, being divorced may be bad for one’s health. But if divorce is a crisis, one eventually adjusts or recovers. After the initial period of shock and loss, people find new roles and relationships, different sources of satisfaction and support, and perhaps a more rewarding lifestyle. In addition, the daily stress of living in an unhappy relationship is eliminated or minimized. This model suggests that becoming divorced is bad for one’s health, but that this effect dissipates over time. Based on a comprehensive view of the literature (although concentrating more on psychological than physical health), Amato (2000) concludes that the evidence is mixed. Some evidence supports the chronic strain model, other evidence the crisis model; perhaps each is appropriate for some people. In their study of rural Iowa women, Lorenz et al. (2006) found that those who divorced during the study experienced increasing rates of physical illness over time, supporting the chronic strain model. On the other hand, Williams and Umberson (2004) found cross-sectional differences in health that favored the married over the divorced, but also found that those who were stably divorced over the period between waves of the study (three to five years) were indistinguishable from the married; this favors a crisis model. The evidence is still mixed, but there are many indications that, for some people at least, divorce may be the beginning of a healing process that results in long-term improvements in health. Williams and Umberson (2004, 95) conclude that “Researchers should begin to question the assumption that marriage is good for all individuals at all times and that all transitions out of marriage undermine health.” Earlier in this chapter we cited the work of Elwert and Christakis (2006), among many other studies, showing the adverse effects of widowhood on mortality. Studies such as these may be used to show that married people are better off than unmarried people, of course. But those who do not marry do not run the risk of widowhood. As shown in table 4.1, even after adjusting for age the widowed are in worse health than any other marital status category on almost all dimensions, and certainly have poorer health outcomes than never-married persons. If marriage does cause improvements in health, we must also grant that marital conflict, the divorce that may ensue from that conflict, and ultimately widowhood eventuate in poorer health and increased mortality risks. Simply getting married does not guarantee a long and healthy life.

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Selection Effects If we grant, as most of the evidence shows, that married people are healthier than others, it doesn’t automatically follow that getting or staying married causes better health. Another possibility is that healthier people are more likely to get married or stay married. In other words, people may select or be selected into marriage based in part on their health. The other side of the coin is that unhealthy people may not be attractive as potential spouses for others, and/or that poor health may lead to divorce. In addition, people may be selected into marriage based on other characteristics—education, earning potential, family background—that are causally related to health, so that healthier people marry and less healthy people don’t because the same antecedent factors are related to both marriage and health. It is also possible that married couples may share poor health habits or unhealthy environments that lead to premature death for one spouse, leaving the other as a widow with health problems that preceded bereavement. Waite and Gallagher (2000) are adamant that marriage causes better health, especially for men. Some longitudinal research, which has the potential to check for selection effects, finds none. Williams et al. (2008), for example, found that health did not predict marriage among either childless women or single mothers. But there are some indications that health may be a selection factor for marriage. Fu and Goldman (1996) used the NLSY to show that people who engaged in unhealthy behaviors such as alcohol or drug use, or who had physical characteristics typically associated with poor health such as obesity, were less likely than others to marry. Waldron et al. (1996) used the female subset of the same data set and found that health problems decreased the odds of marriage among women who were not employed; there was no such effect among employed women. And Amato and Kane (2011) show that, in their sample of young women, differences in selfrated health according to marital status (which did not always favor the married) were attributable virtually entirely to selection effects. Joung et al. (1998) analyzed longitudinal data from the Netherlands. They studied four marital transitions: marriage among never-married persons; marriage among divorced persons; divorce among married persons; and widowhood among married persons. The only association between marital transitions and health they observed involved divorce. They found that married people who had health problems were more likely to divorce than those without health problems. Note, however, that they didn’t find that health predicted marriage among the unmarried. Their findings do suggest, though, that divorced persons may be less healthy than married persons because their poor health causes or follows from marital stress that eventuates in divorce. Sbarra and Nietert (2009) used forty years worth of data from the Charleston Heart Study, which followed about 1,300 people from 1960 to

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2000. They found that those who were separated or divorced at the outset of the study had a higher mortality rate (that is, died earlier) than others, particularly for men, although there were no differences between the married, the never-married, and the widowed. But further investigation showed that the elevated risk of mortality pertained only to those who remained separated or divorced throughout the study (until death). When they compared those who ever experienced a separation and divorce to those who remained married, Sbarra and Nietert found no difference in mortality. They suggest that a likely cause resides in personality characteristics such as hostility and/or neuroticism, which increase the risks of both marital dissolution (and remaining unmarried) and mortality. In other words, a common cause predicts both divorce and mortality; this would constitute a selection effect rather than an effect of divorce. The study by Rendall et al. (2011) on marital status and mortality found, as we noted above, that married people have lower mortality rates than all types of unmarried people, even after controlling for several socioeconomic factors. But the authors were careful to point out that the differences they observed could still be due to selection effects. Showing that differences by marital status exist is one thing, but showing that these differences are caused by marital status is a very different, and much more difficult, thing (Goldman 1993). Wood, Goesling, and Avellar (2007) wrote a report for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in which their objective was to summarize the state of knowledge on the effects of marriage on health. They restricted their review of research to studies done in the United States since 1990 with sufficient methodological sophistication to at least estimate the probability that advantages observed among married people might be due to selection effects. They point out, though, that this is a very difficult objective in research on health and longevity. The best way to estimate selection effects is to do longitudinal research that compares subjects or respondents before an event occurs and after the event to see if they have changed in response to the event. In the previous chapter, for example, we reviewed several studies showing that people who marry experience decreased depression, while comparable people who don’t marry show no change or less change in depression. This is pretty solid evidence that marriage causes a change in depression, supporting the argument that at least part of married persons’ advantage in depression is attributable to marriage itself. The outcome variables we’re examining here are different. This is particularly clear in the case of life expectancy or the risk of mortality. As Wood et al. (2007, 35) point out: . . . because a person’s longevity is undetermined until the very end of life, it is impossible to assess how longevity changes in response to a transition in

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marital status. Likewise, whereas a change in marital status might have an immediate effect on a person’s health risk behaviors, health insurance status, or mental health, the possible consequences for most physical health outcomes (for example, the chances of developing a certain disease or chronic health condition) likely unfold over a longer time frame and would not be apparent in the period immediately after a transition into or out of marriage.

They do conclude that the evidence that married people have longer life expectancies and better health is quite solid. One possible explanation for this, of course, is that marriage improves health and being married helps people maintain their health. But, as Wood et al. (2007, 1) say at the outset of their review, “An examination of the relevance of these patterns for public policy must include careful consideration of whether the association between marital status and various health measures indicates that getting and staying married actually improves health.” They don’t think the evidence is sufficient at this point to be certain of that conclusion. This is probably a much more responsible reading of the evidence than Waite and Gallagher’s (2000, 47) assertion that getting married can save your life, or that divorce is equivalent to smoking in terms of its consequences for health. Overall, we don’t have enough good information yet to come to a decision on the role of selection effects in the health advantage of married persons. It does appear that we need to clearly differentiate between selection of people into marriage and selection out of marriage through divorce or widowhood; health may play a role in one, the other, both, or neither. While the evidence is equivocal, it is not sufficient to allow us to confidently eliminate the possibility of selection effects. It is certainly possible that, to some extent, the health advantages of the married are due to the greater propensity of healthy persons to marry and remain married. CONCLUSION The evidence does indeed support the generalization that married people are healthier than unmarried people, although there are enough contrary findings to justify some qualifications. The real question, though, is whether getting married or staying married actually causes people to be healthier. After reviewing the evidence in this chapter, I think there is indeed some merit to that argument. People who marry and have families are motivated to take better care of themselves, and most married people take care of their spouses too. But we need to put this in some context. The greatest differences in health and mortality are between married people and formerly married people. Differences between those who marry and those who don’t are smaller and less consistent. And as several scholars cited above have pointed out, those who don’t marry don’t run the risk of being

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formerly married. Is this a good reason not to marry? Of course not. But it does suggest that advising people to marry to protect or improve their health may be a tad over-enthusiastic. Marriage is statistically related to better health and longer life expectancy, but it also carries certain risks. People whose marriages end either through divorce or widowhood (and, frankly, that’s everyone except those who never marry or predecease their first spouses) appear to experience deleterious health consequences. They are, other things being equal, less healthy than those who remain married and those who never married. Losing a spouse is traumatic. However, it may well be the case that both divorce and poor health are consequences of poor marital quality. Unhappy, conflictual marriages are costly in many ways, and some of those ways involve health problems. Some of the evidence we’ve reviewed suggests that people’s health may actually improve following a divorce; it was the marriage that was the problem. Good marriages may help people be healthier; bad marriages definitely don’t. It is also entirely possible that some of the health advantage of the married is because healthy people are more likely to get married, stay married, and have happy marriages. No one whose work I’ve run across has suggested that this is the entire cause of marital status differences in health, but we can’t eliminate selection effects as at least partial causes based on what we know now. The apparent fact that they can’t explain the entirety of the differences doesn’t mean they’re irrelevant. The evidence doesn’t lend itself to easy summation or unequivocal conclusions. What is clear is that the “get married/stay married/be healthy” equation is much too simplistic.

Chapter Five

Marriage and Economic Well-Being

This chapter will be organized a bit differently than the previous two because we’re dealing with a different type of issue. With regard to the relations between marital status and both psychological and physical health, there’s some debate as to the extent to which marriage is beneficial. Although the preponderance of the evidence shows that married persons are better off than the never-married and the formerly married on psychological and physical dimensions, there is some contrary evidence, some indication that the benefits of marriage are unevenly distributed across the population, and some documented possibility that the effects of marriage may be temporary. None of those things is at issue regarding the relation between marriage and economic well-being; married people are better off. We will review some evidence showing that this is true, and the extent to which it is true, fairly briefly; there is no contrary evidence to discuss. On the other hand, the question of selection effects is a very important one in the context of economic issues, and is also enormously complex. Are unmarried people more likely to be poor than married people because they are unmarried, or is marriage less available to and feasible for poor people? Can poor people in our society actually improve their economic situations by marrying? Or do people on the bottom of the economic ladder have such limited opportunities for marriage that any potential spouse available to them would be unlikely to benefit them economically? The questions we’re asking here are the same as those we’ve asked in prior chapters. If today’s unmarried people got married, would they have the same economic characteristics as other married people? If today’s divorced people had remained married, would they be indistinguishable from those whose marriages have survived in terms of income, wealth, and standard of living? These questions were complex when we addressed them in the con71

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texts of psychological and physical differences between married and unmarried people. They’re even more complex when the subject involves economic or financial status. And they are also intimately intertwined with issues involving demographics, particularly the actual existence of potential marital partners. We’ll need to investigate these issues in subsequent chapters. For now, we’ll examine several different kinds of data that show that married people and their children are substantially better off in economic terms than unmarried people and their children. Here we’ll look at economic data for families and households; we’ll deal with individuals in later chapters. MARITAL STATUS, INCOME, AND POVERTY Table 5.1 reports median income for families (the amount that divides the income distribution in half) by family type for the United States in 2013. Families headed by married couples had a median income of over $76,000; among those in which the wife was employed the median was over $94,000. Families headed by single men, though, had a median income of only about $44,500, and those headed by single women earned less than $31,500. Clearly families headed by unmarried people, particularly women, have much lower incomes than other types of families. In part this is true because families headed by single adults have only one adult member to participate in the labor force. The difference in income according to wife’s labor force status among families headed by married couples is striking; on average, families in which the wife is employed made over $42,000 more than those in which she did not work. The financial benefit of having two incomes is obvious. Families in which the wife is not employed had a median income of just under $52,000, which is only about $7,000 more than the median income of families headed by single men. (Not all families with non-employed wives involved a male breadwinner and a

Table 5.1. Median Income of Families by Type of Family, 2013 Type of Family

Median Income in 2013

Married couple

$76,339

Wife in labor force

94,299

Wife not in labor force

51,839

Male householder, no wife present

44,475

Female householder, no husband present 31,408

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (2014).

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female homemaker, of course; some included unemployed husbands, some two retired spouses, etc.) But among families headed by single adults, the sex of the adult matters a great deal. The median income of families headed by an unmarried woman is only about 71 percent of that of families headed by single men. And, of course, families headed by unmarried women are more likely to contain children than those headed by unmarried men. Table 5.2 shows differences in family income in 2012 according to family type (married couple, male householder with no wife present, female householder with no husband present) from the 2013 American Community Survey. This survey is conducted by the Bureau of the Census each year. It shows the distribution of families across income categories rather than median incomes as in table 5.1, and families with children under age eighteen are separated from families without minor children. The numbers in the last row are the estimated numbers of families of each type in the United States’ population, not the number of cases in the sample. The survey actually samples about three million households each year. The first thing to notice in this table is that families containing adults without spouses are much more concentrated in the lowest income categories. This is particularly true of female-headed households, and especially those with children under eighteen. (Note that families headed by women constitute about 76 percent of single-parent families with children, versus 70 percent of unmarried-adult families without children.) Only 1.7 percent of married-couple households with children had incomes under $10,000, but over one-fifth of households with children headed by unmarried women were in this income category. Just less than 9 percent of married-couple households with children had incomes under $25,000, compared to slightly more than half of all female-headed households with children. The differences aren’t as dramatic for households without children, but they’re in the same direction and still quite large. The way these categories are divided, the modal income category (the one with the highest number in it) for family households headed by single men, with or without children, and single women without children, is $25,000–$49,999. This may not seem so bad. Families with incomes approaching $50,000 are generally not in desperate financial shape. But most families below the $50,000 line are not near that line. And the modal income category for single-mother families with children is $10,000–$24,999. In today’s economy, families with incomes in this range have serious problems. There is no doubt that families with two parents have substantially higher incomes than those with one parent, and families with single mothers are much worse off than those with single fathers. At the other end of the spectrum, however, there are some families headed by single women with very high incomes. Over 3 percent of such

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Table 5.2. Family Income by Family Type and Presence of Children under Eighteen, 2012 (in percent) With Children