Sunday, August 9, 1998

Marriage may be making a comeback

By LINDA SEEBACH / Scripps Howard News Service

Marriage may be regaining some of its lost cachet, and for very practical reasons.

A sociologist from the University of Chicago, Linda Waite, reports that married people are healthier and live longer, have more sex and more money, and perhaps as a result, are happier.

I’d often heard that was true for men, but Waite says it’s true for women as well.

“Marriage changes people’s behavior in ways that make them better off,” Waite found.

There could be some confusion between cause and effect here; perhaps people who are disposed to behave sensibly and take care of their health are also more likely to get and stay married. But it’s certainly plausible that having someone to care for and someone to care for you makes life better in many ways.

If the value of marriage for adults still rates news coverage in The New York Times, the importance to children of having married parents has returned to its former position as conventional wisdom after three decades in exile.

All kinds of people are saying in public, and without apology, that divorce is devastating to many children. To be fair, I should say that my husband and I were divorced, but we waited until our son had graduated from college and moved into his own place, and he seems to be fine with that.

And the same people who pilloried poor Dan Quayle for criticizing the single-mother plotline of Murphy Brown are acknowledging that the children of single parents are far more likely to lead troubled lives.

Let’s stipulate fortunate exceptions all round, but the statistical evidence is compelling. And has been all along, had anyone cared to look for it. Why was so much elite opinion, for so long, overwhelmingly dedicated to the propositions that marriage was a tool of patriarchal oppression and illegitimacy was just a lifestyle choice as good as any other?

There have been a few contrary voices. Midge Decter’s 1975 book Liberal Parents, Radical Children explored how the conceits of progressive child-rearing produced the ’60s generation — indulged, narcissistic and reluctant to take on the responsibilities of adulthood.

The problems she describes were not universal, and perhaps not even so widespread as they seemed among her acquaintanceship. I was a college teacher in the late ’60s, and the number of turned-on, dropped-out students was never very large — though lovingly encouraged by a few radical faculty. But that was in Minnesota, which was not necessarily inclined to think that the counterculture was an improvement.

Decter was in Denver last month to speak at a Heritage Foundation 25th anniversary dinner, and again her topic was the family. Where did the idea come from, she asked, that the family might somehow be an object of debate and choice?

She recalled that an early sign of the coming plague was an essay in Esquire magazine in which a young man wrote that “if he thought he might end up some day like his own father, working hard every day to make a nice home for the wife and kids, he would slit his throat.”

Underneath the posturing, she said, he was saying that he did not wish ever to become a husband and father.

“And the raging young women who came along soon after him were saying they for their part would be all too happy to be getting along without him,” she said.

Why did it happen when it did? Because in a fortunate time, which by just about any historical or geographical comparison the American ’60s were, when so much was new and newly possible, it was fatally easy to refuse to accept any limits on human existence.

Women could do anything men could, including leaving their infants behind to go off to war. If they did marry, it was to be a new kind of marriage in which mothers and fathers had indistinguishable roles.

And a great many people ended up miserable, and their children with them.

For the purposes of this talk, I think, Decter somewhat overstated her case. She knows that most people marry, and probably more marriages are traditional than not. At the same time, women are better off for having the opportunity for a good education and a decent job, even though they may prefer to stay at home with their children.

Still it’s a case worth considering.

“Marriage and parenthood are the rock on which human existence stands,” she said. It’s a very old lesson that life has limits, and that only by “becoming part of the onrushing tide of generations can we ordinary humans give our lives their intended full meaning.”

The people who never forgot that have been fortunate.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. E-mail seebach@denver-rmn.com