The Australian Family, March 2003, p. 14
Looking For Love
David Popenoe is professor of sociology at Rutgers University in the US. This interview is found in Marriage: Just a Piece of Paper? (Anderson, et. al., eds., Eerdmans, 2002).
At the National Marriage Project at Rutgers, we decided to concentrate most of our efforts on looking into the mating and dating and marriage ideas, patterns, and behavior of today's pre-married young adults. That means mainly kids in their twenties. We know a lot about the Baby Boomers and what they did to the nation. The Generation Y kids today's teenagers. They're of interest, but they're not fully formed. We have this big group, sometimes called Generation X, which really do represent something quite different from the Baby Boomers. So that's what we're looking at, and it's quite remarkable what's going on out there.
The Baby Boomers grew up in strong, intact families, and they had enough family security, in my opinion, of course, that they were able to go off in a highly individualistic direction and get away with it. They still had family back there that they could turn to. So they went to the extreme.
Today's Generation X are the children of the Baby Boomers, and they've grown up for the most part in crummy families, in which you've had a tremendously high divorce rate, if you even had marriages to begin with. These kids are kind of shell-shocked. They're like deer caught in the headlights. First of all, they desperately want a long-term marriage more than the Baby Boomers ever did. The Baby Boomers had come from these strong families and felt they could do something else. Today's generation knows that that's important but they don't quite know how to go about it. They certainly haven't been taught how to do it by their parents. And the popular culture, the entertainment industry and so on, which is the single most important thing in their lives right now, is about as anti-marriage and anti-child as you can get. So these kids are floundering.
For the first time in history we have this long period of life called young adulthood in which people are living apart from the families in which they grew up and they're not yet married. This is a sexually charged scene. It goes on for ten or twelve years before they eventually marry. The idea is that this is a good way to prepare for eventual marriage and children.
Most of these people, especially the women, still want to have children and they all want to marry. So the question is, "What does this say about preparation?" The fact is that I think that if you were to design a life that was maladapted for what's to come later this would probably be it. They're not thinking about marriage in any realistic or close sense. They're certainly not thinking about children, and they're leading a lifestyle in which relationships become very fragile and involve all sorts of serial connections with other people. That's the kind of attitude one would think you wouldn't want to have when you're married, having children, and wanting to stay on course.
It's interesting in our focus groups that they don't quite understand marriage as an institution anymore. It's a relationship. You know, you have a pal that you can take around with you for life. We ask questions about, "What the heck is the marriage license for?" Their view is that they can't answer it. But in general, they think that maybe it's just a way to raise taxes or something.
Do we need marriage anymore? The reason we need it is because children, when they come into this world, have a mother and father biologically in most cases and they look to this mother and father to care for them. It has always been that way. Marriage is the thing which holds those two people together. Or to put it in a more biological or historical way, marriage is the institution which holds the father to the mother-child bond. That's no less important today than it ever was in the past. Now, if you want to just rid yourself of the whole thing and go to some alternative scheme to raise children, fine. But history is not on your side. There has never been a better solution than a mother and a father staying together and raising their own kids.
There's a whole other new body of evidence that's coming forth about how important marriage is to the individual. Somehow in binding yourself to another person for a long period of time, you get all sorts of personal benefits that people are not fully aware of. You live longer. You're healthier. You're happier. All the studies tend to show that. When you stop and think about it, the thing that you want to avoid is the lonely person who's cut off from all ties to others. Of course, the Baby Boomers never thought of anything like that, but maybe the Generation X'ers are beginning to think a little bit more about that.
All of our couples, by the way, do want to have this pal for life or this partner, although there are some striking differences between the women and the men. The men really are very optimistic about the future. They think they're doing all the right things by delaying marriage, by living with a woman first (which they regard as kind of insurance that the marriage is going to be successful). The women are much more pessimistic about the future. They don't think that there are good guys out there. They don't like the idea of cohabitation. They don't want to wait so long to marry, because their biological clock is ticking.
The biology was never enough to hold a father to the mother-child bond. That's why every society has set up the institution of marriage- virtually every society-and they did it for this purpose of holding the father to the mother-child bond. They realized that the outcome for the children would be better. Of course, in times past, where you lived in large extended families in small communities, the extended family pressure was enough to hold the marriage together. Today those ties are gone, and it's kind of left up to the father's own whim as to whether or not he wants to stick around. In fact, there are all sorts of people telling him that you can have a whole lot better life with some chicks down the street. And sure enough, that's what he picks.
If you want to get into evolutionary psychology, all of this goes back to the very different biological and sexual strategies of men and women. I think that if you do away with the institution of marriage, you are still going to have the mother-child bond, because that's the strongest relationship in humankind. But I believe the father-mother-child bond is going to weaken, and the fathers are going to have a tendency to pull away and set up new families of their own, letting the mother take care of the first kid.
Evolutionary psychology is now the "in" field. Ten years ago it was almost unheard of and you would get hooted by an audience if you brought it up. Now it's front-page stuff in the newspapers. The fundamental issue is that the mother has a very, very strong tie to her own child, and she knows that that child is hers. She has a limited number of children that she can have in life, and she's got to take care of them. The dads can go one of two ways. Either they can stay with that mom and help her raise this child and help that child become a successful adult, or they can go off and spread their seed widely and have little children all over the place. Therefore, you have a very different sexual strategy. The woman is trying very hard to get a man who will stay with her and settle down and care for the kids. The man is, at least at some stages in life, trying hard not to be tied down so that he can still, at least unconsciously, keep this other option open.
Today, in the young, pre-marriage adults, you see that the women are very concerned that they're not going to have the guy. The guys seem to be footloose. The girls tell you that there's a meat market out there, that none of these guys seem to be serious. The girls all want to have a child, and, by the way, more and more of them are saying that if the right guy doesn't come along they're going to have it on their own. They can do it now, because you've got support from the state and so on. Now the guys, on the other hand, they're kind of unconcerned about all this in a way because they know that when they get to be thirty or so they can find a woman. Or, if they don't want to marry, they can stay loose. They can just have a whole series of girlfriends or they can marry. This society is not too worried. They can dump the person if they want to and start a new family if they find someone better. It really is a kind of child-oriented point of view or a human-relationship point of view, but in my view it's a ghastly scene.
Why a ghastly scene? Because I think what people want more than anything else is close relationships with others. If you ask people later in life what has brought them the most meaning and significance and value to their lives, it's going to be close relationships that they have had with others, either marriage or relationships with children and close friends. That's why the family has always been so terribly important.
What happens when marriage is not in the picture anymore? We are headed in that direction, and if you project trends you end up with an even more ghastly, to use that word again, scene than we have now, in which children are raised mostly by their mothers and the fathers are roaming around.
The state has an enormous role in stepping in where the father has stepped out. You might try to have parenting contracts, as some say, so that you can at least get the money from these fathers, but look at what's happened today following divorce. Try to hold all of these dads to good behavior. It's extremely difficult, and I think a parenting contract is, frankly, kind of a joke. If we get to that stage we're finished.
Children are rapidly going out of the picture, and that's one of the big, big problems of our time. The main thing that happens is that the whole reason for the institution of marriage virtually collapses. If it's just a question of adult relationships, I don't think the state would have a big concern; the church, a religious institution, wouldn't have the whole thing institutionalized.
It's a tremendous benefit for people to have a whole lot of close friends, but we don't have the state involved in trying to organize close friendships. Marriage obviously will hang, because there is a benefit in staying with one person. I think removing children is probably the straw that's going to break the camel's back.
I would just point out that with each year we are having fewer children. In the middle of the 1800S, about 75 percent or 80 per cent of households had children. Today it's below one-third and maybe pushing 30 percent. So, in other words, the average household in America doesn't have children, and we're gradually talking about a society in which children are an afterthought. Now some people who have children think of them as having a trophy child: "Oh, let's have a child. That might be fun." It's just something that is brand new in history. Life has always been focused before on the prospect and issue of having children.
I think it's always nice to have a marriage which is deeply fulfilling for parents. But I think from the child's point of view, they're just happy to have two parents there who are taking care of them.
One of the interesting findings of recent years is that most marriages break up today just out of a kind of boredom. Many people get tired of each other. There's not really the kind of severe conflict that used to break up marriages in the past, and should break up marriages today. You would hope that adults could learn that marriage is important, that many problems can be worked out over time, and that there are all sorts of tools now that people can turn to for help with their marriages.
When the first child comes, you enter a phase of the marriage which is probably the least happy of any phase of the marital life cycle. That's something which is a very serious problem today. Young adults live a pretty happy kind of lifestyle, free and easy, and if they have a mate that's a pretty equal situation. They're both working and have free time and so on. Then the child comes and all hell breaks loose.
People just are not prepared for that as they once were. Therefore, it becomes a very difficult scene in so many families. The guy isn't getting his sex anymore. The woman isn't getting the help she needs, and she's had to change her entire life. Now she has this child. Something you could do to help marriages a lot is by giving people a lot more parenting education in advance, so they would know what's ahead and know how to prepare for it.
One of the most corrosive influences today, in my view, is market commerce leading to a consumer view of marriage promulgated by the entertainment industry, which has become the dominant force in popular culture, especially among young adults. If you're to analyze television, music, movies, and the rest, this is the most anti-marriage and, I might say, anti-child barrage of information that one could imagine. There's nothing you see very often that has anything to do to help you have ships. That, by the way, is a far more important phenomenon in explaining where we are today than government.