What is Marriage?

What is Marriage?

Marriage is a formal means of combining two people’s finances and legal responsibilities, with built-in barriers to exiting that relationship. It is a service offered by the government and religious institutions to allow people to make binding commitments to each other that help to build trust.

People make binding commitments that they cannot back out of to increase their credibility in many settings. It’s a general-purpose way to build trust. In marriage, that trust enables dependency relationships for e.g., raising children, staying home to keep house, and emotionally committing to somebody.

Marriage is tied to the idea of intentional community since a two-person partnership is the simplest and most common form of intentional community.

Framing the Problem

The rates and stability of marriage (or “lifelong partnership”) have fluctuated through time. For perhaps the past 100 years, marriage has crumbled in the US. The decay continues: although divorce rates are not falling anymore, marriage rates are.

Reasons for the decay of marriage are clear. It is only controversial whether those changes have been a net benefit.

First, the institutions in society that traditionally made marriage binding have stopped offering that service. While government and church still certify “marriages”, they changed the meaning of the word by allowing people to back out of it. The government allows easy, no-fault divorce; the church doesn’t make such a fuss anymore; and neighbors and society withhold any sort of judgement. The government has gone even further than allowing divorce: single and poor parents are now provided more financial support than before.

There are valid arguments for why these changes have been a net benefit for society. But they did nuke marriage.

Second, the need for stable partnership has decreased. It is easier to operate a one-adult household and the roles of men and women are less specialized. Women are fully included in the workforce. Keeping house has become easier with better home production technology and the ability to buy nearly any service (e.g., it is affordable to not cook). Short-term sexual partnership and substitutes for sex like online pornography and other entertainment have become available. And children have become an economic drain rather than a boost, regardless of whether their parents are married.

Searching for Solutions

All these reasons explain why lifelong partnership has become less valuable and harder to maintain. However, it is still valuable for a lot of reasons I won’t defend here. How can we encourage lifelong partnerships in the America of today?

In business, partnership is about aligning incentives. Marriage aligns incentives in practical ways, like owning or renting a house together and specialization. Love aligns incentives by inducing the partners to care about what the other cares about.

A logical person gets divorced when they predict that they are better off long-term without their spouse. That means, looking at both their present circumstance and discounted future circumstances, they predict long-term misalignment with their spouse. Encouraging marriage is about making that long-term relationship accounting look better.

Where can we revisit the societal changes that led to less stable partnerships, without violating modern values such as gender equality? Above, I sorted the factors that contribute to marriage into two buckets: push factors that rely on external actors to keep married couples together and pull factors that intrinsically make lifelong partnership helpful like sharing housing costs.

To encourage stable marriage, it’s safest to start with intrinsic factors. Sanctions due to divorce will go off the rails quickly. Perhaps they have a place in the future, but let them come later and from somebody else.

The factors I think about to improve the intrinsic appeal of choosing a partner and staying with them are:

  • Love as a means of aligning incentives.
  • Increased assets.
  • Making raising children cheaper generally.
  • Making it economically feasible to have children in your early 20s.
  • Increasing the benefits of household specialization, perhaps by building on government programs.
  • Making it easier for both partners to be reliably positive financial contributors, especially increased opportunities for men to do market-oriented home production when they don’t have a job.
  • Prenup agreements that make divorce more damaging for both parties.
  • Curbing internet browsing to reinforce the real-world “social network” and make people hungrier for each other’s company.

“No man is an island,” but we increasingly live as though we were. Improving conditions for marriage is tied in with a lot of other goals around simply making people healthier and happier by cooperating more.