We have been so preoccupied with divorce and crisis in the American family that we have failed to notice the good marriages that are all around us and from which we can learn. In today's world it's easy to become overwhelmed by problems that seem to have no solution. But we can shape our lives at home, including our relationships with our children and marriage itself. The home is the one place where we have the potential to create a world that is to our own liking; it is the last place where we should feel despair. As never before in history, men and women today are free to design the kind of marriage they want, with their own rules and expectations.
Fortunately, many young people have not yet become cynical and are still able to speak directly from the heart. After spending some wonderful hours talking to college students about their views of marriage, I received the next day a letter from Randolph Johnson, a twenty-one-year-old senior at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He wrote: "What I want in a wife is someone whom I know so well that she is a part of who I am and I of her. Someone to fill all that I am not but aspire to be. My wife is someone not just to share a life with but to build a life with. This is what marriage is to me, the sharing of two lives to complete each other. It is true that people change, but if people can change together then they need not grow apart."
Randolph speaks for a new generation that is still capable of optimism about love and marriage and "the sharing of two lives to complete each other." He also speaks for a society that is tired to death of the war on marriage, escalating divorce rates, and the search for new partners in middle age. All of us want a different world for our children. When we're honest, we want it for ourselves.
It is absurd, in fact, to suggest that the need for enduring love and intimacy in marriage is passé. The men and women I've seen in twenty-five years of studying divorce begin actively searching for a new relationship even before the divorce is final.
In every study in which Americans are asked what they value most in assessing the quality of their lives, marriage comes first—ahead of friends, jobs, and money. In our fast-paced world men and women need each other more, not less. We want and need erotic love, sympathetic love, passionate love, tender, nurturing love all of our adult lives. We desire friendship, compassion, encouragement, a sense of being understood and appreciated, not only for what we do but for what we try to do and fail at. We want a relationship in which we can test our half-baked ideas without shame or pretense and give voice to our deepest fears. We want a partner who sees us as unique and irreplaceable.
A good marriage can offset the loneliness of life in crowded cities and provide a refuge from the hammering pressures of the competitive workplace. It can counter the anomie of an increasingly impersonal world, where so many people interact with machines rather than fellow workers. In a good marriage each person can find sustenance to ease the resentment we all feel about having to yield to other people's wishes and rights. Marriage provides an oasis where sex, humor, and play can flourish.
Finally, a man and woman in a good, lasting marriage with children feel connected with the past and have an interest in the future. A family makes an important link in the chain of human history. By sharing responsibility for the next generation, parents can find purpose and a strengthened sense of identity.
These rewards take root in the soil of a strong, stable marriage. But, surprisingly, we know very little about what makes such a marriage.
