- There's been a general
decline in marriage- but behind that general decline
is a more interesting story. I think it's important
we try to understand why people do get married
in the first place. For some people, of course,
it's a religious matter- it's a covenantal relationship. I think for many more people there's an economic element to it. There's obviously the
companionship and love. You fall in love and want to spend the rest of your life with someone, and so there's a romantic
element to marriage. And another reason was
because they got pregnant, the so-called, "shotgun wedding." There was a sense that if
you were bringing a new life into the world, that that
should be done within marriage. And there's probably a bit of
status signaling to sometimes, and this may be more true
today than it was in the past, that being married is a way of signaling success and
status within a society. And so there's a blend of reasons between
religion, romance, economics and status that have
traditionally led people to the marital state. The old model of marriage
was, for the woman, it was an economic necessity particularly if she was
gonna have children; to be with a man who
would be the provider. And obviously that has hugely changed now. And for the man, it was a way
to attach himself to children. If he was gonna have children he had to do that with a woman. She was going to raise the children, but if she was doing that, he
had to provide for them too. And so there was this complementarity to that traditional view of marriage, which of course was founded on a very deep inequality
between men and women. That was a driving force- the women's movement, including
people, like Gloria Steinem, saying the point is to make marriage into a choice rather than a necessity, and to actually free women
from the economic bondage, as they would've put it, of marriage. And that inequality is
what's been successfully shattered, gladly, by
the women's movement. - 'All of us must stand up
together and say no more.' - The very institution of marriage, which is central to human societies, has been fundamentally transformed. It's one engaged into, in
very egalitarian principles; women have huge exit power. I think it's important to know that women are twice as likely
as men to file for divorce. So women are using exit
power from marriage, they're not stuck in
bad marriages anymore- which is a huge achievement for humanity. But for men, of course, the old role of, "Well, I'll just provide
while you raise the kids," that's out of the window too. And so men's role in marriage and what it means to be "marriageable," to use a slightly ugly
term from social science, is very different now for men
from what it was in the past. And women are looking for something much more
than just a paycheck. It's a bit like the
kaleidoscope has been shaken, and the patterns haven't
quite settled yet. You see lesbian and gay couples being able to opt into marriage. Within a couple of years of
the Supreme Court Decision, we saw most three outta five lesbian and gay couples choosing to get married. You see a big class gap
opening up: fewer working class and lower income Americans
opting into the institution. What we have is what my
colleague Isabel Sawhill calls: "One of the main class
fractures in American society." No one expected that it was Americans with the most choice and
the most economic power, and especially the American women with the most choice and economic power, who would be the ones who
were continuing to get married and stay married. There's a very slight
decline for those say with four-year college degrees,
but a really big decline for those with, with less education. The typical college-educated
American woman is almost as likely to get
married as her mother was, and if anything, a little bit
more likely to stay married than her mother was. So, there really hasn't
been much of a decline in marriage at all in the top
ranks of American society. Meanwhile, significant
declines lower down. One of the other big changes has been a significant shift up in
the age of first marriage, up to closer to 30 now. And I think about my parents who married at 21 having met at 17-pretty common. And actually as late as 1970,
most women who went to college in the U.S., which was
a minority of course, but most of them were married within a year of graduating college. That's a world that's very
difficult to fathom now; where both men and women are
entering the labor market, they're becoming economically successful, they're establishing themselves. In some ways, you do all
that first, then you marry. And so, marriage has become
more like the capstone. Increasingly, marriage
is a signal of everything that has led up to the ceremony, rather than the beginning of a journey. It's as much the end of a journey to a position where people
feel they can get married now. We can't tell a single
story about marriage in America anymore in the way
we could just 40 years ago. We have to tell different stories based on class and race and geography. We've seen this real divide opening up in marriage in the U.S. Americans, now, are much
less likely to see marriage as something that you have to do to to be a complete person
or have a good life. Only 1 in 10 Americans now believe that it's essential to be married to have a fulfilling life. That's a huge cultural change. 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. 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 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 of the last 50 years. I think what we should be looking to is, 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. 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- but I think that's for us to create. If marriage is to survive,
it will be in a new model, not a restoration of the old model. - Get smarter, faster with videos from the world's biggest thinkers. And to learn even more from
the world's biggest thinkers, get Big Think+ for your business.
