- We're finally at a time in humanity when we can choose what
we want for companionship. We're no longer virgins at marriage. Man is no longer the
head of the household. It's who we love, who we
choose, how we partner, and how we raise our babies as a team. - There's a theory among anthropologists, this question of the puzzle
of monogamous marriage. Why on Earth would monogamous marriage have come to be so widely adopted by some of these extraordinarily
successful civilizations? And the answer seems
to be because monogamy makes societies more
stable, more peaceful, more prosperous; monogamous societies have
lower levels of child abuse, have lower levels of domestic abuse. - What matters is parenting. What matters is how we raise our kids. And I do think that
there it's quite possible to imagine a renewed future for marriage based around egalitarianism
between men and women, but a shared commitment to kids. - We, adults, we think
we socialize our children but our children actually looking around and socializing themselves according to the norms
that they see around them. Our children watch for models. And so in that sense,
they learn how to act according to their society, so to speak. - Before we delve deeper, a brief word about our sponsor
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at betterhelp.com/bigthink. Now, back to our
thought-provoking discussion. - I think that the real losers from the sexual revolution are children; there is so much copious evidence to show that children who
grew up in an intact household with two married parents 'cause married people are
more likely to stay together after they have children
than unmarried people are. Boys are less likely to commit crime and antisocial behavior. Girls are less likely to
get pregnant as teenagers. Both sexes do better academically. Almost every possible
metric you can imagine is better for children
to have married parents. - There's the growth
in what you might call the 'dad deficit' or fatherlessness, because of a real shift
in the shape of families. A danger frankly, that
we're just benching dads, if they don't fit the traditional model of what it used to mean to be a father, to be a breadwinner and a provider, then the danger is that they
feel benched as a result, and that they get benched by
societies, benched by families. And when 4 in 10 children
are born outside marriage and most children to less-educated parents are born outside marriage, then we have to reinvent what
it means to be a "father." Because right now, men
are still being held to an old standard of what it meant to be a successful father in a world where that is neither possible for many of them or even desirable because what we've seen
is as women have grown in economic power and
economic independence, then of course they're going to choose to be with a man rather
than being forced to as in the old days. This is probably the greatest
liberation in human history, honestly, that women can now choose, whether to be with a man or not. But it does pose some
really sharp questions about what fathers are for. And until we escape the obsolete model of the breadwinner father, then we will continue
to see more and more men being left out of family life. And the kicker is that boys in families that don't have a father presence suffer much more than girls. And so then what happens
is that male disadvantage can become intergenerational because if the fathers are struggling and therefore not really
involved in their kids' lives, then the boys are the
ones who suffer most, who will then go on to struggle
themselves in education, in the labor market. - I usually speak of potentials. Potential behavior is behavior that we normally don't get to see, but the individuals are capable of it. The best example I can think of is male caretaking potential. Adult males do very little. For example, let's take
chimpanzees and bonobos. It's the females who carry the kids, they feed them, they protect them. The males do extremely little,
but sometimes a female dies. So now all of a sudden we
have an orphan in the group and the orphan is usually
not adopted by females because the females
have their own children. The orphan is adopted by an adult male and sometimes it's the alpha male. So an adult male picks up
the kid starts carrying it, not just for a few days but
sometimes for two years, up to five years I've heard, they become basically the
father figure for their child, even though their child is
often not their own child but they pick it up and they
start to take care of it, and they wait for it, and
they protect it, and so on. So males have this care-taking potential that we normally don't get to see but it's very highly
developed actually in them. I think for human society, this is an interesting observation because we are in a phase where men are taking more
care of children at the moment and some people will say that
that's an unnatural thing, that a female job, so to
speak, is not a male job. But if you look at the other primates we see that they have that potential, clearly, the males do have
that potential to do that. And our species, we evolved
over time, nuclear families in which men were more
involved in childcare anyway. So I think our species has
that potential even more than the other primates. - I mean, as a parent myself, there were certain forms of doing harm that I certainly prohibited,
but I also talked about. My own kid is a 28-year-old
cis heterosexual who is very possibly more
adamantly anti-homophobic than I am. I mean, I will make jokes that
he will not accept as jokes so I'm not responsible for that. He grew up in a culture
and became part of a world that's very mindful about what
is hurtful and what is not. And it could very well be that as much as I have fought
homophobia my whole life, that I have more to learn
from a younger generation than I have to teach a younger generation. - Right now love is changing. In the past, both men and women married in their early twenties, now they're marrying
in their late twenties, this very long period of
pre-commitment, 'slow love.' They're getting to know
each other very slowly. They're starting these
days, "Oh, just friends, we're just friends." Then they move into friends with benefits. You learn a lot between the sheets, not just the way somebody makes love but whether they are patient,
whether they're kind, whether they've got a sense of humor. Then if that all works out, then they go out on the
official first date, and tell friends and family
about the relationship, and then they slowly move in
together, and then they marry. Over 95% of singles say they're looking for these five things: Somebody who respects them, somebody who they can
trust and confide in, somebody who makes them laugh, somebody who makes enough time for them, and somebody who they feel
physically attracted to. What's interesting about this slow love is that the longer you
court, the later you marry, the more likely you to are
to remain together long term. - So we no longer speak about
family, woman, man, desire, sex in the same way. Many people don't assume we're
always in heterosexual frame or in a binary gender frame. Is a gay marriage really a marriage? Who's the real parent? There are responses like this that refuse to accept
new social structures because they're holding to the old ones, or they think their sense
of the order of the world depends on staying within
an older vocabulary and an older framework. But we have to allow
ourselves to be challenged and accept the invitation to
revise our ways of thinking because that's the only way of being open to people who are trying
to make their claim sometimes for the very first time, to be heard, to be known,
to be acknowledged. - Only a minority people now think that it's important to be
married to have a good life. So for sure there's the romance and the love stories and so on too, but as I look at the trends, and in particular these class
gaps in marriage that we see, it looks to me as if
marriage has become something actually no more romantic
than it was before. So if before it was based
on economic dependency, I think now it's something
like a joint venture for raising kids- between more equal partners for sure, but it's really a commitment device. It's really a way of signaling: We're gonna have kids. We want to invest heavily in those kids, in time, and money and so on, so let's do it together. And so I actually think that
it's much more about parenting than it is about love, and that's certainly better
than one of economic dependency. But I don't think we should get dewy-eyed and think that marriage has become this kind of wonderfully
kind of romantic, expressive, individualistic thing where husbands and wives
are now writing poems to each other on a daily basis. They're actually not. They're juggling childcare and figuring out who's gotta
go to the parents' evening, and who's gonna pick up their
kid from the baseball game, and sitting down on Sunday nights and figuring out what the
week schedule looks like, which is much more
egalitarian than the old model but not much more romantic. - As a matter of fact, what we're doing now
is we're moving forward to the kinds of partnerships that we had a million years ago. For millions of years, our ancestors lived in
these little hunting and gathering groups. Women commuted to gather
their fruits and vegetables. They came home with over
50% of the evening meal; double-income family was the rule. Women were just as powerful
as men sexually, socially, and economically, and they could leave bad
partnerships to make a better one. - The institution of
marriage is pretty much dead. It used to be really
difficult to get a divorce. Not only was the barrier to
getting a divorce really high but also the social
consequences were really grave. Whereas now we have very
high rates of divorce. We have no-fault divorce available, which means that everyone can pretty much just
opt out of the marriage. Clearly in the past, it was the case that people ended up stuck in wretched marriages because divorce laws made it impossible for them to get out of them. Whereas now, those people
aren't stuck anymore. However, it also has changed the nature of the marriage institution completely. - Many people have taken the
risk of declaring marriage to be on its way out, to
be an obsolete institution, only to find that the trends
are not quite on their side. And in particular, when
you see a situation where the people with most power, most choice are still opting
in huge numbers into marriage then it's way too soon to
say that it's out of date. It's clearly as an institution, still doing quite a lot
of work for certain people in society. I think what we can safely say
is that the model of marriage that was founded on economic
dependency of women on men is completely obsolete. And so attempts to somehow
bring that back to life is a sort of zombie version about how can we sort of raise
it up again from the dead, are doomed to failure
as well as being unfair. Now I think we've created
models of the family that are much more equal and much fairer, but maybe not quite as
stable in many cases too. And so we've gone from a situation where we had quite stable but deeply unfair family structures to much fairer but quite
unstable family structures- and the challenge we
all face is to find ways to create more stability
in our family life, but without sacrificing
the goal of equality which has animated the movement
over the last 50 years. How do we have strong relationships within which people can raise kids well? And if marriage has a part
to play in that, then great. But there are alternative models around civil partnerships and so on too. But I think that's for us to create, and I think we should
be careful not to assume that the way to restore
marriage as an institution is to bring it back to the old model. If marriage is to survive,
it will be in a new model not a restoration of the old model. - Want to dive deeper? Become a Big Think member and join our members-only
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