In this episode, Andrea Morosik and her co-author, Peter J. Mitchell, discuss their new book, The Question Mark: A New Look at Marriage in Canada. They talk about the history of marriage in Canada, why it s so important, how it s changed over the past century, and why we should all be asking questions about it.
00:03:01.400Well, to me, there's always seemed to be a contractual element to marriage.
00:03:06.720And, you know, the one partner does something for the other partner
00:03:10.540and the other partner does something back.
00:03:12.540And to that point, we've just published a story from B.C.
00:03:16.800We have a reporter in B.C., young Jared Jaeger, and he reports that a child advocacy group says nearly half the children living in poverty, as they define it, are actually in single-parent households.
00:03:29.460And that's likely to be single mothers, far more likely than to be single fathers.
00:03:34.880So when the man-woman contract breaks down, the one where a man basically promises to support a woman and his family,
00:03:44.180and in return, she looks after him and his needs, when that breaks down, the children suffer.
00:03:49.940And then, and obviously authors of the poverty study we're talking about do this, there's an appeal to the state to help.
00:03:58.640So women end up looking to the state for what they should be looking for from a husband.1.00
00:04:03.180As a society, where does that take us?
00:04:06.460So I think you've just said a lot, of course, but one angle of that that I'll immediately comment on is that, yes, we do see less income, less financial resources in single parenting families.
00:04:19.800And marriage remains a source of stability for longevity.
00:04:22.220And that's good for the kids as it is for the parents.
00:04:25.260But when you see stories like that arise, and they will often talk about many aspects of poverty eradication that are very valuable, whether it's turning to the state or to the charitable sector.
00:04:39.380But the one thing no one ever talks about is the obvious family angle, which is foundational to poverty eradication.
00:04:48.840So I come to this question of marriage also with an eye to helping those who are poor, helping those who are living on the margin.
00:04:57.800And what we see in marriage culture today is that there's a marriage divide and wealthier people continue to get married.
00:05:05.000We're less wealthy, lower income people.
00:05:08.340The marriage rates are dropping off even more than the population as a whole.
00:05:12.640I think that that speaks to the idea of luxury beliefs, which is a term coined by a scholar, Robert Henderson.
00:05:19.400He was raised virtually without family in the foster care system in the United States, but those stories also exist here in Canada.
00:05:25.660So when we're thinking about some of the pressing social issues that we face as a society, be it child poverty, be it rising rates of social isolation or loneliness,
00:05:34.860the family angle often, most often goes totally unmentioned.
00:05:38.940And so part of the book's effort is to bring the family angle back in, not as a form of judgment or saying everybody must be married, but as a simple research question that we see benefits from this.
00:05:49.300So why not talk about the institution of marriage?
00:05:52.620So, Andrea, look, you said just a moment ago that for wealthier people, they tend to carry on, get married and have families, but that marriage rates are dropping off among the less prosperous.
00:06:08.940mm-hmm is which is the cause and which is the effect is yeah go ahead i think you know what
00:06:16.780i'm getting at yeah which is cause and effect and i think there is um different theories on that and
00:06:22.300you can see um uh factors coming together in a circular way and that it's not it's a complex
00:06:27.980issue and so you might have um you know simple choices amongst people who are wealthier towards
00:06:33.660getting married or they're more marriageable um you have the education factor mixed in there but
00:06:38.940ultimately we want to see a society where we treat people equally regardless of education level
00:06:43.660regardless of income level that they everybody sees marriage as an opportunity for their own
00:06:48.940family stability regardless of how we get into the place of seeing uh less educated or lower income
00:06:55.180uh north americans really this is across north america we see that trend line we want marriage
00:06:59.900to be an accessible option to everybody um i'm not sure if your viewers are aware but there's
00:07:04.460something called the success sequence and that in the research points to the idea what is it
00:07:09.580what did you just say there's nothing called a what the the success sequence um which virtually
00:07:16.380eliminates the probability that you're ever going to live in poverty and that is the the sequence is
00:07:21.260a simple one you finish your schooling first you get married next and you have kids after that in
00:07:27.020that order and so um that i guess gets the poverty angle again as well as some of the differences
00:07:33.900between high income and low income um in marriage rates but really we want marriage to be there for
00:07:39.100everybody and um not just a certain segment of society so in the course of your researches
00:07:46.380you must have observed that in this day and age unlike maybe 20 or 50 years ago
00:07:52.140So often you have the wife earning or has the ability to earn more than the husband.0.80
00:08:02.180So if the woman is earning more than the man, does that tend to make men less anxious to be married?
00:08:09.580Is it kind of a little power thing going on there that deters them?
00:08:13.740I don't know about that, Nigel, but I do think there is the sense today that we have,
00:08:18.240which I would argue is wrongheaded, that we just don't need marriage as much anymore.
00:08:23.700And that may have something to do with income generation on the part of women and rising1.00
00:08:28.840opportunities in the workforce. Whether we're in the 2000s or back in the 50s, I think the same
00:08:36.840thing is at play, which is to say that marriage acts as a future-oriented institution in your
00:08:44.560life and it contains the love of partners in it and that means that we can view marriage more as
00:08:51.360like an adventure tolkien style adventure rather than a rom-com and you can have a lot of variation
00:08:58.240in the ways that people live out their marriages but it is still something that is future oriented
00:09:04.480and holding families together maintaining stability at a greater rate than say merely
00:09:09.520merely living together and it remains important regardless of the ways in which people negotiate
00:09:15.920particular aspects of their married lives. I do know there's research available to suggest that
00:09:20.880women still even today with all of our earning potential and all of the career opportunities1.00
00:09:26.720available which are a good thing but even today women would like men who also earn as much or0.91
00:09:32.400more than they do. I don't think this is a deal breaker for marriage as an institution really
00:09:37.280we're getting at that foundational idea of marriage and how it undergirds our social stability and
00:09:42.640helps us um in raising our families and having a source of long term like thinking about the long
00:09:51.040term in our lives looking towards the future i think what you just talked about there is something
00:09:56.080you refer to in the book as a life script this sequential uh you know i think you said you
00:10:02.160finish school and and then you you get married and then you have children do it in that order
00:10:07.520and things go better now i guess one of the questions would be is if you are wanting to
00:10:18.160to do that do you have to be married you could still finish school start a relationship and have
00:10:25.920children and i know there's a whole lot of people who are out there living in that situation who
00:10:32.820would say well and it works fine for us but you're saying marriage is better what's the difference
00:10:39.600yeah and the answer there is going to be a bit dry and certainly we all have those examples in
00:10:44.280our lives and perhaps living them ourselves but the data on the nature of cohabitation just shows
00:10:51.300that it works itself in the aggregate in spite of the wonderful examples of people who look
00:10:58.080exactly as if they're married raising children happily and the data is just just not the same
00:11:04.500and so I think we can intuitively understand that both can coexist both can be true but in the
00:11:10.240aggregate people who end up living together have come into that relationship for different reasons
00:11:16.540and some of them are very intentional and others slide into a living together arrangement by
00:11:22.320accident. Maybe they have a child by accident. The intention there is not quite the same. The
00:11:27.800intentionality, the purposeful nature of it may not be the same. That's actually an advantage of
00:11:32.540cohabitation. If you want to get in and out quickly, it's really not the same type of commitment
00:11:40.340as marriage might be in spite of many beautiful examples that we might see around us. So the
00:11:45.200answers a bit dry there simply say that the data doesn't bear out but they're exactly the same
00:11:49.520and so on heated issues and family and marriage can be quite heated because they are so personal
00:11:56.800oftentimes i'm just like what does the data what did the data show us and the data tells us it's
00:12:01.440not the same thing well being pretty ancient as i am i grew up in an arrow and the joke was that
00:12:09.600men didn't want to get married but women did and it seems to me that just to take that seriously0.97
00:12:16.560for a moment for cohabitation without marriage seems whatever the law says but seems to a man
00:12:27.200a kind of lower level of commitment and i think that's what you just said and so it makes it more
00:12:32.640attractive now is that perhaps at the root of why the data and i where the data you're talking about
00:12:41.440it's it's very clear the cohabitation the less successful outcome but is it the fact that men
00:12:49.280go into this thing thinking they can get out of it a bit easier in the cohabitation side of the thing
00:12:55.760the law says otherwise but what men often think stupid things you know as you were talking i
00:13:01.760thought of some of the feminist literature on marriage which has really panned marriage you
00:13:06.640know second wave feminism and beyond has has almost without exception said that marriage is1.00
00:13:11.920terrible for women a bit of a prison for women and that it constrains women but that conversation is0.77
00:13:17.840pushed out the side saying that what actually marriage can do is constrain men and limit their
00:13:23.440options in such a way that is beneficial to the woman and perhaps mother of a child and family
00:13:29.520also beneficial to men, but I often like to bring up that point of marriage as a constraint on men,
00:13:38.260acting as a constraint in a way that we haven't had that conversation, because we're, you know,
00:13:43.820immersed very much in this, in a lot of the feminist literature on marriage, declaring that
00:13:48.820it's bad, it's bad for women. So we have a section in the book talking about the ways in which1.00
00:13:53.340marriage is beneficial to men alone, and then to women alone, then to children, as if they were0.94
00:13:58.480separate but really that amounts to benefits for everybody even if it comes through constraints so
00:14:04.220endless choices don't always amount to greater happiness so you know hence all the jokes about
00:14:10.240marriage everybody everybody grumbles and yet so many of us still still do it look putting this
00:14:16.020together andrea you're saying that society at large has an interest in not only marriage but
00:14:22.320in stable marriage and yet that can sound pretty harsh to people who have never been married but
00:14:27.820wish to and to those for whom it's not even something they want should everybody be married
00:14:36.000no absolutely not it's not a book that compels forced marriage the question mark remains at
00:14:43.540the beginning and we hope that this book is a soft entry point into discussing the ways in which
00:14:48.040marriage matters without compelling anyone to a particular course of action but because family is
00:14:53.080so personal, and it's a place of great joy, but also our deepest wounds, oftentimes we can't even
00:14:57.940have the conversations that engender, you know, thinking on the subject of marriage. So we haven't
00:15:04.280even begun to touch on how we consider marriage today as a largely romantic expression. There's
00:15:09.420a lot of emotion invested in it. We call it the soulmate model of marriage. Our hope is to return
00:15:14.800to a bit of a more robust model, which is more institutional, and yet at the same time to return
00:15:19.620to your question this is not to say that those who are not married are living lesser lives
00:15:24.740i myself got married very very late in life and uh feel that the uh the uh 40 years leading up to
00:15:31.700that were were quite uh meaningful and fruitful as it were so um it's a book written without
00:15:37.140judgment and if i may toot our own horn just a little bit we were concerned about the judgment
00:15:41.940factor in writing it um and one person who's read it is a divorced mother of a 14 year old
00:15:47.860And her own marriage had ended for good reason, and it had been very traumatic for the family.
00:15:54.120And this divorced mother was going to be giving her 14-year-old daughter a book so that she could encounter some of these more academic arguments around marriage with a lot of the heat taken out.1.00
00:16:04.780So I felt quite proud of that to understand that it was a book that spoke to people who have themselves suffered in their marriages.
00:16:11.380Well, I bet you did feel proud of that. Well done. That's a great compliment.
00:16:15.080And, you know, if anybody could actually take the subject of marriage and set it on one side and look at it from all angles and come up with a good read, that would be you.
00:16:25.880So really, really good to hear your comments about it.
00:16:30.120And how do people get a copy and can they get it in time for Christmas?
00:16:34.280Oh, they can indeed. Yes, just through Amazon is the easiest way.
00:16:37.600I work for Cardist and so it's up at cardist.ca as well.