The Wax and Wane of Marriage: Prospects for Marriage in the 21st Century

Key Words: cohabitation, family change, marriage. I thank the Editor, Alexis Walker, for publishing this symposium. I am especially grateful for her invitation to participate in this dialogue about family changes and what these changes might portend for the future of marriage and family life. The papers in this symposium span quite a wide range of issues. Seltzer (2004) and Le Bourdais and Lapierre-Adamcyk (2004) focus on heterosexual cohabitation, the former on the United States and Great Britain, and the latter on Canada. Kurdek (2004) focuses on gay and lesbian couples, examining how their relationships function compared with heterosexual spouses. Spurred by the Administration's Healthy Marriage Initiative in the United States, Huston and Melz (2004) examine the case for marriage promotion, arguing that policies to promote family well-being need to take account of myriad factors, and that an emphasis on relationship skills alone is misplaced. With a somewhat similar purpose, Bradbury and Karney (2004) explore the implications of research on marital quality for strategies designed to strengthen couple relationships. Oropesa and Landale (2004) investigate the likely consequences of the expansion of the Hispanic population in the United States for the future of marriage. Finally, Cherlin (2004) presents an argument that although marriage has become deinstilutionalized, it retains symbolic value. Although each essay has a unique aim and scope, all are valuable contributions that make for a provocative and diverse set of views on marriage and family changes. I also find it refreshing that the papers in this symposium focus on marriage and marriagelike adult relationships, the latter including heterosexual cohabitation and gay and lesbian couples. Research in my field is increasingly focused on how changes in family patterns affect child well-being. Thus, I applaud a discourse that makes marriage front and center. Also notable is that authorship is somewhat diverse in terms of disciplinary orientations. Some are written by family scholars with sociological and demographic training (Cherlin, Le Bourdais, Lapierre-Adamcyk, Oropesa, Landale, Seltzer, and Melz), and others by those with backgrounds in various areas of psychology (Bradbury, Karney, Kurdek, and Huston). I, by the way, am a member of the former group. The chief goal of my commentary is to identify several themes that emerge in the articles, and to provide some reflections on these themes. Unless otherwise noted, my comments refer to the United States, the country I know best in terms of family research. I conclude by drawing linkages between this symposium and what social scientists and social commentators were writing about families decades or even a century ago; many of the intellectual themes have been around far longer than we recognize. I also take the liberty of closing with my own prediction for the future of marriage. RECURRING THEMES 1. The Retreat From Marriage Stems From Economic, Social, and Cultural Shifts A first theme that runs through several of these contributions is twofold: (a) that marriage has "retreated"; and (b) that the retreat is due to a complex and interrelated set of social forces. Mostly the theme is mentioned in passing in the symposium articles, simply to provide context or interpretation for the discussion at hand. In the case of Cherlin's (2004) article, however, the theme is developed at some length. As far as marriage having retreated, those of us who study families tend to cite the same body of evidence, and that is certainly the case in this symposium. The litany of indicators is well known: declining fertility, increasing age at marriage, high levels of marital disruption, a growing separation between marriage and childbearing as manifested in an increasing proportion of children being born outside marriage, and the growth of nonmarital cohabitation. Where do we look for the causes of all of this change? …