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M. Gallagher: The Moral and Social Significance of Marriage in the Global Context
Written by Maggie Gallagher, President, Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, USA
Thursday, September 14, 2000
Delivered on the occasion of IIFWP Assembly 2000: Renewing the United Nations and Building a Culture of Peace
There is a point of view that countries must modernize or face extinction. However, there is a paradox here, because there is much evidence that countries that modernize also face eventual extinction through the long-term, successive effects of family fragmentation. Those of you here from the UN are probably aware of the population studies on Europe which show that birth rates have fallen so low in many countries that unless there is improvement, it is difficult to see how these societies will still exist in any recognizable form several hundred years from now.
In the 1970s there was a great deal of discussion about how the Western world was abusing less developed countries by taking their natural resources. We are now in a situation where much of the Western world must either borrow people from other countries or they will not be able to sustain their populations. There is no instance in human history of a nation, city, or town that was shrinking and de-populating which was at the same time a healthy, vibrant society. Democratic government makes the situation particularly difficult. As fewer and fewer people are directly involved in child-rearing and have children in their own homes, the tendency is to redirect governmental and social resources towards interests other than the well-being of children and families.
My husband’s family is from India; he was born there and raised in the United States. Sometimes as we contemplate the rapid decline of social support for the family in America, he fantasizes about going back to India to live. But the changes that have occurred in the United States are also occurring all over the world in response to modernization and development. The task before is to solve this conundrum. We do not want poverty; we want growth. We do not idealize a poor agricultural past. At the same time, we have to make a modern society friendly to the family if it is going to survive.
At the heart of the family is the institution of marriage. There are many differences in marriage systems across cultures, and those differences can sometimes lead us to minimize the similarities. Yet there is a common cross-cultural definition of marriage: marriage is that public act which creates recognizable public ties between a man and a woman and their offspring, and which also creates a recognizable public, often legal, bond between that nuclear couple, their children, and the kin of both families.
In that important sense, in every society we know, marriage is the origin of the family. The current high rates of divorce and unmarried child-bearing, family fragmentation, and fatherlessness indicate a serious social problem which threatens the heart of the family and the well-being of children. It becomes an enormous burden on government and civil society as others have to step in to try to take up the obligations of the absent father. The evidence shows that it is very difficult, if not impossible on a broad, mass basis, to come up with programs that will substitute for the love of a mother and father and their families for the children that they make.
However, I want to address an aspect of marriage that has been under-emphasized and is less well known to make the case for marriage as being a key institution for the well-being of adults as well for the children and for society. A large body of research, reviewed in my book, The Case for Marriage, demonstrates that married people are happier, healthier, and better off financially than single people.[1] Much of the research on this question has been done in the United States, but there are several cross-cultural studies, at least in the developed world, that yield similar findings.
A wide and deep body of research, conducted over 20 years, has consistently found that married people are better off than people who remain single, people who divorce, or people who are widowed. First, married people make more money. There is an earnings premium attached to marriage. Married people manage money better, acquire more wealth, and build more assets. Marriage is a productive institution that builds human and monetary capital. Marriage is an important economic institution. Its absence is an economic drag, not only because taxpayers and others are called to step in and support these children, but also because unmarried adults are on average less well off and less productive about their work and managing their money.
Second, married people are healthier. They live longer, statistically, than unmarried.
Finally, and this is perhaps of key significance to the two adults involved, they are more sexually satisfied. Married couples have happier sex lives than single or widowed people, even than singles who are cohabiting.
These are some of the impacts of the public union of a man and woman in marriage.
In terms of the international data, I want to review two dimensions: mortality or long life, and happiness. Yuangreng Hu and Noreen Goldman at Princeton University analyzed death rates by marital status in a large number of developed countries: Austria, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Finland, France, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Taiwan, the United States, and West Germany.[2] Looking at data collected over 40 years, they found that in just about every country, both men and women who are married live longer than men and women who are single, divorced, or unmarried. The effects are apparently strongest among younger people. In most countries, among young adults under the age of 40, those who are married are two to three times more likely to avoid a premature death than those who are single.
These findings are consistent over the variety of countries that were studied. Whether the countries have very well developed national health insurance systems or rely more on individuals to care for themselves, there is something about being joined to another human being of the opposite sex that can actually save your life. This is powerful evidence, not just that marriage is important to society, but that human beings are in some basic sense made to be married. We see marriage in every culture that we know of, across the anthropological record. The idea that we can rebuild the family system without strengthening marriage is I think a utopian vision for which there is no scientific evidence.
On the second dimension, personal happiness, a study by Stack and Eshleman looked at Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, West Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United States.[3] They found that married people have a significantly higher level of happiness than persons who are not married.
This effect was independent of financial and health-oriented protections offered by marriage and also independent of other control variables, including one for socio-demographic conditions such as poverty and national character. Furthermore, the strength of the association between being married and being happy is remarkably consistent across the nations studied. The happiness-enhancing effect of marriage was found to operate independently from marriage’s other effects, such as increased financial satisfaction and better perceived health, which also tend to increase happiness.
The interesting thing is that in all these countries, cohabitation does not have the same effect. Just living with another person, without this piece of paper, this public act recognized in various ways by diverse societies as joining two individuals and two families together, does not produce the same benefit--not only for any children involved but for the partners themselves. The study found that marriage was about three times more closely associated with variance in happiness than cohabitation, and cohabitation had no relationship at all with the adults' financial satisfaction or with their perceived health.
It is often thought that marriage benefits men and not women, but the studies show that the effects for women and men are very similar. Both men and women are healthier, happier, longer-lived, and have better economic conditions if they are married than if they are single.
Finally, these benefits of marriage are obtained across rather different cultures. They are found in societies where marriages are more likely to be arranged and in societies where marriages are more likely to be love matches. They are obtained in countries where marriages are child-centered and in countries that idealize a high degree of attention and communication between the romantic couple. They are obtained in countries in which a large number of wives go out into the marketplace to work, and in countries where wives specialize in home production.
These benefits of marriage, which are absent in couples who are cohabitating who are not publicly and legally joined, give powerful support to the idea that strengthening marriage is key to rebuilding the family. In a global context, strengthening marriage would solve the conundrum mentioned above, that modernization leads first to the nuclearization of the family and then to further fragmentation of the nuclear couple, and yet modernization remains indispensable for sustainable progress and growth across the world.
Let me conclude by giving two broad ideas about how we go about strengthening marriage. The first is recognizing that we have to protect the boundaries of the family. One of the most destructive trends in Western societies, particularly powerful in Europe and Canada, is the tendency to conceptually and legally blur the distinction between formal unions, i.e., marriages, and informal unions, i.e., cohabitation.
At the level of abstraction, many people think that if two people share a house and share a sexual union, then it is just like a marriage. But in fact, it is not just like a marriage. The scientific research does not support the idea that these are similar acts. And at the level of public policy, it’s important to maintain a clear distinction between these two types of family forms in order to protect marriage. Society needs to maintain a distinct place for marriage if marriage is to fulfill its functions as a social institution recognizably different from cohabitation that creates distinct obligations between spouses and families toward the future, towards children, and towards each other’s in-laws.
Second, we have to confront the danger, particularly in this country, that arises with privatizing marriage. Americans are very supportive of marriage, both at a personal level and as a shared value. Every poll shows that Americans personally want to be married; they believe marriage should be for life, and they care about marriage.
Why, then, do Americans face a divorce rate of nearly 50 percent? One reason is that Americans tend to treat marriage as a certification, a public stamp, on what is essentially a private emotional relationship between two people. Thinking about marriage in that way is, first of all, not true. Marriage is a public act. Tracking people as they go towards marriage, move into marriage, and live within marriage, we see that marriage changes people. That’s what social institutions do. Being married gives men a new sense of responsibility towards work. It reduces substance abuse. It creates more meaning and satisfaction in life for individuals. It provides a legal partner that, as in all economic partnerships, allows one to make more money and manage it better. Moreover, the act of marriage increases a couple’s confidence that theirs is a permanent union.
Society needs to recognize that marriage is a public act. It is certainly an intimate act, but what makes it different from other kinds of sexual and romantic liaisons is that it is publicly recognized and supported. One of the keys to rebuilding marriage in the West, and, I suspect elsewhere as the rest of the world develops, is to find new ways and revive old ways of publicly supporting, recognizing, and strengthening marriage as a social institution.
Notes
1. The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off Financially (Doubleday, October 2000).
2. Yuanreng Hu and Noreen Goldman, “Mortality Differentials by Marital Status: An International Comparison,” Demography 27/2 (May 1990): 233ff.
3. Steven Stack and J. Ross Eshleman, “Marital Status and Happiness: A 17-Nation Study,” Journal of Marriage and Family 60 (May 1998): 527-536.