MARRIAGE

Marriage is a legal contract between two individuals to form a sexual, productive, and reproductive union. Through the marriage, this union is recognized by family, society, religious institutions, and the legal system. Marriage defines the relationship of the two individuals to each other, to any children they might have, to their extended families, and to society generally. It also defines the relationship of others, including social institutions, toward the married couple. Fundamental features of marriage include: a legally-binding, long-term contract; sexual exclusivity; coresidence; shared resources; and joint production. Spouses acquire rights and responsibilities with marriage, enforceable through both the legal system and through social expectations and social pressure.

Legal Aspects of Marriage

Marriage differs from other less formal relationships primarily in its legal status. Marriage is a legally-binding contract. Historically, both secular and religious law generally viewed marriage vows as binding and permanent. The contract could be broken only if one spouse violated the most basic obligations to the other and could be judged "at fault" in the breakdown of the marriage. Social changes lead, however, to shifts in the legal underpinning of marriage and, in turn, the legal treatment of marriage shapes the institution.

Changes in family law in many high-income countries appear to have made marriage less stable, as exemplified in the U.S. experience. Beginning in the mid-1960s, state governments in the United States substantially liberalized and simplified their divorce laws. One important feature of these changes was a shift from divorce based on fault or mutual consent to unilateral divorce, which required the willingness of only one spouse to end the marriage. Most states also adopted some form of "no-fault" divorce, which eliminated the need for one spouse to demonstrate a violation of the marriage contract by the other. The shift to unilateral or no-fault divorce laws in the United States was accompanied by a surge in divorce rates. The scholar Leora Friedberg has found that at least some of the increase in divorce rates resulted directly from the shift in the legal environment in which couples marry and decide to divorce or remain married. The link between divorce rates and laws that permit unilateral divorce has led several states to develop alternative, more binding, marriage contracts, such as "covenant marriage."

Fundamental Features of the Institution

According to Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, permanence, joint production, coresidence, and the social recognition of a sexual and childrearing union are the most important characteristics of the institution of marriage. These features lead to some of the other defining characteristics of marriage. Because two adults make a legally-binding promise to live and work together for their joint well-being, and to do so, ideally, for the rest of their lives, married couples tend to specialize, dividing between them the labor required to maintain the family. The coresidence and resource sharing of married couples have substantial economies of scale; at any standard of living, it costs much less for people to live together than it would if they lived separately. Both these economies of scale and the specialization of spouses increase the economic well-being of family members living together.

The institution of marriage assumes the sharing of economic and social resources and co-insurance. Spouses act as a small insurance pool against life's uncertainties, reducing their need to act individually to protect themselves against unexpected events. Marriage also connects spouses and family members to a larger network of help, support, and obligation through their extended family, friends, and others. The insurance function of marriage increases the economic well-being of family members. The support function of marriage improves married people's emotional well-being.

The institution of marriage also builds on and fosters trust. Since spouses share social and economic resources, and expect to do so over the long term, both partners gain when the family unit gains. This reduces the need for family members to monitor the behavior of other members, increasing efficiency.

Benefits of Marriage

The specialization, economies of scale, and insurance functions of marriage typically yield a substantial increase in the economic well-being of family members. Joseph Lupton and James P. Smith noted in their 2003 article that married people generally produce more and accumulate more assets than un-married people. Married people also tend to have better physical and emotional health than single people. This is at least in part because they are married: the social support provided by a spouse, combined with the economic resources produced by the marriage, facilitates both the production and maintenance of health.

In most societies, sexual relationships largely take place within marriage. Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels provide an analysis of data from the United States that indicates that almost all married men and women are sexually active, and almost all have only one sex partner–their spouse. Unmarried men and women have much lower levels of sexual activity than the married, in part because a substantial minority have no sex partner (survey data indicate that just under a quarter of unmarried men and a third of unmarried women who were not cohabiting had no sex partner in the year preceding the survey). Men and women who are cohabiting are at least as sexually active as those who are married, but are less likely to be sexually exclusive.

One central function of marriage is the bearing and raising of children. The institution of marriage directs the resources of the spouses and their extended families toward the couple's children, increasing child well-being.

Age at Marriage

In the United States and much of Europe age at marriage generally declined in the first half of the twentieth century, but then rose strongly, reaching levels not seen earlier in the century. Jason Fields and Lynne Casper noted in their 2001 study that between 1970 and 2000 the median age of first marriage for women in the United States increased by almost five years, from 20.8 to 25.1, and for men the median age increased by almost four years, from 23.2 to 26.8. In this same time period, the proportion of women who had never been married increased from 36 percent to 73 percent among those 20 to 24 years old and from 6 percent to 22 percent among those 30 to 34 years old. Similar increases occurred for men.

The delay in first marriage was especially striking for African Americans, as highlighted in a 2000 study by Catherine A. Fitch and Stephen Ruggles. Among African Americans, the median age at first marriage in 2000 was 28.6 for men and 27.3 for women, a rise of six and seven years, respectively, since the 1960s. Among those African Americans 30 to 34 years old in 2000, 44 percent of women and 46 percent of men had never married.

Trends in age at marriage in Europe have been broadly similar, although marriage patterns differ substantially by country. Sweden, Denmark and Iceland show the highest average ages at marriage for women (around age 29); the Eastern European countries of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland show the lowest (around age 22). Since societies with relatively high age at marriage also tend to be those in which many people never marry, this diversity suggests that marriage is a more salient component of family in some European countries than others.

Marriage typically takes place at younger ages in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The average mean age at marriage in these regions is 25 for men and 21 for women, compared to almost 28 for men and 25 for women in the developed countries. Everywhere men tend to marry at older ages than women, but the gap in average age at marriage between spouses varies both within and between regions. According to United Nations data, this gap tends to be largest where women marry relatively early.

Union Formation

Declines in marriage are closely linked to increases in cohabitation, although it is difficult to untangle the nature of the association. In the United States co-habitation has become an increasingly common step in the courtship process. R. Kelly Raley noted that while only 7 percent of the women born in the late 1940s cohabited before age 25, 55 percent of those born in the late 1960s had cohabited by that age. Most couples begin their intimate life together by cohabiting rather than by marrying: the form of union has changed, but unions remain the norm. But even considering marriage and cohabitation together, in the early-twenty-first century young adults are less likely to be in a union than those of earlier cohorts. Among women born in the late 1960s, about a third had not formed a union by age 25, compared to a quarter of those born in the early 1950s.

Kathleen Kiernan has documented rising co-habitation in Europe, but with large variation among countries. It is strikingly common in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland; France too shows fairly high levels, with about 30 percent of the women ages 25 to 29 in cohabiting unions. A group of countries that includes the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, and Austria shows moderate levels of cohabitation–from 8 to 16 percent of women from 25 to 29 involved in this type of union. In the Southern European countries and Ireland cohabitation remains rare: less than 3 percent of women ages 25 to 29 cohabit with a partner.

In many European countries, the majority of women are in cohabitational or marital unions by their mid-to late twenties. In the Nordic countries and France, about a third of women ages 25 to 29 are cohabiting, a third are married, and a third are single. However, over 60 percent of women in Italy, 50 percent in Spain, and over 30 percent in Portugal and Greece are neither cohabiting nor married at these ages.

Proportion Married

A consequence of the trends discussed above is that a larger proportion of adults is unmarried in the early twenty-first century compared to the past. In the United States in 1970, unmarried people made up 28 percent of the adult population. In 2000, that proportion was 46 percent. (The shift away from marriage has been even more pronounced among African Americans.) In Europe, marriage is most common in Greece and Portugal, where over 60 percent of women ages 25 to 29 are married, and least common in the Nordic countries, Italy, and Spain, where a third or less are married.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of adults still marry at some time in their lives. In the United States, the proportion of people ever married by age 50 is more than 95 percent for both men and women. Relatively high proportions of men and women have not married by their late 40s in the Nordic countries and in Caribbean countries such as Jamaica and Barbados, with a long history of visiting relationships that include sexual relationships but not cohabitation. In Sweden, for example, 76 percent of men and 84 percent of women in their late forties had ever married, whereas in Jamaica, only 52 percent of men and 54 percent of women had ever married by these ages.

Marital Disruption and Union Dissolution

A substantial proportion of all marriages end in divorce or separation due to marital discord. The divorce rate, which reflects the number of divorces in a year relative to the number of married people, rose continuously for more than a century in the United States and many other industrialized countries, then leveled off at a fairly high rate in about 1980. In the United States, around half of all marriages end in divorce. According to Waite and Lillard and scholars Teresa Castro Martin and Larry L. Bumpass, the marriages most at risk are those with no children, those with children from a previous union or older children, those begun at a young age, and those between partners with relatively low levels of education.

Although high divorce rates make marriages seem unstable, other types of unions are much more likely to dissolve. Cohabitational unions show quite high chances of disruption, with a quarter ending in separation within three to four years compared to only five percent of marriages, according to one 1995 study by Zheng Wu and T.R. Balakrishnan. Many cohabitations become marriages, but these show lower stability than marriages not preceded by cohabitation.

Alternative Family Structures

The married, two-parent family has been the most common family form in the United States and other industrialized countries for some centuries. But even when this form was most prevalent, many people lived in other types of families, typically because of the death of one member of the couple before all the children were grown. With high mortality, frequently one partner in a marriage would die relatively early, so remarriage and stepfamilies were common as were single-parent families. The rise of cohabitation and non-marital childbearing have meant that unmarried-couple families and never-married-mother families have become common alternative family forms.

One alternative family form consists of two adults of the same sex, sometimes raising children. In the United States, about 2.4 percent of men and1.3 percent of women identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual and have same-gender partners. According to one estimate by Dan Black, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor, in 1990 about 1 percent of adult men lived with a male partner and about the same percentage of adult women lived with a female partner, though these may be underestimates since some of those living in a gay or lesbian union do not identify as such in surveys. Legal and social recognition of these unions as "marriages" is generally not available in the United States, although France has enacted national registered partnerships, Denmark extended child custody rights to same-sex couples, and in 2000 the Netherlands became the first country to grant same-sex couples full and equal rights to marriage.