It's been a rough couple of weeks for marriage. First, Sandra Tsing Loh came out swinging against the institution in the Atlantic (and we discussed it ad nauseam), and simultaneously Mark Sanford and John Ensign and the Gosselins paraded their broken relationships in front of the nation. In Time, Caitlin Flanagan takes up for long-lasting unions in an essay called "Why Marriage Matters." Flanagan's defense of marriage can be boiled down to: The reasons to get married are to raise children and not die alone.

And she doesn't mean "dying alone" as in your husband or wife leaving you or kicking the bucket first, she means "dying alone" as in dying without someone to wheel you to the E.R. on New Year's Eve. She implies that young folks today will leave their elderly parents to be eaten by housecats because they were the products of divorce: "[T]he current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives—that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old."

But, the thing that all these polemics for and against marriage seem to miss when they speak in extremes and use cartoon examples (Jon and Kate; Tsing Loh's sexless, miserable friends) is the quiet joy of sharing a life with someone. They miss the mystery implicit in a bond between only two people. Flanagan touches on it, almost, when she talks about what's shared between Barack and Michelle Obama, but she uses their example to show how important sacrifice is in a lasting relationship.

I don't expect my marriage to be perfect, or to be without sacrifice on both our parts, but you married Double Xers out there: Isn't marriage about much more than just baby making and providing for old age?

Tags: caitlin flanagan, divorce, John Ensign, jon and kate plus 8, mark sanford, marriage, sandra tsing loh

Jessica, my husband and I have been married for 15 years. Last weekend, we drove from Maryland to New Jersey and during the many hours of crawling in traffic we wrote a rap song together about the Delaware Toll Plaza. We stay up too late talking to each other. We hold hands at the movies. Since we're in our fifties, sure we've talked about who's going to get to pull each other's plug—but eventually being able to do this honor is not why we're together. So do not despair that marriage is an enterprise devoted to raising children, fighting over litterbox scooping duties, and holding the horror of fidelity over each other's heads.

There are long-time married couples who still genuinely enjoy each other's company and would be bereft without their spouse. I say this as someone who grew up in a home where my parents' marriage required the police to be called in. So finding marriage to be an oasis has been one of life's sweet surprises.

Tags: caitlin flanagan, divorce, marriage

A guest post from Linda Hirshman:

With a cover story by working mother scourge Caitlin Flanagan, next week’s Time takes the occasion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that “Marriage Matters.”

Why does marriage matter? Not, of course, because of the harm to the deer-in-the-headlights brigade—Silda Wall Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, etc. That would put Flanagan on the side of the adult females.

Marriage matters, because single parent families are bad for children, the only people who count. “Drastically” bad: “on every single significant outcome ... children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households ... If you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.”

OK, maybe poor people, more often single than their critics from the elite Flanagan class, have worse outcomes, but aren’t those problems more about, say, poverty than single parent families? And in fact sociologists have been looking for reliable data that sorts that out since the invention of sociology in the nineteenth century and as recently as 2005.

But instead of looking at the recent work, Flanagan gives us her usual brew of autobiography (my parents’ fifty-year marriage, my husband’s caretaking), outmoded studies, and interviews with experts from right wing foundations such as David Blankenhorn, President of the Institute for American Values (and a loud spokesman against marriage for same sex people), and Heritage’s Robert Rector.

Unbeknownst to Flanagan, in 2005, the centrist Brookings Institution published “Marriage and Child Well-Being,” which included a report from Penn State’s Paul R. Amato on “The Impact of Family Formation Change on the Next Generation.” Looking at a decade’s work, Amato reported “the results of individual studies vary considerably: Some suggest serious negative effects of divorce, others suggest modest effects, and yet others suggest no effects.” When Amato ran his own numbers, he concluded for example, that “if the share of adolescents living in two parent families returned to its 1970 level, it would have ... a relatively small effect on the share of children experiencing these problems. In general, these findings, which are likely to disappoint some readers, are consistent with a broad, sociological understanding of human behavior."

Broad sociological understanding or Flanagan’s autobiography, take your pick. Most children are raised by women. Given the state of marriage, most 21st-century American children are going to spend some time with single mothers. Everything else being equal, probably two parents are “modestly,” as Amato says, better. But the last thing Time should be doing is running another unsubstantiated, apocalyptic cover on the awful consequences of most American women’s fates. Remember Newsweek’s “You’re more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after the age of thirty-five?” Decades and infinite cultural damage later, they had to take it back. With the Internet, Time could just take it down.

Tags: caitlin flanagan, marriage

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Jess, I can’t possibly say it better than Emily just did, but I can say this: All the naval-gazing we’ve witnessed in recent weeks—about loveless marriage and companionate marriages and coldly calculated political marriages—is happening in mad, crude stereotypes. From Michael Wolff’s hilarious rant against cold, emasculating bitch wives, to Sandra Tsing Loh’s tedious metro-sexual husbands, the discussion always plays out with all the subtlety of the Mommy Wars. This is how we talk about important things—by painting the other side as a Flintstones character.

I found myself liking the Caitlin Flanigan piece. I liked it despite her overheated warning about our how our kids will collude to set us out on ice floes some day, because we have modeled only narcissism and selfishness. I liked it because she’s right, we are narcissistic and selfish. We really do think that our life should be a series of Love Boat episodes in which we are entitled to fall deeply in love with mysterious Argentinians every night, then do it all over again next week with a Frenchman. It’s true: Marriage isn’t the Lido Deck with the moonlight every day. More often than not, it’s slamming grimly around the kitchen in the morning trying to find the Nutella for school lunches. But like Emily says, maybe romance is finally finding someone who’s more important to you than yourself. That’s epic. That's Shakespeare ...

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: marriage; Caitlin Flanagan; adultery