It’s one of the sad ironies of modern life that as marriage has grown more idealized, it’s also becoming less common.
The amount we spend on weddings has skyrocketed; American women are glued to shows about buying the perfect wedding dress, finding the most delicious food to serve at the reception and hiring the best band. Yet we’re less and less likely to actually tie the knot.
Even when kids are involved: New data from the government’s National Survey of Family Growth shows that 40 percent of all births during the 2000s were to unwed mothers.
And that last isn’t only due to the fact that we have stopped stigmatizing pre-marital sex and out-of-wedlock births: It’s also the way we’ve started thinking of marriage as a consumer good, rather than a transcendental commitment that allows the couple to work at building a better, more meaningful life.
Many now see marriage as a prize that you win for getting your life together. Interviews with American women reveal that they want to wait until they get an education, a decent job, good financial footing, even a downpayment on a home before they’ll take that next step of getting married.
And who can blame them? If you don’t have an extra few grand to spend to “look like a princess” on your “big day” and — if you’ve watched a few episodes of “Say Yes to the Dress” — you’ll conclude it’s probably not worth it.
Which is why the decline in marriage can be seen most dramatically among poor Americans. A 2010 Pew survey found that 64 percent of college-educated Americans get married, compared with only 48 percent of those with a high-school diploma or less. That gap quadrupled in the half century after 1960.
Poor women still dream of the fairy-tale wedding, but few believe they can afford it.
If you’ll excuse a little cheesiness, though, marriage is supposed to be a journey, not a destination. Or rather, it’s best thought of as a tool to help you on your journey.
The data are clear on this point. Marriage has lots of benefits, but the easiest to measure are financial. All things being equal, it’s much easier to make it on two incomes than one (or at least, if one spouse stays home with the kids, two workers).
And the long-term commitment of marriage means that people are more likely to pool their resources and build a life together — even if you got the ring from a Cracker Jack box and spoke your vows at City Hall.
But like any tool, there is a correct way to use marriage. Which brings us to a recent study from the Council on Contemporary Families.
The CCF researchers found that these financial benefits don’t necessarily show when a single mother marries: “We found no physical or psychological advantages for the majority of adolescents born to a single mother whose mothers later married.” They did, however, find a “modest benefit” for the children whose mothers married the biological fathers.
This is pretty logical. As Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project explains, the “new guy may not be particularly invested in a child who is not his.” A huge mound of studies support the idea that it is best for a child to be raised by two biological parents. And when that possibility isn’t available, there is no clear advantage to having a stepfather over growing up with a single parent.
The implications of the new CCF study and the other research seem clear enough: To get the benefits of marriage, you should marry first, then have children with the guy you marry.
But such a conclusion is apparently too old-fashioned for the folks at CCF, who argue that the government should stop its encouragement of marriage as a way to get out of poverty. Kristi Williams, a sociologist at Ohio University and lead author of the study, says poverty is the reason people don’t marry. And rationally so, she suggests: If you’re poor, she tells me, “the men available to you have low levels of education and few good economic prospects.” Then again, by that logic, why have a baby with such a guy?
Williams insists we must fix poverty first, then we can fix marriage. To fix poverty, she suggests “raising the minimum wage” and “offering more sex education and more access to birth control and family planning.”
Let’s leave aside whether those fixes are likely to change anything — as well her suggestion that these women are too ignorant to know how not to get pregnant and that they can’t afford (now free) birth-control pills. The problem is that Williams accepts the idea that the institution of marriage should be the cherry on top once everything else in life is settled — a notion that’s better suited for reality TV.