Marriage in Usa

It is no doubt that marriage is one of the hottest topics in today's society. People have different marital status and hold distinct opinions on marriage, love and the relationship between love and marriage. In the article "The Future of Love: Kiss Romance Goodbye, It's Time for the Real Thing", Barbara Graham (1997) claims that people always hope that romantic love and marriage can be the same thing and they keep trying to make their marriage become the ideal love. However, it is just not the case. Most of the time, people cannot obtain both marriage and passion at the same time. Graham also states that many studies prove that love is a series of complicated biochemical activities and is controlled by many kinds of chemicals. In most cases, marriages, in real life, are not based on the idealized love. Individuals now need something different from what they had and expected in the past. In my personal opinion, as a social institution, marriage seems to be failing when we compare it with before. However, the failing does not indicate that it is time for marriage to go extinct, but shows that it is evolving with the time, and our society still needs marriage as an important component.

The increasing divorce rate, the higher percentage of people who have pre-married cohabitation, and the delaying of the first marriage, all of them can fully illustrate the trend of marriage in today's America - the likelihood of getting married for American people becomes less. In "The State of Our Union", David Popenoe and Barbara Whitehead (2002) claim that most unmarried people hope that their partner can also be their soul mate. They begin a relationship and come out from it and then seek another better relationship. People keep seeking for the next better partner rather than sticking on the last one. Just like what Graham says in the same article (1997), "We expect our marriages and relationship to be long-running fairy tales. When they're not, instead of examining our expectations, we switch partners and reinvent the fantasy, hoping that this time we'll get it right" (p.9). This situation somehow leads to the increasing rate of divorce. Meanwhile, a growing number of individuals choose to live together with their partner before they get married in order to reach a better live. However, there is no obvious evidence to prove that the unwed cohabitation can improve the quality of marriage life and lower the divorce rate. In fact, the rate of divorce and unmarried cohabitation keep going up recently. Besides, due to these facts, the age of people's first marriage begins to delay to older age. In addition, marriage now no longer includes the legal, social or religious meaning and authority which marriage used to have before. Popenoe and Whitehead (2002) state that, "As an institution, marriage has lost much of its legal, social, economic, and religious meaning and authority" (p.153). Marriage becomes a way to satisfy the emotional and sexual needs. It includes less love component. In this sense, we can say that marriage is failing in America today.

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