From This Day Forward

                   
Dedication

                   
Introduction

Chapter One
     Our Lives

                   
Early Days

                   
Courtship

                   
Wedding

Chapter Two
     Other Lives

                   
Early America

                   
Companionate Marriage

                   
Slave Marriages

Chapter Three
   Our Lives

                    
Leaving Home

                   
Newlyweds in New York

                   
New Parents in California

                   
Growing Up in Greece

Chapter Four
    Other Lives

                   
New Places, New Roles

                   
Pioneer Marriages

                   
Immigrant Marriages

Chapter Five
      Our Lives

                   
Coming Home

                   
Family House

                   
Equal Work

                   
Empty Nest

Chapter Six
       Other Lives

                   
Broken Marriages

                   
Getting Divorced

                   
Blended Families

Chapter Seven
   Our Lives

                    
From This Day Forward

                   
Afterword

                   
Suggested Reading

                   
Acknowledgments

                   
About the Authors

                   
Also by Cokie and Steve Roberts

                   
Copyright

                   
About the Publisher

This is a book of stories about marriage, not sermons or sociology. We deliberately focus on American marriages, our own and others', because marriage in this country is a rather peculiar institution. You might even say it's un-American. After all, the Founding Fathers made it clear that individuals—not couples or groups or communities—have an “inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But by definition, marriage is a partnership, not an individual enterprise. Married couples have to pursue happiness together, not as separate entities. And the essence of any successful marriage is self-sacrifice, not self-absorption. A friend recently told us about a twenty-fifth-anniversary party where the husband gave a toast and said, “The key to our success is very simple. Within minutes after every fight, one of us says, ‘I'm sorry, Sally.'” Good line, but it's also true that what you don't say in a marriage can be as important as what you do say. We often joke that the success of a marriage can be measured by the number of teeth marks in your tongue. Keeping quiet in the first place means you don't have to say “I'm sorry” quite so often.

Since America is a nation that constantly reinvents itself, the institution of marriage is always changing and adapting as well. We write about John and Abigail Adams, keeping their union together over long periods of separation and anxiety; slaves who defied the indignity of bondage to dignify their own vows to each other; immigrants and pioneers who had to live by new rules in new places with new partners. In our own lives, we were children of the fifties, coming of age in the sixties, and living through a series of cultural aftershocks, from birth control and the Beatles to the rise of feminism and the decline of civility. As a result, concludes the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, when young couples marry today, “they are entering a union that looks very different from the one that their parents or grandparents entered.” True enough, and here are some of the reasons:

 

• Divorce is much more common. If current trends hold steady, almost half of all contemporary marriages will not survive. And the “divorce revolution,” which picked up steam in the early sixties and reached a peak around 1980, is now into its second generation. Young people today are much more likely to be the products of a failed marriage than their parents or grandparents ever were.

 

• Marriage is no longer a rite of passage for most Americans, the moment when they leave home and become adults. The mean age at marriage has jumped sharply since 1960—from twenty to twenty-five for women and from twenty-three to twenty-seven for men—so most newlyweds have been out working and supporting themselves for some time. They are also having sex earlier—more than half of all women lose their virginity by age seventeen—so the average bride has been sexually active for seven or eight years before her first marriage. Indeed, notes the National Marriage Project, the term “premarital sex” has lost its meaning, because sexual
activity is no longer tied in most cases to the “promise or expectation of marriage.”

 

• The sexual revolution has helped fuel a 1,000 percent increase since 1960 in the number of unmarried couples living together. By one estimate, about one out of four single women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine is now living with a partner, and about half have done so at some point. But to call these living arrangements a “trial marriage” strikes us as profoundly wrong. The whole point about marriage is making a permanent commitment to each other, and any relationship lacking that commitment is not a marriage, trial or otherwise. In fact, researchers for the National Marriage Project found some evidence that couples who live together before marriage are slightly
more
likely to get divorced than those who don't cohabit.

 

• Americans will spend a smaller portion of their adult lives being married. Later marriages, longer life spans, and more common cohabitation all play a part. So does the easy availability of sex outside of marriage. The current college culture has spawned the term “friends with privileges,” which basically means, “we sleep together but aren't really a couple.” Add in another important trend: more people are remaining single permanently. Going back to the mid-1800s, well over 90 percent of American women married by age forty-five. If current rates continue, that figure could drop below 85 percent.

 

• Mobility has always been a fact of American life and marriage, but it's getting more pronounced. Steve grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, with one grandfather in the house and two other grandparents a few blocks away. Cokie's grandmother lived with her family a good part of the time and the Boggs house in New Orleans was next door to a great-aunt.
Today our own children live in San Francisco and London, and most of our adult nieces and nephews don't live anywhere near their parents. Young marrieds are often far from home, and while we know the advantages of that experience, we also know how painful it can be. And when a marriage hits a rough patch, the absence of a supportive community can be devastating. A friend of ours, reflecting on his grandparents' sixty-five-year marriage said, “When they got married it was a package deal. You bought into the whole family network. Divorce was inconceivable, because you had to divorce
all
of those people.”

 

• Feminism has had an enormous impact on marriage. Women are far less dependent on a husband for financial support or sexual gratification. Moreover, adds the Marriage Project, women have “higher expectations for emotional intimacy in marriage and more exacting standards for a husband's participation in child rearing and the overall work of the household.” Thus a paradox: women have less need of marriage just as they expect more from the relationship. But just because women
need
marriage less does not mean they
want
it less. Many of our single female friends, all accomplished and independent women, would still prefer the support and companionship of a committed mate.

 

• Marriage has been devalued and even defamed by the popular culture, according to some scholars in the field. One of them, Professor Leon R. Kass of the University of Chicago, argues that most young people today “lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage.” As a result, “for the great majority, the way to the altar is uncharted territory. It's every couple on its own bottom, without a compass, often without a goal. Those who reach the altar seem to have stumbled on it by accident.”

 

But we do not despair about the future of marriage. Our parents were married for a combined total of more than ninety years, and we see strong unions of old friends all around us. Our children seem to attend a wedding every few weeks. We are also heartened by the number of young people who come to us for conversation and counsel, wanting eagerly to make their relationships work. One of them, an Italian-Catholic woman, wrote recently to announce she was marrying her Jewish boyfriend. It took them three years and a lot of heartache. They didn't “stumble” on the altar “by accident”; they made it there because marriage meant so much to them.

For all of its many problems, marriage is also showing other signs of health. While the divorce rate is still at historically high levels, it's leveled off in recent years and even seems to be declining a bit. Moreover, a wide variety of forces are mobilizing to bolster the institution. A group of therapists and counselors has started a movement devoted to teaching couples the practical skills that seem to be present in most enduring matches. One of the founders, Diane Sollee, voices the hope “that in the near future, couples will come to accept that the most romantic thing they can do is walk hand in hand into a course on making marriages work.” A similar effort, Marriage Savers, urges pastors to require several months of counseling for any young couple wanting to get married. And after the ceremony, older couples in the congregation are assigned as sort of marriage mentors to the newlyweds. In one widely watched experiment, Florida has become the first state to mandate marriage education courses as a high-school graduation requirement. Louisiana has passed a law enabling couples to enter a “covenant” marriage, which makes divorce a lot harder.

We do have a prejudice. We're big fans of marriage and don't apologize for that. We have always agreed with the author Judith Viorst, who once wrote a book called
Married
Is Better
. Not better for everyone, to be sure, but for most people. And we believe strongly that a devoted marriage can be reconciled with individual growth and development. Marriage has enlarged our lives, not encircled them; it has opened new doors, not closed them. We are better people together than we are separately.

But let's be honest. We quote a young woman in this book as saying marriage “just scares me,” and she has a right to feel that way. Marriage is serious business and hard work. It's not just becoming roommates, it's becoming soul mates; it's not just signing a license, it's sharing a life. That explains our title. The words in the marriage ceremony “from this day forward”
are
scary. At the moment a couple exchange those vows, they can never know what they really mean, what hills and valleys stretch out in front of them in the years ahead. But if you take the words seriously, there's no going back. There's only the future, unlimited and unknowable, and the promise to make the journey together.