The Marriage-Go-Round by Andrew J. Cherlin

Author:Andrew J. Cherlin [Cherlin, Andrew J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77351-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

When the welfare reform law needed to be reauthorized by Congress in the early 2000s, promarriage conservatives proposed that funds be included for promoting marriage. The Bush administration wished to use the funds for a “Healthy Marriage Initiative” to help low-income couples get married and stay married. When the law was finally reauthorized in 2006, it included $150 million per year for promoting marriage.

Although $150 million is relatively modest compared to the total cost of welfare, the proposal generated more controversy per dollar than any other part of the bill. Advocates of promoting marriage stressed that they wished to use the funds to support only marriages that are relatively conflict-free and that they would not support programs that coerced couples to marry or to stay married. States could use the funds to develop high school curricula on the value of marriage, or they could support public advertising campaigns like the one in Baltimore. (Most recently, I saw a bus with the broadside “Married people earn more money.”) But the most discussed type of program is a relationship skills course that engaged or married couples might attend for one or two hours per week for several weeks. This course would endeavor to teach skills such as the ability to listen to a partner, speak clearly and positively, manage anger, and resolve disagreements. Similar programs for middle-class couples seem to have helped them to improve their communication skills and have increased their satisfaction with their relationships. But it is unclear whether these programs can be adapted to help the poor and near-poor. The government agency leading the Healthy Marriage Initiative therefore is sponsoring some large-scale studies to find out.

Yet despite the social scientific studies, the controversy over the marriage promotion provision of the welfare bill was, at heart, a debate over symbolism more than statistics. Should the government state symbolically that marriage is preferred over other family forms, or should it make the symbolic statement that all family forms are equally valued? Such statements are important because they may influence the way people view marriage and family life, even if they never participate in a federally funded marriage enrichment course. That’s what was at stake in the legislative battle over the $150 million annual commitment to marriage promotion. That the promarriage side prevailed suggested the strength of their movement in the mid-2000s.

There were other signs that belief in the superiority of heterosexual marriage remained widespread. In 2006, more than one hundred promarriage legal and family scholars signed a statement opposing some proposed changes in family law that would further weaken the place of marriage. The proposed changes, advocated by a prestigious legal institute, would treat all unmarried couples who meet certain qualifications, such as living together for two or three years, intermingling their finances, or assuming joint responsibility for a child, as if they were married. The opponents of this proposal argued that marriage is not just a legal category to be determined through tests such as length of coresidence; rather, it

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