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“I am a very committed wife. And I should be committed, too, for being married so many times.”
— Elizabeth Taylor
There is possibly no better embodiment of the complicated relationship we, as individuals and as a culture, have had with marriage over the past century than Elizabeth Taylor: married and divorced eight times, twice to Richard Burton, a self-proclaimed true romantic who also said, “I’ve only slept with men I’ve been married to. How many women can make that claim?”
In her day, of course, Taylor was scandalous. But by contemporary standards — where a Kim Kardashian gets married for a ratings bump, then files for divorce 72 days later to temporary backlash but minimal brand fallout — Taylor’s approach seems quaint, almost girlish in its refusal to give up on true love.
Clearly, attitudes toward marriage, divorce and remarriage are swiftly, tectonically shifting, in ways not seen since the post-feminist divorce boom of the ’80s.
The most recent decennial report by the US Census Bureau found that, for the first time, there were fewer married Americans than singles — yet it also reported that, at some point in their lives, more Americans will opt to get married than not.
What is going on?
Two new books attempt to divine the answer, and coincidentally, the authors took the same, Studs Turkel-like approach: rather than mine pre-existing data or academic findings, Susan Shapiro Barash’s “The Nine Phases of Marriage: How to Make It, Break It, Keep It” (St. Martin’s Griffin) and Dana Adam Shapiro’s “You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married): Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce” (Scribner) feature interviews with a cross-section of subjects around the country, varying in age, ethnicity, education, income, religion and social strata. Unlike Shapiro, however, Barash only interviewed women.
“So much has opened up for women and what we’re up against,” Barash says. “I was interested in how we idealize romance, and how high the bar is set for romantic love. And that’s where a lot of the disappointment lies.”
Shapiro, too, says that given the divorce rate — which has remained at about 50% since the 1980s — he is equally puzzled as to why “the culture prioritizes marriage” rather than re-examines what it is we expect from it.
This is not a new question, but that it still gets asked means that we’re still wrestling with it: As we live increasingly longer lives, can we really expect that one person will meet all our needs throughout? If not, why does divorce still feel like failure, rather than the best option? Why do second marriages tend to flame out so fast? Should we redefine what a successful union is? Can and should that include a sexless marriage, an open one or one that ultimately ends but had more good years than bad? Or that left us a deeper, more nuanced person than when we went in?
“Margaret Mead thought that women really need to understand that marriage is a terminal condition,” Barash says. “She was married three times and considered them all successful.” More recently, Brad Pitt expressed a similar philosophy when discussing his divorce from Jennifer Aniston: “The thing that I don’t understand is looking at this as a failure . . . the idea that marriage has to be for all time, that I don’t understand.”
Barash — who has been married to her second husband for 15 years — set out to explore the experience of the modern American wife, who, according to recent data, likely outstrips her husband in education, employment and earning power. She was surprised by what she found: Among her sample of 200, she reports that 85% of them hope to someday be married.
“At the heart of it, what really resonates is the value of the wife in the culture,” Barash says. “Marriage is the last vestige of church and state. It’s really honored. But with choice comes a different way of looking at your role as a spouse. The residue of the postwar American wife is still hanging on.”
Through her research and interviews, Barash says she was surprised that her youngest subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 30, were the most interested in a traditional role.
“Millennials are more interested [than Gen Xers] in having a marriage that is SO important,” she says. This, even though more young women than men are in grad schools, and those in the workforce are outearning their male colleagues. “They say, ‘I’ll stay home, I’ll make it less stressful — I don’t want to be like my mother — she’s divorced.’ ”
Even so, Barash found that these young wives weren’t any less vulnerable than their older counterparts in feeling a bit let down after the rush of the courtship, engagement and wedding. They are just as susceptible to what she identifies as “the nine phases of marriage,” which include a period of disillusionment from which many relationships don’t recover.
“What’s so broad a sweep is that young women are looking for perfection in a marriage,” Barash says. “They want their husbands to be everything: best friend, lover, confidante. And the man’s attitude is stuck in the 1950s: ‘Hey, I married you, didn’t I?’ ”
According to an online survey that Barash conducted among 80 additional women, she found that the deep desire to be a wife was nearly matched by disappointment not long after becoming one:
* 80% of wives got married for love
* 70% will be dissatisfied emotionally, sexually or financially for a substantial amount of time
* 65% say that the romance left their marriages once they had children
* 60% think they got married for the wrong reasons
* 55% would not marry their husband if they had the chance to do it all over again
While today’s young wives work out their own definition of a satisfying marriage, they would do well to consider the lessons of older wives, many of whom told Barash things they would never tell their sisters or best friends: how many of them preferred their children to their husbands, how many sleep in separate bedrooms, how many seriously considered divorce — and still do — but find that the social and financial security is of greater importance, and no one would ever know, because we still live with a very antiquated definition of just what makes a good marriage.
“While researching, I was continually struck by how much women really struggled with the idealized wife and so badly wanting it to work out,” Barash says. “We’re always up against the cultural messaging, that you have to appear a certain way as a couple. But this is not your mother’s marriage. It might not be convention-bound, but it needs to please you.”
Besides, even your mother’s marriage wasn’t what you thought. What both of these books gift us with is a harsh but comforting truth: The ideal marriage never existed.
Shapiro — 38, several serious relationships, never married — came at the subject from a more fatalistic point of view, setting out to answer the question that most preoccupies him: Why does love die?
He cites the 50% divorce rate but also notes that “of the 50% who stay together, you have to figure that at least some of them should get divorced, which effectively tips the scales in favor of marriage being an empirically bad idea.”
So, why does he think people still get married? “Best reason of all,” Shapiro says. “True love. Of course, the No. 1 cause of divorce is marriage, which means that you’ve married the wrong person.”
He structured the book as a series of discrete profiles with the divorced, and while each tale is specific in its misery, Shapiro found that each marriage — no matter how long or the ages of the spouses — had one common killer: complacency.
“It sounds so banal,” Shapiro says. “But when one person begins to feel unheard and unseen, and that’s metastasized by the notion of ‘I have you, you’re mine until death, I don’t have to earn you anymore’ — that’s where I think divorce is a good thing. It really keeps you on your toes. You have to make a conscious effort.”
As with Barash’s research, Shapiro found that all of his subjects had different definitions of what makes a happy marriage. For some, passion and lust are absolute requirements; for others, being of like minds and sharing the same goals is more important. Some think honesty is overrated; others consider it fundamental. Some went into their marriages wildly in love; others for practical or selfish reasons (one woman confessed she got married only to have kids).
Considering how elusive married bliss is — and that husbands and wives can disagree even on its definition — it’s no wonder that we’re seeing fewer trips to the altar.
Even remarriage is on the decline: a 2009 Census report found that 76% of Americans who were married once never tried again; 20% married twice, and 5% three times or more. And the number of over-50s getting divorced and opting to stay single is increasing; according to a recent study conducted by Bowling Green State University, more than 33% of 46-64 year olds were divorced or never wed in 2010, up sharply from the 1970 rate of 13%.
Still, like Barash, Shapiro says he came away “more hopeful” about the institution and is convinced that as each generation successfully redefines what a happy marriage looks like, we may see more of them — possibly fewer in quantity, higher in quality.
“That term commitment-phobe is irritating,” says Shapiro, who feels it unfairly marginalizes the never-married. “It implies that I’m afraid. I’m not afraid. I just prefer this way.”
He predicts that the demographic trend will continue to tilt toward ever more single people, while divorce may actually spike given that the Internet has changed dating forever; no longer are people afraid that they’ll end up alone.
“The culture prioritizes marriage, but I think that’s changing,” he says. “And the younger generation opts much more for group functionality. We’ll see closer friendships, more group activity” — less priority placed on coupled-up status.
What stuck most with Shapiro, though, was an interview with one woman who thinks that the rules of modern marriage need to be rewritten, beginning with the vows.
“She said, ‘You can’t possibly promise to love someone forever, or unconditionally — unconditional love is for children and pets,’ ” he says. “For someone to say, ‘I’ll love you no matter what you do’ — who wants that type of love? Who wants to give it? Nobody. Give us each the opportunity to earn love.”