This is one of my book club reads nominated by a founding member. This was an awesome read. I love anthropology and sociology because it's looking at a vast cross section of humans and asking questions like, in this case: how can marriage be defined?
The answer is vastly more complex than one would imagine and so varied across time and place that coming up with a cohesive definition is nigh impossible. Here are a couple of attempts she references "commonly stable, mated relationships between males and females" which exists pretty universally except in one instance "the Na" people who raised offspring in extended family groups and apparently didn't or don't have a recognizable marriage institution. Another definition: "the set of legal rules that govern how goods, titles, and social status are handed down from generation to generation."
The author walks us through the centuries - starting out with broad strokes across the globe and then migrating more to decade based deductions from marriage studies (mostly in the US) from the last century. (the book was published in 2005). There are so many fascinating aspects to how marriage is organized and what it has meant. Is it about division of labor, shared resources, influential connections? Or is it the passing on of lands and titles, and resources? ...and all of these are true to a greater degree or another. Also interesting in how involved the extended family or community has been in the selection of spouses and in the actual lives of the couple. In most times and places spouses were integrated into existing extended family households or tribes where the concept of privacy for the nuclear family or couple would have been a foreign notion.
What is, according to the author, unique to recent history (the past 200 years) is the concept and expectation that marriage should be about companionship, love, and emotional intimacy. An expectation that she argues has led to a greater degree of marital satisfaction and quality than ever before but also has facilitated a greater fragility as people readily discard the institution if it fails to pony up the desired results.
The industrial revolution, feminism, ready access to birth control and other factors have radically altered the way in which societies are organized and has had deep ramifications for how marriage is viewed and what it means. We're in a particularly interesting time now as marriage (as she points out in the conclusion) at least in this part of the world is usually totally optional and relationships are more customized than ever before to the whims of the individual. That being said, she proposes that marriage still "gives people a positive vocabulary and a public image that set a high standard for the couples behavior and for the respect that outsiders ought to give to their relationship."
I think there may be something to that. Just like everything for many of us, the vast array of options and choices can be exhilarating but also paralyzing. It's tempting to hearken back to a time when expectations, roles, and institutions were more static. I grew up with a higher degree of focus on traditional marriage values, division of labor between genders (apparently than many of my contemporaries), but at the same time was encouraged to be independent and assertive as well. I think it's normal for people to have to navigate mixed messages and try to integrate them into their adult lives.
It was interesting to reflect on the fact that I entered marriage expecting it to look like "male breadwinner model" - a term Coontz considers to be a modern concept that never existed say for example in the middle ages where most women worked in cottage industries or farms alongside their spouses. I also (like most modern people) had extremely high "romantic" standards of what kind of companionship we would enjoy in our marriage (ie that marriage is the most important and central relationship of your life) - again not something that has been universally true in other times and places. For example, in the middle east where parental and sibling relationships might be much more emphasized in terms of closeness.) The expectation that marriage will be a built in friendship that will satisfy all emotional, sexual, and economic needs puts a huge degree of pressure on the marriage relationship that is definitely not always positive.
