Q&A: Can marriage survive American society today?

In America most marriages end in divorce. Fewer are willing to marry at all. One wonders whether it’s a country that lacks the conditions under which love and romance is possible.

This is often addressed philosophically such that individuals reflect on and think deeply about what it is, say, about the inner lives or “souls” of Americans that seem to be making marriage so difficult.

Less common are examinations of love and romance from the perspective of political economy, perhaps because these intimate dimensions of our lives evade the language the discipline offers and with which it attempts to make sense of the world. However, as gender scholar and psychotherapist Harriet Fraad illustrates, such examinations are key to understanding the material or empirical reasons behind the decline of marriage in America. And whether ultimately it has anything to do with love and romance.

TRT World recently explored this with Fraad, with a particular emphasis on capitalism, culture and the changing ways that men and women relate to one another in America.

Is love possible under American capitalism?

HARRIET FRAAD: Infatuation. Sexual attraction. That's possible. But fewer and fewer people are willing to commit themselves to an intimate relationship, where they get to know someone else and also themselves, while dealing with growing economic hardship in the United States. It’s one of the main reasons marriage is dwindling, as are all social connections in the country more generally. The majority of people in the United States get divorced: 50 percent of first marriages, 67 percent of second marriages and 73 percent of third marriages. 15 percent just separate, which is easier when you don’t have kids or wealth to legally fight over.

If as you say marriage is dwindling can we expect families to remain intact in the United States?

HF: Families are the reproduction of a social and emotional care system – more for children than women themselves. It's one of the reasons why women have been able to desert marriage. They also find companionship and connection through their female friends, their female relatives. It's men who depend on their wives or girlfriends for emotional support. But with women leaving marriages more often – 70 percent of divorces are now initiated by women – men have that much less than they were always used to. That’s a huge change, which also in significant part led to the breakdown of the family in the United States – despite strong pushback from the country’s popular fundamentalist religions.

It used to be for men that a steady job, where you made connections with people with whom you worked, was a basic support. Well, in addition to women leaving them, that support is quickly disappearing; American governments are willing to invest less in the public, including guaranteeing jobs. That's one of the reasons that 97 and a half percent of mass murders are by men. They have gone mad, believing they’re taking back their power with a gun – readily available in America.

It’s well-known that American culture is largely individualistic. Notwithstanding co-operative movements in the United States, such as those involving mutual aid and building community around ideas of care (as opposed to competition), this seems to have translated to Americans having little to no tolerance for having to work through problems together. Some might say the social dynamics of the process are “too stressful”. Do you think Americans view marriage, which often requires working through problems together, the same way?

HF: There's only a certain amount of tension that a couple can maintain. Much of that has traditionally had to do with men expecting women – within the context of an intimate relationship – to provide most of the emotional care, domestic care and childcare, while coordinating social connection – as with friends and relatives – central to our well-being. Now, men are also expecting women to go out and make the kind of wages that will support the flagging male wage. It just doesn't work and is why the majority of American women, for the first time in our history, are single.

Do people need love?

HF: All of us do. But women, more than men, are typically better able to find love through personal relationships, not just romantic ones but with friends. And they sustain love through maintaining such relationships.

The actual need for love starts in our earliest lives, as infants. If we're just fed and diapered and nobody picks us up, looks at and talks to us, we won’t continue to exist. You can die from a disease called “failure to thrive”. The disease results in infants who haven't gotten loving attention. Before the Romanian Revolution, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was the dictator in Romania, did not believe in abortion. Thus, tens if not hundreds of thousands of women had children, who ended up in orphanages. The mothers left them there because they weren’t allowed to live with them. The orphanages diapered and fed the children. But they didn't have the up to five caretakers that are good for them – to hold them, talk to them, press them against their bodies, give them affection. And so the children died, before they even learned to turn over, lift up their heads, walk, anything. They died. They failed to thrive because we need love all our lives. By the same token, I think one of the reasons that the United States is having such a mental health crisis is because we do need to be cared for, to be the centre of someone's affection. And fewer and fewer working class people have that.

Historically it seems that religion in America taught or offered people understandings of love. This often emphasized specific moral obligations men had to the women to whom they were married and vice versa, while strictly prohibiting divorce – a grave “sin”, which people feared being associated with. Arguably this worked in keeping spouses together. All one needs to recall is how few divorces there were in America, say a century ago, and at a time when many more Americans conformed to what was stressed by religion. Do you believe religion has to play some role in loving relationships, for them to survive?

HF: Southern Baptists are one the biggest religious groups in the United States, and they have a mandate that married women should submit to men – by staying at and taking care of the home – and that married men should protect women – by providing for them materially, based on earnings from a job they take outside the home. But marriages that try to conform to this mandate, in today’s America, often can't hold up. They need two income earners so women, including Southern Baptists, have no choice but to find work outside the home too. That’s on top of doing most of the housework already – what Arlie Hochschild's calls the “second shift”.

Also, working class women – whatever their religion – increasingly don't want to marry working class men in America. They know they’ll be expected by these men to do their laundry, cooking, second shift work that centres around satisfying his needs because he believes, reflecting a traditional but sexist view, that as a “husband” he’s entitled to that. The demands of this are further compounded by the fact that in contemporary America the kinship network, such as an extended family where grandparents, neighbours, uncles and aunts help married couples do housework, has broken down under capitalism. With so many Americans struggling to survive themselves today, there’s little time for people, including members of the same family, to spend with one another. That not only increases the amount of housework married couples have to do on their own but undermines the emotional support the kinship network, as a sort of caring community, was better able to offer.

For American men at least it used to be that emotional support, if not from that network, came from a steady job where you socially connected with people on the job, as well as from having a wife. Both sources of support have virtually disappeared in America, where men struggle to find any steady job at all. In the process they become less appealing to women who, understandably, expect them to financially provide their fair share in a marriage, if it’s to survive, but which they can’t reliably do in their position. This makes men feel emasculated and, alarming as it sounds, it’s one of the reasons that 97 and a half percent of mass murders are committed by men in America. They have gone mad and are taking back their “power” with a gun.

It seems that Americans are living in an era where everything, including whether to marry, is negotiable and they are taking less seriously any pressures to conform to ways of life sanctioned by age-old institutions, including the nuclear family. How do you think that might change or affect the way Americans view the kind of care they’ve historically received from that family form?

HF: Americans are looking outside the nuclear family for emotional support, physical support. That’s translating to them forming collectives in the United States where, though not related by blood, people are connecting through shared responsibilities – work, activities and so forth that benefit them all. Sometimes this happens in co-housing, where people – with or without kids – have a big apartment or house and live as a family. Those without kids may volunteer to help raise them, while others might do most of the cooking of meals, shared in these spacious dining rooms.

This is not difficult to model on a larger scale in the United States. But it needs to be generalized and publicized more, presented to people as a viable alternative to the failing and isolated traditional nuclear family.

In the meantime social media apps seem to have become, for many in America, the primary way of meeting people. This includes potential romantic partners and even spouses, through popular dating apps. Some see these apps, especially as AI becomes more sophisticated, as capable of replacing intimacy offline or “in real life” altogether. Can digital technologies offer us the possibility of experiencing love?

HF: No, they can't. It's not a person holding you, looking into your eyes. They’re not affirming you and connecting with you. You’re not the centre of their emotional life. If you have a devoted lover or a devoted husband, then you are each the center of each other's life. And so, yes, you have special importance to that human being. You have love.