Wedlock

May 6, 2016

It’s wedding season in northern Michigan. Unless you live under a rock — a really big one — you know that our culture has been engaged in a furious debate over who should and should not be allowed to marry. Those who read my words regularly might expect me to wade hipdeep into the fray. Not today. I’ve been happy to see marriage revived as something desirable, and not just because couples might hire me to photograph some of those weddings.

It wasn’t that long ago that popular culture had declared the concept of marriage outdated. We hear all sorts of data about the high failure rate of marriage. It’s commonly thought to be a fact that 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. But missing from that statistic is how many of those divorces were executed so one of the parties could marry someone else, not a rejection of the institution at all. We also don’t know how many of those marriages are the same small segment of people getting married and divorced multiple times. If 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce, each person divorced three times requires three lasting relationships to balance the statistics. In reality, most marriages do last.

Marriage also has gotten a bad wrap as being oppressive for women. It’s unclear how two people deciding to commit and share their lives can be bad for one gender but great for the other. Oddly, it seems that today’s social justice warriors decrying marriage are making the assumption that women will naturally allow themselves to be victims, which underestimates women and doesn’t reconcile with reality.

Marriage is good for society. If we accept the idea that a society is well-served when children are well educated and become successful adults, we are wise to support marriage. In The Atlantic, W. Bradford Wilcox cites a range of studies that show that children raised with married parents have more success in life and will earn more income than children from single parents or families with divorced parents. He notes, “The intact, two-parent family seems to be particularly important for children hailing from less privileged homes and a powerful force for economic mobility.” In short, kids growing up in lower income homes will do better if they have married parents. In one study, John Gruber found that adults who came from divorced families are less well educated, have lower family incomes, marry earlier yet separate more often, and even have higher suicide rates.

In an article from the Brooking Institute, Kimberly Howard and Richard V. Reeves attempt to suggest marriage itself doesn’t lead to all of these benefits, but that any two adults living together will gain the advantages. As we find so often in our culture, they write to placate unmarried parents, but even in their conclusions they outline the benefits of marriage and find children are significantly better off with married mothers. This is a direct quote: “Our adolescent success measure, for example, is to graduate high school with a GPA of at least 2.5 and without either becoming a parent or getting a criminal record. Two out of three adolescents with mothers married throughout their childhood clear this hurdle, compared to 42 percent of those with mothers married for some but not all of their childhood and just 28 percent of those raised by never-married mothers.”

In short, 72 percent of kids from unmarried mothers will not graduate high school, get pregnant, or go to jail before they finish high school. Oddly enough, the authors try to suggest married parents’ children are more successful primarily because of the higher incomes that married parents enjoy (they don’t deny that married families have higher incomes.) They call it the “income effect.” They are wrong. It turns out marriage itself is a factor in the higher income and better outcomes for children.

A British study, “Cohabitation, Marriage, Relationship Stability and Child Outcomes” done by The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the benefits of marriage on families don’t transfer to two adults living together out of wedlock. “Married couples enjoy far greater wealth and health than those who cohabit.” The study showed that married couples were 32 percent more likely to own a home than those who cohabitate, and that married fathers had professional occupations twice as often as men who are cohabitating. They also noted that children from married families are less likely to smoke or take drugs and score better on intelligence tests than their counterparts from homes where parents cohabitate.

There was a time when pregnancy outside of marriage was a social disgrace because it was evidence that the woman had engaged in sexual intercourse. It was a religious violation, a sin.

That shame led to all sorts of terrible outcomes including illegal (and legal) abortions and deceptions that tore at families. Even today, in some cultures, out of wedlock birth can lead to pride killings. Those outrageous reactions have led us to abandon a tradition that otherwise served culture well — keeping children inside married families. We need to clarify why it’s better to only have kids after marriage, but we need to get the social convention of having children only after marriage back into our culture. The religious prohibition of sex out of wedlock is outdated for most people. It’s none of our business. But it is simply too easy to avoid pregnancy today for us to blindly condone young women having children out of wedlock. Those women aren’t sinners, but they are making a bad decision. It doesn’t serve our culture well to ignore the benefits of marriage, particularly when children are involved.

Thomas Kachadurian is a photographer, designer and author. He lives on Old Mission with his wife and two children. He is a member and past president of the Traverse Area District Library Board of Trustees.