Redrawing the boundaries of marriage

Abstract

Key Words: cohabitation, cross-national comparisons, cross-national policies, marriage. The golden age of marriage that was prominent across many Western nations from the 1950s to the early part of the 1970s is well and truly over. In that era, youthful marriage, the near universality of marriage, and marriage stability were the key features of partnership behavior, and marriage was the preeminent setting for having children. In recent decades, with the rise in cohabitation, moves to later and fewer marriages, and increased divorce, partnerships between men and women have become more diverse and fragile, and children are increasingly born and reared outside marriage. These are the broad demographic trends that have occurred to varying degrees across and within developed nations and that underlie our concerns about marriage and its future. The articles in this issue go beyond demographic description to provide us with thoughtprovoking and illuminating insights into the nature and consequences of marriage and partnership behavior. My brief from Alexis Walker, the Editor, was not to critique the articles themselves but to use them as a launching point for my own observations on changing marriage patterns, the meaning of these changes, and the future might hold. My perspective is one of a social demographer who has spent the last quarter century studying family change in Britain and Europe. This has been far from a dull endeavor, as the pace of change has been quite breathtaking. At the time of writing this piece, I was a visiting scholar for a semester at Princeton University, and I was able to reflect first-hand on the noticeable differences in the discourse on marriage in the United States compared with that in European countries. If I was to put the difference somewhat baldly, it would be that in European countries, the policy and political discussions are less to do with what is best, cohabitation or marriage? and more about issues concerning how best to support families, particularly in their endeavors to raise children regardless of the marital status of their parents (European Observalory on Family Policy, 1996; H. M. Government, 1998; Millar & Warman, 1996). Fostering healthy partnerships and committed parenthood are more the focus of concern, which resonates with the conclusions of the paper by Ted Huston and Heidi Melz (2004) that the promotion of family well-being and stability requires a holistic approach, with attention to be given to the psychological, social, and economic needs (p. 943) of the partners. This is not to say that Europeans do not value marriage. For example, in 1998, only 11% of 25- to 34-year-olds in the European Union, which comprised 15 countries at that time, said that they were against marriage in response to a question in a Eurobarometer survey. Only France and Belgium, with around 20%, had higher proportions saying that they were against marriage, with most of the other countries being clustered in the 8%-11% range. Even in countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where cohabitation is the most prevalent, 90% of the young men and women were in favor of marriage (European Commission, 1998; author's analysis). Europeans are in favor of marriage, but they are not explicitly promarriage. The particular blend of new-right ideology, coupled with a fundamentalist religious fervor, probably underpins the strong promarriage movement in the United States, as well as the not-unrelated stronger disapproval of premarital sex. This is not the case in European nations (Scott, 1999). Although the so-called moral majority only enjoys a small minority of support, it has been noticeably more vocal and politically active in the United States compared with, for example, Great Britain, which is the European country where new-right thinkers have expressed similar concerns about the demise of marriage (Morgan, 2001; Rowthorn, 1999). Religious authorities in Europe are certainly not indifferent to is happening to marriage. …