Sociology Ruins Marriage

Like every topic covered on this show, marriage is complicated. And for the first time ever, I'm going to pull in two sociologists to discuss the issue at the same time. That's right, I'm Matt Sedlar and it's a good old-fashioned roundtable discussion as sociology ruins marriage.

And my partner and I were sort of like, okay, there's all this talk about who can and can't get married, but isn't it something like sixty percent of the people who do get married get divorced? So what is this institution even supposed to be? And like what Who's doing it and how good is it? And should it still be happening? And so we embarked on this journey and

Uh, we interviewed just tons of people, including Stephanie Kuhnz, who's a really prominent marriage historian. We've talked to Helen Fisher, who's a biological anthropologist who talks about brain chemistry and love and all of that. Um we talk to a divorce attorney, we talk to a prenup attorney, we talk to polyamorous couple. So I learned a whole lot of different perspectives and found it just fascinating. And when I transitioned into sociology, that was sort of my way in was

I started this project. It is unfinished. I have over a hundred hours of footage. One day I'll edit it all and make a documentary because I also am super into documentaries being useful tools for sociologists. we can have a whole other podcast on that. But that's that's where sort of my background kind of began into studying this.

Uh, got it from the library, go libraries. And when talking about the Middle Ages, she says marriage was mainly used in upper classes as a method for transferring wealth and establishing networks for political gain. Uh but with the peasantry, you know, people live together, what kind of what no?

Valuable to society, valuable to communities. And if we think about the United States, right? So let's let's ignore other cultures. I'm so sorry to say I'm gonna do that right now, but That's what we do sometimes, right? We focus in narrow and then we think about generalizations from there. So if we think about the United States, many ways in which, especially in the early 1900s, politicians were trying to figure out how to stabilize society.

How to stabilize cities, rural areas, lots of industrialization, like lots of movement into cities, lots of challenges. And while there was marriage before, of course there was marriage before, but marriage didn't get politicized. encouraged financial benefits being attached to marit.

until the early 1900s. Why? Not because people didn't love each other before and not because marriage wasn't put before, but because there was a recognition that solid, stable union meant something for local communities. S and especially thinking back to oh well, I don't know, early nineteen hundreds, say before nineteen seventy one.

1978, 1979, it was not legal to get divorced. You could petition for an annulment. You could request for a special dispensation. So if you got married, there was something that was solid, committed. To you, your union, to the raising of children, to the transference of wealth, but even more importantly, in urban centers, it meant that you were committing to that space.

Right. And if we think about the rapid urbanization of the United States in the early 1900s, marriage, married couples meant that you had people who were committing to the local. And politicians want commitment to the local space because that's a tax base. That is people who are reducing the likelihood of crime.

Right. All the things that we now can, you know, hindsight say, oh, I see why they continue to want people to get married and why there's this disparaging notion of people who have kids outside of marriage and all the things. Because of what we understand, there have been encouragements towards people getting married. I will say in a book, it was, oh good lord, back in the early 2000s.

That looked at the effect of marriage in men's lives. It was a faculty member from Steve Nock from the University of Virginia. And he tried to understand in his book, you know, what happens to men when they get married? What are the benefits of marriage for men? And why are we trying to encourage people to marry? Interestingly, of course, we have historically thought we understood the benefits of marriage for women.

Which if you look at a number of other books that came out about the same time, there's it's a a really interesting set of critiques. But that's like going back to my comprehensive exam when I was in grad school. So let's not do that. That's let's let's let's go past.

But if we look at marriage in men's lives, what what Steve Nock found was there was sort of this space of he called it um sort of a grounding of men, giving them a space where they no longer had to compete against other men, that they could sort of be themselves.

And this was a book that came out in the early 2000s. So the data that he looked at were from the 1980s and the 1990s and looking at transitions, especially longitudinal data. What were men like prior to marriage and then what were their attitudes and behaviors like after marriage? So not just comparing unmarried and married men. If you really want to look at the change over time, you have to look at one. And in this case what he found was there was

a little bit of what we see when people are together for a long time, right? They sort of transition into a greater understanding of the other, being able to take the role of the other, being able to be more sympathetic and empathetic and be able to work towards common goals.

Funny enough, those are good things outside of a relationship too. Being able to be sympathetic and empathetic is actually good to be able to do at work. Being able to work towards common goals, those are good things to be able to do at work.

So again, if we think about the time period in which these data were coming out, where we're starting to see globalization and all the things, if we're trying to understand why marriage was good for men, it was why marriage is good for society, because at the end of the day, it's good for companies and good. But Courtney, maybe you have a different take.

Again, it was all it was, I mean, mad fiction, you know? And in the early 1900s, we'll bring it back to here in a in the States, it was. illegal for women to work. It was illegal for a woman to own property. It was illegal for a woman to live With another person who she was not related to. So for women in particular, marriage was survival. You would not be able to have a roof or food if you weren't living in someone else's house.

with them. And of course, the times sort of designated that while you're living under someone else's roof who's providing for you, you should also cook and clean and do a couple other things. And as right Have shifted for women as women have gained the ability to.

for women to literally be seen as an an adult woman, to be seen as an autonomous individual. Right? And then we can start talking about the rights that accrue to autonomous individuals.

Nothing against motherhood, nothing against women who want to stay at home, but we have additional options whereas before we did not. And so that is a huge part of how the expectations of whose roles are whose in a marriage and the purpose of marriage itself has evolved over a hundred years.

But I I'm curious how much of marriage is tied to capitalism because a lot of what we see previous to industrialization was these cooperative households where the men and women were, I mean, sure, I'm I'm sure the work was still gendered in some ways, but you had a little more of an even distribution of work.

And then, you know, industrialization comes in, men are out getting wages, and like you have said that women were allowed to get some of these jobs or any of these jobs, maybe those there were very few, right?

Or a civil symbol or religious symbol of a relationship between two people, because one could do that before. But there were literal financial benefits. that accrued, thinking about taxes. For example, if you are married, you have a different standard deduction than if you are married and you file jointly, than if you were married and you file separately, or if you are not married.

Right. There is a different standard deduction. There are different abilities that you have to carry dependence. Things have changed in the financial industries because of the ways in which the world has changed. But again, if we think about the initial space of the sort of the push for marriage. There were pushes for marriage that were tied to finance. And there were benefits to the financial sector for people to be married.

Ergo, there is absolutely a connection between how we have constructed enforced. Marriage, and then implemented, quite frankly, propaganda on the side using our cultural mechanisms. to highlight the value of marriage, to highlight the kinds of ways in which individuals are supposed to behave. Courtney, I sort of rolled my eyes when you said something about the roles that people play.

Well, okay, then let's talk about this as a performance, shall we? Let's talk about the the cultural narratives that we internalize, the performance that we have. the courtship, the performance that we have about the the engaging in the the activity that is a wedding. For God's sake, it should not take an entire year's salary to have a ceremony, right? For people to go in debt.

to have a ceremony that you will have maybe videos and pictures of that there is a cultural symbolism to this that is like signifying the investment the financial investment Into this space, not for the couple. It's not for them. It's signifying for others the commitment. that they are making, which again comes back to the why we see the financial investments into married couples and why you you get certain things or don't have to do certain things.

when you're married. But I do want to I want to sort of make one um critical comment, Matt, about what you said. And then we can think more critically about some other pieces, especially around capitalism. I do want to remind us that when we're talking about women who were prevented from engaging in paid employment in the early n uh in the early 20th century, talking middle class white women.

Right. The non-white women, the immigrant women, um, they they were all working. It may have been in different kinds of jobs. So again, we can't ignore the intersexual nature. of what we mean by marriage, right? And what we mean by the benefits that accrue to marriage and then whose kinds of marriages were to be supported by this. Because for immigrant families, it depends on where they came from.

If we're we're not talking about African Americans from the South who are migrating to the North that we want them to be married, that wasn't even a part of the conversation. Hence also if we're thinking about you know loving the Virginia. the right to marry who you want, right? That that for women and men to be able to choose their partner, right? That that was a legal barrier.

In, you know, it was only been about 50 years, right? In that space. So again, let's not ignore that it's not just about capitalism, it's about privilege that accrues to certain kinds of families. that we're talking about. And so those investments were targeted intentionally to certain kinds of families, hence the prohibition of certain kinds of marriage.

And financial advisor that we spoke to said the average American wedding, when the data was taken at about 2008, was around$26,000. And if the average couple would have invested that money into say the down payment on their house, that over the span of their marriage, they would have grown or accrued something like$800,000 in wealth. Didn't worry so much about the napkin rings, right? It's so funny how it doesn't make you any more. A read.

the more money you spend on that wedding. Um, it's a it they can be fun, beautiful days, but two couple friends that I have that are like the chillest, coolest, happiest couples. Several years later. One got married in a courthouse, and the other couple did a drive thru wedding in Vegas. And it was them and they had me and my ex as as their witnesses. Um, and that was it. And and then we went and saw Penn and Teller and like

Loving someone every day. Because if you love someone every day, you're just going to be with them every day and you're going to be happy about it. The purpose of the legal process of getting married is In anticipation of that union ending. And we would all love till death do us part. We both die in our sleep when we're 97 years old and leave our children the millions of dollars and all of that, like at the end of the notebook.

Right, but that is a rarity. Typically, someone dies a few years before the other, or there are divorces. And that's when marriage matters. It doesn't matter when you're happy and in love. You make the decision every day to be like, this person's great. It's when you're like, oh my God, I can't, the toothpaste cap. What is wrong with you? Why can't you?

or any of the other mundane sort of day-to-day failures and disappointments that people who have been married for a long time and do love each other experience. Whether marriage comes to an end by a decision or by a death. That's when the legal status has any sort of significance because that's when if you're not married to someone and you die and that person's parents didn't like you.

You don't get to get their stuff, right? Your partner might have wanted you to have their stuff, but if someone has any problem with that, the state. can back up the next of kin, right? And so establishing power of attorney and things like that, all of that is is the status that marriage ascribes to a relationship. And what I s sort of came to.

Have that interpretation. And as a result, and again, this is this is about both the creation of an extraordinarily impossible. set of expectations that we place on individuals who are in marriages. Uh especially heterosexual marriages, right? We can talk about lesbian and gay marriages as sort of a different space if it if but the research there is, you know, growing. We've had lesbian and gay relationships, but marriages, you know.

barely a decade old at this point. And so that the kind of longitudinal research that we could perform is ongoing right now. So we'll sort of put that there. But if we're thinking especially about historically the investments in heterosexual marriage The enormous set of expectations, these cultural norms and values that we ascribe to women and men in these relationships are unattainable.

And as a result, uh, what we see are a lack of being able to think about the of marriage from a critical perspective. From thinking about the structural phenomena that enables Certain marriages to be beneficial versus That enables certain people to get married, frankly, and stay married.

Um, even though they hate each other, they live apart, they can financially do that, but you know, neither one of them wants to violate that prenup. And so they just live in two different houses and then they move along, right? That's a structural set of phenomena, right? We have created in the United States a beautiful indoctrination set of ideals that makes the failure of a marriage a personal problem and not a structural problem.

That it really makes it, if we go back to C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination, one of his key examples of what a personal problem and a social issue are is divorce.

It's one of his first examples. And it's like chapter one. And so thinking about How we've made this a personal problem as opposed to a set of social issues or structures that enable certain kinds of relationships or dissuade certain kinds of relationships, which frankly have the same benefit for people and and and community that is tied to a set of

capitalist narratives, it's tied to the ability to control others through those financial means, right? To control behaviors, and a set of ideals that allow for certain kinds of belief systems to um be difficult to dismantle.

It's a vow, right? It's something that you're taking and swearing upon it through the religious institution. And the religious institution recognizes this couple and it recognizes this bond. And so maybe we could talk a little bit about that because it I certainly grew up thinking of marriage as one thing and not the other because of the religion that I grew up in. Sure. And I think a lot of people do.

uh in the anthropological sense, right? And the in the bringing together of people as opposed to um a a religious ritual in the you know in in that sort of space. But I I don't want to ignore the fact that culture is not just popular. religion is a part of culture. And we see in different parts of the United States, we did in the early parts of the country's origins.

Different ways in which people engaged in all sorts of relationship behaviors based upon the predominant religion of those who immigrated to that. And so we can think about the Northeast versus the South. We can then think about the indigenous peoples who are already in much of the United States and the ways in which that our Western norms that we sort of brought over and then morphed into what is the United States now.

How we used, didn't use, modified those immigrants who came, and especially the immigrants on the West Coast. uh the ways in which that we came to understand their understanding of marriage as uh a solidification of um lineage and that Your commitment to family. Is primary, right? And and I I will say, you know, full disclosure, currently living in Korea, understanding

uh what marriage means in the US now in relief to in is sort of in that distinction. I now understand what I didn't before in looking at the regional variations in the United States based upon who the migrants were to those spaces. Asian migrants coming from a different, again, a a different historical religious background and their understanding of the purpose of marriage, the purpose of relationships.

family in those spaces, that meant that it that they brought that with them, right? And so we can't ignore that that's a part of culture. But yeah. We also see places with the highest level of religiosity, especially around Protestantism, as the places where we also have the highest levels of divorce. Courtney.

ideologies with you know who's in charge. Whoever has power is the one who decided gets to decide what's right and what's wrong. And if the Catholic Church is saying, well, if you have a spouse, then you'll worship someone, a person. more than you worship God. Oh, wait, no, now we're losing people to Protestantism because at least they get to get married and then they can have sex. Um, well, maybe we should like bring that in. So, you know.

Then in the 1300s, they say, No, we've got marriage, we're doing that too. And it is also, you know, important to note that marriage predates. Christianity, Moses had a wife, right? Um, and that was a couple thousand years before that. And marriage existed in Hinduism, uh, which is uh like another six thousand years going back. And so marriage has existed again in this sort of Property, familial bond entity, not necessarily having to do with anything about how you feel about the person.

but certainly political alliances and all of that. Um that you know that has been going on in in uh almost every religion. I don't know if if there has been a religion where it was not observed. I was just going back over Helen Fisher, who wrote The Anatomy of Love, and she says something about like anthropologists have observed. whatever the number is of different societies and that there's evidence that there was love. Whether or not I went with marriage is a different thing.

that we continue to have people loving marriage so much, they do it over and over and over again, right? They married and then remarried and then remarried and then remarried. Why is it that we love marriage? And that I think is a really critical kind of commentary, especially on the United States, because not only do we have the highest divorce rate, we have the highest remarriage rate of any developed country in in the world. Probably any country.

frankly, but that's that's the stat that I I seem to recall. Why? It comes back to, I think Matt, your your earlier point of connections to some other things like our sort of our investments in capitalism and the ways in which the capitalism also is invested in marriage. I would also argue that we have done a again, a phenomenal job of convincing married individuals that if there's a problem, it's them, not the

And so if you got it wrong, it was either it was your partner. It wasn't the fact that, you know, it's hard in a marriage. not just relationships, but in a legal marriage to do certain kinds of things and sort of navigate one's life because of the the trappings that are attached to those internalized roles of being husband and wife. that you can't see the structure. You're just like, it was that person's fault. I'll find me another person.

Or maybe it was my fault and I need to go to therapy and then I'll be a better person and I'll find someone else who's my soulmate. Rather than in and and in the United States we've we've done a really nice job of convincing people. that it's it it's them, it's an individual uh uh phenomena and um that they can just keep trying it. Just like anything else. Practice makes perfect.

But it's not just the can women work outside of the home when married, which initially a woman who was single could work until she got married and then she had to quit, right? So there Now, right, there are different kinds of concerns. It's not just can women who are married work. It's let's move to the 1980s, Arlie Hoak Shield's the second. Right? What happens when they come home? They have a second shift of work.

Why is housework women's Because we've still continued to work on these cultural narratives about the private and the public sphere, those connected to masculinity and femininity, and the ways in which we perform in that space.

Especially again in the United States. What's very interesting if you look at contemporary young folk, and by young folk I mean like people who are 18 to 24. If you look at the contemporary young folk, And the recent surveys and qualitative analyses of their narratives, young women are much more skeptical of marriage.

And of that sort of um having that kind of marriage. They want an egalitarian partner or somebody who's at least gonna pretend to be egalitarian, but they really kind of like to get their careers figured out. They wanna have their own autonomous sort of sense of self.

And then find a partner who's gonna support them in that. And that'll take some time, going back to what Courtney said earlier, right? That'll take some time. Marriage rates are are low, not because divorce is high, but because we're waiting longer to get married. Why? Because women are more likely to get educated and Women who are getting educated are looking for partners who support them enabling the use of their education.

being willing to relocate for the woman's uh job, right? Those sorts of things, being able to commit to a long-term social exchange, which funny enough, Matt, you mentioned this as sort of the early origins of marriage, early origins of long-term relationships. The ways in which that social exchange was the critical crux of the household, long-term social exchange. That's what the young women, at least in Gerson's more recent book, have, or hers and several others, have been focusing in on.

So let's go back to Steve Nock. The benefits of marriage for men. Why are we focusing on men? Because the unfinished revolution is really focused on our inability to change masculinity. And that has yielded a number. And I think if we look at contemporary US uh understanding of what white masculinity looks like, uh you can see some of the other

But yeah, it's something that I think uh Pew and other places track is this very, very slow climb. towards men doing a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, but still not re reaching that that equal partner level. And so yeah, the the pandemic is one of those things where much like everything else, it has exacerbated that issue. It has exacerbated everything. And that is is one it's you know, in relation to this conversation.

And Courtney, I don't know if you wanted to say something.

for people in a specific, you know, tax bracket and is not possible for many people to do. Right. And so but like even so, the idealized, I think. Parties in a marriage will work because we all view work as rewarding and substantively, you know, like mental.

I would say being mindful that there are a number of segments of demographically of the US population where the desire is not to have the woman working full-time, even if that's what she wants. The husband doesn't want her to. And what we were able to show in our book is that if you look over time, men have the ability in couples that stay married to get their wives to shift their behavior to be more like what the husbands want.

Right. And so herein lies again a critical change. Women had much less likelihood of being able to get men to shift their behaviors to be what they want. We have to acknowledge that this is a both and. We have many, many women and men who still hold on to the belief, whether it comes from religion. From the media that they consume, from socialization from their parents, that they truly believe.

that men work, women don't. If they do, it's it's literally part-time jobs during small things, but it is an affront to the man's masculinity for her to be working outside of the home. And even if she has a degree, right, that that it is an affront to him because it it is getting in the way of his living up to his uh set of expectations.

There was a lovely book that came out. Um it was right after um Marriage and Men's Lives by Steve Knock. He it was Nicholas Somebody. He came out with this really interesting analysis of Of men, you know, there's a lot of research in the 1980s and 90s. Scott Coltrane's family man. I mean, there are a lot of folks who are trying to get at why aren't men changing?

They kept coming up with even the men who want to be egalitarian are running into these structural constraints at work that prohibit them from being egalitarian at home. and from talking about being egalitarian at home because then their masculinity is questioned at work and then they reduce the ability to to transform into um managers and and move forward. Whereas we know that men get a daddy bonus.

Women get the mommy tax at work. We still see a daddy bonus, even though it's shrinking a little bit because not as many people get bonuses. But you know, as wages have stagnated, we still see that men who are married and have kids have higher wages because there's the expectation that they have more mouths to feed because their wife is.

And so the question we keep coming back to, what what's up with marriage? What's going on with contemporary marriage? I think if we're thinking about what's going on with the future of marriage in the United States, we need to rethink masculinity. Period full stop. We need to rethink what masculinity means. Period full stop. And that it that's a different

There's the benefits right that accrue. There's a long history in the community of doing the the relationship building and the focusing and the and all the things. And then this is The legal aspect that is being attached to this relationship. There's not the commitment to being wife and wife or husband and husband that is tied to these gender dh norms. Note that it's gender d, not gender, gender-d norms.

that that's not it it's different right and so we need to think about masculinity especially as it as it sort of works in heterosexual relationships but also how it's tied to that public sphere And and until we can have a a true honest conversation about that, and God help me, I don't know that that's ever gonna happen in the US in my lifetime, that we're not gonna see marriage as an institution yielding true equality.

both in opportunities. I'm not just talking about who's doing the dishes. And who's clean up the cat puke on the floor? Not that I have any experience with that in my home. Um, but you know, where we actually have a sort of a rhythm in that space because as a family sociologist, I'm like, I can't come home and live. the stuff that I study because that kind of right. Um but in thinking about how we can move forward, we need to have these serious conversations.

Um and And really talk about the nature of work. what it means to be an ideal worker and all kinds of work and those works that have have allowed us to work from home during the pandemic as well as those folks who've not had the opportunity to work from home during the pandemic.

Um, what are the implications for the future of work if we change what we understand masculinity and femininity to be? And as a result, as we've historically seen, a shift in the way in which the We self-identify that we understand ourselves in relations to others, and then we co-construct a different form of.