Twenty-five years ago next Tuesday, my girlfriend and I, midway through a driving trip to Nova Scotia, met with a justice of the peace on the grounds of the old fort in Annapolis Royal, got our friend Heather to take a break from turnip harvesting in Middle Musquodoboit and serve as a witness, and became husband and wife. My bride wore a little red dress with an Eiffel Tower print, I a very 1990s, five-button brown suit. That night, we drank all the champagne in Digby (two bottles). A few days later, I told my parents.
Though it felt like a good thing to do, the institution of marriage was not something either of us strongly believed in. The notion that a bond of love between two people needs to be recognized in a contract with the government, and in some cases the church, seemed anachronistic and even a bit insulting.
We were far from alone in this view: Marriage has been in decline for decades. Last year Statistics Canada reported that a record-low 59 per cent of adults will have been married at any point in their lives (down from 95 per cent in the early 1970s).
Yet a quarter century later, I am convinced that getting married is the best thing I’ve ever done. I recommend it to any two people seeking a happier, more prosperous and less worrisome life. I am quite sure it is better for children to be raised by two married or common-law parents. There is something about a lifelong contract, legal or otherwise, that transforms the heady plasticity of love into a sturdy, challenging, and ultimately profoundly rewarding larger enterprise.
But am I merely projecting when I extend this experience into a belief that society would benefit if marriage were more widely supported?
As it happens, those 25 years have coincided with a long evolution in thinking about marriage promotion. Around the time my wife and I wed, it had become popular for governments to encourage marriage as a remedy to poverty – especially in the United States. President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare law sought “to end dependence by promoting marriage.” His successor, George W. Bush, persuaded Congress to spend hundreds of millions each year encouraging poor people to get married. The idea was catching on in international economic development circles, too.
It seemed sensible: decades of statistics show that people who are married are less likely to be in poverty, more likely to be employed, are happier and live longer.
The correlation-causation fallacy behind this thinking became apparent to many observers in the 2000s. Marriage, more often than not, turned out to be a result of prosperity, not its cause. As scholars Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre pointed out in 2002, “non-marriage is often a result of poverty and economic insecurity rather than the other way around.” In terms of love and marriage, we’d put the horse behind the carriage.
Those policies had little effect, and the topic mouldered until the mid-2010s, when new big-data studies analyzing the lives of millions of people looked into the causes of economic mobility – that is, the odds of doing better than your parents. The economist Raj Chetty found, in a landmark 2015 study, that families who move to neighbourhoods with less joblessness and more married families experienced considerably better intergenerational outcomes.
Media outlets and conservative think tanks focused on the “married families” aspect, and that led to new calls for marriage promotion – and a backlash. Poor people marrying other poor people, data showed, did not generally make them less poor. As the journalist Annie Lowrey pointed out, “many poor women opt not to marry the poor men in their lives, for instance, to avoid bringing more economic chaos into their homes.”
Last year, Dr. Chetty and his colleagues published a pair of even bigger-data studies on economic mobility. They found that by far the biggest driver of rags-to-riches changes is “economic connectedness” – that is, living near to, or personally knowing, people who’d already made it. Another fairly significant driver of upward mobility they found was “share of single parents” – that is, the fewer single parents and therefore the more married families you know, the better you do. But it’s possible that simply means you’re exposed to a greater number of better-off people.
So we’ve learned that married life is usually a better life, but that you won’t improve livelihoods much by enticing masses of people to wed. Look at the big picture: Those 25 years of plummeting marriage rates have also seen poverty rates fall dramatically worldwide, with big declines in low-marriage countries like Canada.
So even if it saved my life, that doesn’t make marriage a magic ticket for everyone. I got lucky. Trust me, though: If you’re having any doubts, take the plunge. After a quarter century, it keeps getting better.
Doug Saunders