Marriage Is to Change and Unify, Not to Acknowledge Perfect Compatibility

This Leanne Italie article, from the AP, proclaiming that “barely half of U.S. adults are married,” is best read backwards, as follows:

“Men’s real wages have fallen and they face a lot of job insecurity, so a woman who would have found a high school graduate a pretty damn good catch in 1960 now has to say to herself, ‘Would it really be smart of me to marry this guy?’ She’s choosing to focus on her own earning power,” [says Evergreen State University family studies professor Stephanie Coontz.] …

… Women, in particular, are experiencing a mass marriage rethink, [JWT Intelligence trend watcher Ann] Mack said. “A growing number of women are taking an alternate life route that doesn’t include marriage as an essential checkpoint,” she said. …

… “We broke up because when you live with someone, everything comes to the surface,” said [interviewee Erin] Turner, who remains single in Chicago as her 30th birthday approaches in March. “You start to see how people handle confrontation, financial realities, challenges, the housework load. If we had been married we would have been divorced, or fully on our way.”

At the level of such specific qualities, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to speculate that no two people are perfectly compatible, especially two people embodying the worthy social objective of blending and unifying different families, even different cultures.  (In this light, it’s peculiar that many of the same people who believe marriage ought to be easily severable would be apt also to cheer increases in mixed marriages.)  The institution of marriage arguable evolved as it has in order to strengthen the collection of qualities — tolerance, lifelong perspective, and a willingness to compromise — that make it possible, even rewarding, to work out differences in opinion and personality.

The article goes on to acknowledge the growing gap between the educated and wealthy and those farther down the social ladder, but in the context that “marriage is riskier” for “less educated and lower-earning women.”  That may be so from the individual woman’s perspective, but from the social perspective, it appears to be exactly backwards.

Economic arguments aside, though, it may be that increasing bifurcation in our society derives not only from the different marital practices of different classes, but also from the simple fact of decreasing marriage and, therefore, decreasing unity.  Matthew Shaffer expresses the idea well in a compelling essay on (I would argue) a related distancing occurring between older generations and younger ones:

The political moral is that unchosen obligations, restraints, and dependencies are the things that push people together, despite our irritableness and our inconvenience to each other. Our limitations and inadequacies counter our selfish bent, and become a foundation for community. (Lewis’s cosmic allegory, then, doubles as theodicy, showing how it can be good for us that we do not always get what we want, and are sick and feeble.)

The Lewis to whom Shaffer refers is C.S. Lewis, who, in his The Great Divorce, presents the image of Hell as a land in which it is surpassingly easy to move away from people who irk or inconvenience us.  Thus, in Shaffer’s summary, “each of the damned is thousands of miles away from any other.”

When it comes to marriage, two especially acute dangers arise from this tendency:  That children whom the unmarried or divorce parents beget must traverse those miles to maintain their sense of a unified heritage, or that there will be no children at all to carry that heritage forward.

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