Dear Katha,
Reading The Case for Marriage and The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce I was periodically reminded of a stanza from a poem W.H. Auden wrote for the Harvard graduating class of 1946. (The subtitle of the poem, perhaps not inapt for the books under discussion, was “a reactionary tract for the times.”) Anyway, the lines–I’m sure that you, a poet,–know them, go:
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.
Since I’ve tried, with reasonable success, to follow this advice, I confess I found myself a bit put out by these books, with their repetitive, ungraceful prose, their commitment of discussing the most complex and delicate human experiences with reference to percentages and probabilities, and their cavalier (and typical) smudging of the boundary between correlation and causation. In the end, they fall into the fastest-growing literary category of the age, namely Books Designed for Purposes Other Than Reading. Their true function is to serve as the scaffolding for magazine features (Wallerstein’s book has already been the subject of a Time cover story), talk show appearances, and political debate. This is not to deny their importance, but rather to identify its conditions. Infidelity, which belongs to the other dominant literary genre of the moment, the intimate non-celebrity memoir, is a very different kind of book. I’ll touch on it briefly at the end of this post. Maybe we can discuss it tomorrow or Wednesday.
The Case for Marriage is a curious amalgam of sociology (Linda Waite is a sociologist at the University of Chicago), self-help, and social criticism (Maggie Gallagher is a syndicated columnist whose writing appears locally in the New York Post, and the director of the Marriage Program at the Institute for American Values). Their stated intention is to persuade readers on “scientific,” rather than moral or religious grounds, that marriage is good for them, a “bargain.” Co-habitation, of which the authors–on scientific grounds–disapprove, is not a bargain but a “deal,” which isn’t as good. Married people, the authors argue, live longer, have more and better sex, and make more money than non-married people. The argument seems to be aimed most pointedly at men, who need to be nudged out of their errant, self-destructive bachelor ways, and who stand to reap the greatest benefits from matrimony (though the authors, mindful of feminist critiques of the institution, insist that it’s good for women too, and far better than the alternatives). This book’s view of male behavior–based, needless to say, on the best available scientific evidence–strikes me as rather quaint:
Consider the lives of David and Mark, two men of the same age. Knowing nothing else besides the two men’s marital status, we can make strong predictions about how they live: Mark, the bachelor, is far more likely to, among other things, smoke, drink regularly, drink excessive amounts of alcohol and show other symptoms of problem drinking, and also use illegal drugs. Bachelor Mark is more accident-prone than husband David, perhaps because he is more likely to drive too fast, ignore traffic regulations, become sleep-deprived, and get behind the wheel while drunk.Being married, David probably spends less time hanging out in bars or at parties where, under the influence of too much alcohol, people have disagreements that sometimes flare up into brawls or homicides.
And on it goes, until we meet David’s wife Karen, who “may nag him to quit smoking or get enough sleep. She may actively seek to cut the fat in his diet or introduce fresh fruits or vegetables into it.” The little woman. God bless her.
There’s a lot of this kind of strenuous, cheerful good sense, buttressed by reams of numbers measuring frequency and quality of sex, life expectancy, earning power, and so on. I doubt very much that the bachelor Marks of this world will read this book and say to themselves, “Gosh, I’ve had it all backward. I’ve got to get myself hitched, and pronto!” But the agenda here isn’t really to persuade individual men and women to choose wedlock, it’s rather to present the warm, at least superficially accommodating face of a set of familiar conservative social positions. It’s not about why marriage is good for you, but why your marriage is good for us, and therefore our business.
The tone is curiously self-conflicted. The first chapter, availing itself of everybody’s favorite peacetime metaphor, is called “The Marriage Wars.” In it, the authors paint a dire picture of a “post-marriage culture” characterized by “the attempt to demote marriage from a unique public commitment supported by law, society, and custom to a private relationship, terminable at will, which is nobody else’s business.” But then, perhaps because such gloomy harangues don’t go over that well, the authors reassure us that, as a society, we still believe in marriage as a value and an ideal. Their polling numbers, in fact, suggest that most people already agree with them that marriage remains, 30 years after the advent of no-fault divorce, and in spite of the facts that half of marriages end in divorce and a third of children are born to unmarried parents, something people very much believe in and desire for themselves.
This strikes me as a very interesting state of affairs (so to speak). My own views about marriage, which I’d rather let emerge over the course of our exchange than state outright at the beginning, are as confused as those of a lot of my fellow citizens. Like a number of other human institutions–the state, Internet, the Motion Picture Association of America–it strikes me as terribly flawed, riven by contradiction, and yet in some way indispensable. But for Waite and Gallagher, and also for Judith Wallerstein, the decline of marriage is nothing less than a social catastrophe. The remedies The Case for Marriage proposes, spelled out in the last chapter, offer a little to make social democrats and feminists happy–increased subsidies and tax credits for parents of children, increased egalitarianism within wedlock–and a lot to please cultural conservatives: tighter divorce laws, restigmatized cohabitation, a bigger role for religious organizations, etc. (On the matter of gay marriage they admit to a disagreement and leave it to be decided on moral and religious, rather than scientific, grounds.)
Wallerstein’s focus is narrower–she is specifically concerned with the effects of divorce on children–and her tone is less prescriptive. She stops short of calling for more restrictive divorce laws, pleading instead for a court and social service system more responsive to the needs of children. But her book, like Gallagher and Waite’s, sings an old refrain: Stay together, folks, for the sake of the children.
The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce presents the latest gleanings of a 25-year longitudinal study–modestly described as “landmark” on the book’s cover–of the generation that came of age in the first decade or so of the no-fault era, people now in their late-20s to early 40s. Rather than assault us with raw numbers, Wallerstein tells a series of stories–usually a child of divorce’s life history juxtaposed with that of a child from an intact marriage. She strikes me as a humane and, to use one of her favorite words, compassionate person, who approaches the feelings of her research subjects with an unusual degree of sensitivity and tact. And the more I contemplated her composite portrait of a generation wounded well into adulthood by the collapse of their parents marriages, the more accurate it looked. But I wonder about some of her conclusions.
One of her premises is that the children of divorce are themselves more prone to divorce because they lack a “template” of sustained commitment. But if divorce in one generation were itself a sufficient cause of divorce in the next (which, to be fair, is not exactly what she claims), then the “revolution” of the early 1970s and after would never have taken place. While I welcomed Wallerstein’s focus on my peers, I found myself wondering about their parents, most of whom were presumably raised in “stable,” lasting marriages. Just as the people Wallerstein talks to were traumatized by their parents’ divorces, isn’t it possible that members of the previous generation were traumatized by their parents marriages, and vowed not to (or found themselves unable to) endure the compromises and frustrations they had witnessed as children? Couldn’t the collapse of marriage have been at least partly internal? I don’t doubt that the children she studied were hurt by their parents’ divorces–though many of her stories testify to their resilience and the resources of self-invention they discovered in adulthood. But how can she be so sure that they would have been less unhappy if their parents hadn’t split? One section of the book–the most interesting, I thought–compared the experiences of a young man who seems to have benefited from the breakup of his violent home with those of a young woman who still suffers the aftereffects of having grown up with wildly dysfunctional parents who remained together.
Ann Pearlman’s Infidelity, which has troubles of its own (one of which is that it’s virtually unreadable), nonetheless offers something of a corrective, since it’s a story of the disasters that can lurk within particular marriages, and Pearlman is careful (too careful, maybe) to avoid anything that might smack of moralism. It reminded me of some lines from another English poet, Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
On that happy note, I turn the floor over to you.
All the best,
Tony
