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“What’s Love Got To Do With It?”The Decline of Marriage, The Road To Perdition and

To Hell in a Hand Basket.

W. Dennis Duggan, F.C.J.© NOVEMBER 2006

“THE WIFE SHOULD BE INFERIOR TO THE HUSBAND. THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO INSURE EQUALITY BETWEEN THE TWO.” MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIALIS

(Roman poet during reign of Nero)

Several years ago the cover ofTime Magazine declared, “God is Dead.”A few years later a book on current affairstold us that we were at “The End ofHistory.” New York Time’s columnistThomas Friedman tells us that “TheWorld is Flat.” Now, the Census Bureautells us that marriage is dead–well sortof—almost—it’s headed that way. For thefirst time since the Census Bureau begankeeping this statistic, the number ofhouseholds in America with marriedcouples has dropped under 50%. Theonly people that are not surprised by thisreport are Family Court Judges. We havelong observed that the only people whoseem to want to get married are gays.

So, it is good news, indeed, that our Courtof Appeals has recently told us that thereason the prohibition of gay marriage isconstitutional is because the legislaturemay validly try to encourage and protectmarriage for heterosexuals by denying itto homosexuals. They have their workcut out for them, as these new figuresshow.

The other bit of news in themarriage area worth noting is the recentdeath of Jane Wyatt, the mother on“Father Knows Best.” During the Fifties,and Sixties, situational comedies anddramas on TV, that were centered on thenuclear family, predominated. Along with“Father Knows Best,” we had “Leave it to

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Beaver,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,”“The Danny Thomas Show,” “Lassie” andseveral others. In these nuclear families,all the women were strong, all the menwere good looking and all the childrenwere above average. As the anchors ofthe family, all the women were, of course,stay at home moms. What most peopleoverlook, however, is that this depiction ofthe family as being “nuclear” is theexception, not the rule. The nuclearfamily of the “Father Knows Best” typelasted only from about 1945 to1970—about twenty-five years. Prior to1945, the slings and arrows of disease,accidents, poverty, and deaths duringchild birth, created extended families ofmultiple variations. After 1970, the risingdivorce rates and births outside marriagedepressed marriage as an institution ofuniversal norm. That trend has continuedbecause another development, older inorigin, has also weakened marriage as aninstitution—love.

Marriage, as an institution the waywe think of it, is not much older than the“nuclear family” concept. What I mean isthat marrying for love is quite recent onthe evolutionary time line. Men andwomen always developed romanticrelationships but romance as the primarymotive for marriage is relatively new.Men and women pairing up to raisechildren obviously had an adaptiveadvantage that Darwin explained over100 years ago. If it wasn’t adaptive wewould have some other arrangement,right? Is marriage for love an adaptiveadvantage? Nobody knows for surebecause, in the long run, we only seeevolution in the rearview mirror and we,personally, will never see it becauseevolution operates in eons and we thinkand remember in decades. Also, wehave a tenancy to believe that whateverjust was, was inevitable and it must havebeen the best way of doing things. After

all, the nuclear family, now in decline, wasthe best arrangement for children wasn’tit, isn’t it?

For most of history, marriage hadnothing to do with love and everything todo with survival. First, it was a way toextend the clan, to unite groups or othervillages. More people with bloodconnections gave a group a better chancefor survival. Later on, the family becamethe basic unit of economic activity thatinsured survival. In the second half of the19 Century, Francis Galton, Darwin’sth

cousin, gave birth to the eugenicsmovement to promote procreation amongthe “upper class” and depress it amongthe “lower class.” The upper class wascomprised of white people from NorthernEurope who had money. Among thisgroup, the conservatives were aghastwhen they began to notice that peoplewanted to marry for love. They couldn’tlet that happen because that would ruinmarriage as an institution, the primarypurpose of which was to guarantee theirpower and place in society. So, slavesand servants and many others wereprohibited from marrying----becausewhat’s love got to do with it? Marrying forlove implied equality and sharing andaccommodation. Those are conceptsthat are inimical to power and control.The ironical thing here is that thosequalities that are intrinsic to the marriageof two people who have married for lovemakes that marriage both stronger andweaker. It is stronger because itproduces a stronger bond between thepartners but it is weaker because equalityimplies the freedom to leave.

There are some other alarmingaspects to the declining marriage rate thatescape our day-to-day notice. In theearly sixties, the overall violent crimerates were the lowest in recorded history.Twenty years later, in the 1980's, violentcrime was at its highest. Why was that?

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One reason is that in the early 1960's, thenumber of men living alone was at itslowest in recorded history. In the 1980's,it was at its highest. We know what thecommon denominator is. Young singlemen, disconnected from the stabilizingaffects of women, are dangerous. Theother side to that coin is that all thestatistics show that unmarried womenhave a much higher chance of becomingvictims of crime compared with marriedwomen.

In 1849, 60,000 young, healthy,resourceful men went West to make theirfortune searching for gold. Six monthslater 20,000 of them were dead. Howcould that happen? Very easily, therewere no women in the mining towns andmen drank, fought and hooliganizedthemselves to death. (The ratio of men towomen was actually 30-1 and many ofthe women were prostitutes.) Here iswhat one writer, Seth Thomas, observedin a letter written home: “As forCalifornia...I believe it is the finest countryin the world. Women is all that is wantedto make it habitable.”

The other changing feature of oursociety that will dramatically change therelationship dynamics between men andwomen is the reversal in educationfortunes between those groups. Go to ahigh school graduation and see who goesup on the stage to get the academicawards----it’s all girls. The boys aremissing. Black women now earn twice asmany bachelor and masters degrees asdo black men. White women earn 30%more bachelor degrees and 50% moremasters degrees than do white men. Inmany inner cities, less than half the boysare finishing high school. In surveys,women consistently say that they want tomarry a man who earns at least as much

as they do. Where will professionalwomen find these men? The marriagemarket in the black community collapsedover two decades ago as the men inthose neighborhoods were diverted intodrugs, unemployment and jail.

When Daniel Patrick Moynihanpointed out in the 1960's that no societyhas ever existed for long where 20% ofbirths were to unmarried women, he wasexcoriated for bringing this to ourattention. The figure in our cities nowregularly exceeds 50% and in somelarger cities, it is 70% and higher. TheCensus Bureau just reported that 4 in 10births in the entire U.S. are to unmarriedmothers—the highest rate in theindustrialized world. These numbers alsodisguise the fact that for the mothers ofthe most at risk kids—the ones who needa father the most—the rates are higherstill. For young women, only about 15%live with their baby’s father.

We know that if a woman does notfinish high school, has a child before age21 and is not married to the father, herchances of living in poverty exceed 80%.Obviously, these women are not gettingpregnant by themselves so what of themen, the fathers? Missing in action is thekindest description that comes to mind. InFamily Court, we see children in troublebecause they are delinquents, PINS,neglected. For about 90% of this group,the children have no biological father whois married to the mother and who is livingin the home. Father knowing best wouldbe a foreign concept to these kids.

So, are we going to hell in a handbasket? Nobody knows. What is thesolution to this problem? Nobody knows.Lysistrata, where were you when weneeded you?