After the loving

THE CENTRAL MESSAGE of Stephanie Coontz's history is that marriage is in big trouble. In fact, it is about to collapse, she says, and there is little anyone can do about it. The forces disestablishing marriage in Western societies are so overwhelming and intractable that all efforts to stop or slow the decline will appear moralistic and coercive to the general population. Therefore, Coontz would probably say, neither churches nor the marriage education movement nor the government should do much to try keep marriage from moving toward the margins of our personal and social lives.

Coontz starts with the refreshing acknowledgment that the message of her earlier books was wrong. In The Way We Never Were (1992) and The Way We Really Are (1997), she developed the familiar thesis that families are changing but not declining--and that, furthermore, they are not changing nearly as radically as religious conservatives and the popular press would lead us to believe. There have always been lots of fatherless children (fathers have always died in wars and from illness and have frequently deserted their wives and children). Fathers in the past were mean to their children, and husbands often beat their wives. Mothers often died in childbirth, were overworked or were depressed because of the patriarchal men in their lives. Therefore, contemporary increases in the number of divorces, nonmarital births and fatherless children are just new wrinkles on perennial problems of life.

In Marriage, a History, Coontz announces that something new is happening that her first books did not take into account. The institution of marriage is in trouble after all. Marriage is no longer a central feature of modern life. In the future, fewer people will marry, more people who marry will divorce, more people who marry will do so later in life, more people will cohabit, fewer people will have children, more people who have children will do so outside of marriage and more people will want to form informal unions of various kinds and experiment with reproductive technologies outside of either marriage or heterosexual unions.

Because of these trends, some commentators believe that marital sexual unions will become increasingly private matters. They argue that marriage should therefore be delegalized--that is, it should lose its status as an institution that is of interest to the state and subject to its sanctions and protections. Proponents of this view believe that the state should take no interest in who is having sex with whom, no interest in what legal scholar Martha Fineman calls the "sexual family."

Coontz does not go that far, but she does think that marriage is being disestablished; it is coming to be only one among several ways to organize human sexuality. Marriage is becoming little more than an option--a lifestyle choice like whether to drive a Ford or Chevrolet or whether to take a train or bus.

Why is this happening? Coontz's answer, which is both insightful and problematic, has to do with the triumph of love. For the first lame in history, culture and social circumstance induce and permit people to get married for love.

For Coontz, love is a mixture of sexual gratification, interpersonal comfort and interpersonal fit. Modern people are now free to marry someone who is simultaneously a soul mate and an exciting sexual partner.

COONTZ ACKNOWLEDGES that people in the past wanted both friendship and sex from their marital partner, but in reality it was necessity, economics, politics and the gaining of good in-laws that were the dominant motivators of marriage. Now women no longer marry to gain a breadwinner, nor do men marry to get a good cook and housekeeper. Nor do couples now choose each other to elevate their social status or to develop tribal and national alliances. They get married for love--and love, Coontz claims, is a fragile reed on which to build a marriage. With love come disappointments, frustrations and failures. Hence, marriage will move to the sidelines of modern life. Love alone is the death of marriage.

This account is partly right and partly wrong. Coontz agrees, with good reason, with historians such as Edward Short, Carl Degler and Lawrence Stone that beginning about 200 years ago, with the rise of Enlightenment individualism and the forces of modernization and industrialization, couples increasingly had the freedom, social space and reinforcing cultural values to be both less financially dependent on each other and more self-regarding in their values. This made love and sexual satisfaction more central in shaping the reasons for marriage.

Coontz's argument seems to work, however, only because she exaggerates the distinction between love and the economic, kinship and social-networking elements of marriage. In her narrative, marriage is either all necessity or all love. Many other modern interpreters of marriage have made the same mistake, and so have many people in American churches, who are tempted to join with Coontz and insist that couples get married for reasons of love alone. Economic, kinship and network issues and even the desire to have children are sometimes seen as contaminations of the purity of marital love. Churches often use the language of sacrament and covenant to bless and sanctify extremely narrow views of love that are not far from what Coontz describes. Such a view of marriage is neither good theology nor an accurate view of what marriage--and marital love--has been about.