marriage contract

“Marriage Markets” – Marriage Beyond Our Means?

Wedding

The New York Times has a story on Marriage Markets, a new book on the failure of marriage as lower classes find the legal system expensive, punitive, and unhelpful:

Two professors of family law, June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, have written a crisp and cogent account — rich with detail and utterly free of legalese — of America’s failure to invest in its children.

Their book, “Marriage Markets,” asserts that this failure lies not only in public policy but also in the private lives of Americans. Marriage, the time-honored way of fostering the interests of children, no longer works for many Americans. In an economy ruptured by increasing inequality, millions of men and women are deciding that marriage imposes obligations that they cannot meet. Nearly half of all marriages fail; more than 40 percent of American children are born to single mothers.

This is not a romantic book. Professor Carbone, who teaches at the University of Minnesota, and Professor Cahn, of George Washington University, describe picking a marriage partner as a high-stakes negotiation to find the most promising person, both emotionally and financially, for a lifelong commitment. It is a contract that comes with rights and responsibilities defined and enforced by law.

On the top rungs of American life, the upper 30 percent, marriage still serves as well as ever, if not better, the authors note. “The elite do not lead the way out of marriage,” they write. “They are too busy buying back into it.”

The pill long ago took fear out of premarital sex, and this best serves the college-educated by permitting a couple to delay having children while both parties mature and pursue lucrative careers, the book says. When two professionals eventually tie the knot, they cement an advantage for themselves and their children.

As things now stand, the authors say, only the upper tiers of Americans have the money and time to reasonably hope that their offspring will succeed. The situation is the most dire at the bottom of the economic ladder, where marriage “has all but disappeared in the poorest communities” — though not from a lack of respect for it, the authors say. Both men and women see marriage as highly desirable, but a goal far beyond their means, like a second home at the beach.

The future of marriage in America will be decided in the broad middle class, where it is already in doubt, the authors contend. Divorce is more common than it is among the elite, but women stick with men, in or out of marriage, much longer than they do on the lower rungs. Still, marriage for the middle is teetering toward a point where it, too, may dry up and leave weddings as another rite reserved for the elite.

The realities eroding marriage are no secret. Recent decades have brought far better career opportunities for women, except among the very poorest. Most women do not need to endure an abysmal marriage because they see no way to earn a living. And, not surprisingly, a working-class woman with a decent job won’t commit to a man who can’t find or keep a job or, worse, might end up in prison.

…

Half a century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, saw that a lack of work for unskilled men made it hard for black fathers in particular to put bread on the table. So, as he argued in his 1965 report, “The Negro Family,” black families became matriarchies, an unhealthy pattern that he said was left over from slavery. His explanations — though not his factual findings — were denounced as racist and anti-feminist.

Professors Carbone and Cahn applaud the prescience of Moynihan, who later became a United States senator from New York. African-American families, they write, proved to be “the canaries in the mine,” the early victims of a misfortune that has now spread much more widely.

…

[T]hey turn to family law for solutions, but the law has lagged far behind the diverse shapes that American families now assume. The authors contend that the law of marriage — and divorce — serves only the elite, the only couples with enough property to fight over.

On the lowest rungs of society, family law is punitive, typically a fruitless effort to determine the paternity of hapless men who have no money to pay child support. In the middle brackets, neither parent sees much to gain by going to court. Their savings are scant; women fear being stuck with supporting a former husband who has lost his job. Unmarried parents work things out on the mother’s terms, trading access to children for child support.

More on the family, society, SJWs, and modern feminists:

Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
Madmen, Red Pill, and Social Justice Wars
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Stable is Boring? “Psychology Today” Article on Bad Boyfriends
Ross Douthat on Unstable Families and Culture
Ev Psych: Parental Preferences in Partners
Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Modern Feminism: Victim-Based Special Pleading
Stereotype Inaccuracy: False Dichotomies
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Red Pill Women — Female MRAs
Why Did Black Crime Syndicates Fail to Go Legit?
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
Feminism’s Heritage: Freedom vs. Special Protections
Evolve or Die: Survival Value of the Feminine Imperative
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)
Gaming and Science Fiction: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Culture Wars: Peace Through Limited Government

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

Marriages Happening Late, Are Good for You
Monogamy and Relationship Failure; “Love Illuminated”
“Millionaire Matchmaker”
More reasons to find a good partner: lower heart disease!
“Princeton Mom” Susan Patton: “Marry Smart” not so smart
“Blue Valentine”
“All the Taken Men are Best” – why women poach married men….
“Marriage Rate Lowest in a Century”
Making Divorce Hard to Strengthen Marriages?
Student Loan Debt: Problems in Divorce
“The Upside of ‘Marrying Down’”
The High Cost of Divorce
Separate Beds Save Marriages?
Marital Discord Linked to Depression
Marriage Contracts: Give People More Legal Options
Older Couples Avoiding Marriage For Financial Reasons
Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Vox Charts Millennial Marriage Depression
What’s the Matter with Marriage?
Life Is Unfair! The Great Chain of Dysfunction Ends With You.
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
Constant Arguing Can Be Deadly…
“If a fraught relationship significantly shortens your life, are you better off alone?
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
“It’s up there with ‘Men Are From Mars’ and ‘The Road Less Travelled’”
Free Love, eHarmony, Matchmaking Pseudoscience
Love Songs of the Secure Attachment Type
“The New ‘I Do’”
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Mark Manson’s “Six Healthy Relationship Habits”
“The Science of Happily Ever After” – Couples Communications
Free Dating Sites: Which Have Attachment Type Screening?
Dating Pool Danger: Harder to Find Good Partners After 30
Mate-Seeking: The Science of Finding Your Best Partner
Perfect Soulmates or Fellow Travelers: Being Happy Depends on Perspective
No Marriage, Please: Cohabiting Taking Over
“Marriage Markets” – Marriage Beyond Our Means?
Rules for Relationships: Realism and Empathy
Limerence vs. Love
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
When to Break Up or Divorce? The Economic View
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
“Sliding” Into Marriage, Small Weddings Associated with Poor Outcomes
Subconscious Positivity Predicts Marriage Success…
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)

“The New ‘I Do'”

I haven’t been able to read it yet, but the forthcoming book The New “I Do”” looks like it will be a useful exploration of reform ideas for marriage. As I’ve pointed out here and here, the one-size-fits-all, state-legislature-designed marriage laws are not suitable for most of the couples getting married today, and the emotion surrounding the topic makes it hard to address some of those problems with prenups, which most people can’t afford to draft anyway. But if you thought it was expensive to hire two lawyers to work out your prenup, you will find it far more expensive to hire two lawyers for your divorce who may successfully make it an adversarial proceeding.

Co-authors Susan Pease Gadoua and Vicki Larson have a web site for the new book which links to some thoughtful material. From their site:

What [author Susan Pease Gadoua] found so striking was the amount of shame people felt if they did not fit the marital mold. Virtually everyone whose marriage ended said he or she felt like a failure or described the dissolution as a “failed marriage.” But admitting something isn’t working does not equal failure. In fact, it often takes more courage to go separate ways than it does to stay and pretend to the world that everything is fine.

Sadly, too many still think that way. If a marriage ends in divorce, people are all too eager to start pointing fingers at what went wrong — either the couple didn’t understand what commitment means, or they didn’t work hard enough on their marriage, or they were too focused on their own happiness, or they were too selfish or lazy.

It’s still all about blame, shame, and personal failure, instead of looking at the institution of marriage itself and asking, why isn’t it working well for about half of those who enter into it? Actually, it isn’t working well for more people than that; many couples remain married in name only because the wife or husband needs the health benefits, or they own a business and it would lead to financial ruin, or they can’t afford to sell the house, or they live separate lives but decide to stick it out, unhappily, “for the kids.”

… Couples are tweaking the institution to make it work for them even if it looks pretty much like a “traditional” marriage from the outside. Serial monogamy, open marriages, covenant marriages, commuter marriages — these variations-on-a-theme arrangements are already happening. What hasn’t happened, however, is the end of the blaming, shaming, and sense of failure many feel, as well as the need to keep their marital choices in the closet lest they be judged.

Our book hopes to change that. We hope to normalize what is already happening. And, just as important, we want to offer those who may want to marry one day — perhaps even you — or those who would like to transform their marriage new marital road maps that will set them up for success.

The New I Do will get you to think consciously about the kind of marriage you want, not the marriage your parents, relatives, friends and — heaven forbid — celebrities have. If you have seen marriages around you end in separation and divorce, or remain intact — unhappy, sexless and perhaps loveless — and you are questioning whether marriage is still worth it, then this book is for you.

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

View Marriage as a Private Contract?

Dog Wedding – Shutterstock

Marriages happened long before government took notice and wrote laws about them, then set up family courts to deal with them specially. Now the special status of the married is embedded in thousands of well-meaning laws covering taxation, benefits, inheritance, and child custody. Starting 20 years ago, same-sex couples quite reasonably demanded to be included, since most of the trappings of marriage had little to do with procreation (and same-sex couples now head many families with children.) We’ve just seen the public flip to majority support for this fairness position, and not surprisingly legislatures and courts are following.

Reason’s Scott Shackford has a story about this which is worth a read, ending with this thoughtful question:

Well, there’s this: Every time a ruling like this happens, there’s a dozen comments or so about getting the government out of marriage entirely. While I think that’s a great goal for creating an equal playing field in areas like government entitlements and taxation, I still have deep fears our court system won’t know how to deal with legal family conflicts.

When a federal judge in Oklahoma struck down the state’s ban on gay marriage recognition, a conservative state legislator named Mike Turner said he was going to craft a bill eliminating government marriage in Oklahoma entirely. After the quick rush of initial, extremely superficial stories, I attempted to get in touch with him to delve deeper into the proposal to see if he had researched or thought about all the things the state would need to change if it were to end official marriage licensing. Unfortunately, he declined to speak further on the matter, leaving some coverage to characterize his actions as some sort of “cut off his nose to spite his face” act of retribution.

Who knows—they may be right about Turner, but that doesn’t mean other efforts to divorce marriage from the government are about denying people the right to freely associate. From the libertarian perspective, it’s the opposite. The government is the barrier, not the liberator. So a thought exercise: Presume that we can’t just eliminate marriage licenses entirely, as much as we might want to. The good news in these gay marriage rulings is that judges are pointing out that the state doesn’t really have an actual stake in using marriage incentives to further breeding (and isn’t handing marriage licenses out based on the concept anyway). What actually can or should be done next to further reduce government involvement in our family composition choices?

Let’s suppose (as I proposed here) the states opened up marriage as a private contract and truly respected the couple’s intentions on entrance into marriage. The states might retain family courts but allow marriage contracts to invoke binding arbitration (which would be far cheaper and faster, because like all services run by government, cost, speed, and innovation are not valued by court systems, so they are unmanageably slow and expensive for settling small matters.) The state’s family court would be invoked only when the parties had failed to make proper preparations (as is true of Probate Courts, now often circumvented by efficient trusts.) The state could outline the minimum requirements for a contract to qualify as “marriage” for legal purposes (to prevent abusive or sham marriage contracts) and set out several model contracts (which would make adjudicating disputes under them simpler by providing the most common options which would then have a large body of previous decisions to examine.) Many people would thus be able to avoid the costly and expensive lawyers now required in adversarial disputes over custody and property.

This reform would be fairer to everyone and reduce the enormous damage divorce causes, as it is now practiced. Be sure that any state that tried to move toward such a reform would find a large number of entrenched interests (lawyers, politicians) trying to block it.

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

Marriage Contracts: Give People More Legal Options

[from 2004] Marriage throughout history has been a contract between two people to bind themselves, their families, and their property into a contractual arrangement to provide for children, a home, and often support for aged relatives. It’s only in the last few hundred years that longer lives and greater security made marriage for love a common ideal, and in many places it’s still a rarity.

Like many other social arrangements codified in law, long before it occurred to legislatures to address the subject, and before churches consecrated the marriage by ceremony, people were getting married. Ceremonies were more or less elaborate, but the magistrates of every era recognized a body of common law which allowed enforcement of the basic contract.

In the modern era, legislators have codified and regulated marriage, and other family law, to promote majority social goals and express popular prejudice. As with most government efforts, one size is expected to fit all, and the laws are created with a stereotyped model family in mind: once a breadwinner husband, homemaking wife, and 3.5 kids, and now working husband and wife and 2.1 kids. Subsidies to marriage for childrearing are embedded throughout the tax code, Social Security benefits, and social services.

Now in a society where people generally live 40 years longer than they did when marriage evolved, there is a need for a form of coupled association that recognizes that childrearing couples — defined as two people raising children below the age of 21 — are now a minority of couples. While the legal form of marriage for childrearing purposes may deal reasonably well with the contractual arrangements most people intend for that purpose, it is not particularly well tailored for most gay couples, or for that matter many straight couples who don’t intend to have children and don’t want to pledge a lifelong commitment, yet see a need for some mutual obligation. Thus the recognition of common-law marriage rights (where the rights and duties of formal marriage are extended to those who have gradually become married by their actions rather than by ceremony), and the movement to provide domestic partnership for gay couples (and in some states, e.g. France, to less-committed straight couples.)

Ideally every couple would draft a contract of what they want their relationship to entail. Since this process would (under the current legal system) involve custom drafting by attorneys and probably cost $10K or more and weeks of work by all involved, only the wealthy can afford it, and even this cannot award the benefits conferred by legislation to married couples, especially in the Social Security benefits and dual parental status. In situations like this (wide universe of possible contracts, prohibitive legal costs, and varying needs), the solution is often codification of several alternative arrangements — the legislative and executive branches research the problems, come up with several carefully-drafted legal arrangements, codify them in law, and offer a choice between them for those who wish to enter into a contract which will be understood more easily by all parties even if not perfectly suited to each user. The contracts are designed to cover almost all needs, with side arrangements (options) for custom tailoring. We see this in things like insurance, where car insurance is offered in various types and coverages, with optional deductibles, or in real estate, where standard contracts are ruled on often enough to have a body of law covering them.

What would really be ideal for marriage is a similar spectrum of different arrangements, prefab versions of the detailed legal arrangements that wealthier couples often enter into today under prenuptial agreements, which allow easy choice between alternatives which all understand, and which can be enforced via less complex and expensive dispute resolution systems than family courts.

With all that in mind, Gavin Newsom, the new Mayor of San Francisco, directed the City to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. I took the pictures below outside City Hall, where thousands of people came during Valentine’s Day weekend of 2004 to get their marriage licenses. The atmosphere was festive, passing motorists honked their horns in support, and some beautiful couples did their bit to overturn the unfair restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples.

And some interesting bystanders:

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

marriage contract

“Marriage Markets” – Marriage Beyond Our Means?

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“The New ‘I Do'”

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View Marriage as a Private Contract?

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Marriage Contracts: Give People More Legal Options

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