In 1999, when France created a system of civil unions similar to those in several states here, it expected that this domestic-partnership law would be embraced by gays.
And it was. But not nearly as much as it has been welcomed by heterosexuals.
Within a year of the law's passage, more than 75 percent of civil unions were signed by straight couples. More than two civil unions now take place for every marriage in France, meaning that the overwhelming majority of these pact civil de solidarite (PACS) are between heterosexual couples.
A PACS gives legal rights to both partners and can be dissolved with only a registered letter. It is, in other words, "marriage lite."
"We are the generation of divorced parents, Maud Hugot, 32, told The New York Times. "The notion of eternal marriage has grown obsolete."
Maybe. Or maybe it's just too hard.
In 2006, the Census Bureau reported that married couples became a minority for the first time in the United States. More couples are living together than ever before. The number of babies born to unmarried mothers has risen eightfold from 50 years ago.
Last year, when the Pew Research Center and Time magazine asked Americans whether they thought marriage was obsolete, 40 percent said yes. That might strike some observers as peculiar, since more than 70 percent of Americans aged 25 to 44 have been married, and more than 80 percent are married by 40.
Historian Stephanie Coontz has written about the most significant shift in marriage in the last 3,000 years [Dash] the growth of the "companionate marriage," in which couples were not only expected to divide the labor and forge political alliances, but actually like one another. Coontz has argued that Americans "have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love…placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process."
She notes the recent survey that found that the number of Americans totally dependent on a spouse for important conversations nearly doubled from 1985 to 2004, while the number of people who had really close friends shrank.
To cynics, it has become almost schmaltzy to call one's spouse one's "best friend," but new research in successful marriages has found support for the idea that an emotional and intellectual bond is critical in maintaining a happy marriage.
The so-called "Michelangelo Effect," coined by the late Caryl Rusbult, holds that the more one partner "sculpts" or affirms the other's ideal self, the better the relationship. "When our partners can chisel and polish us in a way that helps us to achieve our ideal self, that's a wonderful thing," Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, told Science Daily.
Similarly, while boredom is one of the biggest threats to marriage, intellectual and emotional stimulation ----which researchers call "self-expansion" ---- helps marriages to flourish.
"If you're seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position," Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, told The New York Times. "And being able to help your partner's self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself."
It would be --- unless you were threatened by that self-expansion, often the culprit in domestic abuse.
The 80 percent of us who do get married do so in spite of nagging cynicism that everlasting love is impossible. It will be different for us, we assure ourselves, and maybe it will. But as much as marriage "sculpts" us, it also humbles us. In a happy marriage, we're willing to drop the very qualities that spoil the rest of our relationships ---- envy, hatred, bitterness and the resentment that comes from feeling unappreciated.
That all of those things are so difficult to drop ---- that we cling to them with a desperation bordering on the self-destructive ---- may explain why many of us are just not ready for marriage. But anybody --- even the French --- who believe that making marriage easier to dissolve will lessen the anguish when it vanishes cannot have really known love to begin with.
c. Republican-American
And it was. But not nearly as much as it has been welcomed by heterosexuals.
Within a year of the law's passage, more than 75 percent of civil unions were signed by straight couples. More than two civil unions now take place for every marriage in France, meaning that the overwhelming majority of these pact civil de solidarite (PACS) are between heterosexual couples.
A PACS gives legal rights to both partners and can be dissolved with only a registered letter. It is, in other words, "marriage lite."
"We are the generation of divorced parents, Maud Hugot, 32, told The New York Times. "The notion of eternal marriage has grown obsolete."
Maybe. Or maybe it's just too hard.
In 2006, the Census Bureau reported that married couples became a minority for the first time in the United States. More couples are living together than ever before. The number of babies born to unmarried mothers has risen eightfold from 50 years ago.
Last year, when the Pew Research Center and Time magazine asked Americans whether they thought marriage was obsolete, 40 percent said yes. That might strike some observers as peculiar, since more than 70 percent of Americans aged 25 to 44 have been married, and more than 80 percent are married by 40.
Historian Stephanie Coontz has written about the most significant shift in marriage in the last 3,000 years [Dash] the growth of the "companionate marriage," in which couples were not only expected to divide the labor and forge political alliances, but actually like one another. Coontz has argued that Americans "have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love…placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process."
She notes the recent survey that found that the number of Americans totally dependent on a spouse for important conversations nearly doubled from 1985 to 2004, while the number of people who had really close friends shrank.
To cynics, it has become almost schmaltzy to call one's spouse one's "best friend," but new research in successful marriages has found support for the idea that an emotional and intellectual bond is critical in maintaining a happy marriage.
The so-called "Michelangelo Effect," coined by the late Caryl Rusbult, holds that the more one partner "sculpts" or affirms the other's ideal self, the better the relationship. "When our partners can chisel and polish us in a way that helps us to achieve our ideal self, that's a wonderful thing," Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, told Science Daily.
Similarly, while boredom is one of the biggest threats to marriage, intellectual and emotional stimulation ----which researchers call "self-expansion" ---- helps marriages to flourish.
"If you're seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position," Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, told The New York Times. "And being able to help your partner's self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself."
It would be --- unless you were threatened by that self-expansion, often the culprit in domestic abuse.
The 80 percent of us who do get married do so in spite of nagging cynicism that everlasting love is impossible. It will be different for us, we assure ourselves, and maybe it will. But as much as marriage "sculpts" us, it also humbles us. In a happy marriage, we're willing to drop the very qualities that spoil the rest of our relationships ---- envy, hatred, bitterness and the resentment that comes from feeling unappreciated.
That all of those things are so difficult to drop ---- that we cling to them with a desperation bordering on the self-destructive ---- may explain why many of us are just not ready for marriage. But anybody --- even the French --- who believe that making marriage easier to dissolve will lessen the anguish when it vanishes cannot have really known love to begin with.
c. Republican-American
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