American Marriage in Transition Essay

All it took was one google search for marital statistics to prove me wrong. According to a 2016 publication by the ABS, marriage rates have been on a high compared to the mid and late 1900’s. The very play that made me question the future of marriage was a pioneering play of the 1950’s by Ray Lawler, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll- a tale about unconventional relationships that don’t stand the test of time.

At this time, marriage was still somewhat based on the economic standing of one’s partner. Marriage was viewed by some as “a means of increasing one’s credit and one’s fortune and of insuring one’s success in this world” (Zeldin 288). However, marrying for love became much more important. Prior to the 1800s, couples were typically much farther apart in age, with the husband being much older than the wife. However, after the increase in marriages of love, couples were nearly the same age. Love and attraction eventually became the primary

The book has a section entitled, “Marriage is traditional” and in that particular section it mentioned about how “marriage has changed over time.” When examined current day marriage trends show that people are looking for partnership or soul mates, not for the most traditional reasons of the past. The idea that one person is supposed to be with one person for the rest of their life is no longer relevant. It is possible to have many happy years with one person, but that does not mean that these people will die together. People can have a falling out. Situations change—people do grow. If people stayed stagnant their whole lives, where would society be? With the way

In the 1950s, almost everyone would get married right out of high school. If you didn’t get married, society thought there was something wrong with you, that made the other person not want to be with you. There were very few people that lived together that had kids but weren’t married. Living together, without being married, was frowned on back then; mostly because of religious beliefs. Churches frowned on divorce also. They believed that

in divorce. There is a lot of stress on all the people involved. The man has

In Andrew J. Cherlin’s essay “American Marriage In Transition”, he discusses how marriage in America is evolving from the universal marriage. Cherlin’s definition of the universal marriage in his essay is the man is the breadwinner of the household and the woman is the homemaker. In the 20th century according to Cherlin, the meaning of marriage has been altered such as the changing division of labor, childbearing outside of marriage, cohabitation, gay marriage and the result of long- term cultural and material trends (1154). During the first transition of marriage, Cherlin discusses how in America, Europe, and Canada the only socially accepted way to have sexual relations with a person and to have children is to be married (1154). The second change in marriage occurred in 2000, where the median age of marriage in the United States for men is 27 and women is 25 (1155). Many young adults stayed single during this time and focused on their education and starting their careers. During the second change, the role of law increasingly changed, especially in the role of law in divorce (1155). It is proven in today’s research marriage has a different definition than what it did back in the 1950’s. Today marriage can be defined as getting married to the same gender or getting remarried to someone who already has kids. The roles in a marriage are evolving to be a little more flexible and negotiable. However, women still do a lot of the basic household chores and taking care of the

Next, many women were under the age of nineteen got married in the 1950s and started their families with their husband (PBS). Women that went to college in the 1950s did not have a college degree because they potentially had to look for husband or else was in danger of being an old maid if they were not married. (PBS). It is different today because women can get married in the United States at any age and not be part of a social norm that happened in the 1950s. Partners that marry young in their early 20s today have a higher chance for divorce than partners who marry after the age of 25. (Pearlman pg. 203). According to Amato and Rogers (1997) says reasons that young married couples have problems in their marriage is because of infidelity, jealously, lack of maturity, and financial problems (Pearlman pg. 204). People also marry young because of the wrong reasons in today’s society For example, this wife was married to her husband because both

Marrying someone is a big decision and a life choice almost everyone must make. It is the most beautiful relationship anyone could ask for. One thing to never do is make this life decision with someone that you are not happy with. In the article “What if Marriage is Bad for Us?” Laurie Essig and Lynn Owens describe the ways marriage affects us negatively. In contrast, I believe that marriage brings positive influence in our lives. If marriage was bad for someone, would it make them unhappy? Will it make someone think different on how they view the person they married? Maybe even cause an emotional state that brings loneliness or sadness?

The eighties and nineties were a time when everyone was arguing over what a family really was. Erera states "Voices on the right blames changes in the family for a wide range of social problems, while voices on the left look to the family to provide the basis for a more communitarian society" (Erera 356). People were starting to blame the increase of family diversity to almost anything they could. From

In my article that I have chosen, the CBS News hosted Dr. Strohschein Lisa, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta in Canada for a talk show. She talked about modern marriage saying that it never is what it used to be. According to Dr. Strohschein, the concept of love is a complex thing to study, since the term is that there are no real metrics to quantify it (Williamson, 2013). Strohschein says that based on her numerous research studies on why individuals get married, and how the dynamics of love in marriages work, one can conclude that marriage has evolved.

When we are young we play house and we play doctor, we pretend we are husbands and wives to the kids we play with. Marriage is imbedded into our minds at a young age and we value marriage as we get older. We see examples of marriages through personal experience, the TV, and through the media, but how much has marriage changed now compared to the 1950’s? The idea of marriage has been altered and improved since the 1950’s because of feminism, views about individualism, and views of same-sex marriage.

Was anyone aware that forty to fifty percent or more of marriages will end in divorce (“Marriage and Divorce”)? It could be said that one of the largest contributing factors to that is how everyone does not really know what marriage is anymore. The entire Western Civilization is spending so much time trying to figure out what marriage means. They are letting their own marriages crumble. Is a marriage made to be between a man and a woman, or does a marriage really boil down to some form of gender roles? One way to try and decipher this mystery would be to look for the definition of the word itself. Marriage

Marriage has increased in popularity, reaching a peak in 1971. Since then there has been a significant decline in the number of marriages, from 459000 in 1971 to 250000 in 2001.

Today, the idea of marriage conjures images of bashful brides beautifully draped in all white, of grandiose flower arrangements climbing towards the ceiling, of romance personified. As an institution in this modern world, marriage represents the apex of romantic love, with an entire industry of magazines, movies, and television shows devoted to perpetuating marriage as an idealized symbol of the ultimate love between two people. Contrarily, as a sociological institution, marriage comes from much more clinical and impersonal origins, contrasting with the passion surrounding modern understandings of the institution. Notably, french anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss theorizes that the institution of marriage emerged from a need to form alliances between groups, with women functioning as the property exchanged so that such alliances could be solidified (Levi-Strauss).

In the generation where my grandparents came from, marriages were purely arranged by the elderly. Mothers or aunts usually selected a marriage partner for their sons. My grandparents got married when both of them were very