Culture, Class and the Decline of Marriage

Continuing with my promised series of responses to Kevin Drum on gay marriage, here’s his demographic case that growing public support for same-sex wedlock can’t possibly have any connection to the wider retreat from marriage:

I don’t think the demographic details back up Douthat’s case. Take a look at the demographic groups where marriage has declined: very famously, it’s been among poor and working class women, and especially among poor and working class black women. I’ll concede that I might be off base here, but I think Douthat is assuming that recondite arguments over procreation and gay marriage, which are common in his highly-educated social group, are also common in the groups where marriage has declined. I doubt that very much. What’s more, support for gay marriage is lowest in precisely the groups that have abandoned traditional marriage in the largest numbers. If the procreation argument were really affecting marriage rates, you’d expect to see the biggest impact in the groups where this argument is most commonly advanced, and in the groups that most strongly support gay marriage. Instead we’ve seen the opposite.

It’s true that support for gay marriage has historically been strongest among the most educated Americans, who also tend to postpone childbearing till after wedlock in far greater numbers than do the poor and working class; likewise, it’s been historically strongest among whites and weaker among minorities, and whites tend to enjoy greater family stability as well. (Note that “historically” — I’ll return to this below.) These points are excellent evidence against the apocalyptic proposition that mere support for gay marriage will “destroy” heterosexual marriage, and plausible evidence for the argument that gay marriage either has no impact on people’s attitudes toward the institution, or (as some of its conservative supporters hope) actually serves to buttress marriage’s influence over people’s lives.

But there’s another story you can tell here, about how different models of marriage work out (or don’t) for different communities and socioeconomic groups. Liberal doubts about the past existence of a procreative grounding for marriage notwithstanding, there’s a general understanding that the combination of the sexual revolution, economic change, and shifting gender norms have altered the way Americans conceptualize marriage, what they expect out of the institution, and how it shapes their romantic and reproductive choices. There are different takes on how this change has worked and what it means, celebratory and critical and everywhere in between — from Stephanie Coontz’s line about “how love conquered marriage” to Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson’s description of a new “consumption partnership” model of wedlock to the George-Gergis-Anderson view of a “revisionist” view of marriage displacing a “conjugal” understanding. But I think a lot of people would recognize the phenomenon as the National Marriage Project describes it:

Over the last four decades, many Americans have moved away from identifying with an “institutional” model of marriage, which seeks to integrate sex, parenthood, economic cooperation, and emotional intimacy in a permanent union. This model has been overwritten by the “soul mate” model, which sees marriage as primarily a couple-centered vehicle for personal growth, emotional intimacy, and shared consumption that depends for its survival on the happiness of both spouses. Thus where marriage used to serve as the gateway to responsible adulthood, it has come to be increasingly seen as a capstone of sorts that signals couples have arrived, both financially and emotionally—or are on the cusp of arriving.

As the passage suggests, this model didn’t just spring into being fully formed in 1968 or so: It developed gradually, through experiments and experience and also through cultural conflict with alternative models — both a more institutional and procreation-oriented model, which remained (and still remains) influential, especially among more religious Americans, and the more purely libertine, entirely deinstitutionalized approach to sex and relationships that gave us so many wonderful trends in the 1970s. To the extent that the “soul mate”/capstone model has steadily gained ground relative to the alternatives, it’s because it seems to offer a plausible, stabilizing balance between sexual freedom and sexual restraint, new gender roles and traditional forms, adult liberty and children’s needs, the secular and the spiritual. And it offers, as well, a model of marriage that can easily encompass gay and lesbian partnerships as well as male-female ones, which is why the idea of same-sex wedlock has passed so quickly from seeming absurd to seeming commonsensical.

But whereas the institutional model was associated with similar family structures for rich and poor alike, the soulmate/capstone model has thus far only really been stabilizing for the upper and upper middle classes. For the most vulnerable Americans, poor African-Americans and then whites, the new model never had a chance to work: The ’70s-era combination of sudden sexual freedom and economic stagnation — and if you accept the Charles Murray thesis, perverse welfare policies — more or less demolished traditional family structures in a generation, helping to create the underclass as we know it today. For Middle America, meanwhile, there has been a slower but unmistakable drift away from two-parent households and stable families, which has accelerated as the forces propping the older, institutional understanding — traditional Christianity, in particular — have seen their influence over American life diminish. Only among the college-educated has the new model brought anything like the kind of stability that Americans took for granted half a century ago — mostly, one might submit, because the rewards for following a careful “education, job, marriage, kids” trajectory are so obvious that college-educated American understand the marriage-procreation connection intuitively, as a kind of gnostic wisdom that doesn’t need to be spelled out.

In the rest of the country, though — well, again, I think the National Marriage Project has it mostly right: