Exclusive Rebecca Davis interview on MaritalMediation.com
Noted author Rebecca Davis sat down for a talk with MaritalMediation recently. Rebecca’s book More Perfect Unions has been getting great reviews for its unique perspective on how the institution of marriage developed. You can read her rave reviews in the New Yorker, Slate, and Washington Post. Believe it or not, there was a time when marriage counseling didn’t exist, and Rebecca provides a fascinating look at how marriage has shifted with the cultural winds of the last few generations.
Since the topic is so relevant to Marital Mediation, we can’t thank Rebecca enough for giving us these insights into how the concept of saving marriage has evolved to the present day.
If you want to learn more after watching the video, there’s more about Rebecca on her website and you can buy her book More Perfect Unions here.
I'm Rebecca Davis.
I'm an assistant professor at the University of Delaware, in the history department.
And I'm the author of "More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss," recently published by Harvard University Press.
I'm a historian of marriage, sexuality, and religion in the United States.
Well Rebecca, thanks for joining joining us today at MaritalMediation.com. I've got a few questions for you and I'd like to start off with, after reading your book, it was very fascinating to hear the history of marriage counseling over the ages. And what I'd love to know is, after an 80-year history of marriage counseling, can we draw any conclusions?
Sure, thank you. I think the biggest conclusion I drew from my research was that marriage counseling in the United States, which began in the 1930s during the Great Depression, has always to a certain extent been as much about saving marriage as an institution and shaping marriage as an institution, as it has been about are keeping a particular set of individuals together in marriage. And marriage counselors have negotiated this process in conversation with their clients over the decades, and clients pushed counselors sometimes to think about marriage differently.
So when we talk about saving marriage, even what that means has changed over time. In the 1930s to save marriage had a lot more to do with preserving male breadwinners than it does today. In the 1950s the idea of saving marriage was a lot about figuring out changes in gender roles after World War II.When a lot of women had gone to work and had had more authority in their homes while husbands were away for the war. And since the 1950s saving marriage has been a lot about negotiating really radical shifts in American culture that have affected marriage - the gender revolution, sexual revolution, cultural changes, new ideas about parenting, and of course the greater availability of divorce. So today when we talk about saving marriage, we're really talking about something different than we were eighty years ago, but also it's more heavily politicized today than it was eighty years ago because of a lot of those cultural revolutions that have taken place over the decades. So the, uh, in recent times we're starting to hear more about post-nuptial agreements, sometimes called a post-marital or marital agreement, which is essentially a couple after they've become married married, signing some kind of a legal document that sets certain agreements within the marriage. So I'd be interested to hear from you just kind of the historical context behind that. Is a post-nuptial a new thing, is it, what is the history of that?
What's interesting, I wasn't that familiar with a post-marital agreement in the contemporary, setting until I learned about it from you and from your website. What I found interesting about that was that I knew of experiments with it from as early as the 1950s.
In LA County in the 1950s there were a lot more divorces than there were in other places in the country as there still are today. And judges in their domestic courts, or domestic relations courts, a few of them decided to take matters into their own hands, and one of them drew up what he called the husband and wife agreement. And he would offer to couples who would come in for a legal separation or divorce, particularly if they had children, that instead of going through the legal process, they would meet with a counselor and draw up the terms of an agreement. He had boilerplate language he wanted them to use. Sign this agreement and it would be, have sort of a thirty-day effective period. And if either spouse felt the other one had broken the terms, they could come back to court and it had a certain legal standing. The other person could be held sort of in contempt of court if he or she had violated the terms of the husband and wife agreement during that thirty day period.
And it was an attempt to get couples to behave themselves, in a manner the judge saw fitting. It was very traditional in terms of gender. Husbands were agreeing to be good providers for their families, wives were agreeing to be good housekeepers. And it was a voluntary process, like these agreements are today. Very differently in the early 1970s, a radical feminist named Alex Keith Schulman, she was a marriage compact, what she called a marriage compact or contract that was reprinted in Ms. Magazine, in Redbook, lots of popular journals, even in a law journal. She and her husband were going through marital problems at the time, and her agreement was essentially breaking down hour by hour, day by day, all of the household tasks, all the childcare tasks that they did in their household.
And she and her husband agreed to a delegation of those tasks in what they thought, or what she hoped would be a gender equitable way. And they had days where it was her day to work and it was his day to pick up the kids and vice versa and so forth. So both of these types of agreements came out of moments of marital crisis. Schulman and her husband eventually divorced. But at the time when she published the agreement, she didn't tell her readers that it was because she and her husband were having marital problems. It was presented as here's a great way to have a more gender equitable marriage, by really spelling out and agreeing to specific responsibilities with the household and children.
That's really interesting actually. And then it does sound like a, a very close relative to the modern post-nuptial. Yeah, so let's see moving into a new topic. Divorce rates today, historically speaking the divorce rates as of this year are actually lower and happen ste adily decreasing, over the last few years. I'd just like to hear your take on why is that, what are the sort of historical trends of divorce when at one point divorce rates were rising and now that they're falling.
Sure, and your question reminds me that we should be careful to make two distinctions. One is to make an distinction which is that, on the one hand you can look at divorce rates, over a long period of time over decades, and the other hand look at divorce rates year by year.
So to take the second aspect first, one thing that that's been true, since we've been following these things, is that divorce rates go down during periods of economic crisis. It is expensive to get divorced, and there are lots of legal fees involved. Also the expense of setting up a second household. So during recessions or especially as severe as the one we've been going through, divorce rates go down. Divorce rates went way down during the Great Depression. In the 1930s there was this enormous spike in divorce rates, and I think it was 1943 or 1944, and all these people panicked and the sociologists and demographers came out and said, no no, this is always what happens. And sure enough the following year the rates went, once people who had been waiting to divorce all that time got them over with. So we may see divorce rates go back up again as the economy recovers in the short run. So that's that.
In terms of the long term trend there was a really demonstrable increase in divorce rates during the 1970s and into the early 1980s , the first half of the 80's. Because of the creation of no-fault divorce laws starting in places like Oregon and California and then spreading to most of the rest of the United States, New York having only very recently caught up with the rest of the country on that. And that enabled a lot of people who've been wanting to divorce and hadn't, to, to do so much more easily without having to prove fault in a court of law. It also, as more people started to get divorced, a lot of the social stigma associated with it declined. That's another theory, so that people who formerly might have stayed together because it's just what you did even when were unhappy, were part of a cultural shift where, that was not just tied in to no fault divorce. But also had to do with things like feminism with the growth of therapy and increasing acceptance of going to therapy, being part of group therapy, that you didn't have to accept unhappiness in life. And so, in fact, it was the American thing to do, it was the better thing to do to get rid of unhappiness, to seek happiness for yourself, not just for society. So that pursuit of personal happiness was very important in that cultural shift. So also we have no fault divorce laws making it easier, people pursuing more personal happiness. And then we saw a sort of quite logical leveling off. People had really reached a point where it seemed that if you needed a divorce you could get one, but there was no longer a sort of pent up need for divorce, coming, no longer a backlog, so to speak, of people waiting to be able to get their divorces. In addition, marriage, the age at first marriage has been increasing during this whole period, and one thing that um, seems to be true from the statistics is that people who marry later, when they're older, are less likely to divorce. And so as the age of first marriage has gone up, d uring this period in which divorce is readily available, um, the divorce rate has leveled off, even declined a little bit. Ah, so, on the topic of divorce rates, comparative rates in different parts of the country tend to be different. So the Massachusetts divorce rate is historically low, or not historically maybe, but currently lower than it is in some other states, and it also often corresponds with uh, income and level of education. This is something you remark on in your book, and what I'm really curious about is why? What are the theories for why these differences exist?
Right, so the theories that I'm most familiar with are, one that I've touched on already, which is that, people who are better educated tend to also marry when they're a bit older, so and those marriages have always been stabler. From them we often hear about of the gold en era of the 1950's when people married at 20, 21. And in fact marriage counselors at the time, and marriage educators at the time, were very worried about the instability of these youthful marriages. And, so it does seem to be the case that marriages that are entered into when both parties are a little bit older have a lower incidence of divorce. Something else that I think we've seen is that financial stress, despite the point I said earlier that during financial crisis divorce rates go down, financial problems do stress relationships. So people who have financial security have a particular kind of stress less present in their lives. So that also seems to be a factor. We see also see more people, um, cohabiting before marriage. Um, that's a very politicized issue. People feel, um, and there's, one of the challenges in answering any of these questions is that a lot of the research that's done on contemporary issues of marriage and divorce is very politicized. So, it depends who's doing this study, um, who funded the study and so forth. So, I find it sometimes difficult to, um, I mean, things like, does cohabitation prior to marriage, increase or decrease a couple's chances of divorce is a, um laden, is a politically laden question to try to answer. Uh, that's really fascinating. Uh, so in, in , in marriage, marriage counseling, is, can be done by many different types of people. So, you can have a professional certified marriage counselor or a minister or a pastor. Uh, it could be an attorney, uh, a social worker. Uh. just, maybe you can talk a little bit about what, about those different roles, which ones are historically most common, and just sort of what are the trends are historically most common, and just sort of what are the trends among, who is, who is the professional expert for marriage? Historically, social workers got into the game early at private family service organizations, and one e stimate from the 19, I think the late 1940's early 1950's is that they provided about eighty percent of the marriage counseling that was being done in the country. The challenge with any statistic like that is that there's absolutely no way of knowing who is doing marriage counseling, um, in that kind of advocate way. Anybody can be, and this has always been the case, pretty much anybody can be a marriage counselor or call themselves that. So, um, there's lots of informal marriage counseling that would happen in a minister's study, or um, um, as part of other kinds of counseling arrangements. So um, um, as part of other kinds of counseling arrangements. So there's a major caveat to any sort of statement.
That said, um, perf-, in terms of professionals who were provided this kind of service, there's no question that social workers, um, did at the very least, um, the majority of marriage counseling for much of the 20th century. um, and probably still to this day for a number of reasons. One is they marketed themselves as offering it. They really promoted, um, that private family agencies, like Jewish family service, family service association, um, various child guidance, child guidance clinics, places like that , that they were the experts in family life. Um, if you needed help with your kid, if you needed help with your spouse, they were the place to go. And they were extremely effective in getting the message out to Americans that they were the place to go. They were also very affordable. Um, it, could go to these private family agencies did start to charge fees for their service in the 1940's, but it was fees on a sliding scale. And the idea was that pretty much anyone should be able to afford to get this kind of help from a social worker. So that's that with social workers.
With the other group that got into the game a little bit later, but enthusiastically, were clergy. And as clergy have become involved, in many ways probably quite informally for a very long time, but in an organized way didn't really start until the 40's. And then we saw theological liberals - liberal protestants, reformed Jews - because they were more comfortable with psychology , with the professional sciences, than were some other groups.
As other groups, religious groups in this country, have become more comfortable with the mental health sciences, or as they decided to get in the game without aligning with the mental health sciences, we've seen a broader embrace of marital counseling, premarital counseling in particular, in clergy. Um, I think it's safe to say that most of the premarital counseling that clergy would do would be of the premarital variety. Clergy performed, um, a lot of the weddings, uh, weddings in the United States, and many clergy were require some form of premarital counseling, even if it's just a chat with the couple. Um, clergy had been calling that counseling, um, in their own publications and conferences, um, for many decades, and, um, publishing about it, advising one another about how best to do it, debating it for a long time.
That leaves out all the people who, um, were trained as psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists who, um, wanted to be professional marriage counselors, to call them, to have their primary occupational title be marriage counselors who pushed for marriage counseling licensing laws. Um, especially in places like New York and California, who, um, joined the organizations, the professional organizations of marriage counseling. But, what's interesting is that the people who belong to those professional organizations were the minority of people doing what would call marriage counseling in the United States throughout the 20th century. Mainly because their service, there fewer of them and because their services were more expensive.
So, um, social workers and clergy, most counseling that a clergyman would provide or a clergywoman would provide is free, so, uh, many, several states now have laws that say if you go to a, and get some pre-marital counseling, you either pay a reduced fee for your marriage license or it's even free if you have six hour s, 12 hours of premarital counseling. And one way that state legislatures have been able to dodge the question, well aren't you placing an undue burden on, on couples who are financially disadvantaged with this, um, the answer is they think they can just go to a minister and it's free. We're not actually, we're giving them, we're giving them money by letting them do this. Um, so those have been the groups that have been most important to it.
That said, the leadership, have been the groups that have been most important to it.
That said, the leadership, um, of the professional organizations and also the people who've been writing the books and, um, trying to be spokes-people for what marriage counseling should be have most often been, uh, mental health professionals, um, other than social workers.
Uh, so, something that's come up a lot just as we're talking now is this concept of saving marriage. And I, I thought that was another fascinating thing in, in your book, is just that, sort of the mix of, of the political agendas, uh, versus the, uh, the kind of the counseling agenda and trying to help couples. So, I'd, I'd just be interested to hear you talk a little bit more about the concept of saving marriage and how that's evolved over time. One of the ways I can answer that question is to talk about when marriage counselors first thought that divorce might be a reasonable thing for them to advocate for some of their clients. I mean, I found in the published, uh, in journals, for example, in published literature from the 19- as early as the late 1940's, early 1950's, some social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists starting to say actually we need to think about what we're doing here ethically. There are instances in which there's no question that we should really be advising divorce. I should add, as sort of a little asterisk to that point, a footnote to that point that when counseling was happening in the 50's, it was usually a wife who was going on her own to meet with a counselor. Ideally it would be two people meeting together with the counselor, uh, was something that, was advocated by some professionals in the 50's, but, but doesn't seem to really happen in large numbers until the 60's and 70's.
So we're talking about, um, in some ways, marriage counselors acting as advocates for women in those settings. Trying to figure out if women were abused, if they were victimized in their marriages. Or if their personal needs we being so thwarted that it wasn't a good situation for them. Alcoholism was still a mostly undiagnosed, unacknowledged social, medical problem in the 1950s, so, a lot of the case records that I saw were of women whose husbands were alcoholics, who were gamblers. These were understood, well, they were just beginning to be understood as addictions, as medical problems but, for, but as a grounds for divorce it was and sometimes the role of the marriage counselor, in helping women, see their way out of the marriage. So that has, that has really changed.
Of course there was a different view, there was a. famous column in the Ladies Home Journal called "Can This Marriage be Saved ?" And for much of the 50's into the 60's, a marriage counselor based in Los Angeles named Paul Popenoe authored that column. And the answer was always yes, that the marriage could always be saved even when the differences seemed totally irreconcilable. His couples always found a way to stay together. And that was partly his philosophy and partly the philosophy of his editors at the Ladies Home Journal which had a fairly socially conservative bias. So, with no-fault divorce coming in, in the 70's with other kinds of changes in American culture, divorce became much more acceptable. So that idea, that marriage should always be saved, really fell into disrepute among mainstream marriage counselors in the 70's. And in the 70's you see the first divorce counselors. P eople really calling themselves that professionally, and marriage counselors began to include divorce counseling under the services that they would offer.
I, you know, I'm a psychologist, I offer counseling, pre-marital counseling, marital counseling, or divorce counseling. Which is probably not that dissimilar from what we would, what you, you're calling from marital mediation today. Um, bringing two people into a room, helping them think about their obligations to one another. If they have children, whatever their financial entanglements are, um, and figuring out a, a reasonable way of dissolving the marriage.
Um, when people today, when, when we hear conservatives today talk about when people today, when, when we hear conservatives today talk about when people today, when, when we hear conservatives today talk about saving marriage, they're not really, they're not so much anymore talking about preventing divorce. They are, the phrase "saving marriage" has become much more about preserving a particular kind of marriage. Promoting a particular kind of marriage and using the power of the government to prohibit alternative kinds of marriage.
So, um, when people talk today about saving marriage, they're usually also talking about, um, prohibiting marriage for same sex couples, um, about, um, instituting policies to encourage couples who have, um, children but aren't married to get married. Um, so they're, they're opposed to um, couples having children out of wedlock, um, and they point to, and these are folks who tend to draw a straight line between, um, sexual identities and, and behaviors and socioeconomic status. And to say that, um, we need to save marriage because marriage is so socioeconomically stabilizing. If more people would marry they would have better financial outcomes. Um, we see this conversation happen in marriage promotion for people who receive public assistance. Um, so that, you know, the discussion of one of the services we should provide to poor people, is premarital counseling marriage education.
Um, and there are a lot of problems with, um, I think problems with those arguments, because it's drawing a line of causation were there's really more of a correlation. That, yes, married people happen to be, we do know know that, on average, married people have a higher socioeconomic status. It's not at all clear that marrying is what, have, it, it, is the cause of that socio economic, uh, rise. Nevertheless, saving marriage has had, you know it has become now this heavily politicized, um, code phrase for a whole host of, uh, socially, culturally, conservative um, policies related to sexuality, related to your childbearing, rearing, related to public assistance, um, and, and it has become much more about martialing the power of the government, of the state, to um, encourage and discourage, um, particular kinds of sexual and marital activity. Much less about preventing divorce.
Right, right. It's fascinating just how that, that concept of, sav, that, that's such a loaded phrase of, of saving marriage. Well I, I, this has been wonderful talking to you. Do you have any anything else you wanna, you wanna add? No, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you and, and to, you know, the people who follow your website, and I'm very interested to, to see what you guys are doing.
Yeah, no, great. And, so, one last thing is can you just tell people who want to purchase your book, where can they find it? Amazon.com, Harvard University Press, Barnes and Noble, anywhere. It's widely available. And I'd be delighted to have, some more interested readers. Great, wonderful. Well, thanks again for taking part. Alright, thank you.
Well Rebecca, thanks for joining joining us today at MaritalMediation.com. I've got a few questions for you and I'd like to start off with, after reading your book, it was very fascinating to hear the history of marriage counseling over the ages. And what I'd love to know is, after an 80-year history of marriage counseling, can we draw any conclusions?
Sure, thank you. I think the biggest conclusion I drew from my research was that marriage counseling in the United States, which began in the 1930s during the Great Depression, has always to a certain extent been as much about saving marriage as an institution and shaping marriage as an institution, as it has been about are keeping a particular set of individuals together in marriage. And marriage counselors have negotiated this process in conversation with their clients over the decades, and clients pushed counselors sometimes to think about marriage differently.
So when we talk about saving marriage, even what that means has changed over time. In the 1930s to save marriage had a lot more to do with preserving male breadwinners than it does today. In the 1950s the idea of saving marriage was a lot about figuring out changes in gender roles after World War II.When a lot of women had gone to work and had had more authority in their homes while husbands were away for the war. And since the 1950s saving marriage has been a lot about negotiating really radical shifts in American culture that have affected marriage - the gender revolution, sexual revolution, cultural changes, new ideas about parenting, and of course the greater availability of divorce. So today when we talk about saving marriage, we're really talking about something different than we were eighty years ago, but also it's more heavily politicized today than it was eighty years ago because of a lot of those cultural revolutions that have taken place over the decades. So the, uh, in recent times we're starting to hear more about post-nuptial agreements, sometimes called a post-marital or marital agreement, which is essentially a couple after they've become married married, signing some kind of a legal document that sets certain agreements within the marriage. So I'd be interested to hear from you just kind of the historical context behind that. Is a post-nuptial a new thing, is it, what is the history of that?
What's interesting, I wasn't that familiar with a post-marital agreement in the contemporary, setting until I learned about it from you and from your website. What I found interesting about that was that I knew of experiments with it from as early as the 1950s.
In LA County in the 1950s there were a lot more divorces than there were in other places in the country as there still are today. And judges in their domestic courts, or domestic relations courts, a few of them decided to take matters into their own hands, and one of them drew up what he called the husband and wife agreement. And he would offer to couples who would come in for a legal separation or divorce, particularly if they had children, that instead of going through the legal process, they would meet with a counselor and draw up the terms of an agreement. He had boilerplate language he wanted them to use. Sign this agreement and it would be, have sort of a thirty-day effective period. And if either spouse felt the other one had broken the terms, they could come back to court and it had a certain legal standing. The other person could be held sort of in contempt of court if he or she had violated the terms of the husband and wife agreement during that thirty day period.
And it was an attempt to get couples to behave themselves, in a manner the judge saw fitting. It was very traditional in terms of gender. Husbands were agreeing to be good providers for their families, wives were agreeing to be good housekeepers. And it was a voluntary process, like these agreements are today. Very differently in the early 1970s, a radical feminist named Alex Keith Schulman, she was a marriage compact, what she called a marriage compact or contract that was reprinted in Ms. Magazine, in Redbook, lots of popular journals, even in a law journal. She and her husband were going through marital problems at the time, and her agreement was essentially breaking down hour by hour, day by day, all of the household tasks, all the childcare tasks that they did in their household.
And she and her husband agreed to a delegation of those tasks in what they thought, or what she hoped would be a gender equitable way. And they had days where it was her day to work and it was his day to pick up the kids and vice versa and so forth. So both of these types of agreements came out of moments of marital crisis. Schulman and her husband eventually divorced. But at the time when she published the agreement, she didn't tell her readers that it was because she and her husband were having marital problems. It was presented as here's a great way to have a more gender equitable marriage, by really spelling out and agreeing to specific responsibilities with the household and children.
That's really interesting actually. And then it does sound like a, a very close relative to the modern post-nuptial. Yeah, so let's see moving into a new topic. Divorce rates today, historically speaking the divorce rates as of this year are actually lower and happen ste adily decreasing, over the last few years. I'd just like to hear your take on why is that, what are the sort of historical trends of divorce when at one point divorce rates were rising and now that they're falling.
Sure, and your question reminds me that we should be careful to make two distinctions. One is to make an distinction which is that, on the one hand you can look at divorce rates, over a long period of time over decades, and the other hand look at divorce rates year by year.
So to take the second aspect first, one thing that that's been true, since we've been following these things, is that divorce rates go down during periods of economic crisis. It is expensive to get divorced, and there are lots of legal fees involved. Also the expense of setting up a second household. So during recessions or especially as severe as the one we've been going through, divorce rates go down. Divorce rates went way down during the Great Depression. In the 1930s there was this enormous spike in divorce rates, and I think it was 1943 or 1944, and all these people panicked and the sociologists and demographers came out and said, no no, this is always what happens. And sure enough the following year the rates went, once people who had been waiting to divorce all that time got them over with. So we may see divorce rates go back up again as the economy recovers in the short run. So that's that.
In terms of the long term trend there was a really demonstrable increase in divorce rates during the 1970s and into the early 1980s , the first half of the 80's. Because of the creation of no-fault divorce laws starting in places like Oregon and California and then spreading to most of the rest of the United States, New York having only very recently caught up with the rest of the country on that. And that enabled a lot of people who've been wanting to divorce and hadn't, to, to do so much more easily without having to prove fault in a court of law. It also, as more people started to get divorced, a lot of the social stigma associated with it declined. That's another theory, so that people who formerly might have stayed together because it's just what you did even when were unhappy, were part of a cultural shift where, that was not just tied in to no fault divorce. But also had to do with things like feminism with the growth of therapy and increasing acceptance of going to therapy, being part of group therapy, that you didn't have to accept unhappiness in life. And so, in fact, it was the American thing to do, it was the better thing to do to get rid of unhappiness, to seek happiness for yourself, not just for society. So that pursuit of personal happiness was very important in that cultural shift. So also we have no fault divorce laws making it easier, people pursuing more personal happiness. And then we saw a sort of quite logical leveling off. People had really reached a point where it seemed that if you needed a divorce you could get one, but there was no longer a sort of pent up need for divorce, coming, no longer a backlog, so to speak, of people waiting to be able to get their divorces. In addition, marriage, the age at first marriage has been increasing during this whole period, and one thing that um, seems to be true from the statistics is that people who marry later, when they're older, are less likely to divorce. And so as the age of first marriage has gone up, d uring this period in which divorce is readily available, um, the divorce rate has leveled off, even declined a little bit. Ah, so, on the topic of divorce rates, comparative rates in different parts of the country tend to be different. So the Massachusetts divorce rate is historically low, or not historically maybe, but currently lower than it is in some other states, and it also often corresponds with uh, income and level of education. This is something you remark on in your book, and what I'm really curious about is why? What are the theories for why these differences exist?
Right, so the theories that I'm most familiar with are, one that I've touched on already, which is that, people who are better educated tend to also marry when they're a bit older, so and those marriages have always been stabler. From them we often hear about of the gold en era of the 1950's when people married at 20, 21. And in fact marriage counselors at the time, and marriage educators at the time, were very worried about the instability of these youthful marriages. And, so it does seem to be the case that marriages that are entered into when both parties are a little bit older have a lower incidence of divorce. Something else that I think we've seen is that financial stress, despite the point I said earlier that during financial crisis divorce rates go down, financial problems do stress relationships. So people who have financial security have a particular kind of stress less present in their lives. So that also seems to be a factor. We see also see more people, um, cohabiting before marriage. Um, that's a very politicized issue. People feel, um, and there's, one of the challenges in answering any of these questions is that a lot of the research that's done on contemporary issues of marriage and divorce is very politicized. So, it depends who's doing this study, um, who funded the study and so forth. So, I find it sometimes difficult to, um, I mean, things like, does cohabitation prior to marriage, increase or decrease a couple's chances of divorce is a, um laden, is a politically laden question to try to answer. Uh, that's really fascinating. Uh, so in, in , in marriage, marriage counseling, is, can be done by many different types of people. So, you can have a professional certified marriage counselor or a minister or a pastor. Uh, it could be an attorney, uh, a social worker. Uh. just, maybe you can talk a little bit about what, about those different roles, which ones are historically most common, and just sort of what are the trends are historically most common, and just sort of what are the trends among, who is, who is the professional expert for marriage? Historically, social workers got into the game early at private family service organizations, and one e stimate from the 19, I think the late 1940's early 1950's is that they provided about eighty percent of the marriage counseling that was being done in the country. The challenge with any statistic like that is that there's absolutely no way of knowing who is doing marriage counseling, um, in that kind of advocate way. Anybody can be, and this has always been the case, pretty much anybody can be a marriage counselor or call themselves that. So, um, there's lots of informal marriage counseling that would happen in a minister's study, or um, um, as part of other kinds of counseling arrangements. So um, um, as part of other kinds of counseling arrangements. So there's a major caveat to any sort of statement.
That said, um, perf-, in terms of professionals who were provided this kind of service, there's no question that social workers, um, did at the very least, um, the majority of marriage counseling for much of the 20th century. um, and probably still to this day for a number of reasons. One is they marketed themselves as offering it. They really promoted, um, that private family agencies, like Jewish family service, family service association, um, various child guidance, child guidance clinics, places like that , that they were the experts in family life. Um, if you needed help with your kid, if you needed help with your spouse, they were the place to go. And they were extremely effective in getting the message out to Americans that they were the place to go. They were also very affordable. Um, it, could go to these private family agencies did start to charge fees for their service in the 1940's, but it was fees on a sliding scale. And the idea was that pretty much anyone should be able to afford to get this kind of help from a social worker. So that's that with social workers.
With the other group that got into the game a little bit later, but enthusiastically, were clergy. And as clergy have become involved, in many ways probably quite informally for a very long time, but in an organized way didn't really start until the 40's. And then we saw theological liberals - liberal protestants, reformed Jews - because they were more comfortable with psychology , with the professional sciences, than were some other groups.
As other groups, religious groups in this country, have become more comfortable with the mental health sciences, or as they decided to get in the game without aligning with the mental health sciences, we've seen a broader embrace of marital counseling, premarital counseling in particular, in clergy. Um, I think it's safe to say that most of the premarital counseling that clergy would do would be of the premarital variety. Clergy performed, um, a lot of the weddings, uh, weddings in the United States, and many clergy were require some form of premarital counseling, even if it's just a chat with the couple. Um, clergy had been calling that counseling, um, in their own publications and conferences, um, for many decades, and, um, publishing about it, advising one another about how best to do it, debating it for a long time.
That leaves out all the people who, um, were trained as psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists who, um, wanted to be professional marriage counselors, to call them, to have their primary occupational title be marriage counselors who pushed for marriage counseling licensing laws. Um, especially in places like New York and California, who, um, joined the organizations, the professional organizations of marriage counseling. But, what's interesting is that the people who belong to those professional organizations were the minority of people doing what would call marriage counseling in the United States throughout the 20th century. Mainly because their service, there fewer of them and because their services were more expensive.
So, um, social workers and clergy, most counseling that a clergyman would provide or a clergywoman would provide is free, so, uh, many, several states now have laws that say if you go to a, and get some pre-marital counseling, you either pay a reduced fee for your marriage license or it's even free if you have six hour s, 12 hours of premarital counseling. And one way that state legislatures have been able to dodge the question, well aren't you placing an undue burden on, on couples who are financially disadvantaged with this, um, the answer is they think they can just go to a minister and it's free. We're not actually, we're giving them, we're giving them money by letting them do this. Um, so those have been the groups that have been most important to it.
That said, the leadership, have been the groups that have been most important to it.
That said, the leadership, um, of the professional organizations and also the people who've been writing the books and, um, trying to be spokes-people for what marriage counseling should be have most often been, uh, mental health professionals, um, other than social workers.
Uh, so, something that's come up a lot just as we're talking now is this concept of saving marriage. And I, I thought that was another fascinating thing in, in your book, is just that, sort of the mix of, of the political agendas, uh, versus the, uh, the kind of the counseling agenda and trying to help couples. So, I'd, I'd just be interested to hear you talk a little bit more about the concept of saving marriage and how that's evolved over time. One of the ways I can answer that question is to talk about when marriage counselors first thought that divorce might be a reasonable thing for them to advocate for some of their clients. I mean, I found in the published, uh, in journals, for example, in published literature from the 19- as early as the late 1940's, early 1950's, some social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists starting to say actually we need to think about what we're doing here ethically. There are instances in which there's no question that we should really be advising divorce. I should add, as sort of a little asterisk to that point, a footnote to that point that when counseling was happening in the 50's, it was usually a wife who was going on her own to meet with a counselor. Ideally it would be two people meeting together with the counselor, uh, was something that, was advocated by some professionals in the 50's, but, but doesn't seem to really happen in large numbers until the 60's and 70's.
So we're talking about, um, in some ways, marriage counselors acting as advocates for women in those settings. Trying to figure out if women were abused, if they were victimized in their marriages. Or if their personal needs we being so thwarted that it wasn't a good situation for them. Alcoholism was still a mostly undiagnosed, unacknowledged social, medical problem in the 1950s, so, a lot of the case records that I saw were of women whose husbands were alcoholics, who were gamblers. These were understood, well, they were just beginning to be understood as addictions, as medical problems but, for, but as a grounds for divorce it was and sometimes the role of the marriage counselor, in helping women, see their way out of the marriage. So that has, that has really changed.
Of course there was a different view, there was a. famous column in the Ladies Home Journal called "Can This Marriage be Saved ?" And for much of the 50's into the 60's, a marriage counselor based in Los Angeles named Paul Popenoe authored that column. And the answer was always yes, that the marriage could always be saved even when the differences seemed totally irreconcilable. His couples always found a way to stay together. And that was partly his philosophy and partly the philosophy of his editors at the Ladies Home Journal which had a fairly socially conservative bias. So, with no-fault divorce coming in, in the 70's with other kinds of changes in American culture, divorce became much more acceptable. So that idea, that marriage should always be saved, really fell into disrepute among mainstream marriage counselors in the 70's. And in the 70's you see the first divorce counselors. P eople really calling themselves that professionally, and marriage counselors began to include divorce counseling under the services that they would offer.
I, you know, I'm a psychologist, I offer counseling, pre-marital counseling, marital counseling, or divorce counseling. Which is probably not that dissimilar from what we would, what you, you're calling from marital mediation today. Um, bringing two people into a room, helping them think about their obligations to one another. If they have children, whatever their financial entanglements are, um, and figuring out a, a reasonable way of dissolving the marriage.
Um, when people today, when, when we hear conservatives today talk about when people today, when, when we hear conservatives today talk about when people today, when, when we hear conservatives today talk about saving marriage, they're not really, they're not so much anymore talking about preventing divorce. They are, the phrase "saving marriage" has become much more about preserving a particular kind of marriage. Promoting a particular kind of marriage and using the power of the government to prohibit alternative kinds of marriage.
So, um, when people talk today about saving marriage, they're usually also talking about, um, prohibiting marriage for same sex couples, um, about, um, instituting policies to encourage couples who have, um, children but aren't married to get married. Um, so they're, they're opposed to um, couples having children out of wedlock, um, and they point to, and these are folks who tend to draw a straight line between, um, sexual identities and, and behaviors and socioeconomic status. And to say that, um, we need to save marriage because marriage is so socioeconomically stabilizing. If more people would marry they would have better financial outcomes. Um, we see this conversation happen in marriage promotion for people who receive public assistance. Um, so that, you know, the discussion of one of the services we should provide to poor people, is premarital counseling marriage education.
Um, and there are a lot of problems with, um, I think problems with those arguments, because it's drawing a line of causation were there's really more of a correlation. That, yes, married people happen to be, we do know know that, on average, married people have a higher socioeconomic status. It's not at all clear that marrying is what, have, it, it, is the cause of that socio economic, uh, rise. Nevertheless, saving marriage has had, you know it has become now this heavily politicized, um, code phrase for a whole host of, uh, socially, culturally, conservative um, policies related to sexuality, related to your childbearing, rearing, related to public assistance, um, and, and it has become much more about martialing the power of the government, of the state, to um, encourage and discourage, um, particular kinds of sexual and marital activity. Much less about preventing divorce.
Right, right. It's fascinating just how that, that concept of, sav, that, that's such a loaded phrase of, of saving marriage. Well I, I, this has been wonderful talking to you. Do you have any anything else you wanna, you wanna add? No, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you and, and to, you know, the people who follow your website, and I'm very interested to, to see what you guys are doing.
Yeah, no, great. And, so, one last thing is can you just tell people who want to purchase your book, where can they find it? Amazon.com, Harvard University Press, Barnes and Noble, anywhere. It's widely available. And I'd be delighted to have, some more interested readers. Great, wonderful. Well, thanks again for taking part. Alright, thank you.
Learn more about postnuptial agreements.
Of course, just because something is socially constructed doesn’t mean it lacks value. If you want the full answers, we advise you read the book.
This is a great book if you want to learn how not to jump to conclusions (which are often wrong) during your daily life, whether at work or home. A careful reading of Taking the War Out of Our Words followed by intent work in putting it into practice can greatly assist us in all our personal relationships. The key is to formulate that powerful, neutral, non-accusatory, and musing Non-Defensive Question that will open the floodgates to new information that incorrect assumptions had filtered out. Sharon Ellison also has tapes of her books available on her web site. This book is indeed powerful and life-changing.
This book, formerly published under the title “Divorce is Not the Answer”, is a simple, well thought-out and organized little book containing chapters on topics such as “A Fresh Start” and “Compatibility is Only a Thought Away”. Pransky is a practitioner of “Positive Psychology” which essentially posits that “it’s all in our heads”. With that in mind, one can change the trajectory of a marriage by changing a simple thought pattern.
Gary Chapman, author of the longstanding megaseller The Five Love Languages, uses his years of marriage counseling and leading marriage seminars as the basis for his thesis that marriages repeatedly go through periods that can be characterized by the seasons of the year. He begins by describing winter, times when marriages are marked by “coldness, harshness, and bitterness.” Spring is “where most marriages begin,” while summer is filled with fun. He compares an autumn marriage to “the falling of the leaves.” Chapman offers detailed explanations of the emotions, attitudes and actions of the marriage seasons as well as the pros and cons of each. The book’s second section provides seven strategies to enhance or change the marriage seasons, from dealing with past failures and speaking your spouse’s love language to “maximizing differences” and becoming a positive influence. Chapman also specifically addresses how to improve a marriage where a spouse has no desire to change. While it’s valuable to have this information in one place, this book isn’t different from what Chapman has written, said and taught many times before. Clear writing, tested strategies and good stories are here, but new revelations are not.
According to most relationship books, the key to a solid marriage is communication, communication, communication. Phooey, says John Gottman, Ph.D., author of the much-lauded Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. There’s much more to a solid, “emotionally intelligent” marriage than sharing every feeling and thought, he points out–though most couples therapists ineffectively (and expensively) harp on these concepts.
In this best-selling book, America’s #1 love and marriage experts Drs. Charles D. and Elizabeth A. Schmitz show what it takes to create and sustain a long-term loving marriage. Step-by-step they reveal their “Seven Surprising Secrets of Successful Marriage” that define a happy relationship—togetherness, truthfulness, respect and kindness, staying fit, joint finances, tactile communication, and surprise and unpredictability. Taking an upbeat, positive approach to living happily ever after, Building a Love That Lasts helps couples focus on what’s right in their partnership rather than on what’s wrong. The book includes many inspiring and beautiful stories of couples who’ve been together for at least 30 years.
A guide by the author of The Sexually Satisfied Woman explains why affairs happen, offers preventative advice, and presents a seven-step “reconstructive” program for couples who are willing to recommit to one another.
What could be good about a bad marriage? The good news is, you can get beyond that old marriage and its destructive habits, and build a brand-new one with the same spouse. And you can do it in just 90 days, even if only one spouse is committed to change. Thousands of couples in marriages that are on the brink will never enter a therapist’s office, and for others it’s too late by the time they do agree to come. But for more than 20 years, David Clarke has seen marriages turn around in just 12 weeks. Here he takes his 90-day plan and presents it using humor, Scripture, and personal stories to help couples turn difficult marriages into great ones. Whether the issue is communication, the kids, negative attitudes, or even serious sin, Clarke’s personalized approach will put readers on the road to a great marriage.
