The Challenge Of Modern Marriages

And how our often hypocritical views and desires get in our own way.

I’ve been reflecting recently on the decline in marriage rates. I’ve read about it on the news, but it wasn’t until I looked up the chart below that I realized just how dramatic the decline has been. While there’s certainly been fluctuations, including some likely caused by major recessions and wars, it looks like marriage rates began steadily declining in the 80s and never stopped.

This is puzzling, and perhaps even a bit concerning, given that strong marriages are associated with increased happiness and life satisfaction. Much has been written about this recently, including concerns about the potential impact on children, and the fact that marriage is increasingly confined to the privileged elite, who claim marriage doesn’t matter but still overwhelmingly get married, while lower income Americans fall even further behind economically.

But there is one particular thread that interests me — and it’s the widening gap between our expectations around relationships, and our expectations for our partners, and what we see as available to us. I’d argue most people born in the 80s and later aspire to have modern marriages, and yet the definitions and bounds of what that means have not been fully defined, and in some cases, our own desires are contradictory. 

I think of a modern marriage as one that is chosen, rather than societally imposed, and egalitarian, meaning partners share power and see each other as equally worthy of agency and fulfillment. 

Obviously no choice in life is ever totally devoid of societal pressure. We’re inherently social animals, wired to care what other people think because we evolved to need community and belonging for survival. But there are gradations. There’s a world of difference between getting married because it’s simply what you must do in order to have any chance at a stable and happy life (like women did for generations), and getting married because the arrangement genuinely appeals to you even though you live in a society where you could very well get on without one — where you could make a living, have status, and even have a family, without marriage or even partnership. 

The fact is most Americans still want to get married. A 2019 Pew Research poll found that over 85% of Americans say being in a committed romantic relationship is important or essential to living a fulfilling life, and over 70% specifically say being married is. While Americans tend to have very positive views about cohabitating either before or instead of marriage, those relationships don’t tend to last. In Europe and other parts of the world many people live together forever without getting married. For some reason in the US, people either get married or eventually break up — and this is true of couples with and without children.  

And yet, we are seeing people increasingly opt out of marriage. I’d posit that some of this is being driven by women who want something different to what they witnessed around them growing up, and who would prefer to not be married than to settle for something that doesn’t live up to their expectations. Whereas women of the past couple of generations mostly opted out through divorce (and divorces are still initiated by women roughly 75% of the time), today women are increasingly opting out by delaying or forgoing marriage altogether. 

Reading reviews of the recently published memoir This American Ex-Wife reminded me that plenty of American women still grow up believing they need to settle for a traditional and deeply unsatisfying marriage, and that their best hope for shared parenting duties is divorced shared custody. The author tries to make the case for why marriage itself is terrible for women, but instead presents a strong critique of a very type of traditional marriage. She appears genuinely unaware that equal partnerships in marriage can exist, and do exist, and I’d argue increasingly so, at least as a percent of total marriages today.

It’s tempting to say that women just want equal partnerships, and could men please step up and meet them there? But of course it’s not that simple. I recently heard a thought-provoking interview with Lori Gottlieb (author of the hilarious memoir Maybe You Should Talk to Someone) about the dating world today, with plenty of interesting research from her book Marry Him and anecdotes from her therapy practice peppered in. She argues that people dating today are too picky — sometimes their expectations are unrealistic, and often they’re simply focused on the wrong things, which don’t actually matter to relationship success. 

As a woman, I think it makes sense to have a very high bar for whether a partner is truly able and willing to build a relationship of equals — someone who is flexible, open, and shares a fundamental value around gender equality and partnership. I think Lori would agree, and she would also caution people against disqualifying potential partners for minor offenses, or making negative assumptions about them based on small interactions. In other words, have very high standards for the things that really matter, and go easy on the rest. 

But I think the truth is many women are conflicted about what really matters to them. They’re still adjusting to this new world, too. On one hand they want to be seen and treated as equals. On the other, many women want to maintain some of the old traditions even when there’s not a great reason for it. Lori cites research that most women prefer that their partner be super tall, even when they themselves aren’t very tall. And that many women want to date men who are more successful than they are, not satisfied with partners who are roughly as successful. This makes no sense to me, especially if what we’re after is equality. Or is it?

Around minute 12 of the interview, the interviewer plays a funny viral clip of two women describing their own hilariously contradictory feelings around wanting a partner who is traditionally macho (and will “beat someone up”), but also extremely compassionate and emotionally attuned to them. To be clear, the women are doing so in earnest, seeing no conflict whatsoever. Lori says no one thinks they themselves are like that, but in reality it’s very common to have these kinds of contradictory desires. For instance, it’s very common for women today to want someone who is “‘really really ambitious, but also really family oriented,” even though realistically “someone who is really ambitious, is probably going to spend a lot of time at work.”

In a perfect display of how human these conflicted feelings are, Lori herself admits that she wouldn’t date someone who didn’t pick up the check on the first date. She says it would be a huge ick, and that most of her female clients would agree. When pressed, she admits that if she thought about it rationally she’d “talk herself out of it,” and yet she doesn’t seem to want to do that. And so here we are: with ever increasing requirements for our partners, some directly in conflict with one another, and fewer marriages happening as a result.

I don’t think of marriage as something people should do for any moral reason. But I believe the research that having a strong, long-term romantic partnership has an enormously positive impact on our health and happiness, and that getting married improves a couple’s chances of working things through in the long-run. More to the point, I want anyone who wants that kind of partnership to have access to one. I’m somewhat optimistic that marriage rates will climb back up over time, but it will require everyone to re-adjust to a new reality.

First, we need to broaden our definitions of gender expectations, such that men and women are allowed to be multi-dimensional people and express the full range of human emotion and experience, rather than a narrowly defined view of traditional gender norms. We need to learn to embrace and celebrate men and women who are strong, sensitive, confident, and nurturing, or frankly whatever the heck they want to be. I think this begins with parents, and I think about this often in how I raise my two little boys.

It also requires a reshuffling of power dynamics within the private confines of our intimate relationships. It’s about who makes the decisions that matter, and about who gets to go after and achieve their personal and professional goals and ambitions, and whose creative or emotional needs are sacrificed. It’s not about building family structures that look a particular way, or about men and women having to do the same things. It’s about being open to more possibilities, being honest about the implicit assumptions we carry, and confronting difficult conversations and choices about what we each want and need. Fundamentally, it’s about becoming comfortable with a world where all couples truly share power and have the same rights and responsibilities.

And finally, bringing to life this new world order requires that we be honest about all the ways in which we hold conflicting and hypocritical views. You can have a modern marriage as defined above, or a traditional one, or something in between as long as it’s what you both want. But I’d argue you can’t hold on to traditional norms without bringing along some traditional baggage too.