Is marriage obsolete?

Yesterday while waiting in a doctor's office, I read an article in Newsweek titled, "What's Love Got to Do With It? Everything." Here is a clip from the article:
For the true commitment-phobe, living among the Na people in southwestern China would be paradise. The Na are the only known society that completely shuns marriage. Instead, says Stephanie Coontz in her new book, "Marriage, a History," brothers help sisters raise the children they conceive through casual sex with non-family members (incest is strictly taboo). Will we all be like the Na in the future? With divorce and illegitimacy rates still high, the institution of marriage seems headed for obsolescence in much of the world.

This morning I decided to research more about Stephanie Coontz and her theory. In an interview with City Pages, she explains her research about how our recently new idea of marrying for love is effectively changing the institution of marriage. In fact, in the interview she goes so far as to say that, yes, James Dobson is right when he says marriage and family as we have known it for the last 5,000 years has been overturned. But she disagrees with Dobson's claim that it same-sex marriages that are the reason. According to Coontz, it was the shift in our reasons to marry that has changed the face of marriages. No longer are we marrying for procreation, property, social status, forming alliances or making peace treating. The combination of choosing to marry for love with the social and political shifts in the last 50 years (such as birth control pills and women in the workforce) has created a new face of marriage.

All this research was disturbing to me. I will admit, I like the changes and the direction we are going. I don't want to go back to the days of being economically dependent on a man. Or being a bargaining tool so that my family gets more property. But with research that paints such a negative view of marriage, why are we marrying at all?

Coontz says, "in the last 20 years, of course, our expectations [of marriage] have grown much higher. The result is that many marriages are happier than many couples I studied in the past would ever have dared to dream. But the very things that make marriage more intimate and more flexible have also made it more optional. And they've made people less willing to put up with a marriage that doesn't meet those aspirations."

I guess my hope for marriage stems from my own experience. Two years ago my grandparents celebrated their 50th anniversary. This August, my parents will mark 30 years of marriage. And yesterday, while leaving Barnes and Noble, I saw a cute, married, old couple walking hand in hand to their car. (Where he proceeded to open the door for her.) I'm in no way impliying that I think marriage is this idealistic. But I'm not ready to pronounce it dead, either.