{"id":314,"date":"2026-06-04T12:12:35","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T12:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=314"},"modified":"2026-06-04T12:12:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T12:12:35","slug":"the-surprising-liberating-history-of-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":"The Surprising, Liberating History of Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"<section><p><span>A few months <\/span>ago, one of my best friends told me that she and her boyfriend had gotten engaged. <em>Engaged?<\/em> I thought. <em>What for?<\/em> She has two young kids and has never been married; he\u2019s older; they each have their own apartment; she seemed happy with the way things were. \u201cCongratulations!\u201d I said, because he\u2019s a good person, and I love my friend. Then I asked where they were going to live, and she laughed in my face.<\/p><p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=310\">The Death of the Reader<\/a><\/p><p>\u201cOh, we\u2019re not moving in together,\u201d she said. She\u2019d assumed I would have known that. They might do it someday, sure. But for now they can afford to keep paying for two homes, and she\u2019s prioritizing the children\u2019s stability, and everyone\u2019s space and sanity.<\/p><div><section><div><h2>Explore the July 2026 Issue<\/h2><p>Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.<\/p><\/div>View More<\/section><\/div><p>In a way, I was as surprised by my surprise as my friend was. It\u2019s not as if my life is normal. Recently I picked my kids up at their father\u2019s place and one of them ran over and hit me in the face with a big white pillow. When I turned the pillow over, I saw it was printed with a cute photograph of my ex-husband\u2019s girlfriend; someone must have given it to him as a joke\u2014and it was funny. My friends are divorced, separated, married, single mothers by accident, single mothers by choice. And yet the only radical thing I had assumed you could do to a marriage was to open it up and start taking dating-app pics for your spouse. It had honestly never occurred to me that my friend could get married and not cohabit with her husband.<\/p><p>I think Stephanie Coontz would like my friend\u2019s story. For more than 30 years, Coontz has been trying to convince Americans of three things: Our ideas about traditional marriage are holding many people back from getting and staying married; also, our ideas about traditional marriage are incorrect; also, \u201cthere is no such thing as the traditional marriage.\u201d What would happen, she asks in her latest book, <em>For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage<\/em>, if we could get it through our skulls that the male-breadwinner model of a marriage was the norm for only a short period in the 20th century, and that history is full of an \u201castonishing variety\u201d of partnerships and forms of desire? Coontz\u2019s hope is that learning how much marriage has changed over the centuries can liberate more people to imagine different kinds of marriages that might suit them better. Depending on the reader, her argument will scan as either modest or profound: \u201cWe have more latitude in how to organize healthy intimate relationships than most people realize.\u201d<\/p><p>That is not to say she thinks anyone <em>has <\/em>to marry. The first sentence of <em>For Better and Worse<\/em> is: \u201cThis isn\u2019t a book about why you ought to marry.\u201d Nor does she think that marriage is necessarily doomed; it\u2019s simply no longer required when there are plenty of other ways \u201cto achieve economic security, political advancement, social respect, legal protections, and a loving partnership.\u201d This has contributed to a deep pessimism around marriage. But Coontz points out that it is not altogether a bad thing for people to have higher standards for entering a marriage, and for them to know that if they want that marriage to last, they have to keep their partner happy.<\/p><section><div>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-313\" height=\"240\" src=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/222d6c41f9f2bbc88556ea9e7bad7bad.avif\" width=\"158\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<div><div>For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage<\/div><div>By <!-- -->Stephanie Coontz<\/div><\/div><div><div><button>Buy Book<\/button><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section><p>Coontz is concerned, though, that many people who might benefit from marriage can\u2019t see themselves making a go of it. More than a quarter of American 40-year-olds have never been married; that\u2019s a record, and it\u2019s rising. Researchers at the University of Michigan have been asking high-school seniors about marriage since the 1970s. In 1976, 84 percent of girls and 73 percent of boys said they expected to marry, according to one analysis of the data. By 2023, only 64 percent of girls said that, whereas about three-quarters of boys still expected to get married. Have so many young women turned against marriage itself, or only against a persistent 1950s vision of it, one that is no longer viable or desirable?<\/p><p><span>At 81, <\/span>Coontz is now mostly retired from teaching American history, but she remains on the faculty of Evergreen State College and is the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan think tank that dove into the \u201cfamily values\u201d debates of the 1990s. Coontz started going on television to deflate panic about high rates of divorce and single motherhood, and she has been a public figure ever since, promoting her view of marriage as protean rather than brittle. <em>For Better and Worse<\/em> continues that argument, with a swift, myth-dispelling survey of family arrangements down the centuries that focuses on periods when ideas about pair-bonding and marriage shifted in significant ways.<\/p><p>The Stone Age (not her specialty) goes by fast. We learn that women sometimes hunted big game, and that child-rearing was a collective enterprise. Coontz debunks pop evolutionary-psych factoids, such as that many women like stronger, older men because our Paleolithic ancestors needed mates who could support their offspring. In fact, food was hunted and served communally, meaning that a brawny man\u2019s children got the same helpings as the kids of weaklings and dead men. Not so the filii nullius of premodern England and America; the illegitimate \u201cchildren of no one\u201d were brutally neglected, she writes, which helped ensure that young people complied with marriages arranged to maximize their family\u2019s power and property. At one point in between, Jesus entered briefly, preaching that strangers were just as deserving of charity as nuclear-family members\u2014a view that might have made more sense to the early hunter-gatherers than to many of his future followers.<\/p><p>Men obviously dominated in public life for centuries, and in private life too; the history of repressive marital laws is long. And yet, Coontz recounts, the necessities of survival led husbands and wives to share many of their cares and responsibilities. In 17th-century England and colonial America, farmwives and fishwives contributed to the household budget. One account describes women hitting the alehouse on their way back from the market, ending the day with \u201ctheir heads full of wine, and their purses full of coin.\u201d Both husbands and wives supplemented the family\u2019s income through the \u201cputting-out system\u201d (not what you think\u2014at home, they stitched parts for leather shoes, twisted cotton into lace).<\/p><p>But the rise of wage labor in the industrializing 18th century began to drive men and women apart: Husbands were out circulating in the marketplace, and wives were more confined to the home. (Middle-class wives, at any rate; many single and poorer women had to keep showing up for their shifts at the factory spinning machine.) Enter romance. Soon businessmen were swooning for love matches and stroking the silken hair of Victorian ladies too good for this mercenary world. At last, Coontz arrives at the 1950s, with the \u201cmuch-mythologized\u201d male-breadwinner family that, thanks to decades of sitcom reruns and Boomer nostalgia for half-remembered childhoods, has deformed our understanding of the institution ever since.<\/p><p>This speed date with history is Coontz\u2019s seventh book. The book that earned her a wide audience, <em>The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap<\/em> (1992), was more narrowly focused on the white, suburban, one-income families that became the archetype not just of the \u201950s but of marriage itself. The single-earner nuclear families of that time weren\u2019t simply carried along on the broad backs of hardworking fathers, she argued. They were made possible by postwar government policies such as education benefits, job training, and cheap housing loans, and an economy that supported an unprecedented rise in wages. Many Americans benefited\u2014which is one reason the upsides are better remembered than the downsides. More than half of two-parent Black families lived in poverty in the \u201950s, and white resistance to integration sabotaged Black people\u2019s efforts \u201cto participate in the American family dream.\u201d Even those who lived the dream didn\u2019t always enjoy it; as feminists soon made clear, much suffering was caused by stripping women of their wartime jobs and expecting them to be perfect wives and mothers.<\/p><p>In 2015, Coontz\u2019s <em>Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage<\/em>, was cited in the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. The book, published a decade earlier, traced the shift away from a vision of marriage as \u201cfar too vital an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved\u201d and toward the idea of a love match, with the high hopes for lifelong fulfillment that such a love promises; Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on it in his opinion endorsing the right of all to marry for love.<\/p><p>But Coontz didn\u2019t just take the win. She fact-checked the justice. Marriage, Kennedy wrote, had always \u201cpromised nobility and dignity to all persons.\u201d Not so, Coontz said: \u201cFor thousands of years, marriage conferred nobility and dignity almost exclusively on the husband, who had a legal right to appropriate the property and earnings of his wife and children and forcibly impose his will upon them.\u201d Her belief that the decision was right didn\u2019t stop her from noting that both Kennedy\u2019s opinion and John Roberts\u2019s dissent\u2014which argued that marriage had always referred to \u201cthe union of a man and a woman\u201d whose primary purpose was the stable upbringing of children\u2014were \u201cat odds with historical reality.\u201d<\/p><p><span>F<\/span><em><span>or Better and Worse<\/span><\/em>arrives at a moment when the sexes are more polarized\u2014at least politically\u2014than ever. Coontz is trying to address two extremes: those who reject egalitarianism in favor of a romanticized past, and those who reject heterosexual marriage as inherently exploitative. She avoids culture-war zeal, aiming to approach everyone with sympathy. In her earlier work, she went after \u201cunhealthy nostalgia.\u201d Here she acknowledges having been \u201ctoo dismissive\u201d of how fears of losing money and status can encourage fantasies of an idealized past. Psyches are a \u201cjumble of internalized messages and habits\u201d that defy reason. Talk to any couple made up of two good people. Even those who want to change often struggle to do it.<\/p><p>Coontz, incidentally, is married, though she doesn\u2019t talk much about it in her books. Early in her career, she got engaged, but \u201cthe wedding fell through,\u201d she once told <em>The New York Times<\/em>. It then turned out she was pregnant. She was a single parent for a dozen years until she reconnected with, and married, the man who\u2019d been her college sweetheart. The writing of <em>For Better and Worse<\/em> was delayed by the birth of her first grandchild. The book is dedicated to him.<\/p><p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=308\">Is the GOP Starting to Defy Trump?<\/a><\/p><p><em>For Better and Worse<\/em> struck me as particularly generous toward young men. When Coontz started studying the history of the family, she was focused on \u201cwhat women lost when they were denied access to the expanding economic and political rights that White men gained in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.\u201d Now she is \u201cmore aware of what <em>men<\/em> lost\u201d when work pulled them away from the intimacies of family and community life.<\/p><p>In the Victorian era, men wrote love letters expressing their longing and devotion: \u201cI cannot have a separate existence from you, I breathe by you; I live by you.\u201d Before his wedding to Alice Lee in 1880, the 21-year-old future Rough Rider and then-virgin Teddy Roosevelt boasted in his diary: \u201cThank heaven I am absolutely pure. I can tell Alice everything I have ever done.\u201d But this more sensitive masculinity didn\u2019t much help men in a commercial world that rewarded strength and assertiveness, even ruthlessness. Women who depended on men for their livelihood began to prize those traits as well. The idea of the attraction of opposites took hold, and Coontz quotes women worrying in their diaries and letters that potential suitors were \u201ctoo soulful\u201d\u2014not \u201cmasterful\u201d enough. For many, Coontz writes, the ideal man was \u201cpowerful, stoical, and forceful.\u201d<\/p><p>Coontz has sometimes asked students to read those Victorian men\u2019s letters aloud. Most boys can\u2019t handle it: They get sarcastic, \u201cdistancing themselves from the emotion.\u201d Some even blush. What\u2019s wrong with these supposedly enlightened modern guys? One explanation is that we\u2019ve come to think of being a man as the opposite of being a woman. This might seem natural, but Coontz observes that manhood was once counterposed more against childhood than womanhood. Maturity was what turned a boy into a man\u2014the development of self-control and judgment, not aggressiveness. Understanding the tangle of valued traits, she confesses, has made her \u201ca bit more forgiving of \u2018mansplaining\u2019 than some of my friends\u201d\u2014and more optimistic that partnerships between men and women can evolve.<\/p><p>Yet the old idea that men and women should inhabit separate spheres still distorts relationships today, Coontz writes. Couples are especially plagued by the expectation that women be responsible for the \u201cinvisible labor\u201d of managing people\u2019s needs and emotions. And many women are really sick of doing most of the dishes. It\u2019s notable that the major decline in marriage expectations in the survey of high-school seniors occurred only among the girls. It\u2019s also notable that most divorces are initiated by women.<\/p><p>Coontz\u2019s obvious advice\u2014always worth repeating\u2014is that men and women share their burdens. (Plenty of same-sex couples squabble over chores too, of course, but they\u2019re less trapped by gender roles.) \u201cCouples with egalitarian arrangements of household labor and childcare report increases in their levels of love over time,\u201d she says; couples with more traditional divisions of labor report the reverse. Well into the 2010s, magazines were arguing that women were actually turned off when their husbands did more \u201cfeminine\u201d chores, but that was based on a study of people who were interviewed in the early \u201990s. Recent research finds that egalitarian couples report good sex, and more of it. At times, the book gave me the feeling that marriage could be saved in two ways: by women freeing themselves of outdated assumptions, imagining radical new forms of marriage, and having the resources to enact them\u2014or by more men rinsing out their cups more often.<\/p><p>But I did find it helpful to encounter familiar compulsions in their historical context. For instance, do so many women feel pressure to keep a clean house because they\u2019re innately neat? Perhaps, Coontz writes, their need to tidy is \u201ca holdover from the new class aspirations that turned female domesticity into a status symbol during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.\u201d And I was comforted to be reminded that, instead of blaming one another so much\u2014for never marrying, or for marrying the wrong person\u2014we could acknowledge how much we are responding to circumstances beyond our control: financial stresses, a lack of social supports, habits inherited from centuries past. In that sense, history can cut us some slack.<\/p><p>Still, every marriage, however it\u2019s shaped by the marriages before it, is its own mystery, or rather dense with many mysteries: the gestures made and missed, the sink and the compost, the closeness, the glances, the jokes, the bodies, the in-laws, the children, the mornings, the years. At one point in Don DeLillo\u2019s <em>The Names<\/em>, a character who is trying to win back his wife thinks that \u201cmarriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it\u2019s improvised, it\u2019s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It\u2019s too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.\u201d<\/p><p>After going through a divorce, I can\u2019t imagine getting married a second time. If marriage once offered stability, it now seems an extraordinary risk. Coontz compares it (both accurately and unappealingly) to a \u201chigh-stakes real estate deal, with feelings as well as finances\u201d on the line. Also, no one has asked me lately. But according to Coontz, I\u2019m in the minority; two-thirds of people who divorce go on to remarry.<\/p><p>Maybe, for some, the risk is part of the appeal. After my friend came back from the courthouse, I asked her why she did it. \u201cRomance,\u201d she told me, and \u201cfun.\u201d And then she used the word <em>propriety<\/em>, but she made it sound almost dirty\u2014as if monogamous marriage were a hot new kink they\u2019d discovered.<\/p><p>In the end, she said she couldn\u2019t quite explain it. There was just something special \u201cabout merging into someone else.\u201d<\/p><p>A blur.<\/p><p><em><small>* Photo-illustration sources: L. Willinger \/ FPG \/ Getty; SSPL \/ Getty; Sj\u00f6berg Bildbyr\u00e5 \/ ullstein bild \/ Getty; Debrocke \/ Classicstock \/ Getty; Keystone-France \/ Gamma-Keystone \/ Getty; Jena Ardell \/ Getty; William B. Plowman \/ Getty; Boyer \/ Roger Viollet \/ Getty; Joe Raedle \/ Getty; Michael Springer \/ Getty; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Afro American Newspapers \/ Gado \/ Getty; Kirn Vintage Stock \/ Corbis \/ Getty; Corbis \/ Getty; Samantha Vuignier \/ Corbis \/ Getty; Kryssia Campos \/ Getty; Juanmonino \/ Getty; Universal History Archive \/ Universal Images Group \/ Getty; Kirk and Sons of Cowes \/ Getty; Jack Mitchell \/ Getty; Evening Standard \/ Hulton Archive \/ Getty; Hulton-Deutsch Collection \/ Corbis \/ Getty; JHU Sheridan Libraries \/ Gado \/ Getty; Sepia Times \/ Universal Images Group \/ Getty; George Marks \/ Retrofile \/ Getty; Art Media \/ Print Collector \/ Getty; Kirn Vintage Stock \/ Corbis \/ Getty; Buyenlarge \/ Getty; Fine Art Photographic Library \/ Corbis \/ Getty; The Print Collector \/ print collector \/ Getty.<\/small><\/em><\/p><p><em><small>This article appears in the <\/small><\/em><em><small>July 2026<\/small><\/em><em><small> print edition with the headline \u201cThe Surprising, Liberating History of Marriage.\u201d<\/small><\/em><\/p><div><p>\u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting<!-- --> <span>The Atlantic.<\/span><\/p><p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=306\">We\u2019re About to Hear a Lot More About Iowa<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To find a future for the institution, Stephanie Coontz turns to its wildly varying past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Surprising, Liberating History of Marriage - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=314\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Surprising, Liberating History of Marriage - 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