Vicki Larson's OMG Chronicles

We’re down one big family get-together with a few more to go for 2012, and I’m guessing many 20- and 30-somethings were asked something along the lines of this: “So, are you still single?”

With more singles than ever, a 50 percent or so divorce rate, a tenfold increase in cohabitation and a growing number of people questioning whether marriage is still relevant, our nosy relatives and family friends can’t help themselves from asking why we’re not getting with the program.

It’s what Bella DePaulo, the author of numerous books on the single life, including Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, calls matrimania, our over-the-top hyping of marriage and coupling. 

We expect people will eventually marry despite everything else that’s going on.

So, you would think I wouldn’t have been taken aback by what two about-to-be-married 20- to 30-something professional couples said to Susan Pease Gadoua and me recently in separate interviews as we gathered research for our book, The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels. But, I was.

“Marriage is just the next thing you do,” the bride-to be said as her fiance nodded in agreement. “You graduate, you get a job, you get married.”

“Our married friends just seem more adult,” the other bride-to be said, despite the fact that she and her fiance had been living together for five years and are well established in their careers.

Put the two comments together and what I heard is getting married is an essential part of the trajectory of being an adult.

That’s certainly how it used to be in our mother’s day. But we’re doing it differently nowadays. As Richard Settersten and Barbara Ray note in What’s Going on with Young People Today? The Long and Twisting Path to Adulthood, couples used to marry to build a life together, but today couples build their own lives separately and then marry:

Today, more than 95 percent of Americans consider the most important markers of adulthood to be completing school, establishing an independent household, and being employed full-time — concrete steps associated with the ability to support a family. But only about half of Americans consider it necessary to marry or to have children to be regarded as an adult. Unlike their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, for whom marriage and parenthood were prerequisites for adulthood, young people today more often view these markers as life choices rather than requirements, as steps that complete the process of becoming an adult rather than start it.

Notes Pamela Aronson, associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, in The Markers and Meanings of Growing Up: Contemporary Young Women’s Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood:

(M)arriage itself became less indicative of the entry into adulthood, and was seen instead as only one step in the process of growing up. … With marriage and parenthood now seen as “optional” aspects of adulthood, establishing a non-family, independent household has now become a normative marker. … Today, marriage may be viewed as independent from becoming an adult: almost half of General Social Survey respondents agree that one can be an adult without marriage or parenthood.

So then what was it that made those two couples feel that marriage was the next essential thing to do, the thing that would make them seem “adult”? It seems to me that it’s because they’re following a familiar script. We “know” marriage and, yes, we still expect it.

Huffington Post columnist Megan Isennock questions why her friends told her everything would be different now that she’s married. She begs to differ:

We are a whole month and a half into our marriage, so this post could serve little more than to expose my inexperience as a wife. At the moment, it feels like we decided to throw a party last month and promised to keep loving each other, and then got right back to our lives. I’ll admit that the nomenclature is throwing me off a bit. I definitely get the excited giggles when I say “husband” or hear Rob say “wife,” but other than that everything is … the same.

But of course everything’s not the same. We know what to expect from a “wife” and a “husband.” As researcher Kelly Musick told me a while back:

Marriage has become less institutionalized and cohabitation is becoming more so, and so the two are kind of meeting in the middle. It used to be that gender roles were more tightly prescribed in marriage. It was much clearer who was supposed to be doing what; if you look at “Mad Men,” the woman stays home and looks pretty and takes care of the house and the man brings home the money and on either side if you’re failing in your role, it’s a real failure in your role as a spouse. Marriage is a lot more flexible nowadays, but there’s still a lot that comes along it, some of it that’s really supportive, but also expectations. Who gets in trouble when Grandma doesn’t get a thank-you note? There’s still a lot of expectation that wives maintain the calendars and send the Christmas presents and plan the parties.

So it’s clear that, equal partnership or not, we still react to internalized ideas of who — wife or husband — does what.

The two engaged couples Susan and I interviewed are on their way to fulfilling a familiar script, as is Isennock. Instead of hearing “So, when are you getting married?” they will now start hearing, “So, when are you going to start a family?” — a question most would not ask if they were cohabiting with no plans to marry.

If anyone fears that the institution of marriage is going away any time soon, it sure doesn’t look like it!

• Is getting married is an essential part of the trajectory of being an adult?
• Did becoming a wife or husband change your relationship?
• Did becoming a wife or husband change the way people viewed you and what they expected from you?