Americans: Optimistically Hypocritical About Marriage

I’m a sucker for any new study about marriage. Maybe it’s because I’ve witnessed three divorces among my parents (their first marriage to each other and each of their second marriages). Maybe it’s because when the time comes, I desperately want to get it right myself. Marriage is both a romantic dream and a daunting enigma to me — an emotionally-loaded puzzle that I simultaneously fear and want to solve.

That means I want every piece of information and insight I can get my hands on. So last week’s TIME magazine — headline: “Who Needs Marriage?” — virtually flew off the shelf and into my lap of its own accord.

TIME teamed up with the Pew Research Center to conduct a nationwide poll about marriage and compare it to polls past. There are lots of interesting statistics in there about socioeconomic trends in who gets married these days and why. But this unlikely truth is what jumped out at me: We Americans are increasingly pessimistic about marriage, but we want to do it anyway.

A 1978 TIME poll asked if people thought marriage was becoming obsolete; 28 percent did. This year it’s 39 percent, and an even higher 44 percent for those under 30 — yet only 5 percent of people in that age group don’t want to get married.

So, we’re stubbornly hopeful about our own prospects for marriage even as we grow skeptical of the institution as a whole. Frankly, I find that endearing. Despite the battlefield of broken relationships around us and the modern feasibility of soldiering on alone, our human spirits still long for love, companionship and family. We still hope. We still strive.

“What we found is that marriage, whatever its social, spiritual or symbolic appeal, is in purely practical terms just not as necessary as it used to be,” wrote Belinda Luscombe for TIME. “Neither men nor women need to be married to have sex or companionship or professional success or respect or even children — yet marriage remains revered and desired.”

In fact, while marriage rates have declined (about 50 percent of American adults are married now, compared to 70 percent in 1960), nearly six times more people in the TIME/Pew poll thought it was easier for marrieds than singles to find happiness. We may or may not be empirically right about that, but it’s significant that we perceive it to be so.

Of course, marriage is what society expects of us — and society tells us that in myriad ways practically from birth. “Getting married is a way to show family and friends that you have a successful personal life,” Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, author of a book on marriage, told TIME. “It’s like the ultimate merit badge.”

That take smacks a little too much of keeping up with the Joneses for my taste, but this much is true: Marriage is an essential part of the life dream that most of us share. It goes hand in hand (no pun intended) with our other shared dreams: a good home, a family, stability, comfort, meaning. Cold, hard facts like the divorce rate — which actually has dropped over the past 30 years, hurrah! — are no match for those human desires.

Maybe getting married is a little bit crazy. We can’t possibly know how our lives, our relationships, our partners or even our selves may change. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, our good reasons for pessimism — and I have plenty — I believe marriage is one of the most honorable endeavors we make in our lives. It may not always work out, but there is love and honor in the trying. And that’s what living is for.