The romantic part of the relationship has peaked.
After the rings, the priest should just say, “Enjoy it, bing-bongs. Due to our brain’s tendency toward hedonic adaptation, you won’t feel quite this giddy in a few years. All right, where’s the pigs in a blanket? I’m outta here.”
So why get married at all?
In recent decades, and in most developed nations, marriage rates have dropped precipitously, leading some to wonder whether it is a dying institution. Philip Cohen, one of the leading demographers of the family, has documented the steep and widespread decline in global marriage rates since the 1970s. According to his calculations, 89 percent of the global population lives in a country with a falling marriage rate, and those who live in Europe and Japan are experiencing something more like a plummet.2
In the United States marriage rates are now at historic lows. In 1970, for instance, there were about seventy-four marriages for every thousand unmarried women in the population. By 2012 that had fallen to thirty-one per thousand single women—a drop of almost 60 percent. Americans are also joining the international trend of marrying later. In 1960, 68 percent of all people in their twenties were married, compared with just 26 percent in 2008.3
For the first time in history, the typical American now spends more years single than married.
What are people doing instead of getting married?
As Eric wrote in his book Going Solo, we are living in a time of incredible experimentation with different ways of settling down. Long-term cohabitation with a romantic partner is on the rise, especially in Europe. Living alone has skyrocketed almost everywhere, and in many major cities—from Paris to Tokyo, Washington, D.C., to Berlin—nearly half of all households have just one resident.
But marriage is not an altogether undesirable institution. After all, reams of social-science research show that successful marriages can make people live longer and be happier and healthier than single people. (Admittedly, a great many marriages aren’t successful, and those who divorce or become widows or widowers may not get all these benefits.)
Good marriages also bring people more financial security, and these days one of the things that sociologists worry about is that better-off people are marrying more—and more successfully—than poor people, which increases inequality overall. In the United States, sociologist Andrew Cherlin writes, “marriage has become a status symbol—a highly regarded marker of a successful personal life.”4
When I saw this graph (p. 219), I had a thought. Might it make more sense to forgo marriage and, instead, set out to experience a lifetime’s worth of, say, one- to two-year, intensely passionate relationships? Wouldn’t that be better than toiling through the doldrums of decades of waiting for your rise in companionate love?
Then your graph would look like this, right?
I contacted Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist who drew the passionate/companionate love graphs, and asked what he thought about the hypothetical graph. Here was his response:
There are two ways of thinking of satisfaction. One is the passionate/companionate love hedonic view, that the best life would be the one with the most passion in it. The other is a narrative view, that the best life is about building a story.
If you think the best life would be one with the most passion in it, then yes, that strategy would be much better than getting married. Falling in love is the most intense and wonderful experience—the second-most intense, after certain drugs, which are more intense for a few hours. Short of that, falling in love is the most wonderful thing.
But I didn’t get much work done when I was falling in love with my wife. And then we had kids, we finally had children, and that was totally involving—and it would be weird to be such a romantically involved couple when you’re raising kids. And now that that insanity has passed, I can return to writing books, which I really love doing. And I have a life partner who I think about all day long. And that’s not tragic. That’s not even disappointing. I have a life partner. We work together really well. We’ve built a fantastic life together. We’re both really, really happy.
If you take a narrative view, there are different things to accomplish at different stages of life. Dating and having these passionate flings are perfect when you’re younger, but some of the greatest joys of life come from nurturing and from what’s called “generativity.” People have strong strivings to build something, to do something, to leave something behind. And of course having children is one way of doing that. My own experience having children was that I discovered there were rooms in my heart that I didn’t even know were there. And if I had committed to a life of repeated sexual flings, I never would have opened those doors.