A Second Opinion

        The Case for Marriage
         by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher

   A Reader Asks:

   I would like to know what you guys think about this book: The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher.   It was recently recommended to me as a tome that would save my marriage.

   Thanks for the great website!  Steve

   Steve, we remember your letter from four or five months ago.  About your marriage of six years, you said:

"My wife seems so different now than when we first got married; she stopped being affectionate almost immediately, and now we rarely have sex except when she drinks and initiates it, about three or four times a year.

   "I eventually stopped trying because it never happened… Whenever we have had frank discussions about what we can do to solve our problems, we always end up talking about what I must do to fix the problem."

   You went on to tell us you agreed to buy the house she wanted, and early in your relationship, you agreed to adopt children.  You both tried therapy "with minimal results." Last year you bought a motorcycle against her wishes, and she got even by running up $10,000 in credit card debt and by "coercing" you into buying $8,000 worth of furniture.

   You ended with, "When do you say, 'I have tried enough?'"

   Let us begin by saying what we believe. A good marriage is a life goal for most people, and it contributes to the physical, emotional and financial health of men, women and children. For many people, it is the single most rewarding thing in their life.

   To that extent, we certainly agree with Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher in The Case for Marriage. However, there are some elements in the book which, in our opinion, do not reflect sound scholarship and research.

   To take the matter most relevant to you, the authors claim, "Permanent marital unhappiness is surprisingly rare among couples who stick it out." To support this claim they say, "…77 percent of stably married people who rated their marriage as very unhappy (a one on a scale of one to seven) in the late eighties said that the same marriage was either 'very happy' or 'quite happy' five years later."

   What happened was this. Linda Waite looked at a national survey asking many questions about families and households. She then pulled a very small section out of a very large survey to support her assertion.

    "Present somebody with a questionnaire clipboard and they lie.  A friend of mine once had a job preparing a questionnaire for people to fill in on the Web.  He said the information he got back was enormously heartening about the state of the world. For instance, do you know that almost 90% of the population is CEOs of their own company and earn over $1,000,000 a year?"
           --Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

 

   The point of the survey was not to investigate this question, and alternative explanations are just as likely to be true.  For example, from the data you can just as plausibly argue that people who are in unhappy marriages will lie about the condition of their marriage if they are still in the same marriage five years later.

   Linda and co-author Maggie Gallagher also gloss over research on the deleterious effects of staying in a bad marriage. The Case for Marriage is one-sided and lacks the balance necessary for you to weigh this most important decision in your life.

   You are the ultimate expert on your own marriage. Your firsthand account is the reality of your marriage. You have to decide what effect this kind of marriage is having on you and your children.

   Wayne & Tamara

   Steve replies:

   I read The Case for Marriage on a friend's recommendation, and for me, it did not ring 100% true, so I thought, "I wonder what Wayne and Tamara think about this one? Maybe it would be good for them to review for their website."

   Thank you for confirming my feeling about the book.  Steve

   Linda Waite is a teacher at the University of Chicago.  Maggie Gallagher is a conservative columnist.

Sources:

• Quote from: The Case for Marriage. New York: Doubleday, 2000. See Chapter 10: When Should Parents Part? pp 148-9, and footnote 27 of Chapter 10, p 225.

• Linda Waite's tabulations are from waves 1 and 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households, based solely on 645 respondents who were married in 1987/88 and still married to the same people in 1992/94.

Data from the survey is maintained by demographers at the University of Wisconsin. The survey is not Linda Waite's or Maggie Gallagher's. The survey was not designed to determine whether a couple should divorce or stay married.