A decade or so from now, I would love to see a study done on the longevity of the
same-sex marriages happening this month in San Francisco. I have no data to
support this, but my gut feeling is that if you plot stability of the marriage
against the day on which they got married, you'd see sort of an inverse bell
curve: high on the first few days, lowering after a bit, then raising back up and
eventually (if the marriages are allowed to continue) leveling off. My theory is
that the first people in line would be those who have been aching to marry for
years, waiting for it to be possible, dreaming of the day. Given the numbers of
couples involved, that group may span a couple of days.Of course, some of those
will still split up, for the same reasons hetero couples do, compounded by the
stress of uncertainty, but I expect the divorce (or "divorce", depending on what
happens next) rate to be lower than the average for hetero marriages, because if
my theory is correct, these will be stable relaitonships. The next group will
still have some of those, but will also include couples who got swept up in the
joy of the moment and so rushed out to get married sooner than they might have
otherwise. These will still outlast, say, the average marriage of Elizabeth
Taylor, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Britney Spears, or my Uncle Walt (I think he had five
wives). The rise I postulate should be showingin couples who are marrying now:
these would be the ones who didn't rush out because they took time to talk it over
and decide carefully whether this is the right step for them. I'd guess their
divorce rate to come close to those we see in hetero couples, maybe a little
higher due to stresses over prejudice and so on, but I really have no idea. This
would be a fertile field for someone like
href="http://faculty.washington.edu/couples/books.htm">Pepper Schwartz, to do
a follow-up to her American Couples book and see if gender makes a
difference when other factors are more equal.
I've seen suggestions
in quite a few places that maybe separation of church and state means that
churches/synagogues/temples/mosques shouldn't be able to perform legal ceremonies
at all, that all legal unions should be civil unions, with religions then free to
beless those unions if they like in a separate ceremony. The fairness benefits of
this are obvious, and it also has clear benefits for those who might want a
religious but not civil union, like senior citizens who couldn't afford what
marriage would do to their Social Security benefits, or those who just don't
believe the government has a place in marriage. One less obvious advantage of this
is that if civil unions are just a matter of registration, like getting a
passport, and people then have to plan any ceremony they might want as a separate
issue, we've added more hurdle to the process of getting married. They may be a
good thing; a more lengthy process may help reduce the divorce rate by
discouraging whim of the moment weddings or by adding one more step to lengthen
the ritual. According to Joseph Campbell, the more impressive the ritual, the more
likely people are to feel married and to stay married. My own wedding was
certainly enough of an ordeal to plan as it was, no help from the government
needed, but except for getting the bloodtests and license, that had more to do
with us wanting to have all our friends and family there and to feed them after
they'd come to join us.
That would be a good study too: does
complexity of the wedding, and the amount of work bride and groom put into it
(wedding planners' work doesn't count for this) influence the stability of the
marriage? We should do that study and then we should go and look at it to see what
we can learn. We don't seem to base enough of our decisions on actual data when
opinion will do. Yesterday on NPR, they had a piece about sex ed and who favored
teaching abstinence only instead of abstinence plus birth control. I sort of
wonder, remembering my own days in those classes, if it matters anyway -- does
anyone really pay attention? But if it does make a difference, then we should look
at the programs we have and see what works, not just decide based on someone's
rabid doctrine. Born-again parents and left-leaning atheist parents want the same
for their kids: health and happiness, which in this case translates to no STDs and
no kids of their own until they're ready (different parents will certainly define
"ready" differently). The thing is, we have programs teaching abstinence
only right now. We have other programs teaching ABCs. We have students who don't
take sex-ed at all, we have students in church programs, we have students who are
taught in a very medical way. We've got enough variety to just look and see what
works. So why don't we?
We probably already do, really. So why don't
we use that data to make our decisions?