Marriage Matters

NEITHER of these books could have been published forty years ago because then we did not have the facts on which they are based. But neither would have been published because nobody needed to be told that marriage is a good idea and divorce a bad one. Facts, and the times, have changed. And in our present culture, it is not yet clear that the message of either book will prove persuasive. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher write on the first page of their book, over the last few decades we have managed to transform marriage, “the most basic and universal of human institutions, into something controversial.” And as any academic expert reading Judith Wallerstein’s book on divorce will know, a lot of scholars do not think divorce is such a bad idea.

Reviewing these books cannot be separated from reviewing a culture that has made what my parents thought was common sense into grounds for contention. The argument, of course, is not on the surface of things. Almost every American thinks having a happy marriage is a good idea and only a tiny minority believe that remaining single is an important goal. But what is true in theory is not true in practice. A lot of children are born to unwed mothers, many women getting married have to apologize for apparently giving up their “freedom,” and divorce ends roughly half of all marriages. As sociologist Norval Glenn has shown, the proportion of people who are happy in their marriages has gone down since the early 1970s.

JW

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James Q. Wilson

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NEITHER of these books could have been published forty years ago because then we did not have the facts on which they are based. But neither would have been published because nobody needed to be told that marriage is a good idea and divorce a bad one. Facts, and the times, have changed. And in our present culture, it is not yet clear that the message of either book will prove persuasive. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher write on the first page of their book, over the last few decades we have managed to transform marriage, “the most basic and universal of human institutions, into something controversial.” And as any academic expert reading Judith Wallerstein’s book on divorce will know, a lot of scholars do not think divorce is such a bad idea.

Reviewing these books cannot be separated from reviewing a culture that has made what my parents thought was common sense into grounds for contention. The argument, of course, is not on the surface of things. Almost every American thinks having a happy marriage is a good idea and only a tiny minority believe that remaining single is an important goal. But what is true in theory is not true in practice. A lot of children are born to unwed mothers, many women getting married have to apologize for apparently giving up their “freedom,” and divorce ends roughly half of all marriages. As sociologist Norval Glenn has shown, the proportion of people who are happy in their marriages has gone down since the early 1970s.