The Decline of marriage?

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1802/decline-marriage-rise-new-families

by trustfundbaby • 16 years ago

19 45 16 years ago

bobf• 16 years ago

It seems interesting that they identify people as moving from historically marrying for "financial stability" towards marrying for love, yet divorce rates have increased. Although it is perhaps slightly counterintuitive, I think it actually makes a lot of sense. If you are relying on a spouse for financial stability, you are more likely to stick it out through the hard times of a marriage. Love is a bit more fickle.

seiji• 16 years ago

There's a Bullshit episode where Penn "argues that free trade and economic interdependence are the best means to achieve peace."

He brings up an example of hating Teller, but never hurting him because there's no money to be made as a single stunt magician.

oldgregg• 16 years ago

Financial stability vs. love is a false dichotomy. You could also say that shift is from Community & Family Commitment to Emotionally Driven Radical Autonomy. Read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam or look at what "love" marriages are doing in India.

In the 60's everyone was casting off (often shitty) cultural restraints, but it was an overcorrection that was almost completely narcissistic. Suddenly you have no fault divorce and a culture that increasingly doesn't view that as a problem. Fast forward 40 years and my generation is largely self-serving paxil-popping automatons. :-)

Facebook brings us together but it ultimately doesn't make us really sacrifice for each other. That's an infinitely harder problem that technology will probably never solve.

duck2• 16 years ago

The share of births to unmarried women has risen dramatically over the past half century, from 5% in 1960 to 41% in 2008. There are notable differences by race: Among black women giving birth in 2008, 72% were unmarried. This compares with 53% of Hispanic women giving birth and 29% of white women.

That blew me away... I would of never guessed it was that high.

Qz• 16 years ago

Where have you been the past fifty years?

sokoloff• 16 years ago

Similarly (though sort of in the opposite direction), I was shocked to see that 32% of respondents reported that "Premarital sex is wrong"

I would have expected about half of that, at most.

steveklabnik4• 16 years ago

I don't plan on getting married, unless a few key things come up. One big one is insurance, the second is hospital visitation rights, and the third is tax benefits.

Other than that, I think it's pretty archaic. Also note I don't want children... that might affect such things, too.

tptacek6• 16 years ago

In what sense is marriage "archaic"?

The bond of family is unlike any other bond.

Friendships, business partnerships, strategic alliances, romances, all of them are transient in ways that family is not.

But the family you're born with is a happenstance. Apart from marriage and adoption, what other discretionary act allows two adults to create a new, deliberate familial bond?

I don't want to get too "no true Scotsman" about this; I accept that there is divorce (partly because we've embraced divorce as a culture, partly because we've embraced casual marriage as a culture, and yes, partly because as a society we have rightly grown out of practices that secured marriage, such as single-income households) and failed marriage.

But marriage as a concept has a clear, practical value. It's more challenging to realize the concept in 2010 than it was in 1910, but that doesn't mean the concept itself is outdated.

steveklabnik4• 16 years ago

I guess I just don't feel the need for such an actual act. Take my current situation: I've been seeing this girl for about three years now, it's my third 2+ year relationship, and it's going exceptionally well. We live together, we have a joint bank account... why bother getting married? It doesn't change the way that either of us feel about each other. Not only that, but marriage implies a few things about our relationship that are simply not true.

The only value it actually holds is getting certain benefits from organizations that are still structured around the idea that a man and a woman end up loving each other very much, and decided to be together forever. That's the concept I'm talking about when I mean it's 'outdated,' I think that the vast majority of relationships won't actually last forever, nor should they.

azanar2• 16 years ago

In what sense is marriage "archaic"?

The bond of family is unlike any other bond.

You don't need a marriage to have a family; if you disagree with this, I worry you are getting concepts and titles knotted to tightly with one another.

Family as a concept has a clear, practical value; this much I will totally agree with. I don't think it is as important the shape that family makes, though, and thus far marriage has only lent legitimacy to certain forms of family -- one man, one woman, largely responsible for the welfare of the offspring they produce. I can think of a lot of ways in which this is suboptimal.

But marriage having clear, practical value? It seems the practical value you call out in marriage is that it acts as a sort of moralistic glue to hold a marriage together when other means of adhesion -- trust of one another, emotional support, physical attraction, etc -- have fallen by the wayside. If this need to not fail against some societal title bestowed upon a couple is all that is left holding them together, why is this good? How does "'till death do us part" help when it is more of a constraint and/or threat than a promise? And if the couple already has a sufficient number of these things gluing them together, why do we need this additional social glue?

So I'd like to see what marriage is meant to represent separated from the actual institution, and considered separately. If a couple has what a marriage represents, but lacks the title, I don't see how this is worth distinguishing -- or a union in general for that matter; I think single man/woman couples are more of a historical accident than anything. If a couple has the title of marriage, but has a substantive lack of what a marriage represents, I don't see how the title is going to make either of their lives better. It only makes them feel guilty for not living up to what they labeled themselves as, and I've never seen the benefit in that.

I am married, and there are few things that mean less to my and my wife's relationship than that title. It isn't the glue that bonds us, and it would not be the glue that would keep us together if everything else fell apart. But enough other people think it is that we found not being married a huge inconvenience; society in general, and the government in particular, are heavily tilted toward engineering couples into marriage. We'd have been happy remaining unmarried the rest of our lives if everything weren't so constructed to engineer us into wedlock, but we also didn't want to be so financially penalized for not behaving.

So we're married, but there are few things that mean less to us; we were married in all practical purposes before we had the title. Getting the title was strictly pragmatic. If this is part of what is tearing marriage apart, so be it; perhaps it would be better if the institutions that stood so much on ceremony faded into insignificance, and we started focusing more on the things those ceremonies are meant to cement.

michaelchisari• 16 years ago

I don't particularly care for the institution of marriage, although I will say that I think weddings are tons of fun, and the only issue I have with the decline in marriages is that I don't get to go to very many of them.

burgerbrain• 16 years ago

The loss of another socially acceptable reason to drink in public is always a sad occurrence.

eru• 16 years ago

You should move to Europe.

pjscott2• 16 years ago

Have you considered celebrating obscure holidays? I know some Americans who celebrate Guy Fawkes' Day just because it gives them an excuse to have a party and burn someone in effigy.

If you get some friends on board and act like what you're doing is perfectly normal, you probably won't be hassled about drinking in public. Everyone will assume that you're supposed to be doing whatever it is you're doing.

igrekel5• 16 years ago

Not to mention an excellent occasion to meet girls you'd otherwise never see in a bar or a club. They are wearing their nice clothes and took good attention to look good, you often even have an occasion to get them to dance.

hasenj5• 16 years ago

I'm not really surprised all that much. Having moved from the middle east to north america, the culture is so different that I'm surprised marriage is still practiced over here.

Marriage is mostly a social construct but a large part of it is also religious in nature. In large part it serves to conserve the tradition and culture of society or a community.

As social relationships become less centered on family bonds, marriage will weaken. And as western societies become less and less religious, there's less motivation for any couple to get married.

This is not even unintentional. I think at the heart of the feminist movement lies a belief that marriage is a tool devised by society to control women, or something of that sort.

igrekel5• 16 years ago

Marriage is also a contract and way to make the relationship official or public. It also make sense in that perspective to invite many people and to publish the information to make sure everyone is aware of this commitment.

I find it always funny when unmarried couples with children are looking for a legal contract of some kind to ensure things are official between them in case something bad happens. They just see marriage as the complicated traditional thing that (they feel) is supposed to be forever. It doesn't have to be.

barrkel• 16 years ago

Marriage is a legal contract you often can't negotiate, and even if you can and do (pre-nup) you come off looking like an ass. As a contract, it's even subject to retroactive changes (politicians changing laws).

The way incentives are set up now, there is simply no way I would enter into a marriage in most western countries. That doesn't mean I wouldn't want a means of committing to a legal contract to make things official; it's just the terms of the default contract that I disagree with.

capstone2• 16 years ago

I think at the heart of the feminist movement lies a belief that marriage is a tool devised by society to control women.

Why do you think that? As far as I know, the feminist movement is a part of a greater civil rights movement focused on equal political, economic, and social rights regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, and yes, in the particular case of feminism, gender. What makes you say that feminism is mainly focused on destroying marriage?

On a separate anecdotal note, I grew up in the former Soviet Union where religion was largely absent and yet marriage was very strong.

hasenj5• 16 years ago

Ah, I didn't say they're set on destroying marriage.

For all I could tell, they couldn't care less.

But from what I understand, they have this notion of the "patriarchal society" where the males control everything, including language, and gender roles, and everything else. It's obvious that marriage is a byproduct of this patriarchal structure.

I've heard a certain feminist (who happens to be married) say on TV that marriage is an old and failed system that we should get rid of. I think this is not too inconsistent with what the western culture(s) subconsciously believe.

The point of marriage is the creation of families in a social structure where pre-martial sex is strongly frowned upon, and where the social network is built mostly on top the "family" unit.

In the west, pre-martial sex is rather encouraged, and the social structure is not built on top of the "family" unit.

djcapelis• 16 years ago

Not just this, but I've noticed a lot of my friends that are married are in open marriages, which seems to be the trend I've noticed more than marrying less.

maukdaddy• 16 years ago

This is the saddest comment thread I've read on HN.

I had no idea geeks were so against marriage.

duck2• 16 years ago

Marriage, like many things include software, is only as good as the foundation that it is built on. I have no doubt that my wife and I will ever get a divorce. It just isn't an option. I've seen others who hold the same belief and through very hard times they don't change when it comes to that... and in the end their marriage is even better than before. I've seen the same with us as well.

I have no problem if people don't want to get married, but if you do, I wish more couples would discuss that before they get hitched.

The Decline of marriage?

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