INTRODUCTION
In recent years, marriage has enjoyed something of a comeback in the popular culture. From hit movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding to top-rated dating reality shows like The Bachelor to best-sellers on sexier marriage, popular attention has turned to the pursuit and pleasures of matrimony.
But the revived enthusiasm for marriage is mostly about romantic relationships and lavish weddings. It has little to do with the importance of marriage for children, or the connection between marriage and parenthood. Indeed, though Americans aspire to marriage, they are ever more inclined to see it as an intimate relationship between adults rather than as a necessary social arrangement for rearing children.
To be sure, marriage is not only about children, nor are children essential to marriage. A couple does not have to have children in order to participate in the privileges and obligations of marriage. Yet, throughout the nation’s history and through much of the world today, marriage is first and foremost an institution designed to unite men and women in the shared tasks of child rearing. The possibility or presence of children is the key reason why the state and society treat marriage differently from other intimate partnerships. But in American society today, this institutional role is eroding.
Marriage is undergoing legal, social and cultural changes, and many of these changes are shifting its meaning and purpose away from children and toward adults. Chief among these changes is the weakening connection between marriage as a couple relationship and marriage as a parental partnership. The two used to be joined together. Today, however, the couple relationship is increasingly independent of the procreative and parental partnership. As a consequence, there is a growing split between adults’ and children’s experience of marriage. Though most adults continue to prize marriage and to seek it for themselves, children are less able to count on their parents’ marriage as the secure foundation of their family lives. Indeed, if there is a story to be told about marriage over recent decades, it is not that it is withering away for adults but that it is withering away for children.