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The 'state of our unions': Challenges to marriage today |
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By Maria Wiering
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Wednesday, 01 July 2009 |
Although the majority of Americans want to get married and believe marriage should last a lifetime, the American dream often doesn’t match the reality, social scientist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead told an audience of family life ministers June 24.
 “You might say that Americans are enchanted with the idea of marriage and the aspiration to marriage, but disenchanted with being married, particularly to one person for a lifetime,” she said.
And Catholics are showing tendencies more like the general population
than in previous generations, she said in a keynote address at the
annual conference of the National Association of Catholic Family Life
Ministers in St. Paul.
Titled “Becoming a Marriage-Building Church: Implementing the U.S.
Bishops’ Pastoral Initiative on Marriage,” the NACFLM conference
offered a range of workshops and featured national speakers on
marriage-related issues. It was held June 25 to 28 at the University of
St. Thomas.
The U.S. bishops named marriage a top priority at their spring meeting
June 18. Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Ky.; Bishop Kevin
Boland of Savannah, Ga.; Archbishop Roger Schwietz of Anchorage,
Alaska; and Bishop Michael Pfeifer of San Angelo, Texas, reiterated the
bishops’ commitment to defending and strengthening marriage at a NACFLM
panel discussion June 25.
Whitehead is co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers
University in New Jersey. In her keynote talk, “State of Our Unions,”
Whitehead identified three troubling trends threatening marriage today:
the split between marriage and parenthood, the statistical divide
between marriages of college-educated and non-college-educated couples,
and a shift from a public to private understanding of the relationship.
What could your parish do?
The U.S. bishops have named supporting marriage a top priority and have launched a pastoral plan for marriage, which includes the Web site initiative foryourmarriage.org. They hope their resources can aid parish marriage ministries.
What do you think your own parish could do to support couples either preparing for marriage or recently married? Does your parish already do something unique to support marriage?
You can send your response in one of two ways:
• By e-mail to:
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Please write “marriage” in the subject line.
• By postal mail to: “Marriage,” c/o The Catholic Spirit, 244 Dayton Ave., St. Paul, MN 55102.
Please include your name, address, parish affiliation and daytime telephone number. Your response may be featured in an upcoming Catholic Spirit.
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Ideals vs. reality
Even after decades of rising rates of cohabitation and divorce,
research shows Americans deeply believe in marriage, Whitehead said.
Most Americans want to marry; 90 percent do marry. And, when they
marry, they expect their marriages to last for a lifetime.
However, “Americans break up at astonishingly high rates,” Whitehead
said. “As a people, we divorce more and remarry more than people in
almost any other part of the world.”
One out of 10 American women has three or more husbands or live-in
partners by the time they reach age 35 — more than twice the percentage
in secular Sweden, Whitehead said.
Catholics are becoming more like the general population when it comes to certain attitudes toward marriage, she said.
Shifting family structures
Although scholars debated for decades over whether the kind of family
structure affected a child’s development, or if only an arrangement
that provided love was important, most have concluded that children do
best when they are raised by two biological or adoptive parents in a
stable, low-conflict marriage, Whitehead said.
However, despite this conclusion, trends within the broader culture are
moving away from marriage as the main child-bearing and child-raising
institution, she said.
Nearly four out of 10 children are born outside of marriage.
“This is a historic high,” Whitehead said, “but what is interesting to
me is when it was a lot lower, there was much more concern about it.
Now, I think it’s the new normal.”
A recent high school survey found that most high school seniors agree
that “having a child outside of marriage is experimenting with a
worthwhile lifestyle and not hurting anyone else,” she said.
Research shows that children who are born outside of marriage are
exposed to more economic and emotional hardship and often lose
connection to their fathers. By age 15, the “overwhelming majority” of
children born to cohabitating parents will not be living with both
parents, although they may be living with another live-in partner of
one of their parents, Whitehead said.
The marriage divide
Statistics also show that marriage is becoming another form of
privilege, Whitehead said. The well-educated and well-employed are more
likely to get married and have successful marriages, even though
marriage is a goal that most Americans have, Whitehead said.
College-educated couples are more likely to marry in the first place,
to be happily married and to have low divorce rates, she said.
The majority of the growth in divorce rates has come from the segment
of the population that does not have college degrees, Whitehead said.
This same group is also more likely to forego marriage completely.
Whitehead attributes this divide between who she calls “the marriage
haves” — the college-educated population — and “the marriage have-nots”
— those without a college degree — to several factors, including a
decrease in high-wage blue-collar jobs.
“Young men, if they can’t find steady, reliable work, are not
considered good marriage material by women and even by themselves; they
don’t feel prepared to support a family,” Whitehead said.
Marriage itself has undergone reorganization over the past five decades, she said.
“[It] used to be the first stop on the road to independent adulthood,”
defining separation from one’s parents, she said. “Now marriage has
been redefined in the sequence of adulthood as the very last thing you
do” after finding a job, paying back debt and buying a house, she said.
The population without a college education has a more difficult time
achieving these road markers than those with a college education,
Whitehead said, leading them to put off marriage, but not necessarily
parenthood.
“And when they do marry, their marriages are extremely precarious,” she added.
One in four marriages among non-college educated couples fails within the first four years, she said.
Public vs. private
In addition to its reorganization in early adulthood, marriage has also
shifted from from a public, legal and religious institution to a
private couple’s relationship, Whitehead said.
It used to govern sex, procreation, family life, kinship relationships
and social lives, but today, marriage is widely understood as a
“private, soul-mate relationship” that exists to promote personal
growth, happiness and intimacy, she said.
Those are good things, Whitehead said, “but without the broader,
religious institutional support for marriage, a ‘soul mate’
relationship is very, very fragile,” she said, because it always leaves
the question of whether or not the person one is married to is indeed
his or her soul mate.
Catholic attitudes
The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown
University’s 2007 survey of U.S. Catholics on marriage in the Catholic
Church found that Catholic attitudes are different among the
generational groups.
Older Catholics — those who were adults before Vatican II — are more
likely to look to the church as the source for meaning and expectations
for marriage than are baby boomers, Generation X or the Millennial
Generation.
Older Catholics are also more likely to be familiar with the church’s
teaching on marriage, to believe in marriage as a lifelong commitment
between a man and woman, and to think of marriage as a sacrament that
extends beyond the wedding day, Whitehead said.
She attributes this attitude to being raised in a time of a distinct
Catholic identity, which included the church’s teachings on sex,
procreation and marriage.
Generation X — ages 25 to 35 — and Millennial Catholics — ages 18 to 24
— are confused about marriage, and their attitudes are closer to those
of the general population, Whitehead said.
“Younger Catholics want to marry a soul mate, and they’re much less
likely to see marriage in these broader, institutional terms,”
Whitehead said.
Sixty-nine percent of young Catholics believe that marriage is whatever
two people want it to be, and the sacramental understanding does not
figure as prominently into their understanding, she said.
More than half of unmarried young Catholics do not think it is
important to marry someone of the same faith, she added. Forty-one
percent of young Catholics have married non-Catholics, she said.
“In this, they’re very much like their peers,” she said. “More and more
people are marrying outside their faith [and] marrying people of no
faith.”
‘A hopeful change’
However distant Catholics in Generation X seem from the oldest
Catholics in their beliefs about marriage, the youngest generation —
the Millennial Generation — is showing a swing toward traditional ideas.
“The youngest Catholics . . . look a lot more like the pre-Vatican II,
Vatican II or post-Vatican II cohorts,” she said. “Huge majorities — 80
percent or more — of these youngest Catholics believe that marriage is
a lifelong commitment and that people don’t take marriage seriously
enough when divorce is readily available.”
Many children of this generation have experienced divorce in their own
families, and they are determined not to divorce themselves, Whitehead
said.
“This is a hopeful change,” she said.
Whitehead urged the lay marriage ministers to share the social science evidence to dispel misconceptions, she said.
“There’s a body of social science evidence that is largely consistent
with Catholic teaching that somehow goes down more easily with people,”
she said. “It opens their minds and it changes their minds.”
She also urged parish ministers to find ways to support young adults
who aren’t on college campuses and who are scattered in the community.
These young Catholics need a welcoming parish, especially as they think
about preparing for marriage, she said.
Last, she asked parish ministers to help young married couples deal with practical issues, such as money, she said.
“This does not mean a retreat, or watering-down, or anything close to
it for Catholic teachings on marriage; in fact, it might call for more
intense catechesis on marriage,” she said.
“What it does mean, in these times when we have a culture that is so
really difficult for people to remain faithful in their marriages,
there must be a polar recognition of the circumstances of life and the
need of support to help people live out the teachings of their faith,”
she said.
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