A Selection of Books on Divorce
Dear Katha and Jim,
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StumbleUponFirst, in answer to Jim's question: Much of Gallagher and Waite's book can indeed be summed up by Bogie's line. Ann Pearlman's portrait of her philandering father suggests an interesting corollary: that a married man can still be a pig.
But what about men (and women) who live together without, as the saying used to go, "benefit of clergy"? (Or the captain of a ship--isn't that who married Bogart's and Hepburn's characters in The African Queen, just as he was about to hang them?) Gallagher and Waite take a dim view of "the cohabitation deal"; for them it represents a threat to marriage at least as grave--perhaps graver--than divorce. The threat, as they see it, is that the widespread acceptance of relationships that are a lot like marriage but aren't exactly marriage erodes the specialness of marriage, which is rooted in the fact that marriage is, well, special. The last item on their manifesto for a new pro-marriage social movement calls on Americans to "Rethink Domestic-Partnership Legislation" because
[e]xtending marriage benefits to cohabiting men and women who have refused to marry sends a message social scientists now know to be dangerously false--that cohabitation is the functional equivalent of marriage. Cohabitation is not just like marriage. On average, cohabiting couples are less sexually faithful, lead less settled lives, are less likely to have children, are more likely to be violent, make less money, and are less happy--and less committed--than married couples. Ironically, this negative characterization applies primarily to cohabiting couples who have no definite plans to get married, those who live with children of only one of the partners, and those who have been married before. Engaged cohabiting couples without children seem more like married couples in their attitudes and behaviors.
I love that phrase "social scientists now know to be dangerously false." It just gives me goosebumps. What I understand this passage to be saying--ironically!--is that, in spite of what Gallagher and Waite want us to believe, people are perfectly aware of the differences between cohabitation and marriage, and that these are indeed not functionally equivalent relationships but distinct and, dare I say it, complementary ones. It's now quite common for people to live together, sometimes for years, before getting married. All of the couples whose weddings I've attended since I graduated from college--every single one--lived together first. If they'd been harboring the "dangerously false" impression that cohabitation and marriage were equivalent, why would they have bothered? Premarital cohabitation may in fact be a way of taking marriage seriously--of testing out sexual and domestic compatibility before entering into a lifelong commitment.
And, similarly, postmarital (or more precisely post-divorce) cohabitation--yikes! I sound like a social scientist; Wystan, please forgive me!--might also be seen as an acknowledgement of the seriousness of marriage. That is, a person who's been married once may be leery of risking its legal entanglements a second time, or be disenchanted with the institution, or maybe with the rituals surrounding it.
My point is just that people are not only, as you suggested, smarter than Gallagher and Waite (which isn't all that hard), but also they don't take their lives, their relationships, and their children lightly. The Case for Marriage worries that marriage has been "privatized" (something I thought conservatives were supposed to favor; the opposite of privatization, let's remember, is socialization, but you won't hear Gallagher and Waite on talk shows promoting "the socialization of marriage," even though that's exactly what they propose), and that it has been reduced to a "lifestyle option." The last phrase is pure cant, an empty, trivializing phrase. Religious conservatives perform a similar rhetorical deflation when they refer to homosexuality as a "lifestyle." But would anyone--gay, straight, married, cohabiting, single, whatever--characterize his or her affective and erotic life, the most intimate sources of meaning and identity, as equivalent to, say, taste in food or furniture? No. Waite and Gallagher also purposely misconstrue the meaning of "privacy." To think of marriage as a private matter, they assert, means being committed to a kind of absolute individualism, a belief that nothing you do affects anyone else or has any social weight. But who believes this? Does anyone who has ever been married, contemplated marriage, or even been to a wedding think that it's a matter between the bride and groom alone? People marry for all kinds of reasons, but marriage is by definition a public, social act. Waite and Gallagher, bizarrely, argue for it in language that smacks of quick-fix self-help seminars and advertising--the language, precisely, of radical individualism. Here's what's in it for you, they say: more sex, more money, longer life. Buy now! Who's trivializing marriage here? Not "the culture" (whatever that is), or feminism, or the matrimonial bar, but Gallagher and Waite themselves.
Wallerstein's book, muddled as it is, at least tries to grapple with the complexities of human experience. She may travel in the same circles as Waite and Gallagher, and she certainly has her biases (unlike you and me), but Wallerstein doesn't strike me as an ideologue in the way that Gallagher and Waite clearly are. In fact, the stories in Unexpected Legacy seemed to me to undermine one of Gallagher and Waite's claims, namely that people divorce as capriciously as they marry. Wallerstein thinks, as a general matter, that parents should try to stay together to protect their children, but it's hard to draw the conclusion that any of the specific failed marriages she talks about should have continued. The weird disjunction between the general and the particular is the problem with her book, and maybe with the kind of social science she practices.
As I said yesterday, I was moved by a lot of the stories themselves--moved partly because they seemed to confirm something about the world I've grown up in. But I can't quite make the leap from agreeing that divorce has hurt a lot of children to the idea that widespread divorce is at the heart of a social crisis demanding special policies to remedy it. After reading the book, I performed a little thought experiment, with myself as sole research subject. (Before this "Book Club" started, I made a silent vow to keep my own family out of it, but I'll cheat a little here.) When I was growing up, my family moved around a lot--I attended seven schools in four states--and in retrospect, this experience has clearly shaped my personality and my sense of the world. For good and ill--I'm haunted by a feeling of impermanence and rootlessness, but I've probably also developed some compensatory skills, like the ability to adapt to new situations, make friends quickly, etc. Now, if someone like Judith Wallerstein were to study a bunch of kids like me she might discover a pattern, and might even be moved to write about "The Unexpected Consequences of Mobility" elaborating on the damage done to the "children of itinerancy" by their thoughtless parents. We need to listen to these children, she might say, and soon the thinktanks would be churning out policy proposals. Let's limit the number of times a family can move; let's make it harder to move from one city to another, or require a waiting period before a move, or participation in relocation counseling for families who feel there's really no alternative.
Crazy, no? But these are just the kinds of policies Wallerstein, Gallagher, and Waite want to impose on divorce. I'd like, though, to get away from policy into the heart of Wallerstein's argument, away from her proposed and implied solutions and toward the problem, if indeed it is a problem. How badly does divorce hurt children?
Until tomorrow,
Tony
This week, our Book Clubbers examine three books about divorce: Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's The Case for Marriage and Judith Wallerstein's The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, which argue that even troubled marriages are worth preserving for the kids' sake, and Ann Pearlman's Infidelity, a memoir by a relationship guru who discovered that her husband had been cheating on her. Click here to learn more about the critics and here, here, and here to buy the respective books. 
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
Reply from co-author, The Case for Marriage:
Katha Pollitt dismisses The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better-Off Financially as a "clip job." Your readers should know that Katha Pollitt, a committed anti-anti-divorce warrior, has already repeatedly publicly condemned me, the Institute for American Values, and more importantly anyone else who thinks we should try to do something about high rates of family fragmentation. Assigning the book to her, balanced by a film critic who doesn't know much about the issue, was not likely to produce a fair, lively, informative exchange on an important public topic, and, surprise, it surely did not.
Readers who are interested in actually following the current marriage debate might like to know: The Case for Marriage synthesizes the latest and best scientific research on marriage, much of it the original work of my co-author, University of Chicago Prof. Linda J. Waite, a leading family sociologist. Here's the new case in a nutshell: marriage changes men and women's lives in very important, life-enhancing ways that other sorts of relationships, such as cohabitation, cannot. Marriage is not just another lifestyle or an emotional relationship, but a powerful, productive, wealth-creating institution that (like education) builds human and social capital and (like education) therefore deserves public support. If we continue to privatize marriage, only the already highly advantaged will receive the benefits of lasting marriage. This is one reason Linda Waite and I call for new public and community strategies to support marriage, and reduce divorce and family fragmentation.
If your readers would like to know "what's new" about the Case for Marriage, I offer these as just three examples: new scientific evidence that 1) explodes the idea that marriage benefits men at women's expense; 2) shows how marriage actually likely reduces the risk of domestic violence, at least compared to cohabitation and 3) demonstrates for the very first time what happens to bad marriages that don't divorce, using a large nationally representative sample. What are your odds of turning a bad marriage around? The Case for Marriage gives you a ringside seat on the latest scientific evidence about marriage that both family scholars and ordinary people are hotly debating.
To pretend that everybody already knows these things and that there is no marriage debate in America is just silly. (Especially silly, come to think of it, a few weeks after Time magazine put "Who Needs a Husband?" on its cover). Pollitt does more damage to her own reputation than ours by trying to pull it off.
To charge Linda Waite and I with animus against women is also silly. Of course people are free to disagree with us and with what we recommend, as good or bad for women or other Americans. But to lapse into ad hominem attacks on our basic good faith is a sign that you've run out of arguments. Linda Waite is a liberal feminist, as well as one the nation's top family scholars. I am a political conservative who has made the well-being of women (yes, and children) the centerpiece of my own heterodox writing career. As someone who was an unwed mother for ten years, I know whereof I speak from personal, as well as professional experience, and the charge that my real goal is to hurt such women is to me, absurd.
If marriage really is powerfully better for women, men, children and society than the alternatives, we aren't doing anyone any favors by pretending that all family forms are equally good, and should be embraced equally.
--Maggie Gallagher
[Director of the Marriage Program Institute for American Values]
(To reply, click here.)
(10/9)
The defensiveness of some of these posts is transparent. In general, divorce hurts children. Moving around is not like divorce. To even hint there might be a similarity is absurd. When you move, the entire universe, which is to say parents and siblings, moves with you. The outside stuff is irrelevant. There is no betrayal, no custody-induced moving on weekends or in the summer. Get real. To say that there are some marriages which ought to end in divorce and soon is not addressing the question of whether it hurts the children. That's the point. Nobody has addressed it. With the exception of a few folks who don't count since their views are inconvenient and so they are demonized as right-wing interfering old fools. Thus, whatever they have to say is meaningless, even if true. That there are marriages which are so bad that children ought to be out of them is also true, but the question is whether that applies to all families in which parents are feeling like getting a divorce. That a number of intelligent, well-read people can so obviously duck the question written in neon is the clearest indication imaginable that kids don't count.
--Richard Aubrey
(To reply, click here.)
Like many people, you seem to have a distaste for generalizations about complex human behavior. You may have a point, but the point is more appropriately placed in your own work against social science, not in a review against a given social science text. If you don't like sociology, or social science, as you imply with that cute poem, you should not read or review this book. Since you readily admit bias against social science, your readers are hard put to take you seriously as a reviewer of social science literature of any kind. The business of sociology is to make generalizations about human behavior. In order to critique sociological arguments, you need to take this as a given.
Arguments stemming from tables of statistics are not necessarily dry or void of emotional content to the reader. Many sports fans don't seem to have trouble incorporating multitudinous tables of stats within their interest in games born out of the passionate support of their local team. Some people are simply not turned off by correlations and regressions that represent patterns in human behavior. If the reviewer finds himself so ill at ease, he should abstain from reviewing such books.
--Jacob Felson
(To reply, click here.)
BT writes in The Fray: "Marriage is not for everyone, and should not be forced down one's throat like cod liver oil."
The point is not to "force" marriage on anyone. In fact, sometimes I think it should be more difficult to get married, based on the casual way some people seem to get married and divorced on a whim. But in this world of rich old men who discard their wives for younger models, of children shuttled back and forth between divorced (and sometimes battling) ex-spouses, of people passing fatal diseases to each other through casual sex, don't you think that more people might benefit from acting on something other than what makes me feel good at the moment? When people stay married for many, many years, it's not necessarily because they never get mad at each other and never desire another partner. Maybe there are a lot of negative reasons for their sticking with it, but I like to think that at least part of it is that they take commitment seriously, and are willing to put up with some unhappiness in exchange for long-term rewards.
--Michael Ladenson
(To reply, click here.)
[This post was part on a longer discussion between Mr Ladenson and BT.]
Notes from the Fray Editor: Everyone is either married or not married, so everyone has an opinion. And a status. And a life story. And advice. Check out Robert K, who says being married is like having a favorite book or food (and no, the conclusion is not romantic: "having sex outside of marriage is as natural as eating more than your favorite food") and then read the thread about Beverley and her marriage plans: that'll teach you to get cynical in The Fray, Robert.
There were plenty of personal experiences, and there was Amanda's jaunty list of ways to stay married. Ray Joseph Boudreaux Jr also offers some rather charming advice. And in an interesting post Dan Perreten says "social norms can favor life-long commitment without making pariahs out of those who need to end their marriage for reasons of abuse."
(9/26)