Why We Get Married, Part 2

Grown-Up Marriage
by Judith Viorst

(Page 2 of 3)

The women of my generation were looking for lifetime, not slice-of-life, companions. We were looking for a strings-and-rings relationship. We wanted to know, for the next fifty years, exactly who our New Year's Eve date would be. We wanted to be not semi, but totally, married.

Indeed, I suspect that my friends and I, had the option been available back then, would have signed on eagerly for the "covenant marriage," which requires premarital and predivorce counseling, as well as — in Louisiana, one of three states that now have covenant marriage — two years apart before a marriage is terminated. The point of the covenant marriage is to make divorce much harder, to intensify the commitment of husband and wife, to give them the opportunity to choose "marriage heavy" over "marriage lite." The point of the covenant marriage is "to lock in forever and throw away the key."

I married, of course, believing that I had chosen marriage heavy, that I had locked in forever and thrown away the key. I certainly never dreamed that I would divorce.

I was still in my twenties when my brief first marriage came to an end in the late 1950s and on my own for the first time in my life. A single woman living in Greenwich Village, I was only just beginning to become acquainted with the dread of loneliness. On her visits from New Jersey, my mother would often reassure me, as she fluffed up my hair and proffered a darker lipstick, "You're a nice-looking girl. You'll get yourself a husband." But I knew that she was worried about my matrimonial future. So was I.

Will I ever get married?
Is the end of my searching in sight?
There are lamps that I'm waiting to light,
Waiting to light them together.

Will I ever get married?
There are secrets my heart yearns to speak
To that someone who seeks what I seek,
And wants to seek it together.

The world is full of short-term lovers
Who don't even know your middle name.
I want to cuddle under the covers
Year after year after year after year
With the same...
With the same man.
Will I ever get married?
Will I ever be somebody's wife?
Making dinner, love, babies, a life,
Making a life together.

Then one night the telephone rang. It was Milton.

My first husband and I had agreed that we would wait to file for divorce until one of us decided to remarry. I decided, in 1960, to remarry. But when I went off to get my divorce, I fell into a panic: Ending a marriage was horrible. I never wanted to go through this again. How could I be sure that I never would? Why was I, a woman who loved the great indoors and obscure poetry readings, planning to marry a man who loved to ski and canoe and go on camping trips? Surely Milton and I were irredeemably incompatible. Surely it was best to break this off now and avoid the grief of a second divorce.

I called him up and broke it off. He told me we needed to talk. And after we finished talking, and hugging and kissing, and going out shopping to buy me a wedding dress, it was back on.

* * *

What is the lesson here? If I had listened to my panicky inner voice instead of listening to Milton, we would not now have been married for forty-two years. But should everyone beset by you're-making-a-really-big-mistake fears simply ignore them?

One young man, a few weeks before he was due to say "I do," had a powerful wish to flee his fiancée. He felt that his marriage was already doomed, but persuaded himself to stay by telling himself that "although there's a lot about her I just don't like, I'm twenty-seven years old and almost all my friends are married, so maybe the problem isn't her but me."

A twenty-four-year-old woman, only a week before her wedding, decided that although her husband-to-be was a man of many fine qualities, he was also a workaholic and undemonstrative and "I didn't think I'd be happy living that way." She wanted to call off the wedding, but her parents gave her Valium and told her that everything would be okay, that she was simply suffering from normal premarital jitters.

"I don't think I love her," Rick told his dad about his bride-to-be. His father quickly replied, "Oh, you'll get over that."

"There's too much we don't agree on," Mary Ellen wailed to her mom, who said, "No, there's not."

And Maggie, who informed her mother and father the day of the wedding that she wasn't good enough to marry Scott and therefore she wouldn't, was informed by her mother and father that she was plenty good enough — and therefore she would. She was also informed it was normal, if you really took marriage seriously, to find yourself with a case of premarital jitters.

That's what Jeffrey tried to tell himself too.

For Jeff had looked at Annabel and decided that, since their engagement, they had been going down two very different paths. He knew in his gut, he said, "that she wasn't the one." But they now owned a dog and a house, and they had a wedding coming up to which three hundred people had been invited, and "the train was in motion. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't stop that train. I was just too much of a coward to try to stop it." Embarrassed at his change of heart, Jeff didn't breathe his secret to a soul. Instead, he kept reassuring himself, "We'll find things to talk about, things to do with each other." Pasting a happy smile on his face, he walked into the church on his wedding day, saying — or maybe praying — "It will work out."

So Jeff and Annabel, Maggie and Scott, and the other couples got married. Then Jeff and Annabel, Maggie and Scott, and all the other couples got divorced.

* * *

Perhaps these jittery people should have bravely postponed their weddings until, with counseling, they had explored their concerns. Indeed, some experts have argued that marrying couples, whether jittery or not, should attend premarital education classes, which teach them how to listen, praise, deal with conflict, and fight respectfully, and which sometimes recommend a compatibility quiz. For those who prefer to skip the quiz, Todd Outcalt's book, Before You Say "I Do," supplies an exhaustive list of questions that couples, prior to marriage, are urged to explore:

Like how many kids do you want? And how important is religion in your life? And what do you call a clean house? And are you in debt? And how close to your folks do you think we should live? And do or don't you like animals? And what big secrets haven't you told me yet? The questions cover hopes and dreams and values and work and sex and money and family and household chores and personal history, although the usefulness of the answers depends on the answerer's honesty and self-awareness. For couples who set a wedding date without ever asking each other the most basic questions, this Q&A may be a revelation. But sometimes almost a decade of knowing each other will still not provide enough information to guarantee a woman and man that their marriage will last.

For marriage, as Ted and Nancy learned, can provide a whole different kind of information.

Ted and Nancy met in their sophomore year of college in southern California. They were living in the same dorm and became close friends. They took classes together, studied together, and hung out a lot together before, in their senior year, falling deeply in love. After graduation they temporarily put their relationship on hold while they each went off "to do stuff on our own," then after two years of separateness, they got back together, moved in together, and lived together for four mostly pretty good years.

"We believed that we loved each other and were meant to be with each other," Nancy told me, although there were some tensions that arose, what with Ted becoming something of a free spirit who couldn't be bothered with paying bills, and Nancy becoming "the stabilizing force, the administrator, and sometimes the nag." Nevertheless, she says, they were very committed to the relationship. "We thought," she said, "we were building a shared life." So when Ted began behaving less free-spiritedly and declared that he wished to be married and have a family, they decided that the time was right to get married. Five months later, in a state of panic and confusion, Ted stunned Nancy by saying he wanted out. He couldn't stay in the marriage, he told her. He needed to be free. He wasn't, he explained, the person he'd claimed he was (and maybe had hoped he could be), a person who wished to be married and have a family.

Nancy, who had known Ted as her friend and classmate and roommate and lover for nine full years, didn't know the confused and panicked Ted who'd become — and did not want to be — her husband. She was astonished, astonished, she said, and then repeated the word again, astonished to discover she didn't know him.

* * *

Couples who think that living together allows them to learn the "truth" about each other may also assume that knowing this truth enables them to make a sounder marriage. But in Should We Live Together? a review by David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of recent research on the subject, the question of whether cohabitation before getting married is helpful to the marriage is (you may be surprised to hear) answered no.

Consider this: Between 1960 and 1997, the number of cohabiting couples — unmarried sexual partners sharing a household — grew from less than half a million to four million. Consider this: More than half of all first marriages today, in contrast to almost none at the start of the twentieth century, are now preceded by cohabitation. And consider this: Almost all the research on the subject finds that marriages preceded by living together have a greater chance of ending in divorce.

If you want a figure on this, it's about 46 percent higher than for marriages not preceded by cohabitation.

Alhough this finding doesn't apply to couples who've already planned to marry and are simply cohabiting briefly before they do, it's a blow to those who believe that living together will help them get to know each other, thus helping them decide if they ought to get married — and inoculating them against getting divorced.

So how come it doesn't?

The most common explanation is that people who choose to live together are less traditional than those who don't, and that the same untraditional outlook that allows them to cohabit allows them to divorce more easily. Studies also find that cohabiting couples, compared to couples who are married, display less of a commitment to the relationship, along with a greater insistence — in matters like money and social life — on individual autonomy. "It is reasonable to speculate," concludes the Should We Live Together? report, "that once this low-commitment, high-autonomy pattern of relating is learned, it becomes hard to unlearn." Add to all this the studies suggesting that living together itself negatively affects the way that partners value the institution of marriage, and we've got some persuasive theories of why the married state may be riskier for those who, before getting married, have first cohabited.

Ian, age thirty-six and married for the second time, offers his thoughts on the subject. "I lived with my first wife for two years before we got married. Although I don't have any religious or ethical objections to living together before marriage, I would now advise against it. The problem is that, once you live together for a significant period of time (say, six months), you... do not have reasonable middle ground or neutral corners if differences arise. You're essentially faced with either getting married or ending the relationship."

He concludes that "if you have doubts about your partner, it is unlikely that living together will clear anything up."

I respect what Ian is saying, and yet there are still, in my view, some good arguments for cohabiting. Even if living together doesn't ensure a successful marriage, it does weed out clearly poisonous relationships. (Indeed, I've known a few parents who've urged their children, "Don't be rash! First live together," hoping they'd see the error of their ways.) It also allows men and women who are too young or not yet ready to be married to become somewhat more responsible and mature. And of course, it enables those who do not wish to be celibate to have regular and safe unmarried sex.

Copyright © 2003 by Judith Viorst

About the Author

In her long and varied career, Judith Viorst has worked as a garment district model, unappreciated secretary, and children's book editor. She has lived in Washington, D.C., since 1960, when she married Milton Viorst, a political writer. (They have achieved the almost-impossible — working in adjoining offices at home and eating three meals a day together for most of their married life.) They have three sons — Anthony and Nick (who are lawyers) and Alexander (who does community-development lending for a bank); three daughters-in-law — Hyla, Marya, and Marla; and six grandchildren — Miranda, Brandeis, Olivia, Nathaniel, Benjamin, and Isaac.