[This is the sixth in my new series of monthly columns. The views expressed here are my own and not the official positions of Unmarried Equality.]
In our matrimaniacal society, there is a lot of bedrock talk about marriage. The institution, we are told, is the bedrock of society, the very foundation of civilization. It is marriage that builds the social bridges that keep us all connected. Single people, in contrast, are the social isolates, lonely and alone. Or so the story goes.
Bedrock talk is not new. In the late 1800s, the sociologist Emile Durkheim proposed that marriage so integrates people into society, and singlehood so alienates them, that single people end up killing themselves more often than married people do. (He was wrong about that. In fact, most claims about how getting married makes people healthier or happier or makes them live longer are grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong.)
But do people really become more connected to neighbors, friends, coworkers, siblings, or parents after they marry than they were when they were single? Popular culture, with song lyrics such as “You are my everything” or “I just want to be your everything,” seems to glorify something different, what I’ve called “intensive coupling.” By that set of values, it is not insular or creepy, but admirable, when the two people in a marriage look to each other
“for companionship, intimacy, caring, friendship, advice, the sharing of the tasks and finances of household and family, and just about everything else. They are the repositories for each other’s hopes and dreams. They are each other’s soul mates and sole mates. They are Sex and Everything Else Partners.”
That’s how I described intensive coupling in Singled Out. Sociologists have a different description of it. They call marriage a “greedy institution.” Once people marry, they focus primarily on each other. Their own nuclear family gobbles up almost all of their time and attention. Everyone else – friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even their own siblings and parents – gets short shrift.
These arguments are no longer theoretical (though they will probably always be ideological). We now have stacks of studies relevant to the question of whether marriage is an institution that integrates and embeds people within their broader families and communities or whether it is instead a greedy institution (at least as it is practiced today, and in the countries such as the US where most of the relevant research has been conducted).
The weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly in support of the hypothesis that it is single people who are more connected to other people, who are doing the work of maintaining social ties and exchanging help and support, and married people who focus primarily on each other. Marriage does, indeed, seem to be a greedy institution these days.
The relevant research includes studies that compare people who have always been single to people who are currently married and also to people who have previously been married (divorced or separated or widowed). Those studies can’t really show that getting married causes people to become more insular, because the married and single people are different people, so maybe other differences between them (and not their marital status) explains the differences in social ties. The stronger research (though still not definitive, in terms of causality) follows the exact same people as they go from being single to getting married: Do they become more connected to other people or less so?
As it turns out, the answer is almost always the same, no matter how you do the research or which measure of greediness or connection or caring you use.
Here are some examples of relevant research findings:
- People who have always been single spend more time exchanging help with neighbors and socializing with them than married people do.
- People who have always been single spend more time exchanging help with friends and socializing with them than married people do.
- People who have always been single are more likely to exchange help with their parents, and have frequent contact with them, than are married people.
- People who have always been single are more likely to exchange help with their siblings, and have frequent contact with them, than are married people.
- When people get married, they have less contact with their parents and spend less time with their friends than they did when they were single. It is not just a honeymoon effect – in research that followed people for up to six years after the wedding, they were still more insular than they were when they were single. Kids can’t explain the difference – even the married people with no kids were less connected to their family and friends.
- Single people keep siblings together. Once people marry, they have less contact with their siblings than they did when they were single. If they get divorced, then they again have more contact.
- Single people are more likely to volunteer for civic organizations and participate in the life of their cities and towns than married people are.
- In the US, Single people have more friends than married people do. That’s true whether they are men or women and regardless of whether they are parents or have no kids. (Studies from the Netherlands and Great Britain offer similar conclusions.)
- Elderly parents are more likely to get help from their grown kids who are single than from those who are coupled. That’s true regardless of whether they are Black or White, and it is true for their sons as well as their daughters.
- Single people are more likely to provide long-term care than married people are. When more than 9,000 British adults answered the question, “Do you currently or have you ever regularly looked after someone, for at least three months, who is sick, disabled, or elderly?”, the results were clear. Singles had done so more often than married people.
Are you thinking to yourself, hmm, I thought I had heard just the opposite. That’s what I thought, too, long ago, before I started studying single life and not just practicing it. There have been books written that claim to make the case that it is married people who are more caring and more connected and who are the glue holding our society together. But when I actually studied the data from those books very closely, I found something else entirely. For example, in his book, Marriage in Men’s Lives, Steve Nock claims to have shown that marriage civilizes men, making them more dedicated workers and more generous people. But his own data show that they only work harder in ways that benefit just themselves (for example, working more hours to get more pay, though only in their first marriages); they actually devote less time to the kinds of professional and work groups that would benefit people other than themselves and their own nuclear families. Nock’s data also show that men also become less generous with their friends after they marry.
Of course, all of these studies were published before same-sex marriage became legal all across the U.S. We do not yet know whether gays and lesbians will practice marriage in different ways than heterosexuals do. Perhaps in part because LGBT people were sometimes excluded not just from marriage, but from their own families of origin, there is a rich tradition in such communities of valuing a wide range of social connections, such as friends and fellow activists and supportive members of extended families. The term “families of choice” has origins in LGBT communities. Gays and lesbians have long been in the forefront of experiments in living, creating meaningful lifespaces rather than just following some prescribed path through life.
Will they continue to innovate or will they practice marriage the heterosexual way? Wouldn’t it be interesting if same-sex marriage really did affect heterosexual marriage, not in the ways that its opponents feared, but by turning it into a less greedy institution?
[Note. For more about contemporary innovations in living, as practiced by gays and straights, singles and couples, parents and people who are not parents, and people of different ethnicities and social statuses, check out How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century.]
About Bella DePaulo
