Paul R. Amato, Alan Booth, David R. Johnson and Stacy J. Rogers. ALONE TOGETHER: HOW MARRIAGE IN AMERICA IS CHANGING

Abstract

Paul R. Amato, Alan Booth, David R. Johnson and Stacy J. Rogers. ALONE TOGETHER: HOW MARRIAGE IN AMERICA IS CHANGING Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, (2007), 323 pages.The first sentence in this book begins: Throughout most of American history, marriage has been the social arrangement that, more than any-other, provided structure and meaning in people's lives (p. 1). explaining how marriage was associated with adult independence, the initiation of sex, having children, forming personal identity, and relative stability, the authors note on the same page that But times have so that After centuries of being the bedrock of the American family system, marriage is losing its privileged status and is becoming one lifestyle choice among (p. 2). However, they note that marriage remains important in many ways. The plan of the book is to use two national surveys, one from 1980 and one from 2000, to examine how marriage changed over those two decades in the United States. To begin to explain such change, the authors identify two major perspectives on marriage-the marital decline perspective and the marital resilience perspective. The former view sees the institution of marriage as weaker, largely due to excessive individualism, with adverse consequences for children, adults, and society. The latter view may agree that marriage is cihanging but not necessarily for the worse, that individualism is not problematic, there have been few negative consequences for society, and that all types of families should be supported, not just heterosexual couples with children. Did the threshold for divorce change or has marital satisfaction itself declined? The debate is framed largely in terms of Burgess's concepts of institutional versus companionate marriage, whether marriage is primarily about finding personal happiness or meeting obligations to others. The authors assume that larger social forces can impact individual marriages through a balance of positive and negative effects. For example, among many factors, they cite increasing levels of education and later age at marriage as possible positives and increasing levels of premarital cohabitation and heterogeneous marriages as possible negatives.In chapter 2, their analyses indicate that marital happiness was unchanged while couples did things together less often but had fewer disagreements and less violence in their marriages. Divorce proneness changed inasmuch as respondents were more likely to report extreme levels, very prone to divorce or much less prone. Women reported less positive attitudes towards their marriages than men at both times. Thus, the results did not clearly support either of the two perspectives. In chapter 3, they note that the percentage of spouses who had cohabited prior to marriage increased from 1 6% to 4 1 % with similar higher levels of cohabitation for respondents regardless of their race or ethnicity. The best predictor of the increase in cohabitation was parental divorce, although it accounted for only about one-seventh of the change. Their analyses suggested that cohabitation continued to predict lower marital quality, especially divorce proneness, even in 2000 in spite of being more accepted. Age at marriage increased over time and was only partially explained by education or cohabitation; later age at marriage was a significant predictor of lower divorce proneness. Among remarried persons, the presence of stepchildren appeared to promote marital quality in 2000 whereas that had been associated with a decrease in marital quality in 1980. Parental divorce was more common in 2000 and also predicted divorce proneness, marital conflicts, and marital problems in 2000. Parental divorce appeared to increase risks more for wives than for husbands. Parental divorce also was predictive of greater within couple differences, which, in turn, predicted lower marital quality. …