Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection
Researchers see marriage as a weakening institution

By Cheryl Wetzstein THE WASHINGTON TIMES October 28, 1999

One hundred years from now, says Houston futurist Sandy Burchsted,
Americans will marry at least four times and have extramarital affairs
with no public censure.

Marriage, she adds, will be viewed as a "conscious, evolutionary
process." Does this mean that till-death-do-us-part, monogamous unions
will become a thing of the past?

Not if "human nature" has its way, said marriage-watchers who spoke at a
Capitol Hill forum on the future of marriage held last week. The new
Beverly LaHaye Institute, named for the founder of Concerned Women for
America, sponsored the forum, which included social analyst Francis
Fukuyama as one of two keynote speakers.

Mr. Fukuyama, a professor at George Mason University, said there is "some
bedrock point" beneath which humans will not go in reordering their
relationships. But due to "the different technological and economic
conditions of our age," he added, it is "extremely unlikely that anything
like a return to Victorian values will take place."

The author of "The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution
of Social Order" said the introduction of the birth-control pill and
women moving into the paid labor force are key forces behind social
upheaval and family breakdown that began in America in the mid-1960s.

Neither of these watershed events is likely to be reversed and the family
will not "roll back to the 1950s," he told the Capitol Hill forum.

However, "evidence is growing that the 'great disruption' has run its
course and that the process of renorming has already begun," he said,
citing the popularity of "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger's radio show as a sign
of this "renorming."

As for the future of traditional, monogamous marriage, Mr. Fukuyama told
the forum that it depends on "human nature." Which is why syndicated
columnist Maggie Gallagher believes that lifelong, monogamous marriage
will rebound.

"The story that we'll fall in love, go through a little ceremony and
after awhile we will part is not the story that people want," said Miss
Gallagher, who attended the forum. Instead, there is "amazing power" to
the story that says "two people meet, they fall in love, they make love,
they make a family and they live together and take care of each other,
happily."

Ms. Burchsted, who runs Prospectiva in Houston and is writing a book
about marriage in the year 2100, doesn't see such a fairy tale ending.

Based on her research on current megatrends, she sees denizens of the
next century moving through at least four kinds of marriages.

The first union will be "the icebreaker marriage," in which couples
learn how to live together and become sexually experienced, says Ms.
Burchsted, who spoke on the subject at a World Future Society conference
in July.

Icebreaker marriages are likely to last no more than five years and be
somewhat "cut and dried," she says. Once disillusionment sets in, it will
be "perfectly acceptable" for couples to split up as divorce will not
carry any stigma.

The second marriage, known as "the parenting marriage," will last between
15 and 20 years.

These couples will view raising children as their primary purpose,
although child-rearing in the future will be in communal settings, not
nuclear families, she says.

After the second marriage ends, couples may enter a third union, called a
"self-marriage," in which they seek self-discovery and
self-actualization.

"We see marriage as a conscious, evolutionary process," says Ms.
Burchsted, "so this marriage will be about consciously evolving
yourself." Finally, because people will be living until age 120, many
couples will reach for a late-in-life "soul mate connection."

In this fourth kind of marriage, couples will discover "marital bliss,
shared spirituality, physical monogamy and equal partnership," she says.
Miss Burchsted bases her predictions on trends showing women becoming
more financially independent, marriage and childbearing becoming more
"delinked," "serial monogamy" becoming more acceptable and extramarital
sexual affairs occurring more frequently and with less public outcry.

Researchers at the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University agreed
this summer that the institution of marriage in America is weakening.
Americans are "marrying later, exiting marriage more quickly and choosing
to live together before marriage, after marriage, in-between marriage and
as an alternative to marriage," David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead
said in their study, "The State of the Union 1999: The Social Health of
Marriage in America."

The researchers agreed that the desire of teens for a long-term marriage
is higher than ever, but noted that "girls have become more pessimistic
about ever being able to have such a marriage," and both boys and girls
have become much more accepting of unwed parenthood and other
alternatives to marriage.

Such things "do not bode well for marriage," Mr. Popenoe and Mrs.
Whitehead wrote.

The pair saw hope in the "stirrings of a larger grass-roots marriage
movement," including marriage education classes in schools and
communities, and acceptance of hard-to-dissolve "covenant" marriages.
Americans will respond to the weakening of marriage with renewed
dedication and success in achieving the goal of a long-lasting happy
marriage."

Miss Gallagher, director of the Marriage Project at the Institute for
American Values, agrees.

"If you look at the younger generation," she said, "there's been no
decline since the late 1970s in the proportion of young people who say
that having a good marriage and family is their No. 1 aspiration in
life."

Conversely, she says, the portion of young people who say marriage is
outdated has never gone above 8 percent.

Allan C. Carlson, an anthropologist who also keynoted the forum, said
monogamous marriage has long been practiced in Western society and
marriage is a natural --not artificial -- institution.

"We know this," he said, "because "every time we move away from children
being raised in the home by two natural parents, there are adverse
outcomes for the children."

To protect and strengthen traditional marriage, social reforms should
target the cause of family breakdown, which is the "divorce" of work and
home that occurred when adults left the family farm for industrial jobs,
added Mr. Carlson, who heads the Howard Center for Family, Religion and
Society in Rockford, Ill.

American society needs to "pull some functions back into the home" to
foster closer family bonds, he said, listing home births, breast feeding,
home schooling, home gardening and home-based businesses as optimal
choices.

Governments, he added, can also promote marriage by changing tax policies
and zoning laws to benefit home-based businesses, home schoolers and
families where mothers stay home to care for their children.


| Smart Marriages Archive | New Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog | Older Divorce Statistics Collection Archive |