Marriage 2001

Despite the challenges of each generation, people still love to get married. A look at where we've been points to where we're going

Tim Stafford

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Marriage has gone through profound changes over the last five decades, but we continue to speak about it as though it's the same old familiar pattern. To see how much has changed, look at the shift from the forties, when my parents got married, to the sixties, when I graduated from high school, to today.

I got my diploma and headed off to Stanford University in 1968, less than a year after the famous Summer of Love. "The times they were a-changing." The sexual revolution, Viet Nam, drugs—my friends and I were convinced the world would never be the same again. Yet we didn't think about how such changes would affect marriage. We thought it would be about the same as it had been for our parents, except better because we (like most youth of most times) thought we were better than our gray and jaded parents.

Our parents, the World War II veterans, thought so, too. I mean they thought marriage would work out for us as it had for them. They were just glad when we got married. Finally, the kids were beginning to settle down and act like regular people.

In a way, we were. Marriage is very slow to change. Today's young people can listen to their grandparents tell how they fell in love, or what their first apartment was like, and feel that nothing is different. The sweetness of love, the struggles of partnership, the passion of sex—these move, but only within an orbit that is determined by human nature.

In the fifties, a man's career was to provide for the family, not his ego.

Yet in 50 years, marriage has changed dramatically. As a parent, I realize what my parents did not—that my children must marry under circumstances neither I, nor my parents, ever knew. It's sobering to contrast my parents' circumstances, marrying in 1946, with what my own children can expect in the decade to come.

In 1946, the vast majority of marriages were "till death do us part." Now it's a coin flip—as many as half of all first marriages end in divorce.
Most women were virgins when they married then—and a lot of men were, too. Now, only a small percentage of partners lack sexual experience prior to their wedding day.
Then, husbands earned money while wives stayed home to raise the kids. Today's roles are much more fluid, since most women work for pay and many work full-time even when their kids are small.
Then, most people had grown up with a mother and dad, a pattern of family life they expected to reproduce. Now, about half of all children grow up without a full-time father because of divorce. As young adults, they enter marriage with little experience of a strong two-parent family.
Then, the idea of a man marrying another man (or a woman another woman) would have provoked amazement, incredulity or hilarity. Now, any sixth grader can tell you what a gay "marriage" is.

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Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 1998, Spring

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