GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

The World's Leading Strategic Alliance

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Ian Morris
Board of Contributors

Aug 3, 2019 | 10:30 GMT

About 40 couples participate in a group Valentine's Day wedding ceremony on Feb. 14, 2017, in West Palm Beach, Florida.

About 40 couples participate in a group Valentine's Day wedding ceremony in West Palm Beach, Florida. The forms and functions of marriage have changed dramatically many times in the past as societal conditions changed.

(JOE RAEDLE/Getty Images)

Highlights

  • About half of adult Americans continue to see marriage as an important strategic alliance that provides material and psychological benefits that outweigh its costs.
  • But the forms and functions of marriage have changed dramatically many times in the past as societal conditions changed and the balance between the benefits and costs of marriage tilted one way or the other.
  • As American society continues to change, it's not hard to imagine most people playing a different kind of marriage game, opting for other alliances that offer better versions of marriage's benefits at lower costs.

Journalists and politicians regularly treat marriage and divorce rates as metrics for morality, but they are not. Marriages are strategic alliances, and like everything involving strategy, they combine an unchanging logic with cultural specifics. Humans are rational, strategic actors. Marriage is losing ground not because Americans are more feckless than they used to be but because the conditions that for so long made it a profitable form of alliance are changing -- particularly for women....

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