This new book on marriage and family begins with a bus ad the author spotted in Baltimore, featuring "a smiling couple proclaiming, 'Marriage works.'" He has written a book-length response: Not always, not here.

Andrew J. Cherlin argues that American family life is characterized by two conflicting ideals: an ideal of marriage, and an ideal of "expressive individualism," the belief that developing and expressing oneself should be a primary life goal. So we rush to the altar--a larger percentage of Americans marry than citizens in the other Western nations, and we marry earlier--but we have much greater difficulty sustaining our unions. We marry and divorce and remarry, or live with a series of cohabiting partners, subjecting our children to a revolving door of parents and quasi-parents.

Cherlin writes, "There are more partners in the personal lives of Americans than in the lives of people of any other Western country." The end result is a startling statistic: "[C]hildren born to married parents in the United States were more likely to experience their parents' breakup than were children born to cohabiting parents in Sweden."