What is Marriage For?

I have found that it is impossible to write honestly about marriage and family life without some personal disclaimers. So, I’ll get this out of the way first: I am 26 years old and I have been married for four years to a woman two years my senior. We met in college, where she was my editor on the school paper. Our relationship has persisted along those same lines ever since. I write; she edits. We don’t have too many other interests to speak of, but we do have a two-year-old daughter. We live in a rowhouse in Georgetown, but we go to church across the river in Northern Virginia. Our tastes skew conservative, but as a rule we don’t vote.  

Am I happy? I have no idea. My usual line is that it doesn’t matter. I didn’t marry my wife for love. I don’t know why I married her. Sometimes we joke that my intentions must have been noble because I married down, at least in socioeconomic terms. Whatever the case, we are both great believers in Fate—the inexorable unspooling of our destinies—and trust that as together we hurtle toward death, and, we hope, eternal life, all will be revealed. I shouldn’t be melodramatic; our time is so occupied by the demands of our jobs, housework, and childcare that only occasionally do we consider these things.

But I did find myself wondering about it all as I read through Brad Wilcox’s case for marriage, Get Married, the result of his years of sociological research at the University of Virginia. Wilcox argues that marriage for the great majority of people marks the clearest path to happiness, or, to use his word, “flourishing.” It’s a fascinating study, one whose detail forced me to work through it very slowly, and I think it will prove profitable reading for anyone trying to understand debates about marriage in America today.