“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family,” Justice Anthony Kennedy rightly argued in his majority opinion in the Obergefell v. Hodges case. Even today, when marriage is less likely to guide our lives, relationships and families, it’s still the case that marriage is without peer when it comes to calling forth the best in our relational lives.
There are outliers to be sure — the occasional cohabiting couple, the unusually devoted friend — who embody the relational ideals articulated by Kennedy in their own unique and powerful ways. But, on average, no other relationship between two people compares to marriage when it comes to embodying our highest relational ideals. Married couples are significantly more likely to share their bodies (only with one another), their money (in joint checking accounts) and their very lives (until death do them part), compared to cohabiting and dating couples. Not surprisingly, married Americans enjoy markedly happier relationships than do their fellow citizens in other types of other relationships.
Why does marriage still matter? Thinking about the entry into a relationship is suggestive. When you hook up, date, or cohabit with someone, you typically don’t have friends and family assembled to watch you begin the relationship, honor your relationship and signal their willingness to help you on the road ahead. Marriage, by contrast, is marked by a public, dramatic expression of commitment that functions to make each spouse underline their commitment to one another, to foster needed support from friends and family on behalf of the relationship and to recognize their relationship in the eyes of the state. Likewise, cultural expectations of fidelity, sacrifice and commitment remain more tightly bound to marriage than to other types of relationships. All this, of course, is the flip side to the social fact that other relationships provide more freedom and flexibility to the adults involved.
This is partly why families formed by marriage are more likely to go the distance than families formed outside of marriage. Children born to married families are much more likely to see their parents stick together, compared to children born to cohabiting couples.
The bottom line: Marriage is much more than a piece of paper. Even today, when less than half of adults are married, as Justice Kennedy noted, marriage remains the gold standard for “love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family” in America.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1TglumY
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