Pi-Consulting

Marital Misconceptions

The New York Times recently ran a “Pop Quiz on Marriage”, whose aim was to de-bunk some of the misconceptions we all carry around on the Great Institution of Matrimony. Some of the observations in the piece are so fascinating, Pi wanted to summarize these indicators of changing American mores on the website.

* No, women are NOT more enthusiastic about marriage than men. Since the year 2000, more men than women in America described marriage as their ideal state. Men have become happier with their marriages than women, and in divorces it is predominantly the wives who want out of the marriage.
* No, second and subsequent marriages are NOT significantly less likely than first marriages to end in divorce. Divorce overtakes 43% of first marriages, but 55% of re-marriages. If children from a prior marriage are involved, the failure rate rises to 65%. Some couples are trying to raise the odds of success by taking each other’s teenage kids along on the honeymoon.
* Born-again Christians are NOT less likely than their secular fellow-citizens to divorce. 35% of American born-agains have divorced (vs. 37% of atheists and agnostics), and 23% of the born-agains have divorced twice. America’s highest divorce rate is in the Bible Belt.
* Yes, it IS true that there are more long-term marriages now than in the past. The reason is a demographic quirk. Divorce rates have manifestly climbed in the last half century, though they have fallen again since their early 1980s peak. But the overriding reason for more long-term marriages is longer lifespans. As a result of old age being prolonged, more couples get to celebrate 40 years of marriage than at any time in human history.
* There are many who assert that throughout human history society has always seen strong marital commitment as the foundation-stone of public virtue. They turn out to be WRONG, however. The ancient Greeks held that love in its purest form was between two men. Philosophers in ancient Rome and theologians in the early Christian churches held that loving your wife too much (or “uxoriousness”) was a betrayal of one’s higher obligations to God or country. Many early Christians thought that marriage was inescapably tainted by its inclusion of sex, (a notion which eerily re-surfaced in the diaries of the late Ronald Reagan). And centuries of Chinese culture have puts the relationship between father and Number One Son far higher than that between husband and wife.
* Those who believe that one-man-one-woman has always been the favored form of marriage also turn out to be WRONG. More societies have opted for polygamy than monogamy, by a comfortable margin. Indeed, the first five books of the Bible cite one-man-many-wives as the marital norm. Some societies have gone the other way, with one woman taking multiple husbands simultaneously. As the NYT feature points out, most of human history has put a higher priority on acquiring in-laws and appropriating property than it ever put on sex or love.
* The notion of young Japanese women instinctively longing to be “good little wives” also seems to have been proved WRONG. In surveys conducted four years ago three-quarters of American schoolgirls agreed that “everyone needs to marry”. In Japan, 88% of schoolgirls disagreed.