The Elusive AltarBy David Brooks
The New York Times
If all the world were south of 96th Street, what a happy place it would be! If all the world were south of 96th Street, then we could greet with unalloyed joy the news that after decades of social change, more American women are living without husbands than with them.
We could revel in the stories of women — from Riverside Drive all the way to TriBeCa! — liberated from constraining marriages and no longer smothered by self-absorbed spouses. We could celebrate with those — the ad executives as well as the law partners! — who now have the time and freedom to go back to school and travel abroad, and who are choosing not to get remarried.
But alas, there are people in this country who do not live within five miles of MoMA, and for them, the fact that many more people are getting divorced or never marrying at all is not such good news.
For voluminous research shows that further down the social scale there are millions of people who long to marry, but who are trapped just beyond the outskirts of matrimony. They have partners. They move in together. Often they have children with the people they love. But they never quite marry, or if they do, the marriage falls apart, with horrible consequences for their children. This is the real force behind the rise of women without men.
The research shows that far from rejecting traditional marriage, many people down the social scale revere it too highly. They put it on a pedestal, or as Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins puts it, they regard marriage not as the foundation of adult life, but as the capstone.
They don’t want to marry until they are financially secure and emotionally mature. They don’t want to marry until they can afford a big white-dress wedding and have the time to plan it. They don’t want to marry until they are absolutely sure they can trust the person they are with.
Having seen the wreckage of divorce, they are risk averse, but this risk aversion keeps them trapped in a no man’s land between solitude and marriage. Often they slide into parenthood even though they consider themselves not ready for marriage. The Fragile Families study shows that nearly 90 percent of the people who are living together when their child is born plan to get married someday. But the vast majority never will.
In her essential new book, “Marriage and Caste in America,” Kay Hymowitz describes the often tortuous relations between unskilled, unmarried parents. Both are committed to their child, but in many cases they have ill-defined and conflicting expectations about their roles. The fathers often feel used, Hymowitz writes, “valued only for their not-so-deep pockets.” The mothers feel the fathers are unreliable. There are grandparents taking sides. The relationship ends, and the child is left with one parent not two.
It’s as if there are two invisible rivers of knowledge running through society, steering people subtly toward one form of relationship or another. These rivers consist of a million small habits, expectations, tacit understandings about how people should act and map out their lives.
Among those who are well educated and who are rewarded by the information-age economy, the invisible river reinforces the assumption that childbearing is more arduous and more elevated than marriage. One graduates from marriage to childbearing.
But among those who are less educated and less rewarded, there is an invisible river that encourages the anomalous idea that marriage is more arduous and more elevated than childbearing. One graduates from childbearing to matrimony.
The people in the first river are seeing their divorce rates drop and their children ever better prepared to compete. Only 10 percent of students at an elite college like Cornell are from divorced families, according to a study led by Dean Lillard and Jennifer Gerner.
The people in the second river are falling further behind, and their children face bad odds. For them, social facts like the rise of women without men cannot be greeted with equanimity. The main struggle of their lives is not against the patriarchy.
The first step toward a remedy, paradoxically, may be to persuade people in this second river to value marriage less, to see it less as a state of sacred bliss that cannot be approached until all the conditions are perfect, and more as a social machine, which, if accompanied with the right instruction manual, can be useful for achieving practical ends.
Photo Credit: David Brooks. (The New York Times)
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