Fast facts:
MARRIAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Formal marriage breakup has always been a part of life for people.
Women who have a choice over when and if they want to get pregnant, and therefore an affordable choice about whether or not to remain in a marriage, essentially double the number of married people who are reconsidering their vows.
If half of all marriages end in divorce, divorce is statistically, if not culturally, common.
Divorce has surpassed death as the most popular endpoint of marriage for the first time in human history. This extraordinary change in human coupling and uncoupling trends necessitates a new framework for social policy, family law, and marital counseling, i.e., a more compassionate approach. With permission, the title of this article is adapted from a well-researched review by influential family psychologist William M. Pinsof, Ph.D. His article is both fascinating and divisive, and it needs to be read by a broader audience.
Marriage’s Brief History
The Experience of the Ancients
Beatrice Gottlieb, a historian, studied marriage in the Western world from 1400 to 1800. She discovered that marriages rarely lasted more than 20 years between the end of the black plague and the beginning of industrialization. At this time,
Almost all broke up, not due to legal action, but due to death… The fragility of marriage was profoundly rooted in people’s minds…very few people grew up with a complete set of parents or grandparents. From the viewpoint of the married couple, this meant that no matter how much they loved each other, they would definitely feel forced to prepare for a future without the other. The majority of marriage “contracts” included provisions for widowhood. It was not unheard of for couples who were not especially fond of each other to fantasize about death bringing them together.
Marriage was regarded as a long-term engagement, but one that was often unstable and fleeting. “When a couple got married in the past, they couldn’t help but have mixed feelings about how long their relationship would last,” Pinsof explains. “They were well aware that the time would come when they would part ways, even if they were deeply ensnared in it and couldn’t easily get out by legal means.”
The Modern Marital Condition
Formal marriage breakup has always been a part of life for people. Since the mid-nineteenth century, when industrialization started, the risk of a marriage ending in divorce (or annulment) has been below 10%. Divorce became the most popular endpoint of marriage in 1974. The divorce rate had gradually risen to over 55 percent by 1985. It has stayed stable at about 50% for the past 20 years.
Dr. Pinsof found a fascinating fact: the average length of marriage did not change much over time. It remained remarkably stable, hovering about 20 years. In other words, a substantial body of empirical data inferred hard wiring of one generation after nearly 600 years, 500 of which the predominant terminator was death, and in modern times divorce.
Transitioning from Death to Divorce
Although modern human life is vastly different from that of the past, this does not explain away the family’s apparent anomaly. Dr. Pinsof’s meticulously recorded research seeks to pinpoint the causes of what he refers to as the “death to divorce transition.”
Longer Life Expectancy
We are living longer and better lives, which is a fundamental and unparalleled shift. The average human life span rose by more than 25 years between 1900 and 2000. In other words, relative to our forefathers, people who live to adulthood should now expect to have “two adult life cycles.” Furthermore, the decrease in mortality in this century is greater than that of the previous 250 years.
