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"The Future of Family and Tribe," a seminar of CLAL’s Jewish Public Forum held January 28-29, 2002 in New York City, brought together a dozen leading thinkers on gender, gay rights, adoption, reproductive law, bioethics, and aging. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants’ contributions to the seminar.  This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement.   For more information about the project, click here.

Dorian Solot, Executive Director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project (www.unmarried.org), a national nonprofit organization for unmarried people, participated in "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar. Her contribution follows below.

No Ring To It: Considering A Less-Married Future

By Dorian Solot  

We'll start with a marriage quiz.   Which of the following statements is true? 

a) 90% of Americans marry at some point in their lives.

b) Most Americans spend the majority of their lives unmarried.

c) The marriage rate in the U.S. is significantly higher than marriage rates across Europe.

d) The majority of Americans who marry today have lived together first.

e) All of the above. 

The answer is (e), all of the above – a collection of contradictions.  Americans love marriage to death, though not necessarily 'til death do we part.  We love marriage so much that 9 out of 10 of us marry in our lifetimes,[i] and that movies that include wedding scenes sell more tickets at the box office.[ii]  We place so much importance on the marriage ceremony itself that we delight in throwing the most lavish, elaborate weddings of any culture in history,[iii] spending on the average wedding nearly the amount the average American earns in a year.[iv]  We have such confidence in marriage that it is an unquestioned truism that children do best in married parent families, and that President Bush has proposed promoting marriage among people on welfare as a plausible solution to poverty.[v]            

But even as Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? recently took the country by storm, 150 years of demographic trends paint a clear picture: marriage doesn't play the role it used to in most people's lives.[vi]  More than 3 in 7 American adults are not currently married,[vii] and at the rate of increase of the last five decades, the bare ring finger crowd will be a majority in a few decades.  The percentage of Jewish adults who are unmarried, 35-45%, is only slightly lower than the overall U.S. population.[viii]  But even if we're not marrying as soon or staying married as long, Americans are forming relationships at about the same rate we always have; the decrease in married couples is mostly offset by an increase in unmarried ones.[ix]  In fact, unmarried partners are one of the fastest-growing household types, increasing by 72% between 1990 and 2000.[x]  These unmarried partner households don't necessarily fit the stereotype of a young, childless couple either: 41% of them include children.[xi]            

I'm part of this fast-growing constituency. I share my life and plans for the future with my partner of nine years.  Our relationship is strong and committed; we take out the recycling and consider each other's parents our in-laws (or, jokingly, our "out-laws") just like the married couples on our block.  But neither of us feels any desire to make a trip down the aisle.            

A few years into our relationship, I was stunned at the pressure to marry directed at us from friends, family members, and even strangers.  Growing up Jewish I was told, "You can be an astronaut!  You can be President of the United States!" I was caught completely off guard to learn in my twenties that the one thing society considered set in stone was that I would become a wife.  Even though our relationship worked so well, my partner and I ran into marital status discrimination everywhere we went.  A landlord threatened not to rent to us.  My employer told me Marshall and I couldn't get a joint health insurance policy, even though we'd been in a relationship longer than some of the married couples with joint policies.  A tenants' insurance company told us we'd have to take out two policies and pay double what a married couple would.      

Today, being unmarried is not just my personal identity, but also my professional one.  As the Executive Director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project (ATMP), a national nonprofit organization for unmarried people, I work full-time organizing the grassroots movement advocating for fairness and equality for people who choose not to marry, cannot marry, and live together before marriage.  ATMP has over 4,000 households on its mailing list, representing every state in the country, and our staff, board, and members appear in the media hundreds of times each year to provide an unmarried perspective to news about marriage and non-marriage.  When Reverend Jerry Falwell, the Family Research Council, or the Traditional Values Coalition are on national television commenting on the latest census figures or welfare proposals, we're the ones sitting next to them providing analysis from a family diversity perspective.

Who Are the Unmarrieds? 

The people the Alternatives to Marriage Project represents don't all look like Marshall and me.[xii] Although pundits often talk about marriage as an issue of morals and values, economics provides a more accurate framework for understanding.   Poor people are much less likely to marry, for reasons ranging from an inability to afford keeping a chronically unemployed spouse around the house, to the realization that marrying a poor partner would likely put a permanent end to any dream of upward mobility.[xiii]  A vast body of research makes the links clear: when the country's economy improves, marriage rates go up.[xiv]  The same holds true on an individual level, where rising incomes make people more likely to marry.[xv]  As the gap between rich and poor widens in the U.S., marriage patterns follow a similar pattern, leading demographer Frank Furstenberg to famously describe marriage as a "luxury consumer item" and cohabitation and single parenthood the "budget" approaches to family formation.[xvi] 

But the poor aren't the only ones not married.  Many people are unmarried because they haven't met a partner they find worthy of a lifetime commitment, because they want to avoid the pain or expense of divorce, because they don't want the government to "regulate" their relationship, or because they don't plan to have children and see no other reason to wed.  Same-sex couples can't marry anywhere in the country, and thousands of different-sex couples have chosen not to marry to avoid taking advantage of a privilege available only to some.  Many senior citizens and disabled people would lose significant financial benefits (perhaps a pension from a previous spouse) if they married or remarried.  Thanks to employment for women and the invention of TV dinners and washing machines for men, husbands and wives are no longer essential to survival.

For the most part, we unmarried folks do just fine, thank you.  If we're in relationships our lives are more similar to married couples than different from them.  But because of the ease with which couples move in together, many of us are surprised at the "marital status-ism" we encounter.  The first problem is a lack of social support from families, communities, and religious institutions.   It's widely believed that social support is a key ingredient to making marriages strong, yet cohabiting couples often see their partners excluded and relationships ignored at family events, and shamed or stigmatized in faith communities.  Many describe the pressure to marry as intense (and without regard for whether marriage is in their best interest), and with it the message that their relationship as it currently stands is second best, inadequate.  Legal barriers compound the problems.  Everywhere that families come into contact with the law – housing, employment, health care, insurance, taxes, immigration, adoption, pensions, social security, inheritance, and more – the legal system is oblivious to the needs and realities of unmarried families.   

Even the most basic issue of self-definition creates problems when the language and categories available to us don't adequately describe unmarried lives.  Every form seems to have checkboxes that ask us if we're married (no) or single (I certainly don't feel single).  And one of the most common things unmarried couples wrestle with is what to call each other.  Boyfriend and girlfriend sound too teenage; partner leads people to think you're business partners or gay; significant other is trying too hard; and spousal equivalent is just plain silly.[xvii]  Everyone in an unmarried relationship has had the experience of being introduced, "This is Margaret and her – uhh … mmmm … eh … friend."   

The Future of Unmarriage 

Projecting into the future based on the demographic trends of the last century and a half, the continuation of the gradual move away from marriage looks fairly inevitable.  Writing in the New York Times, social commentator Katha Pollitt described the unlikely scenario that would have to take place to allow a return to mythologized Ozzie and Harriet families: "We'd have to restore the cult of virginity and the double standard, ban birth control, restrict divorce, kick women out of decent jobs, force unwed pregnant women to put their babies up for adoption on pain of social death, make out-of-wedlock children legal nonpersons.   That's not going to happen."[xviii]  

The inescapable shift is taking place not just within our borders but also around the world. In the last decade marriage rates fell in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK, just to name a few.[xix]  The percentage of births to unmarried parents rose in 14 of the 15 European Union countries, and is 39% or higher in a third of them.[xx]  The number of unmarried parents in Japan grew 85% in the last five years,[xxi] and in 2001 the Swiss marriage rate fell faster in a single year than it had in the previous eighty years.[xxii]  There's nothing to suggest people will quit the institution cold turkey.  Instead, more will marry later or not at all; a significant portion of those who do marry won't stay together for life; people will marry for specific, practical reasons (childrearing, immigration, health benefits, etc.); and acceptance of cohabitation will continue to increase. 

It also seems clear that, eventually, the U.S. will give unmarried relationships and families social and legal standing comparable to that currently accorded to married ones.   There's a lot to be learned by watching other countries grapple with unmarried relationships.  Some, like Canada, France, and Sweden, have already overhauled their legal codes so that references to "spouse" also pertain to unmarried partners, or so that partners who meet certain criteria can register and gain "marital" rights as domestic partners. Others, like Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Uganda, and the UK have either taken initial steps toward broader recognition, or are currently engaged in national debates about how to best reconcile the gap between real families and those in the legal imaginary.[xxiii]  Another set of nations is reacting to the changes entirely differently, as seen in news articles about women and couples in Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates who are sentenced to imprisonment, public floggings, or death by stoning for the crimes of cohabitation and unmarried sex.[xxiv]  It does not seem presumptuous to assume that the U.S. will end up with a system more like Canada's than like Nigeria's. 

There are two questions that remain.  First, how much damage will we do to children and families in the intervening time before we revise our social and legal codes?  On a daily basis, unmarried people are denied access to health insurance, bi-national couples are prevented from being together, partners are shut out of hospital rooms, couples are shut out of faith communities, and people lose their homes when their partner dies without a will.  Groups that oppose expanding rights to unmarried people and families base their arguments on the well-being of children and the strengthening of families.  Yet their resistance functions to leave an ever-growing portion of American families out in the cold.  The reality is stark: two in five American children live in a family other than their biological married parents.[xxv] 

The second question is how the change will come about.  Shifts in social support are likely to happen gradually on their own, as unmarried people and relationships become increasingly commonplace.  But updating laws and policy is a more complex process.  An organized grassroots lobby of unmarried people could bring change, like the War Widows of America who in the 1960s lobbied successfully to eliminate the "singles penalty" from the tax code.[xxvi]  A high profile case of discrimination on the basis of marital status could turn legislators' sympathies, such as the scores of surviving partners of people killed on September 11th who are currently denied access to most survivors' benefits.  The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender rights movement has already succeeded in expanding recognition of diverse families in a myriad of ways, and is another likely leader in the movement for fairness. 

Social theorist Peter Drucker said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it."  Lacking an obvious path to fair and equal treatment, those of us who recognize marital status as a social justice issue need to commit to making a difference where we can.  Some of us can implement or agitate for workplace benefits policies that include employees' partners and dependents regardless of marital status.[xxvii]  Some can create a culture of support and acceptance for diverse families in synagogues and churches, encourage unmarried people to take leadership positions, and offer relationship counseling in addition to marriage counseling.  Some can strengthen unmarried couples' relationships by presiding over union or commitment ceremonies for those who seek a religious blessing but cannot or choose not to marry.   Some can encourage legislators to expand the definition of family, so that families are recognized as people linked by emotional and financial care and interdependency, not limited to those connected by marriage, blood, or adoption. 

All of us can become conscious of our language and assumptions.  We can talk about partners along with spouses, pay attention to the word someone uses to identify his partner/sweetheart/significant other, and make an effort to understand the meaning of a couple's own relationship rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model to everyone. We can learn more about the history and reality of marriage and families in the U.S. and around the world, to better understand the dangers of regressive policies that would "strengthen marriage" by increasing the privilege divide between married and unmarried.  We can make contributions to the organizations – the Alternatives to Marriage Project, the Council on Contemporary Families, and others – that are on the front lines, who are regularly called on to debate spokespeople from groups with budgets hundreds of times larger than our own.  

On a regular basis I still answer questions about why I'm not married, and I still argue with unenlightened rental car companies about why we should have to pay more than a married couple for a second driver. But I can also feel things shifting all around me.  I receive my health insurance though the domestic partner policy at Marshall's workplace, and my doctor's office has a "partnered" checkbox on its patient forms. Recently, for our ninth anniversary, we got a card in the mail from my grandmother, which read, "Your commitment and love for each other is all that really counts.  Hoping you keep celebrating to eternity!"   

If the octogenarians get it, the rest of the country can't be far behind.  

To view other essays from "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar, click here.

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