Marital Issues

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Over the weekend, Mark Regnerus, a UT-Austin sociologist, argued in The Washington Post that young people are giving short shrift to the idea of getting married in their early- and mid-twenties. The main problem with the piece is that, like many socially conservative arguments, it treats the subject at hand—human beings—like pawns, the purpose of which is to work toward societal and economic stability. It’s a teleological style of argument: When making personal decisions, we need to gravitate toward something greater rather than get caught up in “selfish” notions like personal fulfillment.

Regnerus’ article, as my colleague Kay Steiger pointed out, is also rather sexist. He doesn’t touch on the numerous gender-based workload differences that come with marriage and the parenthood that usually follows. But if we’re all just objects that need to be configured in the correct way to maximize our wealth and society’s stability, who cares about a pesky little detail like that?

Regnerus starts by claiming that young women would want to be married, but are being dissuaded from that path by their peers’ views on the subject:

In my research on young adults’ romantic relationships, many women report feeling peer pressure to avoid giving serious thought to marriage until they’re at least in their late 20s. If you’re seeking a mate in college, you’re considered a pariah, someone after her "MRS degree." Actively considering marriage when you’re 20 or 21 seems so sappy, so unsexy, so anachronistic. Those who do fear to admit it — it’s that scandalous.

This phrasing is quite fishy. Saying “many women report” leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Are there actually scores of young women in the United States who want to get married, but who feel so cudgeled by societal expectations that they’re scared to even voice this desire? Or is it more likely that young women, who have more educational and occupational opportunities to them in their twenties than has been the case in the past, simply see logical reasons to delay marriage?

Sara, a 19-year-old college student from Dallas, equated thinking about marrying her boyfriend with staging a rebellion. Her parents "want my full attention on grades and school because they want me to get a good job," she told me. Understandable. But our children now sense that marrying young may be not simply foolish but also wrong and socially harmful. And yet today, as ever, marriage wisely entered into remains good for the economy and the community, good for one’s personal well-being, good for wealth creation and, yes, good for the environment, too. We are sending mixed messages.

Regnerus obviously threw in the bit about the environment because green is hip right now. But even taking away the fact that having a kid—often the next step after marriage—is bad for the planet, let’s assume Regnerus is right and do a little unpacking. Let’s say marriage is good for the environment. How good would it have to be to justify an individual choosing to get married? In what possible scenario would this be a reason to pop the question? If someone was on the fence about getting married, and the environmental aspect pushed them over the top, doesn’t this mean they probably shouldn’t be getting married at all? This all speaks to that same broader problem with Regnerus’ entire article—he sees people and marriage as means, not ends. He starts from the “Marriage is good for society” premise and deduces from it what choices individuals should make.

This is not just an economic problem. It’s also a biological and emotional one. I realize that it’s not cool to say that, but my job is to map trends, not to affirm them. Marriage will be there for men when they’re ready. And most do get there. Eventually. But according to social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, women’s "market value" declines steadily as they age, while men’s tends to rise in step with their growing resources (that is, money and maturation). Countless studies—and endless anecdotes — reinforce their conclusion. Meanwhile, women’s fertility is more or less fixed, yet they largely suppress it during their 20s—their most fertile years — only to have to beg, pray, borrow and pay to reclaim it in their 30s and 40s. Although male fertility lives on, it doesn’t hold out forever, either: Studies emerging from Europe and Australia note that a couple’s chances of conceiving fall off notably when men pass the age of 40, and that several developmental disorders are slightly more common in children of older fathers.

The first half of this is a regurgitation of the sexist “old maid” canard: Ladies, get married young or you’ll be alone forever! This is obviously much less true in a country and time when the single thirty- and fortysomething population is growing every year—not to mention the fact that some people don’t want to get married, and that there’s nothing wrong with this. The second half hits on fertility. This is, of course, an issue for many couples in their thirties and forties, and it would be wrong to discount it. But despite Regnerus’ claims, no one is arguing that it is inherently stupid to get married in your twenties. If you find the right person and can make it work on all the requisite levels, go for it, the vast majority of young people would say. It would be stupid, however, to let the “I’m at my most fertile right now” argument shade your judgment about a particular partner, which is what Regnerus seems to be suggesting.

Of course, there’s at least one good statistical reason to urge people to wait on the wedding. Getting married at a young age remains the No. 1 predictor of divorce. So why on earth would I want to promote such a disastrous idea? For three good reasons:

First, what is considered "early marriage" by social scientists is commonly misunderstood by the public. The best evaluations of early marriage — conducted by researchers at the University of Texas and Penn State University — note that the age-divorce link is most prominent among teenagers (those who marry before age 20). Marriages that begin at age 20, 21 or 22 are not nearly so likely to end in divorce as many presume.

Second, good social science pays attention to gender differences. Most young women are mature enough to handle marriage. According to data from the government’s National Survey of Family Growth, women who marry at 18 have a better shot at making a marriage work than men who marry at 21. There is wisdom in having an age gap between spouses. For women, age is (unfortunately) a debit, decreasing fertility. For men, age can be a credit, increasing their access to resources and improving their maturity, thus making them more attractive to women. We may all dislike this scenario, but we can’t will it away.

Third, the age at which a person marries never actually causes a divorce. Rather, a young age at marriage can be an indicator of an underlying immaturity and impatience with marital challenges — the kind that many of us eventually figure out how to avoid or to solve without parting. Unfortunately, well-educated people resist this, convinced that there actually is a recipe for guaranteed marital success that goes something like this: Add a postgraduate education to a college degree, toss in a visible amount of career success and a healthy helping of wealth, let simmer in a pan of sexual variety for several years, allow to cool and settle, then serve. Presto: a marriage with math on its side.

One more time: Young people are not automatically opposed to getting married in their early twenties. Ask most twentysomethings if they know someone who is or was engaged or married by then, and they’ll say yes. As for the “scenario” we “can’t will away”—well, it was based largely on gender inequality, a concept Regnerus, remarkably, doesn’t come anywhere close to addressing in his column. There was a time when marriage was largely about resources, and when, because so many opportunities were closed off to women, it was common for prosperous men to marry ever-so-fertile women who were quite a bit younger. The idea that we should carry this on because women are “more mature” in some abstract sense is absurd. We no longer have to make the same compromises; sexism isn’t dead when it comes to the workplace, but the concept of a working young woman is now so commonplace that we needn’t look at marriage in such mercenary terms.

Perhaps the most disingenuous part of the whole column comes when Regnerus argues that the well-educated believe in a “recipe for guaranteed marital success.” Of course they don’t. They believe that marriage is more likely to work when both partners are at a certain phase in their lives, and that marriage, as a practical matter, makes more sense then. Why not rebut these claims instead of a straw-man argument?

Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life.

For someone who is allegedly an academic, it’s shocking how authoritatively Regnerus presents his opinion. Marriage “works best as a formative institution”? Says who? Some would argue that marriage has a much better chance of working out when both partners have significant relationship experience. Again, why not rebut this claim? If it’s untrue, surely Regnerus has a better argument to make than a blunt, opinion-shaped one. And what does it mean to say we “learn marriage”? Obviously, in the most basic sense, this is true: anyone who is married for the first time hasn’t been married before, and therefore has to learn how to make it work. Not to beat a dead horse, but if, like language, we only have a certain window during which we can most effectively “learn marriage,” then where is the data showing that older marriages tend to fail?

Today, there’s an even more compelling argument against delayed marriage: the economic benefits of pooling resources. My wife and I married at 22 with nothing to our name but a pair of degrees and some dreams. We enjoy recounting those days of austerity, and we’re still fiscal conservatives because of it, better poised to weather the current crisis than many, because marriage is an unbelievably efficient arrangement and the best wealth-creating institution there is. Married people earn more, save more and build more wealth compared with people who are single or cohabiting. (Say what you will about the benefits of cohabitation, it’s a categorically less stable arrangement, far more prone to division than marriage.)

One more time: A marriage based in economics is obviously not a good idea. This yet another argument disconnected from the fact that we are human beings, not machines built for society maintenance and wealth building.

So while many young Americans mark their days in the usual ways — by hitting the clubs, incessantly checking Facebook, Twittering their latest love interest and obsessing about their poor job prospects or how to get into graduate school — my applause goes out to those among them who’ve figured out that the proverb was right. One of those is Jennifer, a 23-year-old former student of mine. She’s getting married this fall. It wasn’t religion that made her do it. It wasn’t fear of being alone. It was simply affection. She met Jake while still in college and decided that there was no point in barhopping through her 20s. Her friends balked. She stood firm. Now they’re bridesmaids.

So she’s getting married because she’s in love with Jake and wants to spend the rest of her life with him? Not because it’s a prudent financial move? Not because it’s good for the environment? Not because she’s worried about where her ovaries will be a decade from now? What a good idea!

Jesse Singal is an associate editor at Campus Progress.

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