Not long ago, Kristen Bell shared a post to celebrate her anniversary with Dax Shepherd. She wrote: “Happy 12th wedding anniversary to the man who once said to me: ‘I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.’” It was accompanied by a photo of him holding her protectively on a bed.
Much of the internet was not having it. “Tone-deaf” was the most common assessment, with some viewers of the post outraged that Bell would seem to make light of the fact that a woman is killed by her partner every ten minutes worldwide. Others expressed genuine concern for her and her relationship.
While the firestorm eventually blew over – with some even speculating that it seemed a little too conveniently timed right before the premier of the second season of her show – it did draw at least a few days of attention to the issue of intimate partner violence. More than a third of women in the U.S. will experience physical violence at the hands of a romantic partner, according to the CDC. And as any Dateline episode will verify, 34% of women murdered in the U.S. are killed by their husbands.
I realize that these are awfully grim statistics with which to start off an essay on improving marriage, but I’m committed to not sugar-coating the depth of this issue: marriage can be dangerous for women. And while it bears saying that the majority of women will not be physically hurt by their husbands, there are unfortunately many ways in which marriage can still hurt.
I wrote about this a little while back in an essay called, “Is marriage bad for women?” In it I talked about some of the research and reasons that heterosexual marriage as an institution doesn’t confer the same benefits to women as it does to men. Marriage, on the whole, tends to improve men’s health, enhance their careers, increase their socialization, and extend their lives. Women don’t see the same level of boost from marriage. While they do see benefits on the whole, they are more meager and they are more dependent on the quality of the marriage.
A low-quality marriage is hard on everyone, but women particularly suffer. Being in a low-quality marriage, as compared to being unmarried, largely negates any health or well-being benefits associated with marriage. A complicating factor here, at least currently, is economics. Women do tend to experience more economic hardship upon divorce, which can have a number of downstream effects. Even still, it’s clear that women’s benefit from marriage is highly conditional on the quality of the partnership.
Young and otherwise unpartnered women seem clear on this these days. They’ve set much higher bars for relationships with men and are less willing to sacrifice health and happiness for the sake of a relationship that isn’t additive to it. In an article that went viral recently in Vogue titled, “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?,” author Chante Joseph interviews women who feel “cringe” about showcasing a male partner given the state of modern relationships. “Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right,” she quotes one woman saying.
Whether due to relationships that fractured or a choice to avoid the whole thing, increasing numbers of women are staying away from committed relationships. By 2030, 45% of women ages 25-45 are estimated to be single. It’s of course core to the panic of many conservatives and some religious communities who are watching the marriage and fertility rates decline in real time.
Me? I’m not personally panicked, but I have been curious. Ever since I wrote about whether heterosexual marriage was bad for women, I’ve had the question in my mind of whether there was a way for it to be good. What would need to be true to make marriage itself a boon for women – something worth potentially giving up more restful sleep and time with girlfriends for?
One could fairly argue that it’s not worth trying to transform marriage and that those resources could be better utilized by creating a culture less centered around marriage. I don’t totally disagree. And at the same time, as a realist (the majority of people want marriage to work) and maybe a romantic (I wrote about why I chose to get remarried a while back), I do believe that marriage can and should be better. The research on how much the quality of marriage matters helps remind us that marriage can indeed be a protective and additive element to our lives. I see firsthand the way that it can enrich our experience and support our wellbeing when done right.
And so before scrubbing the whole thing, I wonder if we could work to make it better for women. Here are a few things that I believe we would need to do:
Emphasize marital quality over marital status.
Even with Vogue’s pointing to the questioning of partnership happening in some segments, there certainly remains an overarching cultural veneration of marriage. We just love to see people get hitched. Women have been calling out for decades now the discrepancy in celebration between when they announce a wedding (or pregnancy) and when they achieve an incredible professional milestone or otherwise transform their lives.
Our default is to exalt the fact of marriage without real regard for the healthfulness of it. The impact is that we marry even when we may have gnawing questions about the partnership, and that we stay in marriages long past it being clear that they are diminishing for all involved. We’ve strongly internalized the idea that almost any marriage is better than no marriage at all, even if we wouldn’t say this out loud. (And then there are some people who will say it out loud, like our Vice President.)
The paradox is that to make marriage actually better, we need to be able and willing to differentiate between low and high-quality marriages. Only when we acknowledge that a marriage’s quality is what’s most relevant will we start holding marriage to a higher standard.
Normalize preparation, education, and therapy for marriage.
When I was going through my own divorce process, we were required to do an online course about conflict resolution for the sake of co-parenting. The course turned out to be pretty decent, with some solid education on emotional awareness and management. It struck me as ironic that I couldn’t dissolve my contract of marriage without learning to sort through issues with this other person, but I’d been allowed to enter into it. I’m not necessarily suggesting mandated education before marriage certificates, though I don’t think it would hurt. I am suggesting a shift in how we think about preparing for long-term partnership and handling when it starts to get hard.
Despite the overall shift toward greater acceptance of therapy, I hear from women every week who want to do couples therapy but their partner does not. The pushback usually centers around the misguided idea that it will signal something is very seriously broken. In general, something is not seriously broken when couples come to therapy – that is unless they’ve waited years to come trying to avoid that being true.
Improving marriage for women will absolutely involve putting to bed the idea that we should all just know how to do marriage and instead treating it like a skill that we all have to actively learn.
Let everyone grow up a bit.
Age at first marriage has steadily increased over time, with the current averages being about 28 for women and 30 for men. That’s up 2.5 years in just about the last decade.
Research on marrying later is complex given that there are a variety of factors to consider – things like the age spread between partners, reasons for marrying later, and whether children are in the home. Even still, marrying later tends to be a good thing, particularly for women.
Women who themselves are older when marrying tend to have more economic security and have established more health-related practices for themselves. Having managed many things independently as an adult, they may also have a stronger sense of what a partner needs to contribute to be additive to their lives. Men who marry later have potentially also spent more time building skills for domestic life. This is dependent, of course, on whether they have lived independently – 20% of men ages 25-34 currently live with their parents, compared to 15% of women.
Give the structural support needed for family life.
We’re all well aware that the U.S. falls far short on offering the infrastructure for families to thrive. It remains the only of the 38 high-income countries in the world to offer no national paid family leave, and only about 23% of American workers have access to it through their jobs. The same is of course true when it comes to early childcare or comprehensive healthcare.
These shortcomings disproportionately impact women, as it’s nearly always women (with some rare exceptions) who most acutely absorb the blow of lost wages and the reduced ability to work. While these might seem like economic problems, they quickly become relationship problems and create instability in marriage. When one partner becomes financially vulnerable and also leaned upon to compensate for the lack of structural support, inequity and resentment naturally build. Habits and systems in families also develop in the early years around who takes care of things or even knows where things are, and those become entrenched over time in ways that undermine intimacy and connection.
Rebalance domestic and mental labor.
If you’ve been around here for any time at all, you know how important balancing the domestic load is for not just women, but men too. Despite significant progress towards women’s participation in the labor market, the division of responsibility in homes remains skewed. Even in marriages where women earn more than their male partner, they do 3.5 hours more domestic work per week. These patterns have remained entrenched, and they aren’t likely to change without specific intervention.
Systems like Fair Play help couples to talk about and become aligned around domestic tasks. It’s not just dividing them up, but actually giving a framework for understanding all of the conceptualization and planning that goes into getting things done.
Women performing an outsized amount of domestic labor leads to decreased relationship satisfaction, decreased time for physical and mental health, and even lowered sex drive (which should probably be obvious). Until the domestic workload is more balanced, it’s unlikely that marriage can ever be healthy for women.
Decentralize marriage and broaden social networks.
One of the ways in which marriage ends up being less healthy for women is that it tends to reduce the time spent with others. Meanwhile, being married tends to increase men’s social participation.
Part of the reduction in time spent with friends for women is related to some of the issues I’ve already discussed – having too much domestic work to do and too little structural support. But it’s also a function of the guilt that so many women experience when they even think about evenings out with others.
We’ve so centralized marriage as the core relationship in our lives that it has become to the exclusion of the myriad other relationships that can fulfill different parts of our complex emotional needs. We know on some level that one person could never meet every need, and yet we’ve come to expect it. If we could expand our concept of our relational needs, we could actually find much greater fulfillment, including in the marriage itself.
Ensure it’s safe and possible to leave if needed.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but ensuring that women can safely leave a marriage can actually support the institution itself. Economic research and sociology both show that when divorce laws and social norms make leaving easier, marriage equality actually increases. When no-fault divorce laws (which are frighteningly at risk currently) were enacted in the 1970s, balances of power shifted in such a way that domestic violence decreased and women’s suicide rates fell significantly.
Just as game theory would suggest, when partners can walk away freely, it actually makes partners more cooperative and marriage more mutually beneficial. This isn’t to suggest that people get out when going gets tough, but rather that we ensure that economic or social dependency doesn’t prevent women – or men – from leaving marriages that are creating harm.
Recognize and celebrate a variety of family forms.
Our focus on the nuclear and traditional family structure has been especially hard on women. When the “normal” family unit became two parents and their children living independently from others, women lost layers of support and added hours of work to their weeks.
Many are starting to reconsider their household and family structure. That includes everything from sharing residences with friends and other families, setting up an intergenerational home, or including other partners or former partners/co-parents in the home. Creating family environments that are flexible and focused on what’s meaningful and works – rather than what’s expected or typical – helps everyone in the system.
These points are just a start, and there are many more shifts that could support a better experience of marriage for women. Honestly, I hope that we can and that we do. There’s a lot of things that I do that are cringe, but I hope that we can get to the point where being married isn’t one of them. But to do that, our culture has to invest in doing this all very differently.
