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Why Thee Wed

A tourist's map for the institution of marriage.

Sep 14, 2009, Vol. 14, No. 48 • By EVE TUSHNET
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The Marriage-Go-Round

The State of Marriage and
the Family in America Today

by Andrew J. Cherlin

Knopf, 288 pp., $25.95

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."

Cherlin also notes that Americans have always divorced more--and yet we've also always been especially exhortatory about marriage. While Europeans worried about producing enough babies--a problem which, in 1783, led Frederick the Great to argue that divorce shouldn't be "made too difficult" because unhappily married couples wouldn't have sex whereas happily remarried ones would--Americans worried about divorce.

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