What's love got to do with it?

Catherine Bayer Horner came into the world at the end of June and swept her parents off their feet. Rebecca (Echols ’92) and David are typical first-time parents, utterly enraptured by this precious, new being in their midst.

"It’s a delightful surprise what parenthood has brought to our marriage," Rebecca said. "Catherine is such an amazing blessing. She has just deepened and strengthened who we are as a couple and we are just thrilled about that."

Despite the warm feelings flowing now, however, Steven Nock, professor of sociology and director of the Marriage Matters Project, thinks it’s a good thing this couple has that piece of paper that binds them legally to each other and this child. Because even though they feel this overwhelming sense of love and affection now, he’s sure it won’t last in its current form.

"For all its beauty, love is an insufficient basis for marriage if that’s all there is," he declared, "because relationships always go through periods when the love fades. Always. No good relationship ever endures without going through days, weeks, months, years, maybe more when the couple don’t love each other, when they don’t have that deep, wonderful bond."

Nock has been studying change in the American family for nearly 30 years now. His research into issues of unmarried fatherhood, cohabitation, commitment, divorce and marriage makes him a strong advocate of marriage as an institution.

Changing families

"It has always been true that families change," Nock explained, "because the family has to accommodate all the other changes that are happening in society. The biggest change that modern families have had to deal with is the dramatic change in women’s lives in the last 50 years."

As increasing numbers of women started entering higher education and the work force during the 1960s and ’70s, couples started postponing marriage and childbearing. According to Nock, the average age of marriage is the highest it’s ever been in recorded history: 28 years for men, 26 years for women.

These days, couples are also choosing to forego marriage, opting instead to live together in committed, unmarried relationships either as a prelude to marriage or, to a lesser extent, as an alternative to it. About 60 percent of all marriages are now preceded by cohabitation.

Since the introduction of the birth control pill in the late 1960s and with the changing status of women in society, couples are also choosing to have fewer children. And growing numbers of children are being born to individuals who are not married.

One of the most significant trends of this era is divorce. But there is a lot of confusion about what this rate means and where it stands today.

"It has never been the case, and it is certainly not true now, that half of marriages end in divorce," Nock said.

Even before the precipitous climb in divorce rates that started in the early 1960s, Nock said, marital break-ups started rising along with industrialization from the end of the Civil War. As the rate of divorce soared in the 1970s and social demographers tried to predict where this trend would go, their best estimate of what fraction of marriages would some day end in divorce used prevailing rates to arrive at an alarming 50 percent.

"But a strange thing happened in 1981," Nock said. "The divorce rate started to go down, and it’s gone down every year since then."

Nock estimated that the current divorce rate is somewhere between 30 and 40 percent, "depending on how pessimistic you are about the people who get married."

Horner, who has been married for three years, is decidedly not pessimistic.

"I disagree with his premise altogether that the love necessarily dies," she declared. "I think it must change. It matures, deepens."

Horner sees both her own parents and her in-laws, each married for more than 30 years, as examples of how love endures over time and evolves through shared experience.

"I do think their love has changed," she said, "but in no way do I think the love has gone away from their lives. And in no way do I ever see myself falling out of love with my husband. I just see that love changing as we grow together."

Watching parents

W. Bradford Wilcox (Government ’92) said the modeling Horner and her husband saw from their parents growing up is an important factor in creating strong marriages.

Wilcox, who coincidentally was a classmate of Horner’s when they were undergrads, is an assistant professor of sociology whose research focuses on the influence of religious belief and practice on marriage, cohabitation, parenting and fatherhood. He, too, cited his own extended family as prime examples.

His mother’s is a fairly large, politically progressive mainline Protestant family. Yet despite modern trends in the divorce rate and this cohort’s acceptance of the idea of divorce as a social phenomenon, Wilcox is aware of only one instance of divorce in four generations.

"I would argue it’s because there are certain informal norms about family life, commitment, obligation and sacrifice that militate against divorce," he explained.

These informal norms are played out in daily life, so children see parents and grandparents as they experience difficulty in their marriage working things out and staying together. These models "serve as touchstones for [the children] in their own family life," Wilcox said.

Pamela Cochran (Ph.D., Religious Studies ’01), a lecturer in religious studies, thinks Americans, even churchgoers, mistakenly view marriage as just a social contract. For her, marriage is more than a piece of paper, more than personal preference, more than a vow even. Marriage is a sacrament.

"A vow is a commitment of our will," she explained. "It’s like ‘I’ll make myself do this. I’ll vow that I’ll be with you the rest of my life, and I’ll try my darnedest.’ But a sacrament, in a Christian theological sense, is something that says when we do this before God, it brings God into this union and therefore God is helping to keep it together."

From the Jewish cultural perspective, not only is God in there working to keep the marriage together, so is the whole Jewish community, according to Vanessa Ochs, an anthropologist and professor of Jewish studies.

"When a Jewish couple marries," Ochs explained, "the rabbi stands up before them under the chuppah, the wedding canopy, and indicates that the canopy is symbolically a home, a sign of divine shelter. We in the congregation serve not only as witnesses that [this couple] is creating a home, but we pledge our assistance in supporting that home, in holding up all the relationships that take place in that home. So what you’re seeing very dramatically and dynamically in the wedding ceremony is the transformation of erotic love into the commitment to create a home, a family and a mini society."

This "performative act," as linguists refer to this public, ceremonial declaration, transforms the intangible intention into something real, a social construct.

It is this social construct that makes marriage a lot more than a piece of paper for Wilcox. As a social institution, marriage engenders a particular set of practices and norms that provide a kind of structure of expectations.

"So when you go from being ‘an item’ to being married," he explained, "your friends and family expect certain things of you, typically things like sexual fidelity, support when your spouse is sick, a certain level of financial cooperation and a whole range of things that make up that institution."

And while the institution of marriage changes over time and is very different in different cultures, "the institution itself is necessary for the regulation of intimate life and childbearing," he said.

Choosing kinship

Susan McKinnon, an associate professor of anthropology, finds this discussion a bit too clinical. Americans, she said, tend to focus on legal definitions of family and on the biology of kinship -- that is, the genetics or familial bloodlines-and give less weight to the social aspects of what makes a family.

"We tend to think the biology is the really real part," she explained, "but that’s always in tension with something that you can call choice or the code of what people do to be kin to one another."

This non-biological kinship code includes all the things people do out of a sense of nurturance and caring, things like feeding and raising children or taking care of sick and aging parents.

It’s on this non-biological kinship code that Jewel Caven (English ’90) has decided to put more emphasis with her family these days. After working full time since college in media relations and university development jobs (three of those at U.Va.), Caven decided two years ago that the time was right to join another recent trend, the career move to stay-at-home mom.

Caven and her husband Dean (Medicine ’95) have two sons, 18-month-old Josh and James, who is 4.

"It’s very hard to have both parents working," Caven said. "With all the things going on with kids, [parents] have to juggle a lot. We are lucky that I want to be home right now and that we can afford it. I think it has really benefited our marriage."

After 11 years of marriage and a long, stressful 10 years during which she supported the family while Dean worked through medical school, residency and a cardiology fellowship, Caven knows that staying together requires a lot of give-and-take all around. She, too, is skeptical about Nock’s assertion that a marriage certificate is necessary to keep a couple together.

"I think people have various views of what marriage is or what commitment means," she said. "I think it’s going to depend on whether you see [marriage] as a lifelong commitment or not as to how hard you’re going to work to try and keep it together."

Working at it, after all, seems to be the key.