The Decline Of Marriage

Marriage Isn't "Changing": We Broke It

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The present state of marriage is a chance to exercise our creativity in the same sense that a ruined house is. Making the argument more unseemly, in this instance, is the fact that the house in question was not swallowed by some abstract, unstoppable “sea change.” We ruined the house ourselves, and articles like "All The Single Women" and T-shirts like the ones Ms. Bolick remembers from her childhood were among the instruments we struck it down with.

The reason marriage (and the entire dating/mating/men-and-women-in-the-world landscape) used to be more solid-seeming was because we made it that way. We were a people who felt that the one-income nuclear family was a good thing, and so we supported it with instruments like the GI Bill, postwar homeowner loans and strict laws and taboos concerning divorce and illegitimacy. We thought, at the time, that this did not enslave us but made us somehow free. We were not free, of course, to do whatever we wanted at all moments, but we were free in a sense that we once recognized as adult: We were free to participate in our society.

The “sea change” we are talking about here was nothing of the sort. It was not something murky and mysterious, or beyond our control. We dismantled tariffs, depressing wages. We enabled no-fault divorce, consenting to broken homes. We privileged the goals of adolescence (freedom, travel, sexual discovery) over those of adulthood (what my colleague Kathryn summed up as "sacrifice and the performance of duty"), and now we find ourselves — both men and women — a little lost. Babes in the wood, or in the ruins.

Marriage isn’t experiencing a sea change — we broke it. We broke it because we thought it was too hard, too confining, too unfair. We exploded it. We made it easy to divorce, easy to father illegitimate children and easy to act 24 until we turn 50.

Ms. Bolick’s barely-disguised frustration is the exact thing her 1978 counterpart would have called "freedom.”

We are now free. Sorry if it looks a little grim.

Have we forsaken adult responsibility? Click here to find out.