Has the future of marriage arrived? A contemporary examination of gender, marriage, and psychological well-being.

Thirty years ago, sociologist Jessie Bernard argued that the gap in men’s and women’s marital experiences was so great as to constitute “his” and “her” marriages (Bernard 1972). Bernard further proclaimed that, “marriage introduced such profound discontinuities into the lives of women as to constitute genuine emotional health hazards” (p. 37). A year later, Gove and Tudor (1973) introduced and tested a similar theory, arguing that married women are at greater risk for mental illness than their male counterparts because the adult roles of married women are less valued and more frustrating than those of married men. According to Bernard, the gendered nature of marriage places women in a double-bind: Although family roles are less beneficial and, in some ways, more harmful to women than men, gendered socialization processes encourage women to highly value and identify with the role of wife and mother. Therefore, marital quality should be more important to women’s mental health than to men’s, while simply being married should be more important to men’s mental health than to women’s (Gove, Hughes, and Style 1983). The idea that marriage benefits men more than women while marital quality affects women more than men forms the cornerstone of sociological research on gender, marriage, and mental health and continues to drive much of the research conducted in this area today. For the past thirty years, this idea has contributed to research and theory on a range of related topics, including explanations of marital dissolution, gender differences in mental health, the gendered division of household labor, and the physical and mental health consequences of women’s multiple roles. Despite Bernard’s caustic assessment of the current state of marriage at the time, she speculated that shifts in marital and gender roles gaining momentum in the early 1970s could lead to a “future of marriage” that provided equal advantages to women and men. Demographic and cultural changes in the United States have, in fact, significantly altered women’s status and roles both within and outside of the family. Has the future of marriage that Bernard envisioned arrived? The present study addresses this question using panel data from three recent waves of a nationally representative survey. In addition to providing a contemporary assessment of gender differences in the effects of marital status and marital quality on psychological well-being, the analysis extends previous research in several ways. First, the effects of continuity in an unmarried status are separated from the effects of transitions into and out of marriage in order to assess potential gender differences in the processes underlying marital status differences in well-being. Second, both positive and negative dimensions of marital quality and psychological well-being are considered. Finally, the analysis examines whether being unmarried or exiting marriage through divorce or widowhood undermines psychological well-being more than being in a strained marriage, and whether these associations differ by gender.