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 equality that allowed for fairer, more intimate marriages alongside a social and political life outside the home.
Unfortunately, a speeded-up global economy has destroyed that balance, eating away at our time and energy for nurturing ties beyond the home. The United States is the extreme example. Americans work more days and weeks each year than people in any other affluent country. The average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.
Time spent socialising with people off the job has fallen by 25 percent since 1965. Between 1985 and 2004, Americans experienced a sharp decline in the number of neighbours and friends with whom they discussed meaningful matters. The number of people depending solely on a spouse for important conversations almost doubled.
When people lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. Often, we even cause the breakdown by loading the |
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Between 1985 and 2004, the number of people depending solely on a spouse for important conversations almost doubled
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relationship with too many expectations.
Yet, now, with a higher age of marriage and divorce rate, people spend more of their lives outside marriage. Not surprisingly, the number of Americans saying they had no close confidant nearly tripled.
The solution to this social isolation is not for us to ramp up our dependence on marriage even more. Nor is it, as social conservatives propose, to lower our expectations of marriage so that more people will enter and stay in less-than-satisfying relationships.
Instead, we need to raise our expectations for other relationships, recognising that marriage is not the only place where we meet our needs for intimacy, or the only place that we incur obligations. In our work policies, our social institutions and our individual lives, we must find ways to nurture other social ties.
Paradoxically, we may strengthen marriage more by helping people develop social networks beyond marriage than by trying to revive the failed experiment of making marriage the only source of meaning and commitment in people's lives. 
FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 14, 2006
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