In yesterday’s Times, Stephanie Coontz writes another anti-marriage opinion piece. Coontz always goes for the cool and hip, but leaves the logic behind. Someone at the Times must have said, "hey, let’s distract people from our snoring columnists. Someone call up that kook, Coontz."
Coontz starts off with a history of how the state got into the business of legitimizing marriage. Actually, I found the history quite interesting.
For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a
marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they
had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the
Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.In
1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in
church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and
obligations as a couple married in church: their children were
legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was
subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.Not until the
16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be
performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent
unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.
Government began relying on the marriage license in the 1950s, as a way of distributing social security benefits and health insurance. But Coonz says the marriage license no longer makes sense, because people aren’t getting married anymore.
Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can
keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care
and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists.
But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet
their care-giving commitments.
So, Coontz wants us to do away with this marriage license nonsense. There are so many reasons to have problems with this argument that I don’t even know where to begin.
I’ll let the social conservatives talk about why state sanctioned marriages force feet draggers to get married and that this is good for children and society. Instead, I’ll talk about why the marriage license is good for women.
So, Steve and I get married on a mountain top, by a hippie who got his ministerial license from an ad in Rolling Stone magazine. We have no state license, just a batik print paper from the hippie saying that we’re married. We hang out for few years and have a couple of kids. Then he decides that he wants the corporate life and a wife who shaves her legs. He leaves me in the trailer park with the dirty kids. I need to sue him for child support, but now he says that the marriage wasn’t binding, because the hippie officiant was stoned at the time. I think he’ll have the edge in court.
That marriage license provides women with guarantees for social security, alimony, and child support. Women need these protections, because they are more likely then their spouses to stop work or to take less demanding jobs after the children are born. Women are the most vulnerable to poverty in their older years. A marriage license provides them with certain guarantees that private unions cannot.
It might even be better for women if marriage licenses were written with the details of pre-nup contract. It could provide detailed information about property divisions and proportions of future salaries, if the marriage should dissolve.
Coontz’s proposal to get government out of the marriage business might distract us from the latest Dowd column, but it is still a lousy idea.
UPDATE: A different take on this issue from bean. More from Family Scholars. See blogrunner for everything.
Apt. 11d 
It seems to me that marriage offers definite protections for women, even if they are not as significant protections as they should be. At least it’s something.
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But your hypothetical doesn’t work.
You can sue for child support whether you were married or not. (Which I think ought to change, but that’s a separate issue on which I’m in the miniscule minority.) Marriage isn’t supposed to change child support levels at all.
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Coontz says: “For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.” Coontz is basically correct for the Western Church (Catholics), but she’s way out of line to talk as if the Orthodox didn’t exist. It’s my impression that Eastern theology of marriage says that the priest confers the sacrament of marriage on the couple. In the West, the couple confers the sacrament on each other.
One factor in the move towards bureaucratizing marriage in the West was probably that the old practices were just too open to abuse. Without witnesses, one party could simply deny that the hayloft exchange of vows had ever happened. To this day, Roman Catholic canon law has provisions for being able to contract a marriage if you and another eligible single wind up stranded on a desert island together, or if you live in a community that a priest visits rarely. Marriage is just so essential an institution that it has to be readily accessible under all circumstances. Interestingly, Catholic baptism is similar–although baptism by a priest or deacon is the preferred mode, absolutely anybody can baptize.
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SamChevre,
You’re right about child support, but in Laura’s dirty hippie case, the share of community property that she would receive would be a big factor in her being able to comfortably raise the children.
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Elizabeth Marquadt at familyscholars.org had this to say:
“A guy dies. Two women appear before a judge, wanting to sue for wrongful death. “I was his girlfriend,” one says. “I was his girlfriend too,” the other says. Is it really practical to throw this whole “fair” system into the laps of judges who must decide which women spent more nights with him, had sex with him more often, received more cash from him, cared for him more often when he was sick, or whatever other measures a court would wish to use to determine who has the “right” to be his (What? Apparently wife or spouse is not the word you, Coontz, would use. Beneficiary? Legal representative?)… whatever. Anyway, whatever the determinants are I hope the judge will figure them out fast because in the Coontz system that courtroom that morning is going to be packed with hundreds of other people making the same arguments.”
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Laura, I have to say I’m responding strongly to your thesis. You’re making it out like women are all golddiggers and we need state-sponsored marriage to ensure the legal standing of our golddigging efforts.
Absolutely we need to make sure that people care for their kids regardless of their tie to the kid’s other parent. (I personally believe that’s the whole point of modern marriage.) But we’re living in a society that does not reward caregiving. That’s the real problem. We should work on valuing caregiving, not on making sure a woman who gets a guy to the altar can get all his stuff.
(And BTW I also resent the fact that, in all the examples given here, it’s women who are fighting over the assets of a man who’s either dead or gone. Women own assets too!)
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Goodness, I couldn’t get through the first two sentences without finding something to be cross about, you’ll pardon the word. For five of those 16 centuries he’s keen on, the Orthodox did not equate Catholicism with Christianity, as Coontz does. Grr. And what’s with the blithe assumption that Catholic Europe is the sole relevant reference point? Grr.
On review, pwned by Amy I see. Still. Grr.
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I didn’t read the Coontz column, and I’m not going to (oh, maybe I’ll give in, and do it, but not right now). So I don’t know what points she makes.
I do think, however, that rather than relying on the “common law” ideas about what rights marriage should confer (and conflating it with the marriage sacrament, as bestowed by a religious or other nongovernmental entity), we should have marriage contracts in which people choose what rights they will share as a result of entering the contract. I do believe that spelling out the obligations that marriage confers on each person would be a benefit to the institution.
Laura — your example is a case in point, since marriage shouldn’t change the child support decision at all, because it is an obligation that a father has to his child, not to the child’s mother. The community property question, though would depend on marriage. These obligations should be detailed and understood before the fact, not argued over when death or divorce interferes with the marriage.
Of course, my scheme creates the same problem as wills, and the fact that so many people don’t make them. But, marriage is a proactive decision,so people would have to find a contract in order to get “married”.
bj
PS: My idea of course, is civil union for everyone who wants the civil benefits of marriage (and anyone who wants other benefits, i.e. religious ones, can make whatever bond their church sanctions as well).
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OK, I went and read the Coontz article. Why is it crazy to suggest that adult individuals decide for themselves what obligations they wish to convey to one another?
In my scenario, your mountain top exchange of vows would have no legal value without a piece of paper, and the piece of paper can detail your obligations to one another. I do think women are at a disadvantage in that negotiation, but that’s ’cause women are always disadvantaged.
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I don’t really care what we call it – marriage, a civil union, or a hot fudge sundae. It is very beneficial for women to have a piece of paper that guarantees them certain long term benefits for locking themselves permanently with another person. Those benefits should also be extended to men who assume the child care responsibilities in hetero or gay relationships.
I’m not a romantic. Marriage is more than just about love. It’s an economic contract. It’s not about gold digging, but about protecting oneself against poverty, if a partner strays. For better or worse. The better part is easy. It’s the worse that requires some legal protections.
I would love to know there was a decrease in the poverty rates among women after the introduction the marriage license. My guess is yes.
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There are two things that the marriage contract is enforcing, and I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t be enforced separately and distinctly. In fact, I can see a lot of reasons why they ought to be enforced separately and distinctly.
The first is child support. As other folks have pointed out, even at present, this isn’t tied to marriage exclusively, nor does the fact of a marriage make it more enforceable when either spouse is in the breach. I completely agree that the state should be involved in the enforcement of child support, but I think that should happen whether or not the parents are married. The only contribution that marriage makes to that enforcement is an assumption that when two people are both married and cohabiting, child support is not an issue unless the state can demonstrate active neglect or abuse of children. I’m not even sure that’s a sound argument: there are marriages where parents who have the means to support children living under the same roof don’t do so at the standard that I think is acceptable. But what marriage does in this case is save the government from having so pervasive and extensive an enforcement burden that it couldn’t possibly live up to its responsibilities. The existence of a marriage contract + cohabitation allows the state to pay attention to the status of children within such a household only when there is demonstrable external evidence of neglect or abuse. Actually, this makes me wonder whether there are cases where cohabiting, married partners have initiated child support proceedings against each other for allegedly withholding their expected contribution. Pretty hard to imagine that this could happen without also leading to divorce.
The other thing a marriage contract deals with is commonly held or acquired property. It doesn’t do so in any kind of consistent fashion, hence the large number of lawyers involved in divorce proceedings. Arguably we would be vastly better off if every person who was entering into a sexual/romantic partnership that would entail the sharing of assets signed a contractual agreement that was far more specific than “I do” in governing the splitting of those assets should the partnership dissolve. If you and a friend decided to buy a business together, would you be comfortable just going before a civil authority and saying, “We’re old friends!” and having the authority give you a license that certified you “friendly co-owners”? Most of us, no matter how friendly, would look for a fairly regularized and precise contractual instrument to govern that investment. So why not the same for marriage? Here we’d gain a lot of clarity. If, for example, one spouse agreed to subsidize the education of another spouse in return for a specified share of that spouse’s later earnings should the relationship end–or if a spouse said, “I don’t care to monetize that aspect of our relationship, I’m helping out of love and generosity and hereby forgo any contractual obligations”, overall we’d be better off. Though in practice, many women would probably face a lot of social pressure to be “generous and loving” in this fashion, sure.
That’s all seen from a distance. In practice, marriage means what it means to people, and there are all sorts of reasons to think that it’s a mistake to try and abstractly re-engineer embedded social institutions of this kind for the better. But in many ways, Coontz makes perfectly good sense even in terms of your hypothetical, Laura.
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Haven’t read the column itself or the comments (yet), but isn’t the point that ALL unions would be recognized equally, regardless of whether or not it was “sanctioned” in some legally binding way? So the hippie-hilltop scenario would be JUST as recognized and binding as any other, not less so. (Or maybe I’m just too easily persuaded by anything that will result in fewer wedding invitations and their attendant rituals.)
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If we expect the state to step in and make legal decisions regarding property distribution, then we need to have some document that states that this and that promise has been made and Party A owes this to Party B. What you’re arguing for, Tim, is a marriage license that resembles a business contract. I agree. The trouble is that few people actually spell these things out before they get married.
I actually want the state more involved in the marriage license business, not in terms of deciding who should get one and who shouldn’t, but it should make the financial obligations of both parties more clear.
Maybe the courts have been able to sort out the child support arrangements separately from the marriage issue. But communal property and future earnings are very much tied to marriage issue. Without a marriage license, courts have no evidence that promises have been made.
I admit a weakness for Judge Judy. Women without a marriage license lose every case, while married women have an advantage. She repeatedly chides the unmarried women for not protecting themselves with the marriage license.
BTW, I’m all about extending these benefits to gay, committed couples.
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Haven’t read the column itself or the comments (yet), but isn’t the point that ALL unions would be recognized equally, regardless of whether or not it was “sanctioned” in some legally binding way?
Yep. Laura’s hippie example fails pretty badly, because Koontz quite clearly agrees that the casting off of the hippie wife is a travesty. In fact, it’s sort of the whole premise of her article that the current system which leads to situations just like that is the problem, leaving me to wonder how many of the commenters actually read the piece. I mean, how is it possible to misinterpret this:
A woman married to a man for just nine months gets Social Security survivor’s benefits when he dies. But a woman living for 19 years with a man to whom she isn’t married is left without government support, even if her presence helped him hold down a full-time job and pay Social Security taxes. A newly married wife or husband can take leave from work to care for a spouse, or sue for a partner’s wrongful death. But unmarried couples typically cannot, no matter how long they have pooled their resources and how faithfully they have kept their commitments.
Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists. But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet their care-giving commitments.
so thoroughly?
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Timothy Burke said:
“If, for example, one spouse agreed to subsidize the education of another spouse in return for a specified share of that spouse’s later earnings should the relationship end–or if a spouse said, “I don’t care to monetize that aspect of our relationship, I’m helping out of love and generosity and hereby forgo any contractual obligations”, overall we’d be better off.”
That gets you 5 or 10 years into the relationship, but doesn’t there come a point where the marriage progresses into unexpected, uncharted territory? You can either forget the papers or keep writing up new legal agreements every few years to keep up with changing circumstances. You could wind up in very nasty legal struggles with your spouse, with one or the other of you trying to strongarm the other into an unfair bargain. Ugh.
I think that prenup mania interferes with a basic function of marriage and family, which is to create a small, highly dynamic socialist society, demanding “from each according to his abilities” and giving “to each according to his needs.”
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In general, I think it’s naive to think that spouses’ financial lives can be carefully walled off from each other. If Bob and Suzie are married and have a house and Suzie runs up big gambling debts, Suzie’s half of the house may eventually be foreclosed on and Bob will have to move. No amount of prenups could prevent the situation.
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Without that wedding license, it is very possible to end up with a he said-she said thing in court. In my hypothetical, the former-hippie dude can say that he no longer is a hippie and thus does not recognize that any real obligation was made between himself and the hippie wife. He wasn’t in his right mind at the time.
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Honestly, it’s not any easier to break a contract because “you weren’t in your right mind at the time” than it is to break our current version of marriage.
I also believe in the economic unit Amy defines, where individuals make decisions, together for the benefit of the whole family. I further agree that there’s no way for people to define the details of the economic relationship in a way that accounts for all eventualities, and that to imagine that one could account for every possibility. But those views can be written into a contract as well. Yes, one could end up having battles mid marriage, but not any different from the ones that happen at the end of marriage.
The marriage contract can’t just be a regular contract, because it is going to require things you can’t actually require in a real contract and, we will limit the ways in which people can obligate each other (for example, the state can’t enforce a rule that says that the husband has to take out the garbage every Tuesday).
The comparison here really is to wills, which try to do the same thing with the disposal of property. With wills, we have the probate laws, which determine what happens in the absence of any adequate will, and the will. With wills, as well, people have to change their wills as things get more and more complicated. As with wills, it’s likely that a lot of people will make bad contracts (actually unenforcible ones, or bad bargains). So, the state will still have to have defaults and laws. But, codifying the rules rather than assuming that marriages will not end (and will always remain a working socialist unit) would be a good thing.
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Just to follow up on denise’s comment. Any hetero couple (over a certain age) can easily get a marriage license at city hall. Contracts make things easy for the courts. If you live with a guy for 20 years without a license/contract, then you will have a tough time proving that promises have been made. If I bought a car without a service contract, I would have the same problems. The simple solution for unmarried couples is to get married or go sign some other document with lawyers detailing obligations. Since most people can’t be bothered to legally arrange these matters on their own, the state has to step in to help solve this problem.
I don’t really get what Coontz is proposing. Is saying that the courts should decide what marriage is. I think she’s just transferring that obligation from one governmental body to another.
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I think she’s saying that the government shouldn’t be making the contract, and that people should make it themselves. In a way, that can be interpreted the way you describe, that courts will try to determine what obligations individuals have towards one another. That would be a mess, and I don’t think she means that. Children are a different story; Parents have obligations to their children, and because the children can’t make contracts with their parents before they are born, and even after (they are minors), the state has to get involved in defining a parents obligation to their child (when the normal system of loving the child has broken down). But, the state doesn’t have to get involved in defining the economic obligations between two adults who choose to share their lives; they can define those for themselves. But, I might be misreading Coontz, too. Maybe she does believe that it’s possible for people to share their lives while keeping their economic lives separate.
bj
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How crazy that we have to be guess at Coontz’s alternative proposal. My guess is that she has no alternative.
The state is ultimately going to define marriage/committed relationship. Either it’s going to be the legislature or the divorce courts. The problem with the divorce court scenario is that each judge will define marriage his/her own way, since most couples will never formally document their arrangements. Better to do it in the legislature.
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“most couples will never formally document their arrangements”
Laura, you’ve got that right. Consider how many people die without a will, which is actually a much simpler document than a prenuptial agreement that is intended to cover decades of married life for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. Plus, let’s consider how badly tens of thousands of people have botched their mortgages. I really don’t trust average people to come up with equitable prenups exquisitely tailored to deal with every phase of their future lives in advance, even with lots of expensive legal help–which most people won’t be able to afford anyway.
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Why is the Family Scholars [sic] blog so terrible?
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denise,
It’s mainly a clipping service, highlighting the latest articles on children and family, with minimal commentary. They’ve had a certain amount of turnover over the years–the crew used to post more, and they used to have comments, too. I’m a big fan of Brad Wilcox, who is a newish member of the team there, as well as being the author of the very important book “Soft Patriarchs.” Elizabeth Marquardt wrote “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of children of Divorce” which is on my to-read pile.
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Amy, the view of marriage as creating a new “corporate” or merged economic personhood is fine. But we could much more explicit about that in the process of licensing marriage/union, and describe it contractually, so that people understood what it meant to agree to this arrangement.
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“How crazy that we have to be guess at Coontz’s alternative proposal.”
Cue Brad Delong: Why oh why can’t the most influential newspaper in the country have an op-ed page that isn’t run by idiots?
“Better to do it in the legislature.”
For which I take “better” to mean “Not actually a good idea, but probably least bad among a series of bad alternatives.” Or maybe exposure to the Louisiana and Tennessee legislatures has given men an unnecessarily jaded view of legislatures.
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TB,
Certainly. A little more pre-marital legal education would be a good thing, so that prospective spouses would understand existing law and that if they want something different, they’d better get it on paper. I’m certain, though, that prenups for the masses would be a disaster on the level of adjustable-rate mortgages for the masses, ending with hundreds of weeping victims telling reporters that they didn’t understand the document, and they just signed because they loved him/her soooo much. I am somewhat more sympathetic to prenups for mature people with children and substantial assets, but don’t approve of them for young folks (like myself back in the day) who get married without owning a spoon.
To even things out a bit (especially now that education is often the most important piece of capital in a household), I suggest that we start looking at degrees and job advancements obtained during a marriage as community property, too, since in many cases they were obtained at the expense of family resources, and often involved crushing debt loads or crazy schedules and required the other spouse to dial down their career. This may look like the return of alimony, but I don’t think that would be such a bad thing.
On the whole, I think the direction that Coontz is pointing the debate is socially irresponsible and regressive (we’ve already done the 70s–do we have to go back?). In the past few years, we have been experiencing a stabilization of marriage and family for the middle class, and it’s crazy to mess with that success. A far better goal would be to help non-middle class people learn about the benefits of marriage for them and their children, and to get them on board (perhaps paying for marriage counseling as needed–potentially it could save taxpayers hundreds of dollars for every dollar spent). (Insert obligatory plug for “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.)
Doug,
Re: the legislature, have you seen that parody motivational poster “All of us together are stupider than any one of us separately”? If you want to lose all faith in the democratic process, just go hang out at any large city council for a morning and marvel at how few of the members are there, how little business is transacted, how little attention is paid to members of the public presenting their views (and how many of them are kooks), and how much time is spent greeting troops of Girl Scouts and B-list TV actors. (One of my journalism professors made us go to Los Angeles city council meetings.)
Re: the NYT. Have you seen that recent NYT Style section story on Beltway elites shopping at the Pentagon City Costco?
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Well, I’m usually a fan of Stephanie Coontz – I loved her “The Way We Never Were” and “Marriage, A History” as well as the book she wrote with Peta Henderson, “Women’s Work, Men’s Property.” However, I think she dropped the ball on this one.
Clandestine, behind-the-haystack marriages worked in the days when you usually married the boy or girl next door, the whole village knew you were married and treated you as such even if there was no priest involved, and there wasn’t much property to leave. Also, life expectancy was so short that it was rare to reach adulthood with two living parents, and children were routinely apprenticed out or sent to work as servants (service was not considered demeaning or degrading, it was something everyone did like a rite of passage; even rich people would go to serve the Duke or Duchess of Soandso, or the king or queen, as teenagers).
These days, there’s just too much at stake to leave marriage up to the individual whim. However, I would like to see done as they do in Yurp: make marriage a civil contract only and the religious part is optional. You’d have to be married by your local justice of the peace. However, if you choose, you could THEN have a priest, rabbi, Wiccan priestess, Elvis impersonator or the ghosts of Johnny Cash and June Carter bless your union as you pleased.
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Nobody’s holding a gun to people’s heads and making them book the cathedral for their wedding. Anybody who wants to go justice of the peace can do that today, although it’s true that the civil ceremony (at least from what I recall in Pittsburgh) is surprisingly religious. (Some atheist friends had quite a problem arranging a congenial ceremony, since the civil one wouldn’t do. They later divorced.) The American approach (issuing a marriage license, which can then be activated by a religious functionary) keeps things nicely streamlined, a welcome feature now that multi-day destination extravaganzas have become common. (The European style can make things go on for days.)
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Actually, I suspect the unbureaucratic medieval model was worse for them than it would be for us, because medieval poverty would have been so much more dire. There wouldn’t be much property, but what there was might be a matter of life and death.
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But Amy, we’re not talking about it here, but the “streamlined” approach in the US that conflates the civil union of two people (with the economic rights and obligations that confers) with the religious union of two people (with whatever religious rights and obligations it confers) means that a significant segment of our community cannot avail themselves of the civil and economic rights of being in a partnership.
bj
PS: Perhaps we shouldn’t allow atheists to marry, either, since they apparently get divorced. Was there some reason that tidbit was relevant?
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“Perhaps we shouldn’t allow atheists to marry, either, since they apparently get divorced.”
Oh crap, I’m gonna get divorced? How am I supposed to fit that into my busy schedule?
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bj,
I hesitated about that bit after I posted it–but I think I would have been leaving an important detail out if I skipped it. It required some work, but the couple was able to find someone (I forget exactly how) to do a ceremony to their satisfaction. They also had an individualized bit where they snapped on handcuffs to symbolize the unbreakable nature of their union. The whole thing was ultimately very, very sad, but I think I’ve probably infringed enough on their privacy.
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By the way, there must be some variation in civil wedding vows, because I was just googling “civil wedding vows” and the ones I was turning up on the wedding sites are a lot less theistic than I remember.
Here’s one that turns up a lot:
“Officiant: ‘I, [partner’s name], take you to be my lawfully wedded [husband/wife]. Before these witnesses I vow to love you and care for you as long as both shall live. I take you with all your faults and your strengths as I offer myself to you with my faults and strengths. I will help you when you need help, and I will turn to you when I need help. I choose you as the person with whom I will spend my life.'”
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I was married by a justice of the peace in the state of NY, and I don’t recall anything theistic. We wrote our own vows (pretty vanilla–we basically took the “I Ken take you Wendy…” out and substituted it with promising to love each other, then we did the whole ‘through blah blah blah” stuff. I think. It’s all very vague now. Does this mean I’m getting closer to that inevitable divorce since I can’t remember? Quick! To the videotape!).
We also like to joke that we were married by Tip O’Neill. The JP who married us looked just like him.
I have a question: are there any searchable databases of op-ed pieces? Lexis-Nexis grabs all the newspaper articles too, and Technorati is blog stuff. I just want op-eds, like Bob Herbert’s columns, Mark Steyn’s columns, and Nat Hentoff’s columns all in one place easily searchable by topic. Is that too much to ask for?
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Elizabeth Marquardt wrote “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of children of Divorce” which is on my to-read pile.
Oh, dear. If you know any statistics or survey design, it’s gonna be one hell of a painful read.
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denise,
I don’t, actually, but so far I haven’t noticed anything suspicious. I’m about halfway through, and as I recall she’s working with 1500 phone interviews (results at the back of the book), plus 70 or so in-depth interviews which she uses to illustrate the phone survey results. I don’t know how they conducted the 1500 phone interviews, but so far things seem respectable. Her focus is not on catastrophic situations, but on relatively successful children from “good” divorces, and how the structure of life in a divorced family differs from the structure of life in an intact family. A lot of her points are obvious when you think about it, but you might not. Her book is like a guidebook to the land of divorce as experienced by children, written by a native. Her treatment of her parents seems very charitable, even though as a kid she was bouncing back and forth between an ever-changing series of households, with a kaleidoscope cast of step-parents, step-siblings, half-siblings, etc.
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denise,
I skimmed through just about all the amazon.com reviews of Between Two Worlds last night, and there was a lot of praise, from many adult children of divorce and some therapists. The adult children of divorce said repeatedly that Marqardt was telling their story. The only negative review was by someone who clearly didn’t read the book. I realize that shills are an issue with online ratings, but have no reason to think that is the case here.
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Amy P, here’s a great description of the flaws:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/09/19/poor-methodology-in-anti-divorce-study/
I realize that shills are an issue with online ratings, but have no reason to think that is the case here.
The issue isn’t just “shills”, it’s an issue called self-selection. People who, like Marquardt, are very bitter that their parents divorced are likely to read it and positively review it. People who are bitter that their constantly arguing parents didn’t divorce are unlikely to take much interest.
And most importantly, there tends to be far more awful social science out there than there are statisticially-minded folk who have the free time to do careful review of books from PR firms for Amazon!
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I don’t know how big of an issue those objections are, not being a social scientist. Purely anecdotally, it seems to take a dumped spouse about a year to stop wallowing in despair, and another 2-4 years before they stop unloading all their grievances against their ex to anyone who will listen, monopolizing and poisoning every extended family gathering they attend. 3-5 years is an eternity for a young child to have a parent who is totally turned in on themselves, hashing over all the past and current rights and wrongs of the failed relationship, not to mention financially struggling. Then there’s the question of the relationship with the newly unavailable parent, who used to be there all the time and now isn’t, who forgets birthdays, sends clothes several sizes too small, and perhaps doesn’t want to help pay for college. I realize that most of these items are features of the “bad” divorce rather than the “good” divorce, but frankly I’ve never witnessed a “good” divorce.
For the record, Marquardt thinks that 1/3 of divorces are good for kids (that’s the ones that end high-conflict marriages), and the remaining 2/3 are bad for kids.
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