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The "end of marriage but deceptively continuing" hypothesis of what's going on

#1
C C Offline
Is marriage over?
https://aeon.co/essays/marriage-is-dead-...-couple-up

EXCERPT (Manvir Singh): . . . It was an impossible-sounding scheme that attacked a cherished institution. And it rubbed up against the sensitivities of god-fearing New Englanders. Nevertheless, John Humphrey Noyes somehow made it happen.

Today, Noyes is best known for founding the Oneida Community, a religious utopia that, among other ambitions, eradicated traditional marriage. Any man could ask any woman to have sex; each woman could in turn reject any man. The nuclear family disappeared. Couples who developed romantic relationships were criticised, and both property and childcare were communal. The community was so resistant to forms of sticky love that mothers and fathers were condemned for showing special affection towards their children.

The Oneida experiment is one in a long line of anti-marriage crusades stretching from 2nd-century North Africa to 20th-century Israel. And like all of them, it failed. [...] Noyes’s failure to destroy marriage demonstrates just how resilient the institution is. ... Yet it’s this – the primality of the institution, its inexorable tendency to exist – that makes the current historical moment so puzzling. Around the world, marriage rates are dropping. Children are born out of wedlock at an unprecedented frequency. Reviewing these trends, one commentator warned that ‘the marriage apocalypse may be coming’. Are they right? Is marriage truly doomed? And if it is, why? What’s killing the world’s oldest institution?

[...] For the first time in US history, a majority of young adults are unmarried. Last year, the UK Office for National Statistics reported that heterosexual marriages ‘remain at historical lows’. And the rate of children born outside of marriage has exploded in the developed world, exceeding 50 per cent in the Scandinavian countries and many others. As the historian Stephanie Coontz concluded, we are ‘in the middle of a world-historic transformation of marriage and family life’.

[...] The apparent collapse of marriage is staggering because marriage is ubiquitous. ... as the anthropologist George Murdock concluded in his treatise Social Structure (1949), no society ‘has succeeded in finding an adequate substitute for the nuclear family’. ... But Murdock didn’t know about the Mosuo of southwestern China. The Mosuo are famous for not having marriage. Instead, they have tisese, literally ‘walking back and forth’. In a tisese relationship, a man and a woman live and eat in their own households (there aren’t descriptions of non-heterosexual tisese). When the fancy strikes, the man visits the woman and, assuming she consents, spends the night and leaves in the morning. ... It’s similar to casual dating, except that if a woman gets pregnant, the father has few obligations to the child.

In actuality, the Mosuo have marriage too. [...] the practice looks strikingly like marriage in the contemporary West. ... Still, married people are – or at least were – a minority in Mosuo society. ... To understand why marriage was so weak among the Mosuo, we first need to be clear on what marriage is. It consists of two parts. First is the pair-bond, a longterm relationship in which two people typically have sex, live together, cooperate economically, and produce and rear babies. ... But a pair-bond alone doesn’t qualify as marriage. It needs to be institutionalised, too. The relationship needs to be wrapped in privileges and responsibilities, with socially recognised rules

Both pillars of marriage are weak among the Mosuo. Not only are tisese relationships free of institutional formalities, but they lack the behaviours common to human pair-bonds. The couple have sex, yes, and sometimes even produce babies, but they don’t live together, and their economic cooperation is meagre compared with the resource-pooling characteristic of most marriages.

[...] The basic lesson holds: when women rely less on their sexual partners, pair-bonds become weaker. People still couple up, still live together, have sex, rear babies, pool resources. They’re just not getting married Is something similar going on worldwide? Is marriage collapsing because empowered women have less need for pair-bonds?

At first blush, the answer seems to be yes. Many writers trace the decline of marriage to the growing ease of single parenthood. Given Iceland’s staggering statistics – more than 70 per cent of births in 2018 were outside of marriage – it has become a popular focus. Writing for The Atlantic in 2016, Emily Epstein pointed out that, in Iceland: ‘A combination of generous social programs and a secular society have all but made nuptials obsolete – while giving rise to a unique culture of independent motherhood … Living in a small community means relatives are often close by and can pitch in on childcare.’

The political scientist Janet Johnson made a similar observation in The New Yorker in 2015. [...] she noted that ‘Icelandic parents receive extensive social benefits, including nine months of paid leave to be shared between parents and affordable preschools. Most people also have networks of relatives available nearby to pick up the slack.’ Just as Mosuo women have their brothers and sisters, Western women have family, friends and governmental assistance.

Single motherhood might indeed be easier today than before. But all these comments miss the point. The major trend isn’t a rise in single parenthood; it’s a decline in the formality of marriage. People still couple up. They still live together. They still have sex, rear babies, and pool resources. They’re just not getting married. They’re not subjecting their relationships to the bundle of rights and responsibilities that governments call ‘marriage’. As the Icelandic demographer Ari Klængur Jónsson clarified in his report ‘A Nation of Bastards?’ (2019), the vast majority of nonmarital births in Iceland are not to single mothers; they’re to cohabiting couples.

For demographers, the rise in cohabitation is at the centre of the marriage revolution. The numbers are staggering. [...] To explain the decline of marriage, we shouldn’t look at single parenthood and weakening pair-bonds. We need to look at cohabitation.

If you want to learn about cohabitation, you can’t do much better than to ask Brienna Perelli-Harris. [...] as Perelli-Harris points out, ‘the survey data is very shallow. It doesn’t tell you a lot about the explanations – the reasons people are behaving as they are – and how these trends differ across countries.’ So, they took a different approach: focus groups. ... Despite that variation, a common story emerged. Almost everywhere, people agreed that marriage requires greater commitment than cohabitation. You make a promise before friends and families and accept that, if you back out, you’ll face the administrative hellhole that is divorce. As one Russian participant explained: ‘I can much more easily leave a cohabiting union than a marriage.’ With marriage, ‘there is something like a lock there.’

People accept the commitment of marriage, because getting married provides benefits. You get to live together and, if you so desire, raise babies. You feel more secure because your partner commits too. And you gain legal privileges, including some that are essential for making a living. One participant remembered how, in former East Germany, only married couples were allowed to take out loans. ‘There was no other way,’ he said.

He contrasted then with now. ‘Today,’ he said, as a single person, ‘I go into a furniture store and buy my whole apartment on loan.’ His comment reflects a broader societal trend: marriage is losing its monopoly over benefits. This is partly because governments are granting single people privileges once limited to married couples. Yet the biggest contributor seems to be the growing acceptance of cohabitation. [...] unmarried partners can live together. They can raise babies and build a life together. And they can do so without signing over their life in an eternal marriage contract. A Dutch participant summed up the appeal of cohabitation over marriage when he said: ‘It’s like a subscription. You can easily quit it and move on with your life.’

The difference between marriage and cohabitation dwindles further as governments recognise cohabiting unions. [...] This is good for cohabiting couples, who can now adopt children and jointly submit taxes, but it has a paradoxical result: cohabitation is becoming a new form of marriage...

[...] Despite these trends, most people want to get formally married eventually. ... Even among those cohabitation-enthusiastic Norwegians, marriage is the ideal. It’s just that its meaning is changing. As the practical shell of marriage dissolves, a core of commitment remains. Marriage is becoming a way for people who feel strongly about each other to solidify and celebrate their relationship.

The same idea comes up in conversations around same-sex marriage. [...] When the gay rights organisation Equality California ran a television ad campaign in 2007-8, they asked viewers: ‘What if you couldn’t marry the person you love?’ For them, and presumably for the Californians watching, marriage wasn’t about being an adult, having children or getting legal protections. It was about love.

Is a marriage apocalypse coming? Looking at current trends, it’s already here. Modernity, as destructive and unexpected as an asteroid, has ravaged societal norms. The hegemony of formal marriage over relationships is ending. [...] In its formal place, a zoo of new relationships is appearing. There’s casual cohabitation for couples testing the waters. There are registered unions for those unwilling to sign the big contract. And there’s a fieldguide of lesser-known arrangements, from living apart together (when longterm partners keep separate addresses) to kitchen-table polyamory (when a tangle of nonmonogamous partners are intimate enough to have breakfast together).

Marriage is weakening. It’s diversifying. But it won’t disappear any time soon. (MORE - details)
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