To Have and to Hold

by Stella Baer

For the past thirty years, feminists, psychologists, and academics have tried to convince us that marriage thwarts autonomy, independence, growth, creativity, and happiness. Drawing from a seemingly infinite number of studies, Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher offer a very different perspective in The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially. With meticulously documented passages and simple, lucid prose, The Case for Marriage discloses the results of years of research, and leaves us with the startling conclusion that what has become today’s “common knowledge” about marriage is simply not true.

Waite and Gallagher trace the conception of the marriage myths back to the 1960s, when marriage and family ties came under attack as “potential threats to individual fulfillment as a man or a woman.” As Waite and Gallagher note, “the search for autonomy and independence as the highest human good blossomed with the women’s movement into a critique of marriage per se, which the more flamboyant feminists denounced as ‘slavery,’ ‘legalized rape,’ and, worst of all, ‘tied up with a sense of dependency.’”

Since that time, marriage has been increasingly described as “a trap, circumscribing a woman’s social and intellectual horizons and lowering her sense of self-esteem.” One college textbook published in the mid-1990s went so far as to state that “marriage has an adverse effect on women’s mental health.” The Case for Marriage details the five most lethal myths that have embedded themselves into American thought over the course of the past few decades:

1.Divorce is usually the best answer for kids when a marriage becomes unhappy.

2.Marriage is mostly about children; if you don’t have kids, it doesn’t matter whether you cohabit or marry or stay single.

3.Marriage may be good for men, but it is bad for women, damaging their health and self-esteem and limiting their opportunities.

4.Promoting marriage and marital obligation puts women at risk for violence.

5.Marriage is essentially a private matter, an affair of the heart between two adults, in which no outsider, not even the children of the marriage, should be allowed to interfere.

The Case for Marriage is devoted to exposing these myths—and quite a few others—for the fallacies they are; as it turns out, the book’s research indicates that the negations of these statements are far more true than their positive counterparts.

The authors’ task, however, was more difficult than one might think. For many years, scholars have devoted themselves to the destruction of the once-sacred status of marriage in order to unearth the “truth” about “why married people, and children raised by married parents, seemed so much better off and why, in particular, children raised outside of marriage faced so many additional burdens and struggles.” Many have tried to prove that it is not marriage per se that improves the quality of people’s lives, but rather race, socioeconomic status, education, and quality of parenting. Thus Waite and Gallagher could not merely establish that married people are happier and have more successful children, but that it was marriage in and of itself that caused people to be happier and more successful. The difference is an important one, for not only do researchers always look to other facts for answers when two characteristics are correlated, but they will call into question whether or not one actually causes the other. In other words, what if it just so happens that happier people, because they are happy, marry more often than those who are depressed? Then it would be clear that marriage itself doesn’t make people happier; married people are just happier to begin with.

Waite and Gallagher, however, manage to provide convincing arguments for marriage being causally efficacious, and claim that their studies rule out mere correlation and firmly establish causation. “Marriage itself,” they argue, “makes a difference.”

But just what sort of difference does it make? “Getting married doesn’t merely certify a preexisting love relationship,” Waite and Gallagher note. “Marriage actually changes people’s goals and behavior in ways that are profoundly and powerfully life enhancing.” Dissecting the marriage contract itself, Waite and Gallagher conclude that “the promise of permanence is key to marriage’s transformative power.” Men and women who believe they are going to be together for a long time plan their whole lives differently because each of them can count on the other for doing some things that he or she cannot. “Each spouse can develop some skills and neglect others, because each can count on the other to take responsibility for some of the work involved in making a home and a living.”

No one person can become good at everything; but the married couple, Waite and Gallagher argue, can learn—between the two of them—to do just about anything. “By pooling their labor, married people lower not only their expenses but the amount of work that each needs to do… couples can have the same standard of living for much less money or effort than can an adult living alone.” In fact, “just getting married boosts your standard of living by about a third.”

But the benefits of marriage do not end with the advantages of pooling salaries and sharing in day to day chores. Based on their research, Waite and Gallagher conclude that “being unmarried can actually be a greater risk to one’s life than having heart disease or cancer.” While heart disease shortens the average man’s life span by slightly less than six years, being unmarried actually chops almost ten years off a man’s life. Similarly, unmarried women don’t even live as long as married women with cancer or who live in poverty. And, once again, it was found that married people are not just healthier to begin with; men lose the health benefits of marriage immediately upon losing their spouse either to death or to divorce.

There are quite a few explanations for the remarkable health benefits married men and women alike enjoy. “Upon marrying, people typically adopt a healthier way of living,” Waite and Gallagher explain. “Married men really do settle down, while men who aren’t married voluntarily behave in ways that endanger their own life and health.” Unmarried men, in fact, are more likely to be alcoholics, “to smoke, to drink and drive, to get into fights, and to take other risks that increase the chances of accidents and injuries.” Waite and Gallagher insist that “this change is not just a statistical artifact of selection – sober-minded men marrying and staying married more often… the evidence suggests that men actually mend their ways as they first approach and then actually get married.” Furthermore, “light drinkers, moderate drinkers, and heavy drinkers all imbibe less after they marry.” Waite and Gallagher note that many of the health changes result from “what social scientists call social support and husbands call nagging.”

Perhaps the most surprising advantage married couples have over unmarried men and women is in regards to their sex lives.  Everyone seems to take for granted that married life is “a life of sexual self-denial.”  The “shocking truth,” however, is that, according to recent surveys which take into account “fantasies, ideals, preferences, and satisfaction, married people have both more and better sex than singles do.” Studies have also established that “a permanent commitment to one’s sexual partner makes a big difference to both sexes’ sexual satisfaction.”

If one is still not convinced that married life is a positive innovation, he or she should note that married couples are actually happier than single men and women as well.  The feminists have claimed for years that marriage is equivalent to an emotional and psychological prison; Waite and Gallagher reveal that this couldn’t be further from the truth.  In their words, “when it comes to avoiding misery, a wedding band helps.” Psychologists and therapists continue to urge married women to abandon their marriages, arguing that staying in an unhappy marriage teaches children “to be extremely insecure and lacking in the skills to be intimate and caring”—yet divorced women are more likely to commit suicide than the widowed, never-married, and married (in that order). All of which indicates that those to whom married women go for help in times of grief end up compounding the problem.

Likewise, married men and women report far less depression and anxiety than those who are single, divorced, or widowed. When disaster does strike, married people are better able to cope because they are not alone. As it is put in The Case for Marriage, “living with someone ‘until death do us part’ provides a particular kind of intimacy—a spouse comforts partly because he or she has the knowledge that comes from long emotional acquaintance but also because only a spouse can offer the peculiar reassurance that whatever life tosses at you, at least you won’t face it alone.”

Waite and Gallagher site the studies of sociologist Émile Durkheim, who argued that people who are more integrated into society are much less likely to commit suicide and to be depressed than those who are not. The authors claim that “marriage and family provide the sense of belonging that Durkheim had in mind, the sense of loving and being loved, of being absolutely essential to the life and happiness of others. Believing that one has a purpose in life and a reason for continued existence, that life is worth the effort because one’s activities and challenges are worthy comes from having other people depending on you, counting on you, caring about you… Marriage…[gives] people a sense that their life has meaning and purpose.”

What makes The Case for Marriage so fascinating is that virtually every argument  against marriage is proven wrong by the simple facts that emerge in the studies Waite and Gallagher examine. The feminists and psychologists have led us horribly astray, and conventional wisdom needs to change.

Women have been told for years about the disadvantages of marriage when unmarried or divorced women are more likely to be impoverished, unhealthy, and raising children that will be unhappy and unsuccessful. It is unmarried women—and not the married ones, as the feminists would have us believe—who are at the highest risk for domestic violence. Furthermore, getting and keeping a wife can increase a man’s income as much as an education, in addition to drastically improving his sex life.

As Waite and Gallagher put it, “the evidence is in, at least for the ways in which marriage is practiced today: Both men and women gain a great deal from marriage. True, marriage does not affect men and women in exactly the same way. Both men and women live longer, healthier, and wealthier lives when married, but husbands typically get greater health benefits from marriage than do wives.  On the other hand, while both men and women get bigger bank accounts and a higher standard of living in marriage, wives reap even greater financial benefits than do husbands. Overall, the portrait of marriage that emerges from two generations of increasingly sophisticated empirical research on actual husbands and wives is not one of gender bias, but gender balance: A good marriage enlarges and enriches the lives of both men and women.”

The attack on marriage must end. In The Case for Marriage, the authors offer nine steps to rebuild a culture of marriage and to resist a culture of divorce. They include the creation of a tax and welfare policy that is pro-marriage, reform of no-fault divorce laws, restoration of the special legal status of marriage, and discouragement of unmarried pregnancy and childbearing. If we neglect to support marriage as the preferable lifestyle for all men and women, Waite and Gallagher warn, we will lose nothing short of marriage itself. “As frightening, exhilarating, and improbable as this wild vow of constancy may seem, there is no substitute. On the whole, man was not meant to live alone, and neither was woman."