Marital distress

The National Marriage Project of Rutgers University recently published its annual assessment of the health of marriage in America, called The State of Our Unions. In brief, our unions are increasingly suspect, an undesirable trend that may lead current values as much as reflect them.

Of positive note, the divorce rate continues to decline slowly, down about 15 percent since the early ’80s, but still more than double the 1960 rate. That means about 45 percent of the couples marrying today will eventually divorce, although Mainers are slightly below the national average. More alarming is that Americans are marrying less frequently. Taking into account the aging population, marriages are down more than 15 percent since 1980 — 10 percent in just the last six years.

The authors address several possible reasons for the decline. They argue that marriage is not the rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood it once was. Young people, particularly women, are more likely to have established their adult identity outside the family home without the help of marriage. Most young people are more likely to have lived with someone of the opposite sex before marriage. The number of couples co-habitating has increased 800 percent since 1980. Marriage is also no longer the only acceptable way to raise a child: 32 percent of all babies are born to single women, more than three times the rate in 1970. Almost 3 of 10 children live in homes with one parent.

What concerns some psychologists is that marriage is in danger of becoming nothing more than another form of “couples relationship,” with the added encumbrances of legal entanglements. This defining down of marriage, if nothing else, leads to confusion for children. Consider that the percentage of high school seniors who indicate that a good marriage is ‘extremely important’ has increased over the last two decades. Yet those same teen-agers are less likely to think they will remain married, and their pessimism as a group has increased over that same period. A mere 30 percent of teen-age girls see marriage as offering a unique contribution to their quality of life as adults.

The Marriage Project is valuable because it raises questions about an institution most Americans, for now anyway, think is worth saving. Certainly there is a sense that the nation has endured enough the devolution from “We, the People” to “I, my needs.”

One of the unrecognized strengths of marriage is in its unwieldy structure, and the relative difficulty of termination. Emotional commitment waxes and wanes, but adults as well as children benefit from the reflection and deliberation a divorce process requires. If marriage further erodes, more children will be confronted with the confusing message of a society honoring the institution of marriage without knowing one firsthand.