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Nearly 40 percent of Americans think that marriage is becoming obsolete.
5Xabc 2^\Tb ;^eT The changing face of partnership
By Jessica Dur
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une and Ernie met while on a college field trip to the desert. They dated, fell in love, had a couple of kids, and bought a house in Santa Rosa. Together, they remodeled it into a home—her doing most of the sawing, him designing the cabinets. Still in their early 30s, he fashioned a backyard shed into a cavernous studio where he writes, records and produces music; she built a charmingly rustic bed out of antique doors. Like their parents, they had children young, in their early 20s. June works full-time; Ernie is there when the kids, aged nine and seven, come home from school. Each helps shuttle the kids to karate and to cook evening meals. By all accounts, they are an idyllic family, with a dog, a cat, a mortgage and strictly enforced bedtimes. Except that June is not married to Ernie. Nor does she intend to be. Fifty years ago, June and Ernie would have
been the exception to the rule—societal outcasts with suspect morality. Today they are just another couple redefining what it means to be committed and building a relationship outside the traditional bounds of a white-picket marriage. According to a recent Pew Research Center Poll, people like June and Ernie are not alone. They found that in 2008, only 52 percent of American adults were married, down from 72 percent in 1960—not so surprising. Yet Pew also found that almost 40 percent of Americans believe that marriage is becoming obsolete. Given that we’re not talking about the latest gadget with the shelf life of a hamster, but a venerable institution, how on earth did we get here? In 1957, when my mother was a child, 80 percent of Americans thought people who remained single were “sick, neurotic or immoral,� according to Stephanie Coontz in her epic tome Marriage, a History. My mom, like most of her generation, married young (at 19) and had children not long after. By the time I was born,
on the last day of 1978, that statistic had dropped to 25 percent, which helps to explain why at 19 I was backpacking Europe with my best friend and being seduced by the works of Kurt Vonnegut. Like many of my generation, my 20s were a time of radical self-discovery, miserable heartbreak and global traipsing. I emerged from this decade intact, in love and peacefully unconcerned with the idea of marriage. So when, at a solstice taco party with dear friends, my boyfriend dropped to his knee and asked if I’d be his “baby forever,� I was stunned. Yes—we had been living together for almost a year, madly in love for almost two. And yes—I wanted to have a couple of kids, age together, maybe even invest in a fuel-efficient sedan. I just never saw any reason to ask the government to sanction it. After all, for most of its existence, the institution of marriage has had nothing to do with romantic love. As societies farmed and then settled, issues of property rights, inheritance and blood lines made marriage the answer to problematic questions. How do we pass '' THE BOHEMIAN
02.09.11-02.15.11
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