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PERHAPS it’s bursting the heart-shaped balloon to bring this up so close to Valentine’s Day, but far too many people live in la-la land when it comes to marriage.
Go ahead and order the flowers for your sweetie, expect the chocolates. This isn’t a diatribe against marriage or an estrogen-laced bashing of men. Consider it a plea for more reality when discussing marriage and its counterpart, single life.
Take the news that 51 percent of all women live without a spouse. Two responses followed, both telling in their perspective.
The panic response: “Oh my God, marriage is doomed!” This was followed by predictions of the downfall of society with so many unmarried women running amok. Images were drawn of angry women, gloating in their ability to pay their own mortgages, content to be single.
Tell that to Match.com. Women and men, what to be married.
Among single women, the news sent keyboards a clicking. Rapid-fire, women sent articles about this tipping point to single friends. Finally! Headline blaring validation that they are not out-of-step with everyone else. Single women are the majority!
I know. I was one of them, receiving and sending the articles.
That so many women still feel they are less valued in society for being single when, in fact, they are the majority is striking.
Mislabeled as the lonely hearts, the women who missed love because they coveted the paycheck, attaching to their pets, not a man … believe me, I’ve heard it all. That’s the emotional toil.
American society — by attitude and policy — stoically clings to the idea that marriage is the main institution around which people shape their lives. The majority of people do marry — about 90 percent — often reaping personal and community benefits.
But people also spend about half of their adult lives unmarried, mostly because we are living longer and marrying later. The time people spend single is being overlooked, at a huge cost.
And how about this reality check: If more women aren’t coupled, neither are men. Yet, news coverage of the 51 percent mark tended to focus more on single women, leaving men out of the equation.
The mistake is to remain so oblivious to these trends while forming social policy. Consider saving rates, educational goals, school expectations for parents, workplace family leave, housing starts, sex education and proposals seeking to “fix” social issues like unwed mothers. All are affected, often negatively, by assumptions about marriage and its role in U.S. life.
Twenty-three percent of new home-buyers are single women. Who is building for them?
Single women have more interactions with family and friends and are more likely to attend political events, sign petitions, assist aging parents and their neighbors.
Those facts are from studies by the Council on Contemporary Families. Washington-state author Stephanie Coontz is a council guru, famous for dispelling myths about both married and single people. The titles of Coontz’s books: “The Way We Never Were” and “They Way We Really Are” say it all.
Coontz stresses that marriage today is not threatened, that it has the potential to be more fulfilling than ever, for men and women.
Again, most people do marry, in rates not that far off what they were 1890s. And divorce rates are down, declining since the early 1980s. But marriage has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, Coontz says.
Take, for example the still often-held idea that women can “marry up.” Not anymore. People are more likely to marry within their own class level. Educated women tend to have higher marriage rates, lower divorce rates and happier marriages. That’s good for the college set, but should set off alarms for educators, people concerned with wealth disparity. Uneducated women, and therefore their children, are more stuck than ever at their class level. Parents who want wedded bliss for their daughters should push education, not marriage.
OK, Cupid. Load your bow.