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For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage
Twenty years ago, Stephanie Coontz asked of traditional marriage, “What tradition?” Now she returns to examine its contemporary state—what threatens its prevalence and what freedoms it can create for all people.
Ninety percent of the world’s people live in countries where marriage rates have plummeted since the 1980s, with the Western world experiencing especially steep drops. Almost everywhere, marriage has declined most among men and women with the lowest levels of education or earnings. And highly-educated and high-earning women are actually more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than in the past. But such women often express more ambivalence about getting married than other women—and typically postpone doing so until later in life.
Still, rather than devaluing marriage, people all around the world overwhelmingly describe it as the highest expression of commitment they can imagine. And most people say they eventually want to marry even while they increasingly express uncertainty about whether they will end up doing so.
In her new book, For Better and Worse, Stephanie Coontz unravels the origins of these paradoxical trends. Using the past to illuminate the present, she shows how shifting marital ideologies, gender relations, sexual mores, and emotional mind-sets over time have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory expectations and habits that often sabotage our attempts to build mutually satisfactory relationships. “Traditional” roles and values that once promoted successful marriages are now a recipe for relationship failure. Only by undoing the legacy of marriage’s “problematic past,” Coontz argues, can we help individuals and society at large navigate the “challenging future” of marriage.
Ninety percent of the world’s people live in countries where marriage rates have plummeted since the 1980s, with the Western world experiencing especially steep drops. Almost everywhere, marriage has declined most among men and women with the lowest levels of education or earnings. And highly-educated and high-earning women are actually more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than in the past. But such women often express more ambivalence about getting married than other women—and typically postpone doing so until later in life.
Still, rather than devaluing marriage, people all around the world overwhelmingly describe it as the highest expression of commitment they can imagine. And most people say they eventually want to marry even while they increasingly express uncertainty about whether they will end up doing so.
In her new book, For Better and Worse, Stephanie Coontz unravels the origins of these paradoxical trends. Using the past to illuminate the present, she shows how shifting marital ideologies, gender relations, sexual mores, and emotional mind-sets over time have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory expectations and habits that often sabotage our attempts to build mutually satisfactory relationships. “Traditional” roles and values that once promoted successful marriages are now a recipe for relationship failure. Only by undoing the legacy of marriage’s “problematic past,” Coontz argues, can we help individuals and society at large navigate the “challenging future” of marriage.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published May 26, 2026
About the author
Stephanie Coontz
19 books252 followersStephanie Coontz is director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, which she chaired from 2001 to 2004, and emeritus faculty of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She has written about gender, family, and history, and her writings have been translated into a dozen languages.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 25, 2026
I like to think I'm an expert at marriage. In fact, I've done it twice which means I'm twice as good as the next person. Or am I twice as bad? I digress.
Marriage rates are dropping in lots of places and Stephanie Coontz is here to talk about it in For Better and Worse. I write my reviews so people can know whether a book is for them. This is simple for this book. Let me tell you something that Coontz talks about in the book. While marriage rates are dropping, people overwhelmingly describe marriage as the highest expression of commitment and most say they want to be married.
If you found that juxtaposition interesting, then you'll want to read this book. Coontz looks at the history of marriage in order to better understand what the current and future of the institution may look like.
Coontz approaches the subject scientifically. There are extensive notes at the end of the book to look up what she discusses in the main section of the book. Coontz informs the reader she did this to make the narrative accessible to most readers. I think it does cut both ways. I felt like some sections read as a loose connection of random (but very interesting) facts about marriage. I am, however, a dork who loves details, so I am probably an outlier.
If you want to know about what marriage really was like and where it might be going, this is the book for you.
(This book was provided as a review copy by Viking Books.)
Marriage rates are dropping in lots of places and Stephanie Coontz is here to talk about it in For Better and Worse. I write my reviews so people can know whether a book is for them. This is simple for this book. Let me tell you something that Coontz talks about in the book. While marriage rates are dropping, people overwhelmingly describe marriage as the highest expression of commitment and most say they want to be married.
If you found that juxtaposition interesting, then you'll want to read this book. Coontz looks at the history of marriage in order to better understand what the current and future of the institution may look like.
Coontz approaches the subject scientifically. There are extensive notes at the end of the book to look up what she discusses in the main section of the book. Coontz informs the reader she did this to make the narrative accessible to most readers. I think it does cut both ways. I felt like some sections read as a loose connection of random (but very interesting) facts about marriage. I am, however, a dork who loves details, so I am probably an outlier.
If you want to know about what marriage really was like and where it might be going, this is the book for you.
(This book was provided as a review copy by Viking Books.)
May 30, 2026
I tore through For Better and Worse yesterday (release day) and today. Of course, I had been waiting for it. Over the last several years I have periodically had the privilege of corresponding with Stephanie about it, providing whatever assistance I could with data and interpreting family demographic trends — some of which I’m thrilled to see in these pages. But beyond the personal connection (though I will still call her Stephanie), this book is an essential breath of fresh air in today’s marriage and family cultural discourse.
Each of her books has changed the way I think about families, and together the body of her work has formed the historical foundation of my understanding. It started for me with, The Way We Never Were (first published in 1992, revised and reissued in 2016). In his 1993 review in the American Historical Review, Steven Mintz summarized: “Her concluding message is that nostalgia for a mythical golden age of stable, intact families should not prevent us from addressing the novel problems of the present.” Stephanie extended her canvas geographically and chronologically in the 2006 book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which offered a sweeping narrative account of the emergence of love as a basis for marriage, and its implications, in the process profoundly destabilizing the contemporary mythmaking around — again — traditional families.
Her 2011 book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, was deeply revelatory and emotionally gripping — so much so that I still remember where I was when I read different parts of it. It was history, but alive and intimate, with interviews but also rich readings of diaries and letters and articles from the post-WWII period. I don’t remember the 1960s from real life, but reading that book more than anything else made me feel I could understand America’s — by historical standards — truly bizarre society at that time from women’s perspective.
For Better and Worse
Anyway! For Better and Worse brings us up to the present, not just updating of the story she has told for decades, but reflecting the process of continuously studying and learning that should be a model for any scholar working today. These are some of my notes.
In this book, Stephanie pursues the evolution of patriarchal norms and practices, the pathways of acquiescence and resistance, the commonalities and diversities, the are most relevant to today. For example, she frames the story of modern patriarchy around the appearance of the “Mrs. Man’s Name” practice for naming married women, which was unique to our era. “Mrs.” originally referred to a women of higher social status, whether married or not — as with men, who only were titled “Mr.” if they had a certain status. Identifying women as Mrs. Man’s First Name Last Name only emerged in the late 19th century — and lasted less than 100 years.
Of particular interest in that story is the emergence of a stricter gender essentialism — separate spheres — and its ties to family structure and practices, around the late 18th century.
“Domesticity gave women who wouldn’t have qualified as a ‘Mrs.’ in the old social order an alternative source of respect and influence. Instead of being ‘deputies,’ valued for their productive contributions to the household but bound to obey their husbands, wives could become experts in a world of family rituals and neighborly interactions in which men played a more marginal role than in the past. Women’s enhanced reputation for morality and compassion even allowed some women to enter teaching and nursing jobs before marriage and after marriage to take a larger role in religious and charitable work.”
The tradeoff was severe, of course. As women of a certain status got a new kind of deference, “Such deference, however, was not a tribute to the recipient’s power, but instead to her presumed defenselessness.”
Essentialism — not just of gender, but of race as well — partly emerged in response to the democratic ideals of the Revolutionary period and after. “‘The wife submits to the husband as the husband submits to the Crown’ was a typical justification for wifely subordination,” she writes. “But with two kings recently beheaded by their subjects, that analogy now raised uncomfortable possibilities.” If humans had inherent rights, how could those in power deny rights to their subordinates? They had to be seen as less than human. The resulting ideologies constructed women who had to be protected from society — and society that had to be protected from people who weren’t White.
This was the context for the extreme practice of erasing women’s identities with Mrs. His Name. It was often said Stephanie reports, that a woman’s name should appear in print only on the occasions of her birth, marriage, and death. Women with high status husbands mostly did not object. For example, the widow of President Tyler, Julia Gardiner, used to signed her letters, “Mrs. Ex-President Tyler.” This history bequeathed to us the legacy of a “benevolent sexism” that give some women credit for being smart and altruistic while punishing those who seek real power and authority — which is sharply resurgent of women’s rising educational and occupational attainment.
And what about men? The men who were practicing “traditional” masculinity in the 19th century — more secure in their gender’s dominance than today’s perhaps — did not consider it a manly necessity to hide their emotions. Diaries and letters between men from the period of America’s founding show “male friends sentimentally commemorating the anniversaries of their first meeting, reproaching one another for failing to answer letters, weeping with joy or loneliness, gushing about the pleasure of their reunions, and confiding their anxieties about whether their feelings for a special woman were reciprocated.” Real men of the 19th century, dropped from a time machine onto TikTok today, would be endlessly bullied by MAGA as low-T girlie men.
In the late 19th century, as women started getting higher education and entering into formerly all male occupations, like clerical jobs, the ideal form of middle-class masculinity (tragically) shifted away from kindness and vulnerability to stoicism and mastery: “The original middle-class ideal of ‘manliness’ was conceptualized as the opposite of childishness — and also the opposite of what middle-class men viewed as lower-class belligerence and upper-class arrogance. But in the late nineteenth century that gave way to a new and very different model of ‘manliness’ or ‘masculinity’ as the opposite of femininity. The resultant pressure on males to demonstrate their manhood instead of their adulthood has been good for neither sex.” Later, she notes, girl children went through a parallel process of self definition, as evidenced by their dolls shifting from babies to Barbies. Becoming a woman became less about growing up and more about growing apart from men.
In the fallout from this transition, women are much more able to have close, intimate friendships with other women than men do with their peers. On the one hand that means no more holding hands in public for male friends, on the other it means that aggressive men have often been taken for granted as acting according to their essential gender identity, leaving women and children responsible for managing their abuse. (Stephanie is at pains to couch the following sentiment with appropriate cautions: our society would be better off if we had ways to tolerate or even encourage more casual, nonsexual touching.)
Marriage and nostalgia
Ultimately, Stephanie wants us to identify and then escape from two opposing “earworms”: that marriage used to be great but now it’s bad (one way or another), and that it is inherently oppressive. She writes: “I believe knowing the actual history of marriage can help people attune themselves to more complex melodies and become comfortable with a wider range of harmonies.” The amazing power of history (and education) is its capacity to show how the things we’re stressing and fighting about today are — or are not — bequeathed to us by historical habits and forces. That’s essential for identifying and solving the problems we actually can, and understanding those we can’t.
The wisdom in this perspective runs deep. And nowhere is that more in evidence than in her discussion of nostalgia. Crucially, she explains how her thinking on the question has changed since “the nostalgia trap” subtitle of The Way We Never Were. She has come to realize that, “Some types of nostalgia are actually healthy. And when it comes to dealing with unhealthy nostalgia, I’ve come to believe that the only thing worse than pandering to it is failing to acknowledge the genuine injuries or anxieties that produce it.”
The history of nostalgia itself is fascinating — the word is from the Greek nostos (homeward journey), and algos (pain). First defined as a pathology, basically homesickness, it was a real sickness — especially among soldiers, at least through the Civil War, but also among people who were forced to move by economic circumstance (or slavery). And people really died from it. The severity of the condition receded with the development of modern personalities raised on rapid change, and with communication technology that allowed people stay in touch with their folks back home.
That was personal nostalgia, the feeling of missing home. Today’s nostalgia, the kind that is politically weaponized, is not the feeling of missing a real experience – but the tendency to “idealize a whole, and often wholly misremembered, set of social arrangements and political institutions from another era.” Psychological research shows this is associated with acting judgmental and hostile to strangers. And, highly relevant for today’s MAGA moment, it is less felt by people who have left home, and more often by people whose communities have been left behind. Think: the rural Nazis that formed the base for Mussolini, Hitler, and Trump’s ascendance.
Such nostalgia isn’t helpful, obviously, but it is worth knowing what we lost from the post-WWII period instead of just attacking it. It was “the fifties,” that mythological but also real period for families that Stephanie’s scholarship, perhaps more than any other historian’s, has come to define. For one thing, we lost “much more extensive government-funded job creation, stricter regulation of businesses and banks, higher tax rates on the wealthy than today, and stronger guardrails against financial piracy,” In that era, unions were better protected. The government built parks. Living standards were rising. Racism and segregation were extreme, but economically, unions and business regulation raised the floor for all workers, including Black workers. Giant infrastructure projects like the interstate system, and the expansion of higher education, dominated the landscape. CEOs had incomes 20-times the typical worker, compared with 300-times today. And yes, birth and marriage rates were much higher, for good and bad reasons. “The family” benefited from all this materially — even as, culturally, it was reinforced by the restrictions on women’s individual opportunities and other social constraints that tightly bound women to marriage. For better and worse.
To bring the narrative up to the present, I quote from the conclusion of Stephanie’s essay yesterday in the LA Times.
“Contrary to contemporary nostalgia brokers, the main threat to family life and social solidarity today isn’t the fact that couples who can’t get along can obtain a no-fault divorce. It’s not that women and girls have access to birth control and the fallback of abortion when needed. Nor is it that same-sex couples can now formalize their commitments the same way that different-sex couples do and can access alternative ways to have children.
“We need to address the underlying sources of pain and resentment: the reversal of the economic equalization of the 1950s and 1960s, the shredding of the social and medical safety net, the assault on hard-won protections for workers and consumers, and the extent to which middle- and lower-income families have been saddled with so many of the stressful inconveniences that are the flip side of the privileges accorded the rich.“
There’s much more where these notes came from! This book is wonderful, and you should read it, and if you teach families, or history, or the history of families, your students should too.
This review was posted on my blog FamilyInequality.com on May 28, 2026.
Each of her books has changed the way I think about families, and together the body of her work has formed the historical foundation of my understanding. It started for me with, The Way We Never Were (first published in 1992, revised and reissued in 2016). In his 1993 review in the American Historical Review, Steven Mintz summarized: “Her concluding message is that nostalgia for a mythical golden age of stable, intact families should not prevent us from addressing the novel problems of the present.” Stephanie extended her canvas geographically and chronologically in the 2006 book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which offered a sweeping narrative account of the emergence of love as a basis for marriage, and its implications, in the process profoundly destabilizing the contemporary mythmaking around — again — traditional families.
Her 2011 book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, was deeply revelatory and emotionally gripping — so much so that I still remember where I was when I read different parts of it. It was history, but alive and intimate, with interviews but also rich readings of diaries and letters and articles from the post-WWII period. I don’t remember the 1960s from real life, but reading that book more than anything else made me feel I could understand America’s — by historical standards — truly bizarre society at that time from women’s perspective.
For Better and Worse
Anyway! For Better and Worse brings us up to the present, not just updating of the story she has told for decades, but reflecting the process of continuously studying and learning that should be a model for any scholar working today. These are some of my notes.
In this book, Stephanie pursues the evolution of patriarchal norms and practices, the pathways of acquiescence and resistance, the commonalities and diversities, the are most relevant to today. For example, she frames the story of modern patriarchy around the appearance of the “Mrs. Man’s Name” practice for naming married women, which was unique to our era. “Mrs.” originally referred to a women of higher social status, whether married or not — as with men, who only were titled “Mr.” if they had a certain status. Identifying women as Mrs. Man’s First Name Last Name only emerged in the late 19th century — and lasted less than 100 years.
Of particular interest in that story is the emergence of a stricter gender essentialism — separate spheres — and its ties to family structure and practices, around the late 18th century.
“Domesticity gave women who wouldn’t have qualified as a ‘Mrs.’ in the old social order an alternative source of respect and influence. Instead of being ‘deputies,’ valued for their productive contributions to the household but bound to obey their husbands, wives could become experts in a world of family rituals and neighborly interactions in which men played a more marginal role than in the past. Women’s enhanced reputation for morality and compassion even allowed some women to enter teaching and nursing jobs before marriage and after marriage to take a larger role in religious and charitable work.”
The tradeoff was severe, of course. As women of a certain status got a new kind of deference, “Such deference, however, was not a tribute to the recipient’s power, but instead to her presumed defenselessness.”
Essentialism — not just of gender, but of race as well — partly emerged in response to the democratic ideals of the Revolutionary period and after. “‘The wife submits to the husband as the husband submits to the Crown’ was a typical justification for wifely subordination,” she writes. “But with two kings recently beheaded by their subjects, that analogy now raised uncomfortable possibilities.” If humans had inherent rights, how could those in power deny rights to their subordinates? They had to be seen as less than human. The resulting ideologies constructed women who had to be protected from society — and society that had to be protected from people who weren’t White.
This was the context for the extreme practice of erasing women’s identities with Mrs. His Name. It was often said Stephanie reports, that a woman’s name should appear in print only on the occasions of her birth, marriage, and death. Women with high status husbands mostly did not object. For example, the widow of President Tyler, Julia Gardiner, used to signed her letters, “Mrs. Ex-President Tyler.” This history bequeathed to us the legacy of a “benevolent sexism” that give some women credit for being smart and altruistic while punishing those who seek real power and authority — which is sharply resurgent of women’s rising educational and occupational attainment.
And what about men? The men who were practicing “traditional” masculinity in the 19th century — more secure in their gender’s dominance than today’s perhaps — did not consider it a manly necessity to hide their emotions. Diaries and letters between men from the period of America’s founding show “male friends sentimentally commemorating the anniversaries of their first meeting, reproaching one another for failing to answer letters, weeping with joy or loneliness, gushing about the pleasure of their reunions, and confiding their anxieties about whether their feelings for a special woman were reciprocated.” Real men of the 19th century, dropped from a time machine onto TikTok today, would be endlessly bullied by MAGA as low-T girlie men.
In the late 19th century, as women started getting higher education and entering into formerly all male occupations, like clerical jobs, the ideal form of middle-class masculinity (tragically) shifted away from kindness and vulnerability to stoicism and mastery: “The original middle-class ideal of ‘manliness’ was conceptualized as the opposite of childishness — and also the opposite of what middle-class men viewed as lower-class belligerence and upper-class arrogance. But in the late nineteenth century that gave way to a new and very different model of ‘manliness’ or ‘masculinity’ as the opposite of femininity. The resultant pressure on males to demonstrate their manhood instead of their adulthood has been good for neither sex.” Later, she notes, girl children went through a parallel process of self definition, as evidenced by their dolls shifting from babies to Barbies. Becoming a woman became less about growing up and more about growing apart from men.
In the fallout from this transition, women are much more able to have close, intimate friendships with other women than men do with their peers. On the one hand that means no more holding hands in public for male friends, on the other it means that aggressive men have often been taken for granted as acting according to their essential gender identity, leaving women and children responsible for managing their abuse. (Stephanie is at pains to couch the following sentiment with appropriate cautions: our society would be better off if we had ways to tolerate or even encourage more casual, nonsexual touching.)
Marriage and nostalgia
Ultimately, Stephanie wants us to identify and then escape from two opposing “earworms”: that marriage used to be great but now it’s bad (one way or another), and that it is inherently oppressive. She writes: “I believe knowing the actual history of marriage can help people attune themselves to more complex melodies and become comfortable with a wider range of harmonies.” The amazing power of history (and education) is its capacity to show how the things we’re stressing and fighting about today are — or are not — bequeathed to us by historical habits and forces. That’s essential for identifying and solving the problems we actually can, and understanding those we can’t.
The wisdom in this perspective runs deep. And nowhere is that more in evidence than in her discussion of nostalgia. Crucially, she explains how her thinking on the question has changed since “the nostalgia trap” subtitle of The Way We Never Were. She has come to realize that, “Some types of nostalgia are actually healthy. And when it comes to dealing with unhealthy nostalgia, I’ve come to believe that the only thing worse than pandering to it is failing to acknowledge the genuine injuries or anxieties that produce it.”
The history of nostalgia itself is fascinating — the word is from the Greek nostos (homeward journey), and algos (pain). First defined as a pathology, basically homesickness, it was a real sickness — especially among soldiers, at least through the Civil War, but also among people who were forced to move by economic circumstance (or slavery). And people really died from it. The severity of the condition receded with the development of modern personalities raised on rapid change, and with communication technology that allowed people stay in touch with their folks back home.
That was personal nostalgia, the feeling of missing home. Today’s nostalgia, the kind that is politically weaponized, is not the feeling of missing a real experience – but the tendency to “idealize a whole, and often wholly misremembered, set of social arrangements and political institutions from another era.” Psychological research shows this is associated with acting judgmental and hostile to strangers. And, highly relevant for today’s MAGA moment, it is less felt by people who have left home, and more often by people whose communities have been left behind. Think: the rural Nazis that formed the base for Mussolini, Hitler, and Trump’s ascendance.
Such nostalgia isn’t helpful, obviously, but it is worth knowing what we lost from the post-WWII period instead of just attacking it. It was “the fifties,” that mythological but also real period for families that Stephanie’s scholarship, perhaps more than any other historian’s, has come to define. For one thing, we lost “much more extensive government-funded job creation, stricter regulation of businesses and banks, higher tax rates on the wealthy than today, and stronger guardrails against financial piracy,” In that era, unions were better protected. The government built parks. Living standards were rising. Racism and segregation were extreme, but economically, unions and business regulation raised the floor for all workers, including Black workers. Giant infrastructure projects like the interstate system, and the expansion of higher education, dominated the landscape. CEOs had incomes 20-times the typical worker, compared with 300-times today. And yes, birth and marriage rates were much higher, for good and bad reasons. “The family” benefited from all this materially — even as, culturally, it was reinforced by the restrictions on women’s individual opportunities and other social constraints that tightly bound women to marriage. For better and worse.
To bring the narrative up to the present, I quote from the conclusion of Stephanie’s essay yesterday in the LA Times.
“Contrary to contemporary nostalgia brokers, the main threat to family life and social solidarity today isn’t the fact that couples who can’t get along can obtain a no-fault divorce. It’s not that women and girls have access to birth control and the fallback of abortion when needed. Nor is it that same-sex couples can now formalize their commitments the same way that different-sex couples do and can access alternative ways to have children.
“We need to address the underlying sources of pain and resentment: the reversal of the economic equalization of the 1950s and 1960s, the shredding of the social and medical safety net, the assault on hard-won protections for workers and consumers, and the extent to which middle- and lower-income families have been saddled with so many of the stressful inconveniences that are the flip side of the privileges accorded the rich.“
There’s much more where these notes came from! This book is wonderful, and you should read it, and if you teach families, or history, or the history of families, your students should too.
This review was posted on my blog FamilyInequality.com on May 28, 2026.
August 4, 2026
For better or worse
- A marriage book - I want to keep learning
- 2/3 of people that get divorced will remarry
- Divorce rates were highest in the late 70’s-80’s
- There was near universal marriage during the 50’s - that sounds awful
- In the 50’s - 85% of women 25-29 were married. Today it’s 85% of women 55-59 - wow. I wonder if that is they are married or have been married
- Still the vast majority of Americans will marry
- This seems like a dry book. I need to pay attention
Chapter 1 - the many and misunderstood traditional marriages
- Three kinds of marriage systems
- Hunter gather
- Patriarchal - colonial America
- Male bread winner model - 19/20 century
- A developing system of modern equal rights marriage
- Paleolithic tribes - shared resources, group child raising, who was family and who wasn’t did not always depend on genes
- Marriage was created to turn strangers into family
- Marriage from outside the tribe spread resources, the gene pool, and geographic boundaries. Spreading generations of connected families, with obligations towards peace and reciprocity
- European patriarchal, imperialism, private property, religious, controlling - changed marriage
- Jesus was closer to the the egalitarian hunter gatherers than he was whatever the gospels and people that distort his word
Chapter 2: the paradox of patriarchy and the dark side of democracy
- In 16/17 centuries most American and Europeans believed that inequality was a necessity
- Women were ordained by god to be subordinate to their husbands
- In colonial agriculture America women heavily contributed to the function of the farm and business. Many women worked and their wages were necessary to the economic standing of the home
- Industrialization lowered wages and lowered female employment
- Women were counted on to the moral center of the home
- They were still subservient to their husbands, who often viewed them as smarter and morally superior. It was a different kind of equality
- Gender roles and masculinity were different than they are today
- The contradiction of the enlightenment and the founding father - looking at you Thomas Jefferson
Chapter 3: how the gender legacy of democracy holds women back
- The gender equality paradox:
- Other less developed and more conservative countries have seen more women in power
- We rank 71 in representation of women in government
- Benevolent sexism?
- The modern perception of women
- Women could be rich and powerful but are too nice to want to be
- Men have agency, women have empathy
Chapter 4: soulmates, courtship, and sex
- Victorian times
- Soulmates and marriage for love were new concepts
- The sex taboo
- JFC - people are crazy, thank god I live in modern times
- Abortions in the 19 century, a friendly reminder of how awful our laws are
- An interesting explanation of courtship, seduction, attraction, and sexual roles
Chapter 5: from spiritual soulmates to sexual playmates
- Best friends, great sex - that’s exactly what I am looking for and we had it
- Platonic physical and written affection
- Conservative repressive cultural warriors are the worst
- Those conservatives are the reason people feel uncomfortable expressing platonic love - because it’s gay
Chapter 6: Nostalgia
- A yearning to recapture the good times, typically associated with community
- Be nostalgic for the great society and new deal
- At the same time interracial marriage was illegal in most states, sodomy was a crime, marital rape was legal, domestic violence was tolerated on some level and laws were looser, child abuse was higher and slightly accepted
- There was red lining and the Jim Crow south
- 95% of Americans were married
- Geez so many gay and trans people married in hetero relationships
- The new deal and great society were awesome in many ways - higher employment, wage equality, home ownership, social safety net, progress
- Modern times - insane inequality, monopolies, deregulation, low union rates, SCOTUS, the heritage foundation, Trump, etc
- The most tolerant and accepting groups have the highest marriage rates and lowest divorce rates
- Economics and changing values have changed marriage rates
Chapter 7:
- In the past most people were married less than 14 months after meeting. In modern times most people marry after knowing each other for +6 years and/or living together for +2 years
- Love essential but it’s not enough
- Reasons for holding off on marriage - financial independence, education attainment, demonstrated personal responsibility, paying off debt
- In the past people saw marriage as the start of independence and adulthood, today people see marriage as the capstone of independence, stability, and adulthood
- That is certainly accurate for my generation. I 100% feel that way
- Women make more money and have higher education attained
- I have long been proud that I come from a family of highly educated, high achieving women, that all had children after 30
- Marriage has become a luxury good
- There is an economic and income gap in marriage. Higher educated women have a significantly higher likelihood 80% of reaching their 20 year wedding anniversary, uneducated women 50%
- Is marriage the start or the capstone
- I have to figure who I am, be financially independent, fuck a bunch of people, be a responsible person, become a person that knows how to be a partner, become a great version of me - then I can get married. Marriage is at the end of the line. If I don’t have those things, I won’t be a suitable husband
- Higher income couples reasons for divorce: incompatibility, lack of love, poor communication, and personality clashes
- Regardless of income and education, people that are married are happier and earn more
- Income gains have come from women working and getting paid more
Chapter 8: what makes a modern marriage
- The older a women is when they marry, the less likely they are to divorce. This includes women in their 30’s-50’s
- The benefits of casual sex - that is my opinion
- Egalitarian house work
- Shared or divided
- Shared - rotated through tasks, everyone is doing the tasks - greater happiness
- Divided - each person contributes equally but they stick to their assigned task - lead to greater unhappiness
- This is what Sam and I were doing and she was unhappy about it. Dang, that makes sense - novelty, don’t get stuck doing the same thing. You don’t stay exclusively doing what you dislike or prefer. There is an easy solution - shared household tasks
- You can share tasks but they are frequently going to revert to typical gender assignments - that’s insulting and patriarchal
- House hold tasks and cleaning - see the mental labor book ‘what’s on her mind’ and ‘how to not hate your husband after kids’
- Learned helplessness - I am guilty of this. I am constantly fighting it. Don’t ask questions, take initiative, do the research, do the work
- In marriages where the husband takes paternity leave are less likely to get a divorce
- The person that works outside the home needs to take extra care to contribute to the house hold functions and child raising. See the two books I mentioned above
- Couples that have egalitarian approaches and where the husband contributes to child rearing and house hold functions, outside of the traditional gender norms - have more sex, are happier, and are less likely to divorce
- Every time I read things like this I get self conscious. Am I doing enough, am I dirty, am I lazy, are we falling into traditional gender assignments. I am doing it wrong, I am gross, I am patriarchal, I have unmanaged ADHD
- I need to step up and change. I am super clean and organized because of these insecurities
I did not always enjoy this book but I found it helpful, it made me better. My ideas about marriage were wrong, my fear of a lifetime commitment, not understanding what marriage offered legally, my desire to travel, lack of exposure to marriage, not seeing how my lack of enthusiasm was a deal breaker, low earning, my learned helplessness, delaying going to relationship therapy until after the holidays, and a slew of other faults, cost me the happiest, healthiest, safest, best relationship of my life. It did not matter how attractive I was, how hard I worked on myself, how much effort I put into the relationship, or how great of a partner I was. I am responsible for the relationship falling apart. So I will just keep reading, keep working on myself, and keep trying to get better. I am glad I read this book. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. When you find your best friend, when you find the person you love most, don’t fuck it up. Love that person absolutely, totally, fully, and completely. Commit to them, overcome fear, and be the best partner possible. I love you
- A marriage book - I want to keep learning
- 2/3 of people that get divorced will remarry
- Divorce rates were highest in the late 70’s-80’s
- There was near universal marriage during the 50’s - that sounds awful
- In the 50’s - 85% of women 25-29 were married. Today it’s 85% of women 55-59 - wow. I wonder if that is they are married or have been married
- Still the vast majority of Americans will marry
- This seems like a dry book. I need to pay attention
Chapter 1 - the many and misunderstood traditional marriages
- Three kinds of marriage systems
- Hunter gather
- Patriarchal - colonial America
- Male bread winner model - 19/20 century
- A developing system of modern equal rights marriage
- Paleolithic tribes - shared resources, group child raising, who was family and who wasn’t did not always depend on genes
- Marriage was created to turn strangers into family
- Marriage from outside the tribe spread resources, the gene pool, and geographic boundaries. Spreading generations of connected families, with obligations towards peace and reciprocity
- European patriarchal, imperialism, private property, religious, controlling - changed marriage
- Jesus was closer to the the egalitarian hunter gatherers than he was whatever the gospels and people that distort his word
Chapter 2: the paradox of patriarchy and the dark side of democracy
- In 16/17 centuries most American and Europeans believed that inequality was a necessity
- Women were ordained by god to be subordinate to their husbands
- In colonial agriculture America women heavily contributed to the function of the farm and business. Many women worked and their wages were necessary to the economic standing of the home
- Industrialization lowered wages and lowered female employment
- Women were counted on to the moral center of the home
- They were still subservient to their husbands, who often viewed them as smarter and morally superior. It was a different kind of equality
- Gender roles and masculinity were different than they are today
- The contradiction of the enlightenment and the founding father - looking at you Thomas Jefferson
Chapter 3: how the gender legacy of democracy holds women back
- The gender equality paradox:
- Other less developed and more conservative countries have seen more women in power
- We rank 71 in representation of women in government
- Benevolent sexism?
- The modern perception of women
- Women could be rich and powerful but are too nice to want to be
- Men have agency, women have empathy
Chapter 4: soulmates, courtship, and sex
- Victorian times
- Soulmates and marriage for love were new concepts
- The sex taboo
- JFC - people are crazy, thank god I live in modern times
- Abortions in the 19 century, a friendly reminder of how awful our laws are
- An interesting explanation of courtship, seduction, attraction, and sexual roles
Chapter 5: from spiritual soulmates to sexual playmates
- Best friends, great sex - that’s exactly what I am looking for and we had it
- Platonic physical and written affection
- Conservative repressive cultural warriors are the worst
- Those conservatives are the reason people feel uncomfortable expressing platonic love - because it’s gay
Chapter 6: Nostalgia
- A yearning to recapture the good times, typically associated with community
- Be nostalgic for the great society and new deal
- At the same time interracial marriage was illegal in most states, sodomy was a crime, marital rape was legal, domestic violence was tolerated on some level and laws were looser, child abuse was higher and slightly accepted
- There was red lining and the Jim Crow south
- 95% of Americans were married
- Geez so many gay and trans people married in hetero relationships
- The new deal and great society were awesome in many ways - higher employment, wage equality, home ownership, social safety net, progress
- Modern times - insane inequality, monopolies, deregulation, low union rates, SCOTUS, the heritage foundation, Trump, etc
- The most tolerant and accepting groups have the highest marriage rates and lowest divorce rates
- Economics and changing values have changed marriage rates
Chapter 7:
- In the past most people were married less than 14 months after meeting. In modern times most people marry after knowing each other for +6 years and/or living together for +2 years
- Love essential but it’s not enough
- Reasons for holding off on marriage - financial independence, education attainment, demonstrated personal responsibility, paying off debt
- In the past people saw marriage as the start of independence and adulthood, today people see marriage as the capstone of independence, stability, and adulthood
- That is certainly accurate for my generation. I 100% feel that way
- Women make more money and have higher education attained
- I have long been proud that I come from a family of highly educated, high achieving women, that all had children after 30
- Marriage has become a luxury good
- There is an economic and income gap in marriage. Higher educated women have a significantly higher likelihood 80% of reaching their 20 year wedding anniversary, uneducated women 50%
- Is marriage the start or the capstone
- I have to figure who I am, be financially independent, fuck a bunch of people, be a responsible person, become a person that knows how to be a partner, become a great version of me - then I can get married. Marriage is at the end of the line. If I don’t have those things, I won’t be a suitable husband
- Higher income couples reasons for divorce: incompatibility, lack of love, poor communication, and personality clashes
- Regardless of income and education, people that are married are happier and earn more
- Income gains have come from women working and getting paid more
Chapter 8: what makes a modern marriage
- The older a women is when they marry, the less likely they are to divorce. This includes women in their 30’s-50’s
- The benefits of casual sex - that is my opinion
- Egalitarian house work
- Shared or divided
- Shared - rotated through tasks, everyone is doing the tasks - greater happiness
- Divided - each person contributes equally but they stick to their assigned task - lead to greater unhappiness
- This is what Sam and I were doing and she was unhappy about it. Dang, that makes sense - novelty, don’t get stuck doing the same thing. You don’t stay exclusively doing what you dislike or prefer. There is an easy solution - shared household tasks
- You can share tasks but they are frequently going to revert to typical gender assignments - that’s insulting and patriarchal
- House hold tasks and cleaning - see the mental labor book ‘what’s on her mind’ and ‘how to not hate your husband after kids’
- Learned helplessness - I am guilty of this. I am constantly fighting it. Don’t ask questions, take initiative, do the research, do the work
- In marriages where the husband takes paternity leave are less likely to get a divorce
- The person that works outside the home needs to take extra care to contribute to the house hold functions and child raising. See the two books I mentioned above
- Couples that have egalitarian approaches and where the husband contributes to child rearing and house hold functions, outside of the traditional gender norms - have more sex, are happier, and are less likely to divorce
- Every time I read things like this I get self conscious. Am I doing enough, am I dirty, am I lazy, are we falling into traditional gender assignments. I am doing it wrong, I am gross, I am patriarchal, I have unmanaged ADHD
- I need to step up and change. I am super clean and organized because of these insecurities
I did not always enjoy this book but I found it helpful, it made me better. My ideas about marriage were wrong, my fear of a lifetime commitment, not understanding what marriage offered legally, my desire to travel, lack of exposure to marriage, not seeing how my lack of enthusiasm was a deal breaker, low earning, my learned helplessness, delaying going to relationship therapy until after the holidays, and a slew of other faults, cost me the happiest, healthiest, safest, best relationship of my life. It did not matter how attractive I was, how hard I worked on myself, how much effort I put into the relationship, or how great of a partner I was. I am responsible for the relationship falling apart. So I will just keep reading, keep working on myself, and keep trying to get better. I am glad I read this book. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. When you find your best friend, when you find the person you love most, don’t fuck it up. Love that person absolutely, totally, fully, and completely. Commit to them, overcome fear, and be the best partner possible. I love you
July 10, 2026
Coontz takes on a big task in this book: she shows how affective patterns structuring marriage in a given culture and time period depend on economic and material circumstances. Once technologies or geographies or generations change, the emotional content of marriage and its assumed “natural” gendered ingredients change as well.
Coontz provides one of the most poignant reminders of how quickly these things can change, in my opinion, when she tells us that mid-Victorian middle-class men professed their suitability for marriage during courtship through constant emotional disclosures to their fiancées, something that relatively abruptly ceased with the financial crisis or political turmoil of the 1880s when men’s status as men became threatened and they became more universally stoic and withholding to distinguish themselves from women (which was also when the romance novel began eroticizing male intimidation and emotional closedness, surprise!). Female friendships then picked up women’s need for emotional disclosure and introspection, a need that was (and is) itself culturally prompted and rewarded. We’re still “in” this time, in America at least. Oof.
Overall, hugely engaging book: well-written, deeply researched, and wise. Ending the book on strategies for equalizing the labor distribution in the home cuts to the chase of marriage’s current predicament; so many women have low desire and seek divorce because they feel exploited by their partners, period.
Some things suggest that Coontz is, indeed, a grandma: no, we won’t start getting handsier because, things being what they are right now, it’s not safe for women to be touched all the time, even if that lowers everyone’s aggression.
Coontz provides one of the most poignant reminders of how quickly these things can change, in my opinion, when she tells us that mid-Victorian middle-class men professed their suitability for marriage during courtship through constant emotional disclosures to their fiancées, something that relatively abruptly ceased with the financial crisis or political turmoil of the 1880s when men’s status as men became threatened and they became more universally stoic and withholding to distinguish themselves from women (which was also when the romance novel began eroticizing male intimidation and emotional closedness, surprise!). Female friendships then picked up women’s need for emotional disclosure and introspection, a need that was (and is) itself culturally prompted and rewarded. We’re still “in” this time, in America at least. Oof.
Overall, hugely engaging book: well-written, deeply researched, and wise. Ending the book on strategies for equalizing the labor distribution in the home cuts to the chase of marriage’s current predicament; so many women have low desire and seek divorce because they feel exploited by their partners, period.
Some things suggest that Coontz is, indeed, a grandma: no, we won’t start getting handsier because, things being what they are right now, it’s not safe for women to be touched all the time, even if that lowers everyone’s aggression.
July 14, 2026
I struggled to get through this and finally DNF’d toward the end. I read the author’s Marriage, A History book several years ago and remember enjoying it, which was why I picked this book up. There’s lots of interesting facts, but also a lot of progressive talking points dressed up as a discussion of marriage. I found her omission of a discussion of children particularly odd. What does she marriage is really for? No, the ultimate answer is not personal fulfillment or acquisition of in-laws. At several points the author seems to be celebrating personal freedom - sorry, but marriage often leads to children and the freedom to divorce just because you’re unhappy is not clearly an unmitigated good if you have children. At one point the author says that hookup culture might be worse for women because of slut shaming. Huh? Seriously? It might be worse for women because if an unwanted pregnancy occurs, the consequences will typically fall heavily on women. Yes, even in 2026.
Some books I liked that I think examine aspects of this topic in a better way:
- Career and Family by Claudia Goldin
- The Two Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney
- The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry
Some books I liked that I think examine aspects of this topic in a better way:
- Career and Family by Claudia Goldin
- The Two Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney
- The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry
July 31, 2026
Great, but surprisingly short.
I’ve read several other books by Ms. Coontz and was surprised at how short this was. This does a great job of neatly summarizing and modernizing her work on marriage and I’d recommend that anyone starting with Ms. Coontz’s work start here because it captures the themes of her work and it includes contemporary information. It is much harder to relate to her older books when you have to imagine how the pandemic or current political situation would affect her research results.
There was much to learn from this book and it is the most practical and accessible of her work.
I’ve read several other books by Ms. Coontz and was surprised at how short this was. This does a great job of neatly summarizing and modernizing her work on marriage and I’d recommend that anyone starting with Ms. Coontz’s work start here because it captures the themes of her work and it includes contemporary information. It is much harder to relate to her older books when you have to imagine how the pandemic or current political situation would affect her research results.
There was much to learn from this book and it is the most practical and accessible of her work.
June 9, 2026
You know you’re unc when you’re listening to *nonfiction* audio books on the way home.
A good (and more modern follow up) to my history of sexuality class. The broader story was fairly clear, but sometimes obfuscated by digressions and lists of stats.
A good (and more modern follow up) to my history of sexuality class. The broader story was fairly clear, but sometimes obfuscated by digressions and lists of stats.
August 13, 2026
I previously read and enjoyed Marriage, A History by this same author. This book was not as good. A large rehash of topics covered in Marriage, with a side of "feel bad for the boys." This one felt more polemical against marriage, and I just couldn't get all the way through.
July 11, 2026
A solid followup to her history of marriage, collecting essays that go deeper into several historical time periods and connecting more recent trends to older patterns.
August 18, 2026
Ever since reading The Way We Never Were in college, I've been eager to read Coontz's offerings regarding American domestic life and work. This was no exception--I highlighted so many passages!
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