大西洋月刊｜越来越多年轻女性不想结婚？看看这令人惊讶的婚姻史

有趣灵魂说

婚姻一定要同居吗？一定要男主外女主内吗？《大西洋月刊》这篇文章带你穿越婚姻的“惊悚多样”历史：1950年代的“传统婚姻”其实只是短暂意外，养家糊口的丈夫与贤妻模式并非自古如此。婚姻史学家斯蒂芬妮·孔茨说：没有“唯一的传统婚姻”，只有不断演变的亲密关系。理解过去，才能解放未来——也许你和婚姻之间，只差一次想象力。

译文为原创，仅供个人学习使用

The Atlantic ｜大西洋月刊

How to Save Marriage

如何拯救婚姻

To find a future for the institution, we need to accurately account for its wildly varying past.

要为这一制度找到未来，我们需要准确理解其极其多样的过去。

by Honor Jones

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “The Surprising, Liberating History of Marriage.”

本文发表于 2026 年 7 月印刷版，标题为“令人惊讶、解放的婚姻史”。

几个月前，我最好的朋友之一告诉我，她和男友订婚了。订婚？我心想。为了什么？她有两个年幼的孩子，从未结过婚；他年龄更大；他们各有各的公寓；她似乎对现状很满意。

“恭喜！”我说，因为他是好人，而且我爱我的朋友。然后我问他们打算住在哪里，她当面笑了起来。

“哦，我们不会搬在一起住，”她说。她以为我本该知道的。也许有一天他们会这么做，没错。但眼下他们能负担得起两套房子的开销，而且她把孩子的稳定、每个人的空间和理智放在首位。

从某种意义上说，我的惊讶程度和我朋友的程度相当。我自己的生活本就不正常。最近我去孩子爸爸家接孩子，其中一个跑过来用一个大白枕头打我的脸。我把枕头翻过来，看到上面印着我前男友女友的可爱照片；肯定是有人开玩笑送给他的——这确实挺有趣。我的朋友中有离婚的、分居的、已婚的、意外成为单身母亲的、主动选择成为单身母亲的。然而，我曾以为对婚姻能做的唯一激进的事情就是把它打开，开始为你的配偶拍摄约会应用的照片。说实话，我从未想过我的朋友可以结婚而不与丈夫同居。

我想斯蒂芬妮·孔茨会喜欢我朋友的故事。三十多年来，孔茨一直试图让美国人相信三件事：我们对传统婚姻的观念正在阻碍许多人结婚和维持婚姻；而且，我们对传统婚姻的观念是错误的；此外，“根本不存在所谓的传统婚姻”。她在新书《无论好坏：婚姻复杂的过去与充满挑战的未来》中问道：如果我们能真正明白，养家糊口的男性主导的婚姻模式仅仅是20世纪中很短一段时期的常态，而历史上充满了“惊人多样的”伴侣关系和欲望形式，那会发生什么？孔茨希望，了解婚姻在数个世纪中发生了多么巨大的变化，能够解放更多人，去想象可能更适合自己的不同类型的婚姻。根据读者的不同，她的论点要么显得温和，要么显得深刻：“

我们拥有的组织健康亲密关系的自由度，比大多数人意识到的要大得多

。”

这并不是说孔茨认为任何人都必须结婚。《无论好坏》的第一句话是：“这不是一本关于你为什么应该结婚的书。”她也不认为婚姻必然走向灭亡；它只是不再被需要了，因为有大量其他方式“可以实现经济安全、政治进步、社会尊重、法律保护和充满爱意的伴侣关系”。这导致了对婚姻的深度悲观。但孔茨指出，人们对进入婚姻有更高的标准，并且知道如果他们希望婚姻持久，就必须让伴侣开心，这并不完全是坏事。

不过，孔茨担心的是，许多可能从婚姻中受益的人无法想象自己能成功做到。超过四分之一的美国40岁人群从未结过婚；这是一个创纪录的比例，而且还在上升。密歇根大学的研究人员自1970年代以来一直在向高中高年级学生询问婚姻问题。根据对数据的一项分析，1976年，84%的女孩和73%的男孩表示他们期望结婚。到2023年，只有64%的女孩这样说，而大约四分之三的男孩仍然期望结婚。是有那么多年轻女性转而反对婚姻本身，还是仅仅反对一种持续的、1950年代的婚姻愿景——那种已不再可行或令人向往的模式？

孔茨现年81岁，目前已基本从美国历史教学中退休，但她仍是常青州立学院的教员，并担任当代家庭委员会（一个参与1990年代“家庭价值观”辩论的无党派智库）的研究与公共教育主任。孔茨开始上电视节目，以平息对高离婚率和单身母亲状况的恐慌，自那以后她一直是公众人物，推广她关于婚姻是可塑的而非脆弱的观点。《无论好坏》延续了这一论点，以快速、破除神话的方式，跨越数个世纪审视了家庭安排，重点关注伴侣关系和婚姻观念发生重大转变的时期。

石器时代（并非她的专长）很快被带过。我们了解到，女性有时会狩猎大型动物，而育儿是一项集体事业。孔茨驳斥了流行的进化心理学小常识，例如许多女性喜欢更强壮、年长的男性，是因为我们旧石器时代的祖先需要能养家糊口的伴侣。事实上，食物是集体狩猎和分配的，这意味着一个强壮男性的孩子和弱者或死者的孩子得到的份额是一样的。前现代的英格兰和美洲的“无主之子”（非婚生子女）则不然；她写道，这些孩子遭到残酷的忽视，这有助于确保年轻人顺从为最大化家族权力和财产而安排的婚姻。在这之间的某个时期，耶稣短暂出场，宣扬陌生人与核心家庭成员一样值得施舍——这种观点对早期狩猎采集者来说可能比对许多他未来的追随者更有意义。

几个世纪以来，男性显然在公共生活和私人生活中都占据主导地位；压制性的婚姻法历史很长

。然而，孔茨讲述道，生存的需要使丈夫和妻子分担了许多忧心和责任。在17世纪的英格兰和殖民地美洲，农妇和贩鱼妇为家庭预算做出贡献。有记载描述了女人们在从市场回家的路上光顾啤酒馆，结束一天时“脑袋装满酒，钱包装满硬币”。丈夫和妻子都通过“外包制”来补充家庭收入（不是你想的那样——他们在家为皮鞋缝制部件，将棉线扭成花边）。

但18世纪工业化进程中计件劳动的兴起开始将男女分开：丈夫外出在市场流通，而妻子更被限制在家中（至少是中产阶级的妻子；许多单身和更贫穷的女性不得不继续按时出现在工厂的纺纱机前干活）。浪漫登场了。很快，商人们开始为爱情结合而沉醉，轻抚着那些好得不属于这个唯利是图的世界的维多利亚时代女士们丝滑的头发。最后，孔茨来到了1950年代，谈到了那个“被过度神化的”养家糊口的男性主导的家庭——由于几十年来情景喜剧的重播和婴儿潮一代对半忘怀的童年的怀旧，这种家庭模式自那以后扭曲了我们对婚姻这一制度的理解。

这次与历史的“速配”是孔茨的第七本书。为她赢得广泛读者的那本书——《我们从未如此：美国家庭与怀旧陷阱》（1992年）——更集中于白人中产阶级、单一收入的家庭，这些家庭不仅成为50年代的原型，也成为婚姻本身的原型。她认为，那个时代的单收入核心家庭并非仅仅是靠着辛勤工作的父亲们宽阔的脊背被带动的。它们之所以成为可能，是因为战后的政府政策，如教育福利、职业培训和廉价住房贷款，以及一个支撑了工资空前增长的经济。许多美国人受益——这是好处比坏处更被人记住的一个原因。在50年代，超过一半的有双亲的黑人家庭生活在贫困中，而白人对种族融合的抵制破坏了黑人“参与美国家庭梦”的努力。即使是那些实现了梦想的人也不总是享受其中；正如女权主义者很快阐明的那样，剥夺女性的战时工作并期望她们成为完美的妻子和母亲，造成了巨大的痛苦。

2015年，孔茨的《婚姻史：爱情如何征服婚姻》在最高法院将同性婚姻合法化的判决中被引用。这本书出版于十年前，追溯了婚姻观念从“一个对于经济和政治至关重要、不能完全由两个个体自由选择的制度”向爱情结合的转变，以及这种爱情所承诺的终身满足的巨大希望；大法官安东尼·肯尼迪在他支持所有人有权为爱结婚的意见书中引用了这本书。

但孔茨并没有仅仅接受这个胜利。她对大法官进行了事实核查。肯尼迪写道，婚姻始终“向所有人承诺了高贵与尊严”。并非如此，孔茨说：“几千年来，婚姻几乎只把高贵和尊严赋予了丈夫，他拥有合法权利支配妻子和子女的财产与收入，并强行将自己的意愿施加于他们。”她认为判决是正确的，但这并没有阻止她指出，肯尼迪的意见和约翰·罗伯茨的反对意见——后者认为婚姻始终指的是“一男一女的结合”，其主要目的是稳定地抚养子女——都“与历史现实不符”。

《无论好坏》问世之际，两性之间的分歧——至少在政治上——比以往任何时候都更加两极分化。孔茨试图应对两种极端：一种是拒绝平等主义、倾向于浪漫化过去的人；另一种是认为异性婚姻本质上具有剥削性而予以拒绝的人。她避免了文化战争的狂热，力求以同情的态度对待每个人。在她早期的作品中，她抨击了“不健康的怀旧”。在这里，她承认自己曾经“过于轻率地忽视了”对失去金钱和地位的恐惧如何会助长对理想化过去的幻想。人的心理是“内化信息和习惯的混乱混合体”，无法被理性完全说服。跟任何一对由两个好人组成的夫妻聊聊吧。即使是那些想要改变的人，也常常难以做到。

顺便说一句，孔茨已婚，尽管她在书中没有过多谈论这一点。在她职业生涯早期，她曾订婚，但“婚礼告吹了”，她曾这样告诉《纽约时报》。之后她发现自己怀孕了。她做了十二年的单亲家长，直到与她大学时的恋人重新联系并结婚。《无论好坏》的写作因她第一个孙子的出生而被推迟。这本书就是献给这个孩子的。

在我看来，《无论好坏》对年轻男性尤其慷慨。当孔茨开始研究家庭史时，她关注的是“当白人男性在18世纪末和19世纪初获得不断扩大的经济和政治权利时，女性被剥夺了什么”。现在，她“更加意识到男性失去了什么”——当工作将他们从家庭和社区生活的亲密关系中拉开时。

在维多利亚时代，男性写情书表达他们的渴望和奉献：“我无法与你分开存在，我因你而呼吸；我因你而活。”1880年，在即将与爱丽丝·李结婚之前，21岁、日后成为狂野骑士、当时还是处男的特迪·罗斯福在日记中自豪地写道：“感谢上天，我绝对纯洁。我可以告诉爱丽丝我做过的每一件事。”但这种更为敏感的男子气概在奖励力量、自信甚至冷酷的商业世界中并没有给男性带来多少帮助。那些依赖男性为生的女性也开始珍视这些特质。对立面相互吸引的观念流行起来，孔茨引用了女性在日记和信中表达的担忧，称潜在的追求者“太深情了”——不够“有掌控力”。孔茨写道，对许多人来说，理想的男性是“强大、坚韧、有力的”。

孔茨有时会让学生大声朗读那些维多利亚时代男性的信件。大多数男孩受不了：他们会变得讽刺，“让自己远离那种情感”。有些人甚至会脸红。这些据称已开悟的现代男性到底怎么了？一种解释是，我们逐渐认为做一个男人就是做一个女人的对立面。这看似自然，但孔茨指出，男子气概曾经更多地与童年而非女性相对立。

成熟将一个男孩变成男人——是自我控制和判断力的发展，而不是攻击性

。她承认，理解这各种被珍视的特质的纠缠，使她“比我的某些朋友对‘男性说教’更宽容一些”——也对男女伴侣关系能够演变更加乐观。

然而，孔茨写道， 关于男女应分属不同领域的旧观念今天仍在扭曲着关系。夫妻尤其受到一种期望的困扰，即女性要负责管理他人需求和情绪的“隐形劳动” 。而且许多女性真的厌倦了做大部分的洗碗工作。值得注意的是，在高中高年级学生的调查中，对婚姻期望的显著下降只发生在女孩中。同样值得注意的是，大多数离婚是由女性发起的。

孔茨的明显建议——总是值得重复的——是男女分担他们的负担。（当然，许多同性伴侣也会为家务争吵，但他们受性别角色的束缚较少。）她说：“拥有平等家务和育儿安排的夫妻报告称，他们的爱情水平会随着时间的推移而增加；”而拥有更传统分工的夫妻则报告相反的情况。直到2010年代，杂志还在争论，当丈夫做更多“女性化”的家务时，女性实际上会感到扫兴，但那是基于90年代初接受采访的人所做的研究。最近的研究发现，平等的夫妻报告了良好的性生活，而且频率更高。 有时，这本书给我一种感觉，婚姻可以通过两种方式拯救：一是女性将自己从过时的假设中解放出来，想象激进的婚姻新形式，并拥有实现这些形式的资源；二是更多男性更频繁地冲洗自己的杯子。

但我确实发现，在历史的背景下审视这些熟悉的强迫性行为是有帮助的。例如，这么多女性感到保持房屋清洁的压力，是因为她们天生爱整洁吗？也许，孔茨写道，她们整理的需求是“一种从18世纪末19世纪初开始，将女性家务变成地位象征的新阶级抱负的遗留物”。我也感到安慰的是，我们不必那么多地相互指责——因为从未结婚，或因为嫁/娶错了人——而是可以承认，我们在很大程度上是在回应我们无法控制的环境：经济压力、缺乏社会支持、沿袭自数个世纪前的习惯。从这个意义上说，历史可以给我们一些宽容。

不过，每一段婚姻，无论它如何被之前的婚姻所塑造，都有它自己的谜团，或者说是充满了许多谜团：做出和错过的姿态、水槽和堆肥、亲密、眼神、玩笑、身体、姻亲、孩子、清晨、岁月。在唐·德里罗的《名字》中，一个试图赢回妻子的人物认为，“婚姻是我们用现有材料制造的东西。从这个意义上说，它是即兴的，几乎是随意的。也许这就是为什么我们对它知之甚少。它太灵动、太难以捉摸，无法被清晰地理解。两个人创造出一片模糊。”

经历过离婚后，我无法想象再结第二次婚。 如果说婚姻曾经提供稳定，那现在它似乎是一种巨大的风险。孔茨将其比作（既准确又令人不快）“一笔高风险的房地产交易，涉及感情和财务” 。另外，最近也没有人向我求婚。但根据孔茨的说法，我是少数派；三分之二的离婚者会再婚。

也许对某些人来说，风险正是吸引力的一部分。我的朋友从法院回来后，我问她为什么要这样做。“浪漫，”她告诉我，还有“乐趣”。然后她用了“得体”这个词，但她说得几乎有点色情——仿佛一夫一妻制的婚姻是他们发现的一种热门新癖好。

最后，她说她无法完全解释清楚。只是“融入另一个人”有某种特别之处。

一片模糊。◾

向上滑动阅览

A few months ago, one of my best friends told me that she and her boyfriend had gotten engaged. Engaged?I thought. What for?She has two young kids and has never been married; he’s older; they each have their own apartment; she seemed happy with the way things were. “Congratulations!” I said, because he’s a good person, and I love my friend. Then I asked where they were going to live, and she laughed in my face.

“Oh, we’re not moving in together,” she said. She’d assumed I would have known that. They might do it someday, sure. But for now they can afford to keep paying for two homes, and she’s prioritizing the children’s stability, and everyone’s space and sanity.

In a way, I was as surprised by my surprise as my friend was. It’s not as if my life is normal. Recently I picked my kids up at their father’s place and one of them ran over and hit me in the face with a big white pillow. When I turned the pillow over, I saw it was printed with a cute photograph of my ex-husband’s girlfriend; someone must have given it to him as a joke—and it was funny. My friends are divorced, separated, married, single mothers by accident, single mothers by choice. And yet the only radical thing I had assumed you could do to a marriage was to open it up and start taking dating-app pics for your spouse. It had honestly never occurred to me that my friend could get married and not cohabit with her husband.

I think Stephanie Coontz would like my friend’s story. For more than 30 years, Coontz has been trying to convince Americans of three things: Our ideas about traditional marriage are holding many people back from getting and staying married; also, our ideas about traditional marriage are incorrect; also, “there is no such thing as the traditional marriage.” What would happen, she asks in her latest book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, if we could get it through our skulls that the male-breadwinner model of a marriage was the norm for only a short period in the 20th century, and that history is full of an “astonishing variety” of partnerships and forms of desire? Coontz’s hope is that learning how much marriage has changed over the centuries can liberate more people to imagine different kinds of marriages that might suit them better. Depending on the reader, her argument will scan as either modest or profound: “We have more latitude in how to organize healthy intimate relationships than most people realize.”

From the November 2011 issue: All the single ladies

That is not to say she thinks anyone has to marry. The first sentence of For Better and Worseis: “This isn’t a book about why you ought to marry.” Nor does she think that marriage is necessarily doomed; it’s simply no longer requiredwhen there are plenty of other ways “to achieve economic security, political advancement, social respect, legal protections, and a loving partnership.” This has contributed to a deep pessimism around marriage. But Coontz points out that it is not altogether a bad thing for people to have higher standards for entering a marriage, and for them to know that if they want that marriage to last, they have to keep their partner happy.

Coontz is concerned, though, that many people who might benefit from marriage can’t see themselves making a go of it. More than a quarter of American 40-year-olds have never been married; that’s a record, and it’s rising. Researchers at the University of Michigan have been asking high-school seniors about marriage since the 1970s. In 1976, 84 percent of girls and 73 percent of boys said they expected to marry, according to one analysis of the data. By 2023, only 64 percent of girls said that, whereas about three-quarters of boys still expected to get married. Have so many young women turned against marriage itself, or only against a persistent 1950s vision of it, one that is no longer viable or desirable?

At 81, Coontz is now mostly retired from teaching American history, but she remains on the faculty of Evergreen State College and is the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan think tank that dove into the “family values” debates of the 1990s. Coontz started going on television to deflate panic about high rates of divorce and single motherhood, and she has been a public figure ever since, promoting her view of marriage as protean rather than brittle. For Better and Worsecontinues that argument, with a swift, myth-dispelling survey of family arrangements down the centuries that focuses on periods when ideas about pair-bonding and marriage shifted in significant ways.

The Stone Age (not her specialty) goes by fast. We learn that women sometimes hunted big game, and that child-rearing was a collective enterprise. Coontz debunks pop evolutionary-psych factoids, such as that many women like stronger, older men because our Paleolithic ancestors needed mates who could support their offspring. In fact, food was hunted and served communally, meaning that a brawny man’s children got the same helpings as the kids of weaklings and dead men. Not so the filii ius of premodern England and America; the illegitimate “children of no one” were brutally neglected, she writes, which helped ensure that young people complied with marriages arranged to maximize their family’s power and property. At one point in between, Jesus entered briefly, preaching that strangers were just as deserving of charity as nuclear-family members—a view that might have made more sense to the early hunter-gatherers than to many of his future followers.

Men obviously dominated in public life for centuries, and in private life too; the history of repressive marital laws is long. And yet, Coontz recounts, the necessities of survival led husbands and wives to share many of their cares and responsibilities. In 17th-century England and colonial America, farmwives and fishwives contributed to the household budget. One account describes women hitting the alehouse on their way back from the market, ending the day with “their heads full of wine, and their purses full of coin.” Both husbands and wives supplemented the family’s income through the “putting-out system” (not what you think—at home, they stitched parts for leather shoes, twisted cotton into lace).

But the rise of wage labor in the industrializing 18th century began to drive men and women apart: Husbands were out circulating in the marketplace, and wives were more confined to the home. (Middle-class wives, at any rate; many single and poorer women had to keep showing up for their shifts at the factory spinning machine.) Enter romance. Soon businessmen were swooning for love matches and stroking the silken hair of Victorian ladies too good for this mercenary world. At last, Coontz arrives at the 1950s, with the “much-mythologized” male-breadwinner familythat, thanks to decades of sitcom reruns and Boomer nostalgia for half-remembered childhoods, has deformed our understanding of the institution ever since.

From the March 2020 issue: David Brooks on how the nuclear family was a mistake

This speed date with history is Coontz’s seventh book. The book that earned her a wide audience, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap(1992), was more narrowly focused on the white, suburban, one-income families that became the archetype not just of the ’50s but of marriage itself. The single-earner nuclear families of that time weren’t simply carried along on the broad backs of hardworking fathers, she argued. They were made possible by postwar government policies such as education benefits, job training, and cheap housing loans, and an economy that supported an unprecedented rise in wages. Many Americans benefited—which is one reason the upsides are better remembered than the downsides. More than half of two-parent Black families lived in poverty in the ’50s, and white resistance to integration sabotaged Black people’s efforts“to participate in the American family dream.” Even those who lived the dream didn’t always enjoy it; as feminists soon made clear, much suffering was caused by stripping women of their wartime jobsand expecting them to be perfect wives and mothers.

In 2015, Coontz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, was cited in the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. The book, published a decade earlier, traced the shift away from a vision of marriage as “far too vital an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved” and toward the idea of a love match, with the high hopes for lifelong fulfillment that such a love promises; Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on it in his opinion endorsing the right of all to marry for love.

But Coontz didn’t just take the win. She fact-checked the justice. Marriage, Kennedy wrote, had always “promised nobility and dignity to all persons.” Not so, Coontz said: “For thousands of years, marriage conferred nobility and dignity almost exclusively on the husband, who had a legal right to appropriate the property and earnings of his wife and children and forcibly impose his will upon them.” Her belief that the decision was right didn’t stop her from noting that both Kennedy’s opinion and John Roberts’s dissent—which argued that marriage had always referred to “the union of a man and a woman” whose primary purpose was the stable upbringing of children—were “at odds with historical reality.”

For Better and Worsearrives at a moment when the sexes are more polarized—at least politically—than ever. Coontz is trying to address two extremes: those who reject egalitarianism in favor of a romanticized past, and those who reject heterosexual marriage as inherently exploitative. She avoids culture-war zeal, aiming to approach everyone with sympathy. In her earlier work, she went after “unhealthy nostalgia.” Here she acknowledges having been “too dismissive” of how fears of losing money and status can encourage fantasies of an idealized past. Psyches are a “jumble of internalized messages and habits” that defy reason. Talk to any couple made up of two good people. Even those who want to change often struggle to do it.

Coontz, incidentally, is married, though she doesn’t talk much about it in her books. Early in her career, she got engaged, but “the wedding fell through,” she once told The New York Times. It then turned out she was pregnant. She was a single parent for a dozen years until she reconnected with, and married, the man who’d been her college sweetheart. The writing of For Better and Worsewas delayed by the birth of her first grandchild. The book is dedicated to him.

For Better and Worsestruck me as particularly generous toward young men. When Coontz started studying the history of the family, she was focused on “what women lost when they were denied access to the expanding economic and political rights that White men gained in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Now she is “more aware of what menlost” when work pulled them away from the intimacies of family and community life.

In the Victorian era, men wrote love letters expressing their longing and devotion: “I cannot have a separate existence from you, I breathe by you; I live by you.” Before his wedding to Alice Lee in 1880, the 21-year-old future Rough Rider and then-virgin Teddy Roosevelt boasted in his diary: “Thank heaven I am absolutely pure. I can tell Alice everything I have ever done.” But this more sensitive masculinity didn’t much help men in a commercial world that rewarded strength and assertiveness, even ruthlessness. Women who depended on men for their livelihood began to prize those traits as well. The idea of the attraction of opposites took hold, and Coontz quotes women worrying in their diaries and letters that potential suitors were “too soulful”—not “masterful” enough. For many, Coontz writes, the ideal man was “powerful, stoical, and forceful.”

Coontz has sometimes asked students to read those Victorian men’s letters aloud. Most boys can’t handle it: They get sarcastic, “distancing themselves from the emotion.” Some even blush. What’s wrong with these supposedly enlightened modern guys? One explanation is that we’ve come to think of being a man as the opposite of being a woman. This might seem natural, but Coontz observes that manhood was once counterposed more against childhood than womanhood. Maturity was what turned a boy into a man—the development of self-control and judgment, not aggressiveness. Understanding the tangle of valued traits, she confesses, has made her “a bit more forgiving of ‘mansplaining’ than some of my friends”—and more optimistic that partnerships between men and women can evolve.

Yet the old idea that men and women should inhabit separate spheres still distorts relationships today, Coontz writes. Couples are especially plagued by the expectation that women be responsible for the “invisible labor”of managing people’s needs and emotions. And many women are really sick of doing most of the dishes. It’s notable that the major decline in marriage expectations in the survey of high-school seniors occurred only among the girls. It’s also notable that most divorces are initiated by women

Coontz’s obvious advice—always worth repeating—is that men and women share their burdens. (Plenty of same-sex couples squabble over chores too, of course, but they’re less trapped by gender roles.) “Couples with egalitarian arrangements of household labor and childcare report increases in their levels of love over time,” she says; couples with more traditional divisions of labor report the reverse. Well into the 2010s, magazines were arguing that women were actually turned off when their husbands did more “feminine” chores, but that was based on a study of people who were interviewed in the early ’90s. Recent research finds that egalitarian couples report good sex, and more of it. At times, the book gave me the feeling that marriage could be saved in two ways: by women freeing themselves of outdated assumptions, imagining radical new forms of marriage, and having the resources to enact them—or by more men rinsing out their cups more often

From the June 2013 issue: Liza Mundy on the gay guide to wedded bliss

But I did find it helpful to encounter familiar compulsions in their historical context. For instance, do so many women feel pressure to keep a clean house because they’re innately neat? Perhaps, Coontz writes, their need to tidy is “a holdover from the new class aspirations that turned female domesticity into a status symbol during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” And I was comforted to be reminded that, instead of blaming one another so much—for never marrying, or for marrying the wrong person—we could acknowledge how much we are responding to circumstances beyond our control: financial stresses, a lack of social supports, habits inherited from centuries past. In that sense, history can cut us some slack.

Still, every marriage, however it’s shaped by the marriages before it, is its own mystery, or rather dense with many mysteries: the gestures made and missed, the sink and the compost, the closeness, the glances, the jokes, the bodies, the in-laws, the children, the mornings, the years. At one point in Don DeLillo’s The Names, a character who is trying to win back his wife thinks that “marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it’s improvised, it’s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It’s too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.”

After going through a divorce, I can’t imagine getting married a second time. If marriage once offered stability, it now seems an extraordinary risk. Coontz compares it (both accurately and unappealingly) to a “high-stakes real estate deal, with feelings as well as finances” on the line. Also, no one has asked me lately. But according to Coontz, I’m in the minority; two-thirds of people who divorce go on to remarry

Read: How I demolished my life

Maybe, for some, the risk is part of the appeal. After my friend came back from the courthouse, I asked her why she did it. “Romance,” she told me, and “fun.” And then she used the word propriety, but she made it sound almost dirty—as if monogamous marriage were a hot new kink they’d discovered.

In the end, she said she couldn’t quite explain it. There was just something special “about merging into someone else.”

A blur.