University of Maryland economics professor Melissa Kearney’s excellent book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling has sparked enough pundit pontificating that Politico recently hosted a Zoom discussion with four “marriage experts” to discuss “Why is the Pundit Class Suddenly So Marriage-Obsessed?“
Do read the whole thing, but I was most taken with the fact that other than some references to “same-sex” couples, the word “sex” is never mentioned. Considering that a large part of marriage consists of regulating who gets to have sex with whom, I found the absence telling.
People’s Policy Project President Matt Bruenig, for example, downplayed the importance of marriage, arguing, “Some marriages can increase stability for children. Some marriages can reduce stability for children. It depends on the particular couple, and what problems they may or may not have. … Seventy-eight percent of kids are in cohabiting families. The real question from a policy perspective is: How many of those 22 percent of other kids would really be better off if their particular parents were married?”
And it is true: No two marriages are the same, and some marriages are better than others. But Breunig makes a huge mistake in conflating cohabitation with marriage. Cohabitation is simply a far less stable institution than marriage, even when children are involved.
Half of children born to cohabiting parents see their parents’ relationship end by their 3rd birthday, compared to just 10% of married parents. Fast forward to age 12 and two-thirds of cohabiting parents have separated, compared to just 25% of married parents.
The problem with cohabitation is that couples often slide into the situation without ever having a real conversation about what they are doing and why. As a result, there is often a large gap in why each partner in a cohabiting couple moved in together.
One study of working- and middle-class cohabiting couples in the Midwest found that while both men and women viewed cohabitation as just a temporary stage to gauge whether they were truly compatible with their partner, women were much more likely to worry that cohabitation decreased their bargaining power in the relationship, thus delaying marriage. The ultimate goal of cohabitation for most women is marriage, while most men didn’t see the link.
The men interviewed for the study were four times more likely to name sex as their primary motivation for cohabitation, and the notion that cohabitation is more sexually satisfying than dating was emphasized far more by men. “I think one of the reasons that people do want to move in together is because they have, you know, sex, and I think that is the driving force behind a lot of this,” one male participant eloquently explained.
Yes, sex has long been a driving force for human behavior.
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As University of Virginia sociology professor Brad Wilcox notes in the discussion, there is a large body of research showing that married men work harder and earn more money than their single and cohabiting counterparts. One such study of twin men found that married twins made 26% more money than their unmarried brothers.
Everyone, even a tired parent, has sexual desires. The question is, in what environment do we want parents trying to meet those desires? Do we want children raised in a stable home with married parents? Or do we want children exposed to a parade of uncommitted lovers? Considering that unrelated adult men living in the home are the No. 1 threat to the safety of children, marriage is clearly the better answer.