The Myth of Marriage

Published in

Let’s Get Intimate

6 min readMar 13, 2020

A quick guide to the lesser-known history of marriage—gender roles and common misconceptions that redefine the meaning of “traditional.”

“Marriage today can be a really rewarding experience precisely because it’s no longer a mandatory experience and you can live quite well without it — that’s the interesting, fun paradox.”

In this week’s conversation with Stephanie Coontz, we discuss the history of marriage, its social and political significance, and the changing paradigm in the modern world. We learn about the factors surrounding marital and sexual satisfaction, the importance of egalitarianism, and the lessons to be learned from single people and same-sex couples.

Lastly, we speak to the importance of cultivating a sense of community and trust through casual connections and small interactions — particularly in today’s perpetually disconnected world — and the ways in which putting more energy into interactions with friends, coworkers, and even strangers can actually help strengthen our romantic partnerships.

All About the In-Laws

Forget about love and romance. Stephanie explains how the concept of marriage was originally created as a way to broaden your familial network and social power. As an example, she references an old Anglo-Saxon custom of marrying off a woman to an enemy tribe in order to keep the peace between two groups. And in stratified societies, marriage has always been a vehicle of social mobility.

“It was hard to find an unmarried dead man.”

Today, People Complain About Being Ghosted… But Pople Used To Actually Fight Over Marrying A Ghost.

The desire to secure shared resources through marriage used to be so extreme that it led to the practice of “ghost marriages.” Records of ghost marriages date back to the Han dynasty in 200 AD, with the most common arrangement being two families marrying off their dead children in order to unite the families and officially become in-laws. In other cases, financially independent women would choose to marry the name or spirit of a deceased man in order to maintain her autonomy, while simultaneously appeasing her family and gaining the respectable title of “wife.” In fact, women used to fight over this opportunity, so as not to have to give up their own life and freedom. As Stephanie shares in her book, Marriage, A History — it was extremely difficult to find an unmarried dead man.

“Focusing on strengthening your relationship with other people will actually strengthen the relationship with your partner.”

Focus On Friends & Co.

Again and again, our guests on the show state the importance of cultivating meaningful friendships, as well as informal interactions with strangers, in order to increase your level of happiness. Asking your romantic partner to fill all your social needs (or 100% of any type of need) is an incredibly tall (read: impossible) order, and it will more likely lead to frustration within the relationship. In fact, nurturing relationships with other people — and letting them help to fulfill some of your needs — will actively help strengthen the partnership. Stephanie even jokes in a recent New York Times article that couples could benefit from taking a page out of the single person’s handbook.

“When people tell me that we expect too much of our partner, I say no, we expect too little of our society, our community, and our friendship networks.”

As it turns out, this also goes for spending time with other people as a couple. In one experiment, researchers assigned some couples to spend time by themselves and have deeply personal conversations, while others were set up with a couple they had never met and told to initiate similar conversations. Afterward, all the couples reported greater satisfaction with their relationship, but couples who had been on the “double date” reported feeling more romantic passion toward each other than those who had engaged only with each other.

“One of the best ways to continue to choose your partner is to continue to choose others as well, in the sense that you choose to socialize with other people, to have new experiences, to learn new things, to bring home new things to each other.”

Marriage: A Continuous Choice

Marriage is a daily choice — a choice to stay committed to the growth and evolution of your partner as an individual and your partnership as a whole. Stephanie emphasizes the importance of fostering relationships and seeking out experiences outside of the actual partnership in order to keep a romantic relationship alive. Again and again, studies have proven that the happiest couples are those who have robust and meaningful social networks.

“One of our best opportunities, but our biggest challenge, is that for the first time ever we have decided that marriage is not only something that everyone has a right to do — but also the option not to do.”

Gendered Division of Labor in Marriages

Marriage used to be one of the most powerful business tools there were. If you were from a baker and married another person from a baker — your chances for success were huge. It used to be more like looking for a co-founder than the partnership we think of today. No wonder that today they say that finding a co-founder is like getting married, no? Much more than they even realize.

Most societies have had some gendered division of labor, originally born out of practicality. However, while men perhaps used to go hunt for game, the women might then be the ones to cure the meat and take it to sell in the markets. Stephanie references hunter-gatherer societies, where women were largely tasked with gathering — an activity that enabled women to watch over the children, as opposed to hunting. But studies also show that this division of labor might also be related to differences in the memory processing mechanisms of women vs. men. Other research also shows that some mental or memory processing-related skills, such as the fact that women tend to be better at multitasking, could have also been learned over time as a result of the division of labor.

A very noteworthy detail is that, back then, it was the actual division of labor that was more important than the gender roles themselves. In other words, the fact that a certain traditional “gender role” was accounted for within the partnership was actually much more important than the biological sex of the person carrying it out. For example, same-sex marriages were not a big deal if one of the partners wanted to take on the tasks of the opposite gender role.

However, despite the fact that marriage served as means to an end for resources and business advantages for a long time, as Judeo-Christian beliefs became more widespread marriage instead began to be viewed instead as a means to procreation — and, as a result, same-sex marriages slowly became more and more taboo.

“There are so many illusions about what a ‘traditional’ marriage is.”

More Equality Equals More Satisfaction

Back in 1992, studies found that couples who had very traditional ideas of gender roles and division of labor reported the highest levels of marital and sexual satisfaction, higher than couples who had more egalitarian views on labor division. However, for marriages since 1992, the complete opposite has been found to be true.

“Couples who share tasks and view one another as equals report the highest levels of marital and sexual satisfaction.”

A Note on Recognizing — and Unlearning — Our Own Social Conditioning

“I personally find that knowing the history and the social context of issues I’ve had with my husband often helps me step back from it and de-personalize it. It makes it something we can discuss as a symptom of larger things that are happening to everyone.”