The Surprising, Liberating History of Marriage

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 sh