Marriage, divorce, age and class

This recent National Review article offers some pretty good news about recent divorce trends:

Divorce rates skyrocketed in the 1970s and then stabilized in the 1980s. They have receded somewhat over the past 30 years. Today demographers estimate that about 40 percent of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages will end in divorce. 

However, the authors, Alan J. Hawkins and Betsy Vandenberghe, offer a couple of caveats to this hopeful trend.

The first is that young adults, even though they didn't personally live through the 1970s and 80s, are haunted by the prospect of divorce - and it may be making them reluctant to marry:

[Divorce] rates remain high enough that the specter of divorce still hovers in the public consciousness. The divorce phantom especially affects younger men and women, many of whom lived through their parents’ break-ups ... while divorce angst and its accompanying postponement of marriage paradoxically contributes to today’s lower divorce rates, it doesn’t keep young adults from romantic relationships. Instead, viewing marriage as fragile and divorce as a common and random accident waiting to happen, younger Americans, a recent study found, were more likely to remain unmarried and cohabit, a scenario that researchers have linked to increased odds of a future divorce. For younger adults, high expectations of divorce significantly decrease their odds of being married ...

The second is that the reduction in divorce rates apparently hasn't been enjoyed in equal measure by all social classes:

The disadvantaged, the poor, and the less educated apparently never got the memo — their divorce rates have been climbing and are now well north of half. Meanwhile, those in the upper echelons gaze down, as Atlantic writer George Packer puts it, on the “dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates — and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling,” pledging to stay married and give their children a stable home to boost their life chances.

The frequency of divorce is not, of course, the only marker that separates the groups on either side of the education/income chasm in American society: such factors as substance abuse and addition rate, suicide rate, life expectancy, single-parent households, also are differentiators. Surely, marriage and divorce are related in some way to these poor outcomes, but undoubtedly the relationships are complex and not easy to generalize.

Why the class difference?  Northwestern University psychology and management professor Eli J Finkel looks at three possible explanations in an article from earlier this year in The Atlantic.  He was not able to find much evidence for the first two: that poorer, less-educated Americans don't value marriage as highly; or that they have a different ideal of marriage than their wealthier, better-educated neighbors.  On the contrary, it seems that respect for the institution of marriage, and the culture's ideal of marriage, are pretty consistent across income and education classes: that marriage should be a vehicle for love, self-expression and personal growth.

What Finkel does find evidence for is a third hypothesis:

The third explanation is that building and sustaining a marriage that meets these lofty aspirations typically requires substantial investments of time, attention, patience, and responsiveness, investments that are harder for poorer, less-educated Americans to make. When life happens—when the car breaks down or a ligament snaps—they are at greater risk for unemployment, eviction, and destitution. They tend to have less control over their schedules and less money to pay a babysitter, so they may struggle to get regular time alone with their spouse. When they find such time, they are more likely to arrive to the conversation feeling emotionally depleted from other stressors, and the topics of discussion—how to stretch the money this month, how to wrangle child care with a demanding work schedule—are often thornier. The evidence is generally supportive of this third explanation: a major reason why the marriages of poorer, less-educated Americans are struggling is that economic realities make it difficult to live up to the new cultural ideal. This struggle is leading many to opt out of marriage altogether and, for those who opt in, to make the path to marital success more challenging.

How should the church respond pastorally to these differences?  Perhaps the beginning of wisdom for the church is to recognize those differences: that getting married and staying married is easier for some people than others; and for those for whom it's harder, perhaps the church should be willing to expend additional effort and resources to help.  This would be an untraditional approach for the church, whose traditional teachings on marriage and divorce haven't recognized differences in income, education or social classes.  It may be that the ideal that the church has presented during our lifetimes is considerably easier for some of us to attain than others.

But that one-size-fits-all approach may be changing - or it may begin to change of Pope Francis has his way.  Earlier in this decade, Francis convened a synod on marriage, out of which came his ground-breaking and, unfortunately, controversial document Amoris Laetitia.  Francis, following the synod's lead, eschews broad, overly simple, one-size-fits-all church policies, especially as it regards those who are divorced and remarried (into what the church would consider "irregular marriages").  Without renouncing the church's traditional teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, Francis urges the church to recognize that every marriage and divorce has its own story, and the level of culpability for a failed marriage can vary significantly, not only from one marriage to another, but from one spouse to another.  Francis urges pastors and other public ministers of the church to accompany those who seek to maintain discipleship in the church while in 'irregular' situations.  He urges those in ministry to listen carefully, to propose church teaching with love, and to strive to recognize the complexity of marriage and divorce situations, including the long list of possible mitigating circumstances.  He also recognizes that there may be mitigating circumstances that argue against a uniform application of church discipline, and urges those in ministry to respect the primacy of conscience in discerning the way forward.

One can only hope that, as academic research and pastoral reflection continues to shed light on why some marriages apparently succeed better than others, the church will seek for ways to incorporate those lessons into its teachings and practices.