The Marriage-Go-Round by Andrew J.Cherlin

American are the only Western nation that actually spends government money to support marriage. The 2005 federal Healthy Marriage Initiative now allocates $100 million a year to publicize marriage. No other Western nation devotes as much cultural energy, public policy or religious attention to matrimony as the U.S.

It doesn’t seem to be working; marriage rates are declining precipitously, though most Americans are still expected to marry. Americans continue to have one of the highest marriage rates of any Western country, despite a recent decline, but we also divorce one another at alarming rates. Since the 1960s divorce rates have been rising up to the present moment nearly half our marriages end up there, more even than in liberal Sweden, Andrew J. Cherlin, a demographer and sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, writes in his intriguing book, “The Marriage-Go-Round.”

From one of the nation’s leading authorities on the American family, a book that researches the state of marriage in America today. Its evolution culturally, and with regard to religion and the law, how and why the present state of marriage—a merry-go-round of partnerships—developed, and the implications for parents and children.

In this provocative account we can to see that America’s relationships are in chaos. Even when we live together without marrying, we break up faster than in other places, he says. In one of the book’s surprising findings, he says that American children whose parents are married are more likely to experience the turmoil of a parental break-up than Swedish children whose parents live together without being married.

Marriage is our battlefield. Only in America, Mr. Cherlin says, are gay people campaigning so determinedly for the right to marry. Most gay men and lesbians in Europe, he maintains, view marriage as another oppressive heterosexual institution.

How to interpret this exceptional paradox — we idealize marriage, and yet we’re so bad at it. Mr. Cherlin, who is also the author of “Public and Private Families,” has taken upon himself the task of explaining and has come up with an original thesis: There are two powerful forces at war in America, a historic belief in marriage grounded in our religious heritage, on the one hand and a foundational principle of individual freedom and a post-modern sense of the right to self-fulfilment on the other. When these values clash, breakup and divorce follow.

Johns Hopkins University sociologist Cherlin analyses “the profound changes” that have occurred in American family life. Although heterosexual marriage as the basis institution for raising children remains a strong cultural value, it is challenged by the increasing stress placed on individualism and self-fulfilment. The book presents a comprehensive historical overview of marriage and family in the U.S. and contrasts American behavior with that of people in other Western countries (Americans have the highest levels of moving from partner to partner). In light of relationship instability, the author proposes that children are likely to fare better in a single parent family than in a step-family, a structure that tends to be unstable. While Cherlin describes the stress points created by the conflicting values of marriage and individualism, he offers few suggestions for dealing with the problems identified. To suggest that the “marriage merry-go-round” can be “slowed down” by not starting or ending relationships so quickly is to restate the problem, not offer insight for its resolution.

It doesn’t seem to matter that Americans are such a religious nation: more Americans say they attend church at least once a month than do people in any Western country except Ireland. Even evangelical Christianity, which holds marriage in high regard, has picked up on the self-fulfilment message in books like the “Christian Family Guide to Losing Weight” and Joel Osteen’s “Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential.” Mr. Cherlin describes Arkansas as a deeply religious and conservative place but one that in 2004 had the second highest divorce rate of any state in the country. Efforts to promote Covenant Marriage, in which couples sign an agreement before marrying, making it harder to divorce, largely failed there and in other Southern states.

As the new nation prospered, Mr. Cherlin writes, Americans also began to have the time and money “to cultivate their own emotional gardens.” Baby boomers were, of course, the ultimate “me generation.” The growing preoccupation with individual fulfillment can be seen in women’s magazines in the 1970s and ’80s, when McCall’s, for instance, published an article “Time for Yourself: Must It Hurt Your Marriage?” in which the writer advocated “the attainment of a private space in which individual growth can continue within the intimacy of marriage.” The subtext, according to Mr. Cherlin: If your marriage doesn’t fulfill you, you are almost obliged to leave it.

Historically it has always been easier to get a divorce in America than in European countries. Even during colonial times, though divorce was difficult, it was still possible in many places. But it wasn’t legalized in Britain until 1857. Today, Mr. Cherlin says, he knows of no other Western country where the wait is the wait is generally so short for no-fault divorce.

On the one hand, he notes, most Americans believe that marriage is the best social institution for bearing and rearing children and that marriage should be grounded in a permanent, faithful and loving relationship. On the other hand, Americans celebrate individualism more than people in other Western societies and so believe that they are entitled to make choices that maximize their personal happiness. When a marriage becomes unsatisfying, difficult or burdensome, according to this model, it can be dissolved — it even should be dissolved.

The biggest problem with this aspect of American family life is that children often do not do well when parents and partners are twisting in and out of their lives. Children have difficulty adapting to changes in their routines or to step- parents who is not comfortable acting as authority figures or to nonresidential parents who see children only intermittently. The live-in boyfriend, who may well not have a child’s best interests at heart, is an even greater problem. Such a mix of hybrid forms, according to Mr. Cherlin, is part of the reason that family instability is linked to higher rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, teen drunkenness, truancy and behavioral problems in school.

Family instability, Mr. Cherlin shows, has been increasingly concentrated in poor and working-class households in recent years. Divorce is much more common in less-educated circles: 23% of women with only a high-school degree will divorce or separate within five years of marriage, compared with 13% of women who hold a college degree. Thus children at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder are now much more likely to be doubly disadvantaged by poverty and family instability.

Instead of spending money to promote marriage, we should use it to encourage security for our children, he says. Divorce and breakup can affect children badly. But parents shouldn’t rush into another relationship just to provide a stable home. In one study by Mr. Cherlin and a colleague, the two found that every time a partner entered or left a household, the odds of an adolescent stealing, skipping school or getting drunk increased by 12 percent, though he points out that the majority of adolescents with broken homes don’t exhibit delinquent behavior.

One way to ensure children’s stability is to give single mothers resources so they aren’t pressured to find partners to support them. He points to a Wisconsin welfare experiment with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, in which the state government normally attempted to collect child support from delinquent fathers and then shared it with the federal government as reimbursement for welfare, giving the mother $50 at most. In a 1997 study the state gave the entire amount to a group of randomly selected mothers. The result: mothers who received the full child support payments were less likely to cohabit with men other than their children’s fathers — presumably causing less turmoil for the children — and were just as likely to marry.

The book’s last chapter is titled “Slow Down.” Think before you rush into new relationships, Mr. Cherlin writes. That’s the least we can do.

Andrew J. Cherlin is the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Public and Private Families. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and on the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. He has been a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Distinguished Career Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association. He lives in Baltimore.

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