The 'Relationships' Era: Reinventing Marriage & Divorce

December 01, 2014

The last few decades have seen massive shifts in attitudes and practices surrounding marriage. Social researcher, Hugh Mackay, provides us with a snapshot of marriage in contemporary Australia, together with an analysis of why these shifts have occurred and their implications.

The figures speak for themselves. More than 40 percent of contemporary marriages are likely to end in divorce. About 66 percent of marriages are first marriages, compared with 90 percent just 30 years ago. The marriage rate is the lowest in 100 years, and falling. Thirty years ago, almost 90 percent of Australians were married by the age of 30; today, fewer than 50 percent have taken the plunge by that age. In the past 30 years, the proportion of women marrying by age 20 has fallen from 25 percent to just three percent, and there are now more unmarried than married women in Australia (though many technically ‘unmarried’ women are in live-in relationships that qualify as de facto marriages). Most couples live together before they marry (up from 16 percent to 76 percent in the past 30 years), and about one-third of all babies are born to unmarried parents.

Changed attitudes to marriage are inseparable from changed attitudes to divorce. A sustained high rate of divorce is interpreted by some (mainly older) people as a symptom of moral decline; a sign that we have lost our ‘fibre’ when it comes to upholding the institution of marriage and have surrendered to a more self-centred, self-indulgent view of the world. Others interpret our divorce rate as welcome evidence that we are a society that takes a ‘modern’, healthy, critical attitude to marriage; a society that acknowledges the pain of divorce will sometimes be preferable to the pain of an unhappy marriage. In between, there are those whose ambivalence allows them to see the value of divorce as an opportunity for a couple to abandon a hopeless marriage and seek happiness with someone else, but who still wonder whether divorce has become so easy as to discourage people from making sufficient effort to work things out when the going gets tough.

Divorce is never a pretty sight. Pain and anguish are etched on our divorce statistics—pain for the couples themselves, for any children involved, and for the circles of family and friends affected by the split. A high rate of divorce means that such pain is continually being experienced in our society on a very large scale.

Most people don’t divorce lightly, so the transformation of Australia from an almost zero-divorce society 30 years ago to its status as one of the world’s high-divorce nations signals a profound cultural shift. The stigma attached to divorced people has almost vanished. The legal requirement to establish ‘fault’ in divorce proceedings disappeared with the Family Law Act of 1975. The idea that divorce is a symptom of a character flaw has all but evaporated: which family, after all, has not by now experienced the trauma of separation or divorce somewhere in its extended ranks?

Adults are expected to cope with the vicissitudes of life, or at least to know where to go for help. But the consequences of divorce can be especially painful for children not yet emotionally robust or mature enough to understand the issues at stake or to make much sense of their altered living arrangements. About 50 percent of divorces involve children under the age of 18 and, as a result of our sustained divorce rate, more than one million children—22 percent of all children aged 0-17—now live with only one of their natural parents and have another parent living elsewhere. Only about 50 percent of those children have face-to-face contact with their non-resident parent at least once per fortnight. For 26 percent of them, the contact is less than once a year or never (though even that is a slight improvement on the situation of ten years ago).

Barbed Wire

Living apart from a parent can be tough for children, and for the absent parent. But the regular contacts between children and absent parents (usually fathers) can also be tough for all concerned. More than 500,000 children are making the weekly or fortnightly trek from the home of the custodial parent to visit the home of the non-custodial parent. That many kids regularly to-ing and fro-ing amounts to mass migration at best, and large-scale social dislocation at worst. It’s a round trip fraught with emotional hazard in both directions.

Not only are the children regularly unplugging themselves from one domestic situation—one parent, one bedroom, one home, one set of friends and neighbours—and plugging themselves into another, but they are also repeatedly switching from one parental world-view to another. Stark differences in styles of parenting, not always evident while the marriage was intact, may surface within weeks of a separation as parents try to assert their independence from each other (or, less nobly, to score points off each other). For the children, conflicting values and divided loyalties lurk in their path like landmines.

However it is managed, this is heartache territory for all concerned. Some children adjust with amazing flexibility and a remarkable tolerance of their parents’ occasional flashes of anger or outbreaks of irrationality. Others reflect, as they look back on a childhood dominated and regulated by administrative arrangements designed for their parents’ convenience (or perhaps merely to look good on their parents’ mental score-cards), that their childhood seemed to have been stolen from them. They were too often on the move, and too often feeling as if it was their job to make their parents’ lives easier or happier. Thrust into such a demanding role, too little time seemed to have been left for playing with friends on the weekend, mucking about or just ‘being myself’.

‘Keep your options open’

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that as the children of the most-divorced generation of parents in our history reach marriageable age, they are inclined to hang back. When they say, ‘I’d like to get married but I’d hate to get divorced’, they know whereof they speak. Marriage beckons for all the traditional biological, romantic, social and cultural reasons, but in the light of their direct or indirect experience of divorce, many young Australians have a more hard-edged, sceptical view of marriage than was typical of their parents’ generation. At the same time, having endured the pain and mess associated with the wreckage of their parents’ marriages, many young people are determined to make their own marriages work.

Even without the chastening influence of growing up in a more divorce-aware society, the rising generation of young Australian adults view marriage, as they view everything else, through the prism of their generational ethos.

This is the generation who, at the younger end of the age spectrum, change their plans from moment to moment, partly because they are generationally programmed to keep things flexible and partly because they hold in their hands a magic wand—the mobile phone—that allows them to hold off until the last moment before making a firm arrangement and, having made it, to change it. And change it again.

A generation with that mind-set is hardly likely to rush into marriage: when they do fall in love and decide to cohabit, or even to reproduce, they may still baulk at the ultimate commitment implied by the tying of the legal knot. If their caution leads them to make safer, more thoughtful choices, it may yet result in a declining rate of divorce; it will certainly keep the marriage rate down. Although their parents’ generation has offered them a more transient example of marriage than was typical of Australia for the first three-quarters of the 20^th century, they are not necessarily impressed by their parents’ approach.

If the experience of parents’ divorce creates a certain wariness in young people’s attitudes to marriage, their generational inclination to keep your options open would only reinforce it. All this inhibits an early commitment to marriage and, for a growing number of young Australians, inhibits any commitment to marriage. Paradoxically, some young people see parenthood as being both a more serious and less daunting commitment, in the sense that it involves no continuing choice: once a parent, always a parent, whereas a spouse can become an ex-spouse. A marriage can be unscrambled; parenthood can’t.

The institutional versus the instrumental view of marriage

There’s another factor driving the marriage rate down, and the divorce rate up: attitudes to marriage itself have changed, and the language of matrimony has changed to reflect that. Marriage used to be spoken of as an institution: once you were in it, you stayed in it, as if the institutional door clanged shut behind you as you entered. (Groucho Marx: ‘Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?’) In that era, stable and secure marriage, like stable and secure work, was seen as a cornerstone of a stable and secure society. The quality of the relationship between the spouses was not central to anyone’s thinking: people fell in love, got married, had children … and got on with it. If the result, in some cases, was prolonged misery, then ‘you made your bed so you must lie in it.’ The institutional view of marriage meant the institution was to be respected above the difficulties faced by individual couples. Divorce, in that climate, was a Very Big Deal.

No longer. Such talk would strike today’s young Australians as misguided, heartless and rather silly (as would the view that divorce should be based on one party’s proven ‘fault’). Today, marriage—whether legal or de facto— is essentially about the quality of the relationship. ‘If our relationship works, we might get married. Once we’re married, if the relationship breaks down, the marriage will be over.’ This is new language designed for a new set of cultural norms. The institutional, cultural view of marriage has given way to a more instrumental, personal view: is it working for us? And sometimes the question is even more ruthlessly individual: is it working for me? Even when children are involved, a popular view is that it is bad for children to live in an atmosphere of tension and unhappiness where they will learn poor lessons about relationship-management by seeing their parents trying to flog the proverbial dead horse of a doomed marriage.

At the same time, young people generally regard themselves as being better educated about the conduct of relationships than their parents were, and therefore better equipped to handle the difficulties and tensions that inevitably arise in the course of any long relationship. Many of the current crop of young men, in particular, see themselves as better prepared and more willing to discuss relationship issues than their own fathers or grandfathers were.

Some parents of today’s young adults concede that this is a change for the better. When they look at the marriages and de facto marriages of their offspring, they see the advantages of the new approach to marriage already emerging: a kind of ‘bonded independence’ (together and separate); genuine liberation; an insistence on friendship as the best basis for commitment (since mere sexual attraction is nowhere near the big deal it once was); both parties expected to work at the relationship. In the brightest, most successful cases, ‘love’s work’ is no longer thought of as woman’s work—and that may be the biggest generational shift of all.

One important implication of the shift in emphasis from ‘marriage’ to ‘relationship’ is that the distinction between legalised marriage and de facto marriage blurs, and we come to recognise them as two roughly equivalent versions of the same idea—as, indeed, the legal system increasingly does and no doubt will, eventually, for committed, enduring homosexual as well as heterosexual pairings.

And yet, in spite of the tectonic shifts in our attitudes towards marriage, divorce, parenthood and family life, there is a lingering sense in which ‘relationship’ strikes us as a less determinedly permanent state than ‘marriage’. Couples who have never seriously contemplated a legal marriage and decide to marry only when they have children often seem to be responding to an implicit assumption that being legally married will somehow make the union seem more proper from the child’s point of view. Some are more explicit, believing that the arrival of a child is a signal that the time has come for a more formal, binding commitment.

Nevertheless, those who choose to settle for a relationship that doesn’t involve ‘a piece of paper’ insist their commitment to each other is no less than if they were married.

The language of matrimony will continue to evolve. But, for the time being, ‘I’ve had several relationships’ still sounds to Australian ears like a less momentous declaration than ‘I’ve been married several times’.

The dangerous cult of perfectionism

Our attitudes to marriage have been affected by another culture-shift. In the past 15 years, we have been increasingly caught up in the idea of perfection—in personal appearance (fuelled, as always, by the beauty industry but now boosted by the aggressive promotion of cosmetic surgery), in diet and health, fitness, furnishings, bathroom fittings, kitchen design, vacations, entertainment, cars, food, coffee, and even in the education of our children: ‘We want him to have the perfect teacher in the perfect school—why settle for less?’

The cult of perfectionism, if unchecked, can lead us to expect too much from a partner, and from a relationship. It can make us too cautious in our approach to prospective partners and unrealistic in our demands and expectations. It can infect our experience of love and happiness by introducing the gnawing doubt that this isn’t as good as it should be; that perfect bliss is eluding us; that romantic love should never fade; that we should be able to establish perfect (or even excellent) relationships without too much hard work.

The hazard here is obvious: if we’re banking on the perfect relationship, we’re bound to be disappointed. If we’re banking on having perfect children in a perfect sitcom family—everyone happy, obedient, high-achieving, yet bathed in the glow of a charming humility—we’re in for a nasty shock.

The human journey is characterised by chaos and contradictions, and the cult of perfectionism can blind us to the fact that ‘perfectly reasonable’ may be as close to perfection as life gets, for most of us, most of the time.

The cult of perfectionism has already damaged many relationships that might otherwise have survived (and has also put too many children under too much pressure to succeed). It has caused many couples to decide they could do better with someone else—only to find that ‘someone else’ turned out to be human, too, and that feet of clay are standard issue, after all.

Low marriage and high divorce rates are caused by many obvious and non-obvious factors But the cult of perfectionism is making its own quiet contribution by raising the threshold of contentment.

We are marrying less … and more

Young Australians are postponing or avoiding marriage in record numbers, and only 40 percent of marriages are now conducted by ministers of religion. Young people still fall in love, still want to cohabit and still want to procreate, but they are, paradoxically, both more relaxed and more uptight about these matters than their parents and grandparents were: while they are inclined to regard all relationship permutations as ‘cool’ and to accept that whatever people want to do is their business, they are also less inclined than previous generations to rush into making commitments that sound too daunting.

In previous generations, the combination of hormonal and economic imperatives often drove people into marriage at an early age: today, independence has become a virtue—as has ‘hanging loose’—so marriage requires a more deliberate decision than it used to. Most young people speak as if they expect to get married at some stage or, at least, to have a stable, long-term partnership. But they are more clear-eyed and less romantic about the idea than their parents were, even though they may give in to helpless romanticism as the wedding day approaches with the alluring prospect of starring in your own reality video.

They are more obviously troubled by the idea of commitment than previous generations were, and more open about expressing their doubts and reservations: ‘How could you ever know that someone was the right person to spend the rest of your life with?’ In The World According to Y, Rebecca Huntley noted that ‘the rise in cohabitation before marriage is not a symptom of Ys’ disregard for marriage but their intense concern about getting it right’.[1]

This is not a generational shortcoming, but a realistic assessment of the chances of things coming unstuck. For some couples, the idea of living together without any talk of marriage is appealing precisely because it creates an opportunity to see what it would be like, to see whether it is going to evolve into something special or permanent, or perhaps even to see whether it will be comfortable enough to settle for.

It would be quite wrong to conclude from the falling marriage rate that marriage has become unfashionable or unimportant in our culture. For those who choose legal marriage, the symbolism may be even more intensely important than it was when marriage was the conventional thing to do. Our increasing tendency towards multiple marriages is also a sign of the continuing importance of legal marriage. People who marry two or more times are not doing so, presumably, because they love getting married so much they want to keep having another crack at it, but because they still believe in the whole idea of marriage—in the ideal of ‘happy marriage’—and keep striving to achieve it in spite of setbacks and disappointments. The triumph of hope over experience it may be, but, in our culture, the hope of personal fulfilment through marriage remains a compelling motivation.

Amidst this confusing and sometimes contradictory set of shifting mores and changing attitudes, a stable and satisfying marriage is still widely regarded as the gold standard in sexual relationships. Whether it is postponed, avoided, embraced, respected or mocked, marriage is an ever-present reference point, and it figures somewhere, sometime, in the dreams of most Australians. Parenthood may have more far-reaching effects on the quality and trajectory of our lives, but the public declarations implied by marriage are still typically regarded by those who marry as the most serious they ever make.

The end of the story has to be a reminder that most Australian marriages survive. Almost 60 percent of marriages will never trouble the Family Court. Although this is a smaller proportion than it used to be, it’s a relatively stable majority: the official divorce rate does not appear to be rising, and may yet fall as a consequence of the falling marriage rate. Many of those marriages don’t merely survive; they thrive. Some couples find that if it wasn’t quite ‘happily ever after’ for them, their marriage has brought benefits, joys and gratifications that come very close to that. When it works brilliantly, marriage can be experienced as blissful human harmony. When it works even tolerably well, it can be a source of deep physical and emotional comfort, reliable friendship and shared experience that creates the powerful bond of a common history and the prospect of companionship into old age. A couple committed to their marriage running its full course (and that’s the expectation of most married people) draw strength from the security of knowing they can rely on each other, trust each other and be open and relaxed with each other.

Only a dreamer would ask for a stress-free marriage (or, indeed, a stress-free life). Only a fool would expect perfection in human affairs, including marriage. But those in long-term committed marriages typically report that when the romance fades and the relationship settles down to the long haul of conjugal love characterised by mutual support, encouragement, respect and affection, the rewards are incalculable. Minor irritations? Yes, often. Occasional strong words? Yes. Disagreements? Of course. Even murderous fury, sometimes. But a stable, fulfilling marriage remains, for most Australians, a dream that either has, or might, come true.

[1] Rebecca Huntley, The World According to Y (Allen & Unwin, 2006), p85.