[Vision2020] Despite Title, A Provocative Look At Marriage

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 The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss

Research finds that same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual
marriages. What can gay and lesbian couples teach straight ones about
living in harmony?
By Liza Mundy

It is more than a little ironic that gay marriage has emerged as the era's
defining civil-rights struggle even as marriage itself seems more
endangered every day. Americans are waiting longer to marry: according to
the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age of first marriage is 28 for men and
26 for women, up from 23 and 20, respectively, in 1950. Rates of
cohabitation have risen swiftly and sharply, and more people than ever are
living single. Most Americans still marry at some point, but many of those
marriages end in divorce. (Although the U.S. divorce rate has declined from
its all-time high in the late '70s and early '80s, it has remained higher
than those of most European countries.) All told, this has created an
unstable system of what the UCLA sociologist Suzanne Bianchi calls
"partnering and repartnering," a relentless emotional and domestic churn
that sometimes results in people forgoing the institution altogether.

Though people may be waiting to marry, they are not necessarily waiting to
have children. The National Center for Family and Marriage Research has
produced a startling analysis of data from the Census Bureau and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that women's median age
when they have their first child is lower than their median age at first
marriage. In other words, having children before you marry has become
normal. College graduates enjoy relatively stable unions, but for every
other group, marriage is collapsing. Among "middle American" women (those
with a high-school degree or some college), an astonishing 58 percent of
first-time mothers are unmarried. The old Groucho Marx joke--"I don't care
to belong to any club that will have me as a member"--applies a little
differently in this context: you might well ask why gays and lesbians want
to join an institution that keeps dithering about whether to admit them
even as the repo men are coming for the furniture and the fire marshal is
about to close down the clubhouse.

Against this backdrop, gay-marriage opponents have argued that allowing
same-sex couples to wed will pretty much finish matrimony off. This point
was advanced in briefs and oral arguments before the Supreme Court in
March, in two major same-sex-marriage cases. One of these is a
constitutional challenge to a key section of the Defense of Marriage Act,
the 1996 law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman,
and bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. The
other involves California's Proposition 8, a same-sex-marriage ban passed
by voters in 2008 but overturned by a federal judge in 2010. Appearing
before the high court in March, Charles J. Cooper, the lawyer defending the
California ban, predicted that same-sex marriage would undermine
traditional marriage by eroding "marital norms."
------------------------------

  Liza Mundy and Hanna Rosin discuss what same-sex couples can teach
straight couples about marriage and parenting.
------------------------------

The belief that gay marriage will harm marriage has roots in both religious
beliefs about matrimony and secular conservative concerns about broader
shifts in American life. One prominent line of thinking holds that men and
women have distinct roles to play in family life; that children need both a
mother and a father, preferably biologically related to them; and that a
central purpose of marriage is abetting heterosexual procreation. During
the Supreme Court arguments over Proposition 8, Justice Elena Kagan asked
Cooper whether the essence of his argument against gay marriage was that
opposite-sex couples can procreate while same-sex ones cannot. "That's the
essential thrust of our position, yes," replied Cooper. He also warned that
"redefining marriage as a genderless institution could well lead over time
to harms to that institution."

Threaded through this thinking is a related conviction that mothers and
fathers should treat their union as "permanent and exclusive," as the
Princeton professor Robert P. George and his co-authors write in the new
book *What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense*. Marriage, seen this way,
is a rigid institution that exists primarily for the rearing of children
and that powerfully constrains the behavior of adults (one is tempted to
call this the "long slog 'til death" view of marriage), rather than an
emotional union entered into for pleasure and companionship between adults.
These critics of gay marriage are, quite validly, worried that too many
American children are being raised in unstable homes, either by struggling
single parents or by a transient succession of live-in adults. They fear
that the spread of gay marriage could help finally sever the increasingly
tenuous link between children and marriage, confirming that it's okay for
dads, or moms, to be deleted from family life as hedonic fulfillment
dictates.

In mounting their defense, advocates of same-sex marriage have argued that
gays and lesbians who wish to marry are committed to family well-being;
that concern for children's welfare is a chief reason many do want to
marry; that gay people are being discriminated against, as a class, in
being denied rights readily available to any heterosexual. And to the
charge that same-sex marriage will change marriage, they tend to argue that
it will not--that married gays and lesbians will blend seamlessly with the
millions of married straight Americans. "The notion that this group can
somehow fundamentally change the institution of marriage--I find it
difficult to wrap my head around," says Gary Gates, a demographer with the
Williams Institute, a research center affiliated with the UCLA School of
Law.

But what if the critics are correct, just not in the way they suppose? What
if same-sex marriage does change marriage, but primarily for the better?
For one thing, there is reason to think that, rather than making marriage
more fragile, the boom of publicity around same-sex weddings could awaken
among heterosexuals a new interest in the institution, at least for a time.
But the larger change might be this: by providing a new model of how two
people can live together equitably, same-sex marriage could help haul
matrimony more fully into the 21st century. Although marriage is in many
ways fairer and more pleasurable for both men and women than it once was,
it hasn't entirely thrown off old notions and habits. As a result, many men
and women enter into it burdened with assumptions and stereotypes that
create stress and resentment. Others, confronted with these increasingly
anachronistic expectations--expectations at odds with the economic and
practical realities of their own lives--don't enter into it at all.

Same-sex spouses, who cannot divide their labor based on preexisting gender
norms, must approach marriage differently than their heterosexual peers.
>From sex to fighting, from child-rearing to chores, they must hammer out
every last detail of domestic life without falling back on assumptions
about who will do what. In this regard, they provide an example that can be
enlightening to all couples. Critics warn of an institution rendered
"genderless." But if a genderless marriage is a marriage in which the wife
is not automatically expected to be responsible for school forms and child
care and dinner preparation and birthday parties and midnight feedings and
holiday shopping, I think it's fair to say that many heterosexual women
would cry "Bring it on!"

Beyond that, gay marriage can function as a controlled experiment, helping
us see which aspects of marital difficulty are truly rooted in gender and
which are not. A growing body of social science has begun to compare
straight and same-sex couples in an attempt to get at the question of what
is female, what is male. Some of the findings are surprising. For instance:
we know that heterosexual wives are more likely than husbands to initiate
divorce. Social scientists have struggled to explain the discrepancy,
variously attributing it to the sexual revolution; to women's financial
independence; to men's failure to keep modern wives happy. Intriguingly, in
Norway and Sweden, where registered partnerships for same-sex couples have
been in place for about two decades (full-fledged marriage was introduced
several years ago), research has found that lesbians are twice as likely as
gay men to split up. If women become dissatisfied even when married to
other women, maybe the problem with marriage isn't men. Maybe women are too
particular. Maybe even women don't know what women want. These are the
kinds of things that we will be able to tease out.

In the past few years, as support for same-sex marriage has gained
momentum, advocates have been able to shift their strategy away from
fighting bans on it (on the books in 38 states as of this writing) and
toward orchestrating popular votes in its favor. In 2012, voters in Maine,
Maryland, and Washington state passed measures legalizing same-sex
marriage, joining the District of Columbia and the six states that had
already legalized gay marriage via legislatures or courts. Similar measures
are moving forward in four other states. In the coming weeks, the high
court is expected to issue its rulings on gay marriage. After oral
arguments in the two cases concluded, many Court observers predicted that
the part of DOMA in question might well be struck down as a federal
intrusion on states' ability to decide family law, thereby forcing the
federal government to recognize the marriages of same-sex couples. As for
Prop 8, any number of outcomes seem possible. The Court could decide that
the case should not have been heard in the first place, given that the ban
isn't being defended by California state officials but instead by the
original supporters of the initiative. Such dismissal on "standing" could
have the effect of legalizing same-sex marriage in California.
Alternatively, the Court could deliver a narrow ruling (whether upholding
or overturning the ban) that does not apply to every state. Among other
feasible, if less likely, outcomes: the Court could use Prop 8 to declare
all such bans unconstitutional, legalizing gay marriage everywhere.

Whatever happens with the high court, it seems likely that gay marriage
will continue its spread through the land. So what happens, then, to the
institution of marriage? The impact is likely to be felt near and far, both
fleetingly and more permanently, in ways confounding to partisans on both
sides.

*RULES FOR A MORE PERFECT UNION*

Not all is broken within modern marriage, of course. On the contrary: the
institution is far more flexible and forgiving than it used to be. In the
wake of women's large-scale entry into the workplace, men are less likely
than they once were to be saddled with being a family's sole breadwinner,
and can carve out a life that includes the close companionship of their
children. Meanwhile, women are less likely to be saddled with the sole
responsibility for child care and housework, and can envision a life beyond
the stove top and laundry basket.

And yet for many couples, as Bianchi, the UCLA sociologist, has pointed
out, the modern ideal of egalitarianism has proved "quite difficult to
realize." Though men are carrying more of a domestic workload than in the
past, women still bear the brunt of the second shift. Among couples with
children, when both spouses work full-time, women do 32 hours a week of
housework, child care, shopping, and other family-related services,
compared with the 21 hours men put in. Men do more paid work--45 hours,
compared with 39 for women--but still have more free time: 31 hours,
compared with 25 for women. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists
and professors of public policy at the University of Michigan, have shown
that happiness rates among women have dropped even as women have acquired
more life options. One possible cause is the lingering inequity in
male-female marriage: women's at-home workload can become so burdensome
that wives opt out of the paid workforce--or sit at the office making mental
lists of the chores they do versus the chores their husbands do, and bang
their heads on their desks in despair.

Not that everything is easy for fathers in dual-earner couples, who now
feel afflicted by work-life conflict in even greater numbers than their
wives (60 percent of men in such couples say they experience this conflict,
versus 47 percent of women, according to a 2008 study by the Families and
Work Institute). And men face a set of unfair expectations all their own:
the Pew Research Center found in 2010 that 67 percent of Americans still
believe it's "very important" that a man be ready to support a family
before getting married, while only 33 percent believe the same about women.

This burden, exacerbated by the economic realities facing many men today,
has undoubtedly contributed to marriage's recent decline. As our economy
has transitioned away from manufacturing and industry, men with a
high-school education can no longer expect the steady, well-paying union
jobs that formerly enabled many to support their families. Outdated
assumptions that men should bring something to the table, and that this
something should be money, don't help. Surveying their prospects, many
working-class mothers reject marriage altogether, perhaps reasoning that
they can support a child, but don't want a dependent husband.

It's not that people don't want to marry. Most never-married Americans say
they still aspire to marriage, but many of them see it as something grand
and out of reach. Getting married is no longer something you do when you
are young and foolish and starting out; prosperity is not something spouses
build together. Rather, marriage has become a "marker of prestige," as the
sociologist Andrew Cherlin puts it--a capstone of a successful life, rather
than its cornerstone. But while many couples have concluded that they are
not ready for marriage, they have things backwards. It's not that they
aren't ready for marriage; it's that marriage isn't ready for the realities
of 21st-century life. Particularly for less affluent, less educated
Americans, changing economic and gender realities have dismantled the old
institution, without constructing any sort of replacement.

As we attempt to come up with a more functional model, research on same-sex
unions can provide what Gary Gates of the Williams Institute calls an
"important counterfactual." Although gays and lesbians cannot solve all
that ails marriage, they seem to be working certain things out in ways
straight couples might do well to emulate, chief among them a
back-to-the-drawing-board approach to divvying up marital duties. A growing
body of scholarship on household division of labor shows that in many ways,
same-sex couples do it better.

This scholarship got its start in the late 1960s, with a brilliant insight
by the sociologist Pepper Schwartz, then a doctoral candidate at Yale.
Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval--including changes at the
university, which had just begun to admit female undergraduates--gender was,
Schwartz says, "all we thought about." Like many of her peers, she was keen
to figure out what women were and what men were: which traits were
biological and which social, and where there might be potential for
transformational change. "It occurred to me," she says, that "a naturally
occurring experiment" could shed light on these issues. Actually, two
experiments: the rise of unmarried heterosexual cohabitation, and the
growing visibility of gay and lesbian couples. If she surveyed people in
three kinds of relationships--married; straight and cohabiting; and gay and
cohabiting--and all showed similarity on some measures, maybe this would say
something about both men and women. If the findings didn't line up, maybe
this would say something about marriage.

After taking a teaching position at the University of Washington (where she
remains a faculty member), Schwartz teamed up with a gay colleague, the
late Philip Blumstein, to conduct just such a survey, zeroing in on the
greater San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle metropolitan areas. It
was a huge effort. Unmarried cohabiting couples were not yet easy to find,
and gays and lesbians were so leery of being outed that when Schwartz asked
a woman who belonged to a lesbian bridge group whether she could interview
the other players about their relationships, the woman said, "We don't even
talk about it ourselves." Schwartz and Blumstein collected responses to
12,000 questionnaires and conducted hundreds of interviews; at one point,
they had 20 graduate students helping tabulate data. The project took about
a decade, and resulted in a groundbreaking piece of sociology, the
book *American
Couples: Money, Work, Sex*.

What Schwartz and Blumstein found is that gay and lesbian couples were
fairer in their dealings with one another than straight couples, both in
intent and in practice. The lesbians in the study were almost painfully
egalitarian--in some cases putting money in jars and splitting everything
down to the penny in a way, Schwartz says, that "would have driven me
crazy." Many unmarried heterosexual cohabitators were also careful about
divvying things up, but lesbian couples seemed to take the practice to
extremes: "It was almost like 'my kitty, your litter.' " Gay men, like
lesbians, were more likely than straight couples to share cooking and
chores. Many had been in heterosexual marriages, and when asked whether
they had helped their wives with the housework in those prior unions, they
usually said they had not. "You can imagine," Schwartz says, "how
irritating I found this."

There were still some inequities: in all couples, the person with the
higher income had more authority and decision-making power. This was least
true for lesbians; truer for heterosexuals; and most true for gay men.
Somehow, putting two men together seemed to intensify the sense that "money
talks," as Schwartz and Blumstein put it. They could not hope to determine
whether this tendency was innate or social--were men naturally inclined to
equate resources with power, or had our culture ingrained that idea in
them?--but one way or another, the finding suggested that money was a way
men competed with other men, and not just a way for husbands to compete
with their wives. Among lesbians, the contested terrain lay elsewhere: for
instance, interacting more with the children could be, Schwartz says, a
"power move."

Lesbians also tended to discuss things endlessly, achieving a degree of
closeness unmatched by the other types of couples. Schwartz wondered
whether this might account for another finding: over time, sex in lesbian
relationships dwindled--a state of affairs she has described as "lesbian bed
death." (The coinage ended up on Schwartz's Wikipedia page, to her
exasperation: "There are other things that I wish I were famous around.")
She posits that lesbians may have had so much intimacy already that they
didn't need sex to get it; by contrast, heterosexual women, whose spouses
were less likely to be chatty, found that "sex is a highway to intimacy."
As for men, she eventually concluded that whether they were straight or
gay, they approached sex as they might a sandwich: good, bad, or mediocre,
they were likely to grab it.

*RULE 1: Negotiate in advance who will empty the trash and who will clean
the bathroom.*

Other studies have since confirmed Schwartz and Blumstein's findings that
same-sex couples are more egalitarian. In 2000, when Vermont became the
first state to legalize same-sex civil unions, the psychologist Esther
Rothblum saw an opportunity to explore how duties get sorted among a broad
swath of the same-sex population. Rothblum, now at San Diego State
University, is herself a lesbian and had long been interested in the
relationships and mental health of lesbians. She also wanted to see how
legal recognition affected couples.

As people from around the country flocked to Vermont to apply for
civil-union licenses, Rothblum and two colleagues got their names and
addresses from public records and asked them to complete a questionnaire.
Then, they asked each of the civil-union couples to suggest friends in
same-sex couples who were not in civil unions, and to identify a
heterosexual sibling who was married, and wrote those people asking them to
participate. This approach helped control for factors like background and
upbringing among the subjects. The researchers asked people to rate, on a
scale of one to nine, which partner was more likely to do the dishes,
repair things around the house, buy groceries. They asked who was more
likely to deal with the landlord, punish the children, call the plumber,
drive the kids to appointments, give spontaneous hugs, pay compliments.
They also asked who was more likely to appreciate the other person's point
of view during an argument.

They found that, even in the new millennium, married heterosexual couples
were very likely to divide duties along old-fashioned gender lines.
Straight women were more likely than lesbians to report that their partner
paid the mortgage or the rent and the utility bills, and bought groceries,
household appliances, even the women's clothing. These wives were also more
likely to say they did the bulk of the cooking, vacuuming, dishes, and
laundry. Compared with their husbands, they were far, far more likely to
clean the bathroom. They were also more likely than their husbands to
perform "relationship maintenance" such as showing affection and initiating
serious conversations. When Rothblum and her colleagues held the
heterosexual husbands up against the gay men, they found the same pattern.
The straight guys were more likely to take care of the lawn, empty the
trash, and make household repairs than their partners. They were the ones
to fix drinks for company and to drive when the couple went out. They
cooked breakfast reasonably often, but not dinner. On all these measures
and more, the same-sex couples were far more likely to divide
responsibilities evenly. This is not to say that the same-sex couples split
each duty half-and-half. One partner might do the same chore regularly, but
because there was no default assignment based on gender, such patterns
evolved organically, based on preferences and talents.

Rothblum's observations are borne out by the couples I interviewed for this
piece. "I'm a better cook, so I take on most of that responsibility," said
Seth Thayer, who lives in a small coastal town in Maine. His husband, Greg
Tinder, "is a better handyman." Others spoke of the perils of lopsided
relationships. Chris Kast, a Maine newlywed, told me that he and his
husband, Byron Bartlett, had both been married to women. In Bartlett's
first marriage, it was tacitly assumed that he would take out the garbage.
Now the two men divide tasks by inclination. "I'm more of a Felix Ungar--I
notice when something's dirty--but we both clean," Kast said. "With Chris
and I," Bartlett added, "we have to get *everything* done." Isabelle
Dikland, a Washington, D.C., business consultant who is married to Amy
Clement, a teacher, told me about a dinner party she recently attended with
a group of mostly straight parents. Dikland and Clement, who had just had a
second daughter, were extolling the virtues of having two children. The
straight mother they were talking with seemed dubious. "If we had a second
kid, guess who would do all the work," she told them. "I'd have to give up
my career; I'm already doing everything." The woman glanced surreptitiously
at her husband, at which point Dikland "dropped the subject really quickly."

*RULE 2: When it comes to parenting, a 50-50 split isn't necessarily best.*

Charlotte J. Patterson*, *a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has
arresting visual evidence of the same egalitarianism at work in parenting:
compared with husband-and-wife pairs, she has found, same-sex parents tend
to be more cooperative and mutually hands-on. Patterson and a colleague,
Rachel Farr, have conducted a study of more than 100 same-sex and
heterosexual adoptive parents in 11 states and the District of Columbia; it
is among the first such studies to include gay fathers. As reported in an
article in a forthcoming issue of the journal *Child Development*, the
researchers visited families in their homes, scattered some toys on a
blanket, invited the subjects to play with them any way they chose, and
videotaped the interactions. "What you see is what they did with that blank
slate," Patterson says. "One thing that I found riveting: the same-sex
couples are far more likely to be in there together, and the opposite-sex
couples show the conventional pattern--the mom more involved, the dad
playing with Tinkertoys by himself." When the opposite-sex couples did
parent simultaneously, they were more likely to undermine each other by
talking at cross-purposes or suggesting different toys. The lesbian mothers
tended to be egalitarian and warm in their dealings with one another, and
showed greater pleasure in parenting than the other groups did. Same-sex
dads were also more egalitarian in their division of labor than straight
couples, though not as warm or interactive as lesbian moms. (Patterson says
she and her colleagues may need to refine their analysis to take into
account male ways of expressing warmth.)

By and large, all of the families studied, gay and straight alike, were
happy, high functioning, and financially secure. Each type of partner--gay,
straight; man, woman--reported satisfaction with his or her family's
parenting arrangement, though the heterosexual wife was less content than
the others, invariably saying that she wanted more help from her husband.
"Of all the parents we've studied, she's the least satisfied with the
division of labor," says Patterson, who is in a same-sex partnership and
says she knows from experience that deciding who will do what isn't always
easy.

Even as they are more egalitarian in their parenting styles, same-sex
parents resemble their heterosexual counterparts in one somewhat
old-fashioned way: a surprising number establish a division of labor
whereby one spouse becomes the primary earner and the other stays home. Lee
Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told
me that, "in terms of economics," same-sex couples with children resemble
heterosexual couples with children much more than they resemble childless
same-sex couples. You might say that gay parents are simultaneously
departing from traditional family structures and leading the way back
toward them.

In his seminal book *A Treatise on the Family*, published in 1981, the
Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker argued that "specialization,"
whereby one parent stays home and the other does the earning, is the most
efficient way of running a household, because the at-home spouse enables
the at-work spouse to earn more. Feminists, who had been fighting for
domestic parity, not specialization, deplored this theory, rightly fearing
that it could be harnessed to keep women at home. Now the example of gay
and lesbian parents might give us all permission to relax a little: maybe
sometimes it really is easier when one parent works and the other is the
supplementary or nonearning partner, either because this is the natural
order of things or because the American workplace is so greedy and
unforgiving that something or somebody has to give. As Martha Ertman, a
University of Maryland law professor, put it to me, many families just
function better when the same person is consistently "in charge of making
vaccinations happen, making sure the model of the World War II monument
gets done, getting the Christmas tree home or the challah bought by
6 o'clock on Friday." The good news is that the decision about which parent
plays this role need not have anything to do with gender.

More surprising still, guess who is most likely to specialize. Gay dads.
Using the most recent Census Bureau data, Gary Gates found that 32 percent
of married heterosexual couples with children have only one parent in the
labor force, compared with 33 percent of gay-male couples with children.
(Lesbians also specialize, but not at such high rates, perhaps because they
are so devoted to equality, or perhaps because their earnings are
lower--women's median wage is 81 percent that of men--and not working is an
unaffordable luxury.) While the percentage point dividing gay men from
straight couples is not statistically significant, it's intriguing that gay
dads are as likely as straight women to be stay-at-home parents.

Gay men's decisions about breadwinning can nonetheless be fraught, as many
associate employment with power. A study published in the *Journal of GLBT
Family Studies *in 2005 by Stephanie Jill Schacher and two colleagues found
that when gay men do specialize, they don't have an easy time deciding who
will do what: some stay-at-home dads perceived that their choice carried
with it a loss in prestige and stature. As a result, gay men tended to
fight not over who got to stay home, but over who didn't have to. "It's
probably the biggest problem in our relationship," said one man interviewed
for that study. Perhaps what Betty Friedan called "the problem that has no
name" is inherent in child-rearing, and will always be with us.

*RULE 3: Don't want a divorce? Don't marry a woman.*

Three years after they first gathered information from the couples who
received licenses in Vermont, Esther Rothblum and her colleagues checked
back to evaluate the condition of their relationships. Overall, the
researchers found that the quality of gay and lesbian relationships was
higher on many measures than that of the straight control group (the
married heterosexual siblings), with more compatibility and intimacy, and
less conflict.

Which is not to say same-sex couples don't have conflict. When they fight,
however, they fight fairer. They can even fight funny, as researchers from
the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley
showed in an article published in 2003, based on a study of couples who
were navigating potentially tense interactions. Recruiting married straight
couples as well as gays and lesbians in committed relationships, the
researchers orchestrated a scenario in which one partner had to bring up an
area of conflict to discuss with the other. In same-sex couples, the
partner with the bone to pick was rated "less belligerent and less
domineering" than the straight-couple counterpart, while the person on the
receiving end was less aggressive and showed less fear or tension. The
same-sex "initiator" also displayed less sadness and "whining," and more
affection, joy, and humor. In trying to make sense of the disparity, the
researchers noted that same-sex couples valued equality more, and posited
that the greater negativity of straight couples "may have to do with the
standard status hierarchy between men and women." Which perhaps boils down
to something like this: straight women see themselves as being less
powerful than men, and this breeds hostility.

When it comes to conflict, a crucial variable separates many gay and
lesbian couples from their straight counterparts: children. As Rothblum
points out, for married heterosexual parents, happiness tends to be
U-shaped: high at the beginning of marriage, then dipping to a low, then
high again. What happens in that low middle is child-rearing. Although the
proportion of gay and lesbian couples with children is increasing, same-sex
couples are still less likely than straight couples to be parents. Not all
research comparing same-sex and married straight couples has done an
adequate job of controlling for this important difference. One that did, a
2008 study in the *Journal of Family Psychology*, looked at couples during
their first 10 years of cohabitation. It found that childless lesbians had
a higher "relationship quality" than their child-free gay-male and
heterosexual counterparts. And yet a 2010 study in the same journal found
that gay-male, lesbian, and straight couples alike experienced a "modest
decline in relationship quality" in the first year of adopting a child. As
same-sex couples become parents in greater numbers, they could well endure
some of the same strife as their straight peers. It remains to be seen
whether the different parenting styles identified by Charlotte Patterson
might blunt some of the ennui of child-rearing.

As for divorce, the data are still coming in. A 2006 study of Sweden and
Norway found higher dissolution rates among same-sex couples in registered
partnerships than among married straight people. Yet in the United States,
a study by the Williams Institute has found that gay unions have lower
dissolution rates than straight ones. It is simply too soon to tell with
any certainty whether gay marriages will be more or less durable in the
long run than straight ones. What the studies to date do (for the most
part) suggest is this: despite--or maybe because of--their perfectionist
approach to egalitarianism, lesbian couples seem to be more likely to break
up than gay ones. Pepper Schwartz noted this in the early 1980s, as did the
2006 study of same-sex couples in Sweden and Norway, in which researchers
speculated that women may have a "stronger general sensitivity to the
quality of relationships." Meaning maybe women are just picky, and when you
have two women, you have double the pickiness. So perhaps the real threat
to marriage is: women.

 Rob Hardies wonders whether straight women notice him when he takes his
son to the park. Do they see a man doing this and gently point it out to
their husbands? (Gail Albert Halaban)

*THE CONTAGION EFFECT*

Whatever this string of studies may teach us about marriage and gender
dynamics, the next logical question becomes this: Might such marriages do
more than merely inform our understanding of straight marriage--might their
attributes trickle over to straight marriage in some fashion?

In the course of my reporting this year in states that had newly legalized
same-sex marriage, people in the know--wedding planners, officiants, fiancés
and fiancées--told me time and again that nuptial fever had broken out
around them, among gay and straight couples alike. Same-sex weddings seemed
to be bestowing a new frisson on the idea of getting hitched, or maybe
restoring an old one. At the Gay and Lesbian Wedding Expo in downtown
Baltimore, just a few weeks after same-sex marriage became legal in
Maryland, Drew Vanlandingham, who describes himself as a "wedding planner
designer," was delighted at how business had picked up. Here it was,
January, and many of his favorite venues were booked into late summer--much
to the consternation, he said, of his straight brides. "They're like, 'I
better get a move on!' " It was his view that in Maryland, both teams were
now engaged in an amiable but spirited race to the altar.

Ministers told me of wedding booms in their congregations. In her years as
the pastor of the Unitarian church in Rockville, Maryland, Lynn Strauss
said she had grown accustomed to a thin wedding roster: some years she
might perform one or two services; other years, none. But this year, "my
calendar is full of weddings," she said. "Two in March, one in April, one
in May, one in September, one in October--oh, and one in July." Three were
same-sex weddings, but the rest were heterosexual. When I attended the
church's first lesbian wedding, in early March, I spoke with Steve Greene
and Ellen Rohan, who had recently been married by Strauss. It was Steve's
third marriage, Ellen's second. Before he met Ellen, Steve had sworn he
would never marry again. Ellen said the arrival of same-sex marriage had
influenced their feelings. "Marriage," she said simply, "is on everyone's
mind."

Robert M. Hardies, who is a pastor at the Unitarian All Souls Church in
Washington, D.C., and who is engaged to be married to his longtime partner
and co-parent, Chris Nealon, told me that he has seen "a re-enchantment of
marriage" among those who attend same-sex ceremonies: "Straight folks come
to [same-sex] weddings, and I watch it on their face--there's a feeling that
this is really special. Suddenly marriage is sexy again." We could chalk
these anecdotes up to the human desire to witness love that overcomes
obstacles--the same desire behind all romantic comedies, whether
Shakespeare's or Hollywood's. But could something a bit less romantic also
be at work?

There is some reason to suppose that attitudes about marriage could, in
fact, be catching. The phenomenon known as "social contagion" lies at the
heart of an increasingly prominent line of research on how our behavior and
emotions affect the people we know. One famous example dates from 2008,
when James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis published a study showing
that happiness "spreads" through social networks. They arrived at this
conclusion via an ingenious crunching of data from a long-running medical
study involving thousands of interconnected residents--and their children,
and later their grandchildren--in Framingham, Massachusetts. "Emotional
states can be transferred directly from one individual to another," they
found, across three degrees of separation. Other studies have shown that
obesity, smoking habits, and school performance may also be catching.

Most relevant, in a working paper that is under submission to a sociology
journal, the Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott, along
with her co-authors, Fowler and Christakis, has identified a contagion
effect for divorce. Divorce, she found, can spread among friends. She told
me that she also suspects that tending to the marriages of friends can help
preserve your own. McDermott says she readily sees how marriage could
itself be contagious. Intriguingly, some of the Scandinavian countries
where same-sex unions have been legal for a decade or more have seen a
rise, not a fall, in marriage rates. In response to conservative arguments
that same-sex marriage had driven a stake through the heart of marriage in
northern Europe, the Yale University law professor William N. Eskridge Jr.
and Darren Spedale in 2006 published an analysis showing that in the decade
since same-sex partnerships became legal, heterosexual marriage rates had
increased 10.7 percent in Denmark, 12.7 percent in Norway, and 28.8 percent
in Sweden. Divorce rates had dropped in all three countries. Although there
was no way to prove cause and effect, the authors allowed, you could safely
say that marriage had not been harmed.

So let's suppose for a moment that marital behavior is catching. How,
exactly, might it spread? I found one possible vector of contagion inside
the Washington National Cathedral, a neo-Gothic landmark that towers
watchfully over the Washington, D.C., skyline. The seat of the bishop of an
Episcopal diocese that includes D.C. and parts of Maryland, the cathedral
is a symbol of American religious life, and strives to provide a spiritual
home for the nation, frequently hosting interfaith events and programs.
Presiding over it is the Very Reverend Gary Hall, an Episcopal priest and
the cathedral's dean. Earlier this year, Hall announced that the cathedral
would conduct same-sex weddings, a declaration that attracted more
attention than he expected. Only people closely involved with the church
and graduates of the private schools on its grounds can marry there. Even
so, it is an influential venue, and Hall used the occasion to argue that
same-sex couples offer an image of "radical" equality that straight couples
can profitably emulate. He believes, moreover, that their example can be
communicated through intermediaries like him: ministers and counselors
gleaning insights from same-sex couples, and transmitting them, as it were,
to straight ones. Hall says that counseling same-sex couples in preparation
for their ceremonies has already altered the way he counsels men and women.

"I have a list of like 12 issues that people need to talk about that cause
conflict," said Hall, who is lanky, with short gray hair and horn-rims, and
who looks like he could be a dean of pretty much anything: American
literature, political philosophy, East Asian studies. As we talked in his
office one morning this spring, sunlight poured through a bank of arched
windows onto an Oriental rug. Over the years, he has amassed a collection
of cheesy 1970s paperbacks with names like *Open Marriage* and *Total Woman*,
which he calls "books that got people into trouble." The dean grew up in
Hollywood, and in the 1990s was a priest at a church in Pasadena where he
did many same-sex blessings (a blessing being a ceremony that stops short
of legal marriage). He is as comfortable talking about Camille Paglia and
the LGBT critique of marriage as he is about Holy Week. He is also capable
of saying things like "The problem with genital sex is that it involves us
emotionally in a way that we're not in control of."

When Hall sees couples for premarital preparation, he gives them a list of
hypothetical conflicts to take home, hash out, and report back on.
Everybody fights, he tells them. The people who thrive in marriage are the
ones who can handle disagreement and make their needs known. So he presents
them with the prime sticking points: affection and lovemaking; how to deal
with in-laws; where holidays will be spent; outside friendships. He talks
to them about parenting roles, and chores, and money--who will earn it and
who will make decisions about it.

Like Esther Rothblum, he has found that heterosexual couples persist in
approaching these topics with stereotypical assumptions. "You start
throwing out questions for men and women: 'Who's going to take care of the
money?' And the guy says, 'That's me.' And you ask: 'Who's responsible for
birth control?' And the guy says, 'That's her department.' " By contrast,
he reports, same-sex couples "have thought really hard about how they're
going to share the property, the responsibilities, the obligations in a
mutual way. They've had to devote much more thought to that than straight
couples, because the straight couples pretty much still fall back on old
modes."

Now when Hall counsels heterosexuals, "I'm really pushing back on their
patriarchal assumptions: that the woman's got to give up her career for the
guy; that the guy is going to take care of the money." Every now and then,
he says, he has a breakthrough, and a straight groom realizes that, say,
contraception is his concern too. Hall says the same thing is happening in
the offices of any number of pastors, rabbis, and therapists. "You're not
going to be able to talk to heterosexual couples where there's a power
imbalance and talk to a homosexual couple where there is a power
mutuality," and not have the conversations impact one another. As a result,
he believes there will be changes to marriage, changes that some people
will find scary. "When [conservatives] say that gay marriage threatens my
marriage, I used to say, 'That's ridiculous.' Now I say, 'Yeah, it does.
It's asking you a crucial question about your marriage that you may not
want to answer: If I'm a man, am I actually sharing the duties and
responsibilities of married life equally with my wife?' Same-sex marriage
gives us another image of what marriage can be."

Hall argues that same-sex marriage stands to change even the wedding
service itself. For a good 1,000 years, he notes, the Christian Church
stayed out of matrimony, which was primarily a way for society to regulate
things like inheritance. But ever since the Church did get involved, the
wedding ceremony has tended to reflect the gender mores of the time. For
example, the Book of Common Prayer for years stated that a wife must love,
honor, and obey her husband, treating him as her master and lord. That
language is long gone, but vestiges persist: the tradition of the father
giving away the bride dates from an era when marriage was a property
transfer and the woman was the property. In response to the push for
same-sex marriage, Hall says, the General Convention, the governing council
of the entire Episcopal Church, has devised a liturgy for same-sex
ceremonies (in most dioceses, these are blessings) that honors but alters
this tradition so that both spouses are presented by sponsors.

"The new service does not ground marriage in a doctrine of creation and
procreation," Hall says. "It grounds marriage in a kind of free
coming-together of two people to live out their lives." A study group has
convened to look at the Church's teachings on marriage, and in the next
couple of years, Hall expects, the General Convention will adopt a new
service for all Episcopal weddings. He is hopeful that the current same-sex
service will serve as its basis.

The legalization of same-sex marriage is likely to affect even members of
churches that have not performed such ceremonies. Delman Coates, the pastor
of Mt. Ennon Baptist, a predominantly African American mega-church in
southern Maryland, was active in his state's fight for marriage equality,
presenting it to his parishioners as a civil-rights issue. The topic has
also led to some productive, if difficult, conversations about "what the
Scriptures are condemning and what they're confirming." In particular, he
has challenged his flock over what he calls the "typical clobber passages":
certain verses in Leviticus, Romans, and elsewhere that many people
interpret as condemnations of homosexuality. These discussions are part of
a long-standing effort to challenge people's thinking about other passages
having to do with divorce and premarital sex--issues many parishioners have
struggled with at home. Coates preaches that what the Bible is condemning
is not modern divorce, but a practice, common in biblical times, whereby
men cast out their wives for no good reason. Similarly, he tells them that
the "fornication" invoked is something extreme--rape, incest, prostitution.
He does not condone illicit behavior or familial dissolution, but he wants
the members of his congregation to feel better about their own lives. In
exchanges like these, he is making gay marriage part of a much larger
conversation about the way we live and love now.

Gay marriage's ripples are also starting to be felt beyond churches, in
schools and neighborhoods and playgroups. Which raises another question:
Will gay and lesbian couples be peacemakers or combatants in the "mommy
wars"--the long-simmering struggle between moms who stay at home and moms
who work outside it? If you doubt that straight households are paying
attention to same-sex ones, consider Danie, a woman who lives with her
husband and two children in Bethesda, Maryland. (Danie asked me not to use
her last name out of concern for her family's privacy.) Not long after she
completed a master's degree in Spanish linguistics at Georgetown
University, her first baby was born. Because her husband, Jesse, works long
hours as a litigator, she decided to become a full-time parent--not an easy
decision in work-obsessed Washington, D.C. For a while, she ran a
photography business out of their home, partly because she loves
photography but partly so she could assure people at dinner parties that
she had paying work. Whenever people venture that women who work outside
the home don't judge stay-at-home moms, Danie thinks: *Are you freaking
kidding me?*

She takes some comfort, however, in the example of a lesbian couple with
whom she is friendly. Both women are attorneys, and one stays home with
their child. "Their life is exactly the same as ours," Danie told me, with
a hint of vindication. If being a stay-at-home mother is "good enough for
her, then what's my issue? She's a huge women's-rights activist." But while
comparing herself with a lesbian couple is liberating in some ways, it also
exacerbates the competitive anxiety that afflicts so many modern mothers.
The other thing about these two mothers, Danie said, is that they are so
relaxed, so happy, so present. Even the working spouse manages to be a
super-involved parent, to a much greater extent than most of the working
fathers she knows. "I'm a little bit obsessed with them," she says.

Related to this is the question of how gay fatherhood might impact
heterosexual fatherhood--by, for example, encouraging the idea that men can
be emotionally accessible, logistically capable parents. Will the growing
presence of gay dads in some communities mean that men are more often
included in the endless e-mail chains that go to parents of preschoolers
and birthday-party invitees? As radically as fatherhood has changed in
recent decades, a number of antiquated attitudes about dads have proved
strangely enduring: Rob Hardies, the pastor at All Souls, reports that when
his partner, Chris, successfully folded a stroller before getting on an
airplane with their son, Nico, he was roundly congratulated by passersby,
as if he had solved a difficult mathematical equation in public. So low are
expectations for fathers, even now, that in Stephanie Schacher's study of
gay fathers and their feelings about caregiving, her subjects reported that
people would see them walking on the street with their children and say
things like "Giving Mom a break?" Hardies thinks that every time he and
Chris take their son to the playground or to story hour, they help disrupt
this sort of thinking. He imagines moms seeing a man doing this and
gently--or maybe not so gently--pointing it out to their husbands. "Two guys
somehow manage to get their act together and have a household and cook
dinner and raise a child, without a woman doing all the work," he says.
Rather than setting an example that fathers don't matter, gay men are
setting an example that fathers do matter, and that marriage matters, too.

*THE SEX PROBLEM*

When, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Pepper Schwartz asked couples about
their sex lives, she arrived at perhaps her most explosive finding:
non-monogamy was rampant among gay men, a whopping 82 percent of whom
reported having had sex outside their relationship. Slightly more than
one-third of gay-male couples felt that monogamy was important; the other
two-thirds said that monogamy was unimportant or that they were neutral on
the topic. In a funny way, Schwartz says, her findings suggested that
same-sex unions (like straight ones) aren't necessarily about sex. Some gay
men made a point of telling her they loved their partners but weren't
physically attracted to them. Others said they wanted to be monogamous but
were unsupported in that wish, by their partner, gay culture, or both.

Schwartz believes that a move toward greater monogamy was emerging among
gay men even before the AIDS crisis. Decades later, gay-male couples are
more monogamous than they used to be, but not nearly to the same degree as
other kinds of couples. In her Vermont research, Esther Rothblum found that
15 percent of straight husbands said they'd had sex outside their
relationship, compared with 58 percent of gay men in civil unions and
61 percent of gay men who were partnered but not in civil unions. When
asked whether a couple had arrived at an explicit agreement about
extra-relational sex, a minuscule 4 percent of straight husbands said
they'd discussed it with their partner and determined that it was okay,
compared with 40 percent of gay men in civil unions and 49 percent of gay
men in partnerships that were not legally recognized. Straight women and
lesbians, meanwhile, were united in their commitment to monogamy, lesbians
more so than straight women: 14 percent of straight wives said they had had
sex outside their marriage, compared with 9 percent of lesbians in civil
unions and 7 percent of lesbians who were partnered but not in civil unions.

The question of whether gays and lesbians will change marriage, or vice
versa, is at its thorniest around sex and monogamy. Private behavior could
well stay private: when she studied marriage in the Netherlands, Lee
Badgett, the University of Massachusetts economist, found that while many
same-sex couples proselytize about the egalitarianism of their
relationships, they don't tend to promote non-monogamy, even if they
practice it. Then again, some gay-rights advocates, like the writer and sex
columnist Dan Savage, argue very publicly that insisting on monogamy can do
a couple more harm than good. Savage, who questions whether most humans are
cut out for decades of sex with only one person, told me that "monogamy in
marriage has been a disaster for straight couples" because it has set
unrealistic expectations. "Gay-male couples are much more likely to be
realistic about what men are," he said. Savage's own marriage started out
monogamous; the agreement was that if either partner cheated, this would be
grounds for ending the relationship. But when he and his husband decided to
adopt a child, Savage suggested that they relax their zero-tolerance policy
on infidelity. He felt that risking family dissolution over such an
incident no longer made sense. His husband later suggested they explicitly
allow each other occasional dalliances, a policy Savage sees as providing a
safety valve for the relationship. If society wants marriage to be more
resilient, he argues, we must make it more "monagamish."

This is, to be sure, a difficult argument to win: a husband proposing
non-monogamy to his wife on the grounds that it is in the best interest of
a new baby would have a tough time prevailing in the court of public
opinion. But while most gay-marriage advocates stop short of championing
Savage's "wiggle room," some experts say that gay men are better at talking
more openly about sex. Naveen Jonathan, a family therapist and a professor
at Chapman University, in California, says he sees many gay partners hammer
out an elaborate who-can-do-what-when sexual contract, one that says,
"These are the times and the situations where it's okay to be
non-monogamous, and these are the times and the situations where it is
not." While some straight couples have deals of their own, he finds that
for the most part, they simply presume monogamy. A possible downside of
this assumption: straight couples are far less likely than gay men to
frankly and routinely discuss sex, desire, and the challenges of sexual
commitment.

Other experts question the idea that most gay males share a preference for
non-monogamous relationships, or will in the long term. Savage's argument
that non-monogamy is a safety valve is "very interesting, but it really is
no more than a claim," says Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist at the
Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Garcia
points out that not all men are relentlessly sexual beings, and not all men
want an open relationship. "In some ways, same-sex couples are
healthier--they tend to have these negotiations more," he says. But
negotiating can be stressful: in many cases, Garcia notes, one gay partner
would prefer to be monogamous, but gives in to the other partner.

So which version will prevail: non-monogamous marriage, or marriage as we
conventionally understand it? It's worth pointing out that in the U.S.,
same-sex unions are slightly more likely between women, and non-monogamy is
not a cause women tend to champion. And some evidence suggests that getting
married changes behavior: William Eskridge and Darren Spedale found that in
the years after Norway, Sweden, and Denmark instituted registered
partnerships, many same-sex couples reported placing a greater emphasis on
monogamy, while national rates of HIV infections declined.

Sex, then, may be one area where the institution of marriage pushes back
against norms that have been embraced by many gay couples. Gary Hall of the
National Cathedral allows that in many ways, gay relationships offer a
salutary "critique" of marriage, but argues that the marriage establishment
will do some critiquing back. He says he would not marry two people who
intended to be non-monogamous, and believes that monogamy will be a
"critical issue" in the dialogue between the gay community and the Church.
Up until now, he says, progressive churches have embraced "the part of gay
behavior that looks like straight behavior," but at some point, churches
also have to engage gay couples whose behavior doesn't conform to
monogamous ideals. He hopes that, in the course of this give-and-take, the
church ends up reckoning with other ongoing cultural changes, from
unmarried cohabitation to the increasing number of adults who choose to
live as singles. "How do we speak credibly to people about their sexuality
and their sexual relationships?" he asks. "We really need to rethink this."

So yes, marriage will change. Or rather, it will change again. The fact is,
there is no such thing as traditional marriage. In various places and at
various points in human history, marriage has been a means by which young
children were betrothed, uniting royal houses and sealing alliances between
nations. In the Bible, it was a union that sometimes took place between a
man and his dead brother's widow, or between one man and several wives. It
has been a vehicle for the orderly transfer of property from one generation
of males to the next; the test by which children were deemed legitimate or
bastard; a privilege not available to black Americans; something parents
arranged for their adult children; a contract under which women, legally,
ceased to exist. Well into the 19th century, the British common-law concept
of "unity of person" meant a woman *became* her husband when she married,
giving up her legal standing and the right to own property or control her
own wages.

Many of these strictures have already loosened. Child marriage is today
seen by most people as the human-rights violation that it is. The Married
Women's Property Acts guaranteed that a woman could get married and remain
a legally recognized human being. The Supreme Court's decision in *Loving
v. Virginia* did away with state bans on interracial marriage. By making it
easier to dissolve marriage, no-fault divorce helped ensure that unions
need not be lifelong. The recent surge in single parenthood, combined with
an aging population, has unyoked marriage and child-rearing. History shows
that marriage evolves over time. We have every reason to believe that
same-sex marriage will contribute to its continued evolution.

The argument that gays and lesbians are social pioneers and bellwethers has
been made before. Back in 1992, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens
suggested that gays and lesbians were a harbinger of a new kind of union,
one subject to constant renegotiation and expected to last only as long as
both partners were happy with it. Now that these so-called harbingers are
looking to commit to more-binding relationships, we will have the
"counterfactual" that Gary Gates talks about: we will be better able to
tell which marital stresses and pleasures are due to gender, and which are
not.

In the end, it could turn out that same-sex marriage isn't all that
different from straight marriage. If gay and lesbian marriages are in the
long run as quarrelsome, tedious, and unbearable; as satisfying, joyous,
and loving as other marriages, we'll know that a certain amount of strife
is not the fault of the alleged war between men and women, but just an
inevitable thing that happens when two human beings are doing the best they
can to find a way to live together.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/the-gay-guide-to-wedded-bliss/309317/



-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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