Wedlock was never meant to satisfy all our social needs. It’s time to find new ways of making friends, says stephanie coontz |
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A frequent lamentation about modern marriage is that couples no longer invest the emotional energy in their marriages that they used to. But for most of history, people did not expect marriage to meet all their needs for intimacy, to come first in their loyalties, or to be the main place they gave or received social support.
Indeed, people who invested too much emotion in their marriage were considered to be selfishly disregarding their wider ties to kin, neighbours, and society at large.
In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church deemed marriage inferior to unwed celibacy because it diluted people’s people commitment to the larger community of believers. Until the mid-19th century, the word love was applied as often to relations with friends, kin, and neighbours as to
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| In the 1950s, women were told that total fulfillment could be found only in marriage |
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spouses. In Victorian times, most men and women experienced their deepest intimacy with same-sex friends.
But as modern economic and political institutions spread, traditional social dependence on neighbours and relations receded. Marriage became more intimate, passionate and fulfilling than in the past. Society came to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and urged people to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with the nuclear family for time and attention.
The narrowing of intimacy and obligation accelerated during the so-called Golden Age of Marriage in the 1950s, as a new norm of early, universal marriage emerged. Women were told that total fulfillment could be found only in marriage. Men were encouraged to rely on their wives for access to the emotional side of life.
This attempt to find all meaning within the nuclear family led to deep discontents. But the 1960s and early 1970s seemed to offer a new balance - an extension of male-female 
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