For both professional reasons [family law attorney for 30 years] and personal reasons [husband for 34 years], I find the sociology of marriage a fascinating topic. There are numerous blogs on my website about marriage, a few of them discussing books or essays about marriage.
Earlier this year, two writers I greatly admire published books on marriage. Brad Wilcox, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and the Director of the National Marriage Project authored Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Marcia Zug, the Miles and Ann Loadholt Professor of Family Law at University of South Carolina authored You’ll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love.
I’ve been a fan of Wilcox since I encountered his 2013 research project titled, “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America.” That work highlighted trends in American family formation that are even more readily apparent in 2024: the decline in marriage rates across all educational levels; the greater stability in family formation for women with college degrees; the decreasing family stability for those who bear children out of wedlock.
Yet what I found most fascinating about “Knot Yet” was its finding that, assuming the marriage did not arise as a result of pregnancy or child bearing, marriages contracted when the wife was in her mid-20’s were happier and only slightly less prone to divorce than marriages contracted when the wife was in her late-20’s or early 30’s. This finding was congruent with my own observations of my peer but completely countercultural to my urban educated peers.
Get Married builds on the insights of “Knot Yet” and Wilcox’s subsequent works for the National Marriage Institute. The book has multiple goals but the biggest goal is to encourage young Americans to spend their early adult years giving as much effort into finding a suitable spouse as they do into developing their education and career. Get Married highlight research showing that marriage has benefits among a wide range of desired outcomes. Married people are happier, wealthier, healthier, have greater sexual satisfaction, few mental health problems, and their children are more likely to thrive.
Admittedly, much of this research has a causation/causality problem: are these outcomes better because folks got married or are folks who tend to have better outcomes on these issues more prone to marriage? However, the fact that discrete groups of Americans appear better able to enter and sustain marriages, makes it appear that certain behaviors can be conducive to marriage.
Wilcox identified four categories of people he classifies as “The Masters of Marriage”: Asian Americans (particularly those of Chinese, Indian, Philippine, or South Korean descent), Conservatives, the Faithful, and Strivers. The demographic groups all tend to have rates of marriage, be happier in their marriages, and have very law rates of divorce (except for conservatives). The groups all have very low rates of out-of-wedlock child bearing and their children tend to have better outcomes on education and behavioral issues.
Wilcox identifies the “family first” orientation as the basis for Asian American’s and the Faithful’s success in family formation. Conservatives take to marriage because marriage is an inherently conservative institution. However, the Strivers’ success in marriage is counterintuitive. Wilcox describes Strivers thusly:
This group also embraces “bourgeois” values-education, hard work, and financial success. They tend to be more likely to take the long-term view of things and embrace delayed gratification. They are, in the words of Chris Arnade, “front-row kids,” those who as children were “always eager to learn and make sure the teacher knew they were learning” and have now grown up to be the men and women who wish “to get ahead.” It is at least in part because of their efforts that these Strivers largely dominate the professions, the business world, the universities, and the media. Even though many hold fashionably liberal views about family matters-including politically correct attitudes about family diversity, single motherhood, and so on-they do not put these views into practice in their own private lives. Wouldn’t be prudent.
Wilcox has some (deserved) scorn for Strivers, seeing them as hypocrites whose hierocracy is incredibly damaging to cultural stability. Being members of the culture producing class, their refusal to advocate for marriage and marital child bearing sends inaccurate and damaging signals to a working class and poor who could benefit from the greater stability that marriage and marital child bearing offers. As a clear member of the striver class myself (lawyer married to an MSW/JD for 34 years, with whom I’ve raised two daughters to fledgling age), I acknowledge both the tremendous benefits of a stable marriage to a happy life and the fact that my peer are often way too outwardly tolerant of behavior they would not want their own children to engage in.
After describing the various groups who appear best at sustaining marriage, Wilcox delves into the myriad ways marriage improves life outcome. The three essential take-a-ways, all of which are congregant with my own views of marriage, are:
Essentially Wilcox believes that Americans would be happier and live more stable and fulfilling lives if they were more purposeful in their family formation and devoted more of their energies in young adulthood to pursuing suitable marriage partners rather than singularly focusing on education and career while treating romantic relationships as secondary.
While Get Married makes a full-throated endorsement for marriage, You’ll Do presents a more jaundiced view. Whereas Get Married is a work of sociology, Zug’s book is a remarkable work of scholarship, locating case law spanning centuries that address some of the benefits and drawbacks of marrying for reasons other than love. It is not as though one can do a Lexis or Westlaw search for marriages where one spouse was allegedly marrying for money. Yet Zug locates cases illuminating legal issues that can arise when folks marry for reasons other than love.
Zug dedicates her book to a great aunt—a relatively secular Jewish American in the late 1930’s—who married a cousin from Poland to help him escape the anti-Semitism and fascism that was engulfing the region. Their marriage did not begin in love—although, happily, they fell in love.
Obviously, folks have been marrying for money, status, and power for as long as there has been marriage. However, You’lI Do locates fascinating cases in which the consequences for marrying for these reasons result in legal jeopardy—typically for the less powerful, less wealthy spouse, which, historically, has typically been the wife. Her book notes a long history of young women marrying older veterans which then entitles them to a widow’s pension. Her book notes how men could use marriage to avoid legal problems: both to avoid the consequences of having sex, and sometimes impregnating girls below the age of consent, and in being able to invoke spousal privilege against testifying.
From my own observations as a spouse and divorce lawyer there are four expectations most folks have entering a marriage: 1) a pooling of resources without an explicit expectation of quid-pro-quo reciprocity; 2) cohabitation; 3) raising children—typically one’s own biological children—together to fledgling age; 4) both sexual access and sexual exclusivity. These expectations were never uniformly held and are becoming weaker over the past two centuries, but most people that marry have these expectations. While love certainly enhances these four goals, it isn’t a requirement for any. That folks marry for reasons other than love doesn’t surprise me.
