Somehow, this week has had a fascinating one for sex. First, we had a two-part series at Slate with an economists take on incarceration rates, female education, the pill, and divorce; the second the cover piece of Time discussing the biology and neurochemistry of dating and sex. Both articles are fascinating reads (and I'm essentially going to summarize the relevant points, for you lazy readers), but the interesting similarity between the two is the argument (/implication) that the pill bears considerable responsibility for the rising rates of divorce.
For the economist of Slate, the process works like this: Women before the pill were subject to the whims of getting pregnant. Once you control that variable in a woman's life, suddenly a woman can pursue education, jobs, and careers that involve significant preparatory training or schooling, law, for example. (A fascinating statistic is the notation that each year a woman delays before her first pregnancy raises her lifetime earnings by 10%.)
The flip side is a feedback cycle the author notes that where "no fault" divorce became established, women needed to retain employability in case their husband ditched them. But because they were employable, they were also capable of ditching their lousy, cheap-ass husband and striking out on her own. "No fault" divorce on it's own couldn't have enabled to rates of divorces, after all, what's the point of a girl leaving a bad marriage if she can't fend for herself because she's uneducated or doesn't have enough training for a job to take care of her and the kids? Only when women were sufficiently empowered by the training, education and experience afforded to them by the pill could they afford to walk out the door.
Framed in this way, the high rates of divorce aren't an erosion of social values, they're natural adjustments in people's lives as they realize they didn't quite know who or what they were getting involved in. It gets mentioned in passing divorcees are, in general, happier a year than widowers or widows; a statistic that certainly reinforces divorce as a correction. Even so, the relationship between "no fault" divorce and an population of educated, experienced and ambitious women appears to be a natural elevation of divorce.
The relevance of that second article addresses how well women select their mates. As it turns out, women on the pill have a fairly bad track record for selecting genetically compatible mates. Some of the genes responsible for controlling the immune system are known as major histocompatibility complex (MHC). These genes are primarily responsible for controlling tissue rejection, so if your mate's genes are too similar to yours, your babies are self-aborted in the womb. Among their many other traits, women can smell the genes (and taste, via kissing; fun and educational!), meaning women can subconsciously evaluate a prospective mate's compatibility and therefore the likelihood a child would be carried to term. Except that women on the pill can't. The result is women coming off the pill to have children and suddenly correctly reading all the signals they should have been reading ages ago. They realize their mate sucks (genetically speaking) and want to move on to other prospects, i.e. divorce.
To finally interject my own voice into all of this, it all suggests that as things currently stand, and while divorce is certainly not inevitable, divorce is a factor that must accepted in modern relationships. For better or for worse, the narrative of our life's romantic arc is again corrupted. Just as we aren't really sure what dating is, or how it's different than hooking up, we can no longer be sure that our "true" love will be with us 'til death do us part. I'm certainly not suggesting this is the unavoidable outcome of dating; I'm no where close to that nihilistic. Instead I'm simply saying that the idea of permanent self-actualization through your spouse doesn't quite seem so self-evident either.
If we approach marriage as a job, as the author of the Slate article argues, then can we really expect anything different from our generation? If we're impermanent enough to take 8-10 jobs over the course of our professional career, do we really have grounds to be all that shocked or surprised over a few marriages?
1 comment:
No wonder I'm having a hard time thinking of a response. I'm afraid your train of thought derailed for me, sort of like a pingpong match gone awry. One of the earliest conclusions about the pill was that it would lead to a lower marriage rate, higher divorce rate, and serial dating, maybe even serial monogamy. All that came out in the 70s with the first pills. Some saw that as bad, some as good. I think your statement near the end, that it is likely an inevitable part of life, dare I say it, the unintended consequence, is valid. So, the question becomes, "given this, what do we want to do about it?" This is changing the definition of what marriage is or can be expected to be. Now that women don't "have" to get married to achieve financial stability or even parenthood, what does that say to, for, or about men? Good stuff worth thinking about. m
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