A Book Review

        Andrew Cherlin
                  The Marriage-Go-Round

    In The Marriage-Go-Round, Andrew Cherlin offers a simple explanation for the high rate of divorce in the U.S.  Americans hold two contradictory ideals: the desire for stable partnership, especially in marriage, and individualism, or the desire for personal development.

    Cherlin believes this explains why partner switching is more frequent in the United States than in other countries.

    It’s an interesting claim.  So we decided to test it.

    If individualism drives people to divorce, it follows the highest rates of divorce would be among those most concerned with personal development.  In the U.S. that would be college-educated, upper income people.  But actually, they have a low divorce rate.

    High rates, however, are found among those with lower incomes and less education.  According to Cherlin, that would make them devoted followers of personal development.  That’s contrary to fact.  Cherlin rationalizes this anomaly by saying economic forces destabilize lower income partnerships.  But the fact remains, what should be strong evidence for his thesis refutes it.

    The author believes since 1950 marriage has lost its monopoly position for two reasons.  Marriage was designed for an environment of scarcity, and marriage has always been a fragile institution.  But, if scarce resources make people stay together, once again lower income people should have the most stable marriages.  And they don’t.

    The second claim--marriage is intrinsically fragile—is dubious.  Anthropologist Laura Betzig, after examining records of 160 societies, concluded marriage is as close to a universal human behavior as anything can be.

    But all of that overlooks the most obvious point about the book.

    What is Andrew Cherlin writing about?  Relationships.  What is the first thing people say to a couple having problems? Go to counseling.  Is there a huge relationship industry in the United States?  Yes.  Has this industry dominated the vocabulary of relationships for the last 60 years?  Yes.

    Does Andrew Cherlin even mention it?  No.

    What!  As astounding as it may seem, Andrew doesn’t mention the major player in the field of relationships.

    This industry has tens of thousands of licensed professionals. Since the end of the Second World War, countless Ph.D.s have spread their advice on how to promote and save relationships.  Their advice has blanketed the country on radio and television, and in magazines and bookstores.

    We would conveniently date the beginning of this field to 1930.  That’s when Paul Popenoe founded the country’s first relationship counseling organization in Los Angeles.  Popenoe coined the term marriage counseling, and his movement originated the idea there is a “scientific” way of saving all relationships.

    Since 1950 that idea has been the dominant one in American culture, and the U.S. has exported the idea to the rest of the world.  The trouble is, though this movement claims to be “scientific,” it did not originate in research.  It began as a foregone conclusion.

    Why has this 80 year project failed?  What is the link between the relationship industry and the high rate of repartnering?  What contribution has this field made to the problems the author decries?

    These are the questions Andrew needed to address, instead of chasing an ephemeral concept like “American individualism.”

    Cherlin would like to say religion and law are primary forces pushing a contradictory model of partnership versus individualism.  But that seems wrong.  The central term in religion is soul, not self, and the law reflects outside forces rather than initiating things.  If excessive self-development is the culprit, the place to look is the home of the self, psychology.

    Psychologists in the relationship industry, like John Gottman, can promote a flawed model of relationships all they want, but if the model doesn’t match up to our mental and emotional structure, it won’t work.  And it hasn’t.

    The Marriage-Go-Round seems to us the perfect example of the narrative fallacy.  It looks at events after the fact and does nothing more than weave them into a narrative.  Andrew Cherlin’s story reminds us of another story, a story which explains why the moon circles the earth.  It goes like this.

    Long ago the sun and the moon were married.  They had nine children, the planets.  But the marriage did not go well because the sun was hot-blooded and tempestuous, while the moon was cold and unemotional.

    One day in a fit of rage the sun cast the moon away from himself.  The moon went to stay with her favorite child, the earth.  That is why even to this day the earth is circled by the moon.

    We like that story.  It has charm and even a certain plausibility.  But we don’t believe it.  Nor do we believe Andrew’s story, because like the story about the moon circling the earth, it doesn't fit the principal facts.   (Posted: July 9, 2009)

   Andrew Cherlin is a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today is published by Knopf, 2009.