The Washington Post ran a story last weekend announcing that "Numbers Drop for the Married With Children," in which staff writer Blaine Harden quotes demographers who "peg the rise of a class-based marriage gap to the erosion since 1970 of the broad-based economic prosperity that followed World War II." Marriage with children has become an exception rather than the norm, she writes.
The piece bothered me for a number of reasons. First, as my colleague Roberto Rivera frequently notes, correlation does not equal causation; and as Harden acknowledges later on in her piece (and in her blog posts), factors other than economics hugely influence the marriage decision: The (bad) example of parents who divorce after years of fighting ("Marriage ruins life," a 24-year-old, cohabiting Cameron Roach told Harden) and the example set by peers who cohabit and have children probably affect the decision to tie the knot far more than any economic concerns. If you live in a neighborhood in which the norm is cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing, that's going to influence your marital decisions. Ditto for young people who grow up in a cultural milieu in which the norm is to get hitched.
Harden notes that many poor, cohabiting couples think they cannot afford marriage. Why not? Apart from a one-time fee for the marriage license, how is marriage more expensive than shacking up? Unless these couples think marriage is about having an obscenely expensive wedding, why do they think marriage is going to cost them more than living together does? Harden never explains this.
Harden does not explore the influence upon the poor of wealthy Hollywood moms who make out-of-wedlock child-bearing look chic and glamorous. Nor does she mention the destructive impact of Great Society policies that essentially promised young women regular government checks on the conditions that they (1) have a baby out of wedlock and (2) avoid marriage ever after.
Harden also ignores the fact that well-heeled liberals have been telling us for decades that marriage doesn't matter — it does, immensely. Married couples, unlike cohabiting ones, are highly motivated to work hard and pool their savings for the future, because they believe they'll have a future together. This is a big part of why married people have more money than those who serially cohabit.
Tragically, the broad acceptance of cohabitation encourages many women to agree to a living together arrangement instead of demanding marriage. According to one study, most women believe that cohabiting will eventually lead to marriage, while most men think it's merely a convenient sexual arrangement until the "right" woman comes along, for whom they will make sacrifices.
There's also the fact that a culture-wide acceptance of divorce (including among many Christians) teaches the young that marriage is only a temporary arrangement — much like cohabiting. Who can blame them for thinking marriage is simply not worth the bother?
Harden notes that couples with children now make up fewer than one in every four households, "a share that has been slashed in half since 1960." But these statistics are surely skewed by the huge numbers of baby boomers, many of whom are empty nesters (as my husband and I will become in six months, when our younger son begins college). And how much is that data driven by the fact that people live longer today than ever before, giving us a much larger pool of couples whose children left home long ago? My own parents have been empty nesters for thirty-two years.
Many young lovers, far from letting a lack of cash keep them from the altar, deliberately blow off economic concerns. That's what I did. Twenty-nine years ago, my soon-to-be spouse and I didn't care if we had to live in a tiny apartment with third-hand furniture and exist on macaroni and cheese dinners: We were in love, and, mainly for religious reasons, marriage was the only option we were willing to consider.
The Post's linking of marriage with economic prosperity set off alarm bells; I kept waiting for somebody to blame President Bush, the Republicans, or big business for the decline in marriage. That didn't happen (yes, I maligned Ms. Harden in thought), but even so, when it comes to the link between money and marriage (assuming there actually is one), correlation does not equal causation. My grandparents wed near the start of the Great Depression, and were poor throughout their fifty-four-year marriage. Nothing would have induced these Southern Baptists to live together rather than marry simply because they had no money.
If the poor truly believe that they cannot afford marriage, our culture needs to find way to help them understand that, for many reasons — including the well-being of their children, they cannot afford not to marry; it's out-of-wedlock childbearing that drives women and children into poverty. The children of married parents, even if those parents are poor, are better off, on the whole, than children born to unmarried parents.
Anne Morse is a senior writer for BreakPoint and a contributor to The Point.
