Why We Get Married, and Should We Still? with Stephanie Coontz

Summary

Podcast Summary: Forever35

Episode: Why We Get Married, and Should We Still? with Stephanie Coontz

Hosts: Doree Shafrir & Elise Hu
Guest: Stephanie Coontz
Date: June 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the evolution, meaning, and future of marriage, guided by renowned marriage historian Stephanie Coontz. Doree and Elise use humor and an intergenerational lens to ask: Why do we get married, is marriage still valuable, and how has the institution—and societal attitudes—shifted? Drawing on Coontz's decades of research and her new book For Better and Worse, the conversation delves into marriage myths, gender equality, “trad wife” nostalgia, and why many young people are ambivalent about tying the knot.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Self-Care & Mushroom Foraging

[13:41–14:48]

• The standard Forever35 opener: “What’s something you do for self-care?”
  • Stephanie Coontz: “Foraging for wild mushrooms. It’s the closest I get to meditation—I can’t think about anything except what’s hiding behind the bush, and is it poisonous or not?”
• She stresses that she memorizes species to avoid, relies on expert advice, and enjoys the focus foraging demands.

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2. The Evolution of Marriage and New Egalitarianism

[14:49–18:21]

• Coontz’s research reveals that modern marriages, especially heterosexual ones, are far more egalitarian than in the past.
  • Sharing housework and childcare builds love over time; uneven unions tend to stagnate or decline.
  • Men’s increasing acceptance of women’s financial/educational parity: “Men are no longer threatened when a woman has more education. Right up through the ‘70s, it raised your risk of divorce... Now it doesn’t.”
• Despite relationship-level improvements, marriages are challenged by:
  • Economic stress, work/life time pressures, poor policy supports.
  • Persistent “earworms” from gender myths and childhood expectations.
  • “We’re trying to do something nobody’s ever tried before in history: relationships free from coercion, rigid gender roles... that’s uncharted territory.” (Stephanie, [17:21])
• She urges couples to “cut themselves and their partners some slack” as society figures this out.

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3. Ambivalence Toward Marriage Among Young People

[20:12–22:13]

• Even as partnership quality rises, young people are more hesitant.
  • High expectations: “Young people today are far less likely to say they’re confident they’ll be an excellent marriage partner... It’s not that they don’t want marriage, it’s that they have very high standards.” (Stephanie, [20:36])
• Hosts reflect on how this ambivalence is not based on devaluing marriage but on wanting to meet high relational and economic standards, with self-awareness about one’s own limitations and fears.

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4. The Dating Timeline: Past vs. Present

[22:13–24:35]

• In the past, people often married after six months of dating, motivated by practical needs or social pressure.
  • “If she looks like a good mom, marry her. If he makes a salary you can’t get elsewhere, marry him... People just did it.”
• Now, couples wait longer, wanting emotional readiness and financial/educational stability.
• Economic stability is crucial: “A much bigger predictor of bad communication and bad interactions in marriage [is] economic stress, not childhood origins.” (Stephanie, [23:41])

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5. Class Divide in Marriage and Divorce

[24:35–26:33]

• Since the 1970s, a clear class split has emerged:
  • Highly educated/affluent people are more likely to marry and stay married.
  • Lower-income groups face higher divorce rates due to stress, job insecurity, and lack of support.
• “People are not being dumb, or too picky, to say, ‘Let’s make sure we’ve met a certain kind of security bar before we start out.’” (Stephanie, [25:49])

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6. Cultural Discourse: Trad Wives, Backlash, and Marriage Scepticism

[27:27–33:50]

• Coontz notes two competing narratives:
  • Conservative nostalgia (trad wives, 1950s male breadwinner ideal, anti-cohabitation arguments).
  • Feminist skepticism/abandonment of heterosexual marriage (e.g., Korea’s ‘4B’ movement).
• Historical reality: Marriage has always been socially functional, sometimes oppressive, but also highly adaptable.
  • “If you go back to why marriage was invented, it had less to do with the relationship between man and woman... It was a way of expanding your connections to others.” (Stephanie, [30:07])
• Same-sex marriages provide models for negotiation and breaking rigid roles.

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7. Trad Wife Nostalgia and Economic “Referred Pain”

[33:52–38:35]

• Stephanie’s attitude toward “trad wife” nostalgia has evolved:
  • In her book The Way We Never Were, she critiqued 1950s idealization (when domestic violence, marital rape, and gender inequality were rampant).
  • Now, she recognizes nostalgia as ‘referred pain’: people miss the rising wages and security of the 1945–1973 era, but misattribute this longing to family structure or gender roles.
  • “Our brains aren’t good at figuring out where pain originates. I think that’s why people look back to the 1950s. The stresses of today are immense... [But] it’s not the male-female relations or family forms to miss, it’s the broader trends that improved people’s lives.” (Stephanie, [34:58])
  • She cites data showing today’s lower-income families would have 60–70% more income if postwar wage growth had continued.

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8. Why Marry? The Value and Alternatives

[38:35–41:28]

• “For better or worse, most people still want something akin to marriage: a long-term, monogamous (or at least consensual) relationship.”
• Warns against putting all eggs in the one-partner basket:
  • “Friendship networks—and even interactions with people you’ll never be friends with, consequential strangers—matter for morale.”
  • Shares the benefit her husband found from talking to strangers in grocery lines, backed up by current social science.

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9. Biggest Predictor of Marital Satisfaction Today

[42:00–43:13]

• Stephanie Coontz: “Mutual respect is absolutely critical... You can love someone without really respecting them... If you don’t find that, I think you’re missing something really important.”

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Memorable Quotes

• On the new challenge of marriage:
  “We’re trying to do something nobody’s ever tried before in history: relationships free from coercion... that’s uncharted territory.”
  —Stephanie Coontz, [17:21]

• On relationship standards:
  “It’s not that they don’t want marriage, it’s that they have very high standards for what makes a marriage. They worry whether they’re up to it.”
  —Stephanie Coontz, [20:36]

• On nostalgia for traditional marriage:
  “Our brain isn’t really good at figuring out exactly where pain originates… That’s why people look back to the 1950s.”
  —Stephanie Coontz, [34:58]

• On mutual respect:
  “You can love someone without really respecting them... If you don’t find that, you’re missing something really important.”
  —Stephanie Coontz, [42:00]

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Important Timestamps

• Self-care and mushroom foraging: [13:41–14:48]
• Modern marriage trends, earworms, and challenges: [14:49–18:21]
• Young people’s marital ambivalence: [20:12–22:13]
• Marriage dating timelines—then vs. now: [22:13–24:35]
• Class divides in marriage/divorce: [24:35–26:33]
• Cultural discourses: trad wives, abandonment, nostalgia: [27:27–38:35]
• Why people still seek marriage, and healthy alternatives: [38:35–41:28]
• Mutual respect as key to marital satisfaction: [42:00–43:13]

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Tone & Takeaways

• Warm, wise, and unsentimental, Coontz blends serious scholarship with candid personal anecdotes and actionable advice.
• The co-hosts are playful, thoughtful, and open to intergenerational perspectives.
• The episode roots personal anxieties about marriage and relationships within sweeping social, economic, and historical forces—making listeners feel seen, while encouraging both introspection and structural critique.

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Conclusion

Stephanie Coontz demystifies marriage’s origins, busts myths about “trad wife” nostalgia, and offers grounded hope for more egalitarian and satisfying partnerships. Listeners come away with a richer understanding of both the promises and the realities of marriage today—and why, despite obstacles and anxieties, humans still reach for it.

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For more:

• Stephanie Coontz’s latest book, For Better and Worse (Viking Penguin, 2026)
• Council on Contemporary Families (link)

Transcript

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[Elise Hu]

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[Dory Shafrier]

Hello and welcome to Forever 35 podcast about the things things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Dory Shafrier.

[Elise Hu]

And I'm Elise Hu. And we're just two friends who like to talk a lot about serums.

[Dory Shafrier]

And today we have a great guest on the show, Stephanie Koontz, who is, I would say like the. The leading. Leading expert.

[Elise Hu]

The leading historian. Yes.

[Dory Shafrier]

On the history of marriage.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Dory Shafrier]

And also like contemporary marriage. And she has a new book out that we both really enjoyed.

[Elise Hu]

I was preparing for this episode and around that same time I got a newsletter from the feminist writer Liz Lenz, who famously wrote a memoir about her divorce. And I Think it was like part of the big wave of divorce memoirs that came out within the last couple of years. And she wrote about how yet again, bustle or one of these groups, one of these publications is describing this summer as hot divorce day summer. And like how being a divorce, say isn't. Doesn't necessarily mean you have had to have been divorced. But like, it's a certain energy of like, I don't have, I don't have any cares left to give, you know, and she. But then it's also kind of like an aesthetic and she gets into that also.

[Dory Shafrier]

Interesting.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. She's like, this is kind of a backlash to the tradwife aesthetic, you know, but she wrote. But I do worry that replacing an aesthetic for a revolution creates the sense of change without actually doing anything to create change. We still live in a country where it's harder for a 43 year old woman to get a divorce than it is for a girl under 18 to get married. Women have fewer rights now than they did when I first wrote this essay. Yeah.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Because she.

[Elise Hu]

A few summers ago, it was another hot divorcee summer. And then now she's like, things are actually backsliding. Which Stephanie Coons has said too. Like, she had this answer to one of our questions about like, are things better in some ways, Are they worse in some ways? And she gets into that. So anyway, but we'll get to Stephanie Coons later in the show.

[Dory Shafrier]

I also, I, I love having guests on the show who are like a little older who have never, like, never listened to our show before. They're not like regular listeners, in fact.

[Elise Hu]

Right.

[Dory Shafrier]

She said in our Forever 35 questionnaire, we always ask like, what's a podcast you listen to? She was like, I don't listen to podcasts. But she was like, oh my gosh, this was such a great conversation. Like, thank you so much. So that was really fun. And I just love having these like intergenerational guests on. Like, as much as I enjoy talking to fellow middle aged ladies, it's nice to talk to someone who is our elder.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Dory Shafrier]

With a lot of, a lot of wisdom.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Yeah.

[Elise Hu]

She has like such a contextual view of things too. Not only as a historian whose studies hundreds of years ago, but also just like having lived longer and through second wave feminism and then whatever postmodern feminism came after. So, yeah, I, I thought it was really interesting and she was awesome. So anyway, we're gonna get to that. This was like a long tease for Stephanie Koontz.

[Dory Shafrier]

Yeah.

[Elise Hu]

But before we get to that, we should give an update on your birthday for our non casual chat listeners, because we just wrapped up Memorial Day weekend as we're taping this, and Dory threw her tennis birthday party.

[Dory Shafrier]

I did. I just booked a couple. I booked three courts at a local park, invited a bunch of my friends. I said, you can play tennis or not play tennis. Like, you can just come and hang out or you can also play tennis. We'll play some, like, tennis games and we'll have pizza and cake. It was like, I was thinking. I was like, reflecting on it because one of my friends posted to her Instagram story, like, tennis, pizza, cake, home by 7pm this is my kind of party. And I was like, oh, I basically just had, like, a kid's birthday. Like, I had a kid's birthday party. Yeah.

[Elise Hu]

During the day. Yeah.

[Dory Shafrier]

With like, pizza and cake.

[Elise Hu]

And where was the bouncy house?

[Dory Shafrier]

And where was the face painter?

[Stephanie Coontz]

Right.

[Dory Shafrier]

You know, I actually contemplate. I was like, would it be funny to get a face painter? But I thought of this, like, the day before, and then I was like, meh, whatever. But I did think it'd be funny if we got a face painter and people got, like, tennis balls on their faces. So maybe next year. But yeah, I was definitely, like, inspired by the kids birthday parties I have thrown and attended in parks because, like, the big takeaway from those parties is, like, you don't have to overcomplicate it.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Right?

[Dory Shafrier]

You know, so we had some drinks and some snacks, and people brought drinks and brought snacks, and we got some pizza. Elise brought the cake. And then on the tennis courts, we played queen of the Court. And then there was also a court. This is also super fun. There were a bunch of kids there. I said, bring your kids. And kids brought their tennis rackets. And including Henry. And the kids were playing. So that was really cute. It was really sweet to see the kids playing tennis. I don't know. It's just, like, good vibes. Also, the weather was amazing. Like, it was. It was like low 70s, you know, and it was late afternoon, so it, like, the sun wasn't brutal, and it was just. The park was also empty. I don't know if it was like, Memorial Day weekend, like, people, because usually there's like, a lot happening at that park. There was like, no one there. So that was also great. It just all, like, worked out. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is so. This is so fun. So, yeah, it was a really great

[Elise Hu]

weekend to have stayed in Los Angeles because apparently it was icky in New York. The weather was icky in New York, from what I understand, because they. My coder director, Rufus, lives there, and they went to the Rockaway Beach. Is that what it is? Yeah. And he was like. It was kind of, like, gray the whole time. And. And then on Memorial Day itself, my friends and I, like, just did an impromptu beach hang, and everybody who could come came, and we just had this long, sprawling squad hangout on Venice Beach, a quieter part of Venice Beach. And everybody's kids came and just hung out. And Ava was so happy because the UV was nine, and she's, you know, into tanning. She was like, I just want to get good tan lines.

[Dory Shafrier]

I just read something about how Gen Z is, like, really into tanning.

[Elise Hu]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, she still wears some spf, but, like, lower spf, because they really want to get good tan lines.

[Dory Shafrier]

And.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Yeah.

[Elise Hu]

And it was pretty windy, so people were flying kites, and it was a little windy to play volleyball, but we brought. We brought the volleyball and we brought koosh, which is another thing that. It's like a paddle game with a koosh ball.

[Dory Shafrier]

It's not like, oh, okay, but it's with a koosh. Like. Like the koosh from when we were kids.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah. It's like the little rubber band ball thing. Yeah, yeah.

[Dory Shafrier]

That's so funny.

[Elise Hu]

It's really fun. And we always bring it. We bring that and we bring bop it on road trips, and when we go glamping, you know, like, you know, we'll get a cabin and don't have any devices, so we have to play stuff together, and so we'll have that. So we have to do things as a family and talk to each other.

[Dory Shafrier]

What's that like?

[Elise Hu]

But it was really fun, and I just felt it. I feel like this past weekend, I was just feeling very grateful to live where we live. And every once in a while, I. I go on these little reveries about how rad it is to live in la. And that was one. Except for the potential chemical leak.

[Dory Shafrier]

Yes.

[Elise Hu]

Incident. Potential chemical tanker explosion that did not happen. So crisis averted. For those who were following my Insta stories where I was getting increasingly panicked about that. Everything is fine.

[Dory Shafrier]

Everything is fine. It all worked out. All right. Well, let's introduce our guest. Elise, do you want to take it away?

[Elise Hu]

Yes. Stephanie Koontz is the Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She has authored five books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage A History, How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the United States Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. Her new book is called For Better and Worse. It just came out last week. She is a sought after radio and podcast guest. She's published extensively in both academic and popular media from the New York Times, CNN Wall Street Journal to the Chronicle of Higher Education. She's also cited by a previous Forever35 guest, Megan Cain, who wrote a book on being single. And she based a lot of her arguments for singlehood on a lot of what Stephanie Koontz has learned about marriage. So she was just an awesome guest. As we talked about at the top of the show and we can't wait for y' all to hear this conversation.

[Dory Shafrier]

Before we do. Just a reminder that you can call or text us at 781-591-0390 and email us at forever35podcastmail.com Our website is forever35podcast.com. We have links there to everything we and our guests mention on the show. Our Instagram is rever35podcast and you can join our [e-mail] forever35 if you want to hear more of us. For $5 a month you get access to our casual chat which we now do on video. If you also want to watch us, we have live casual chats. Once a quarter you get access to our community chat on Patreon and more. And at $10 a month you get ad free episodes and a shout out on the podcast each and every month. And if you want to just join the community but you don't want to like commit financially yet, you can join us at the free level and get access to our semi monthly newsletter where we discuss pod highlights, product reviews, exclusive discounts, giveaways and additional bon content. So head over to patreon.com forever35 and check it out. And we are going to take a short break and we will be right back with Stephanie.

[Elise Hu]

We'll be right back.

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[Dory Shafrier]

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[Elise Hu]

Here's a show that we recommend.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Hello hello, it's Brooke Devard from Naked Beauty. Join me each week for unfiltered discussion

[Elise Hu]

about beauty trends, self care, journeys wellness tips and the products we absolutely love

[Stephanie Coontz]

and cannot get enough of.

[Elise Hu]

If you are skincare obsessive and you spend 20 plus minutes on your skincare routine, this podcast is for you.

[Dory Shafrier]

Or if you're a newbie at the

[Elise Hu]

beginning of your skincare journey, you'll love this podcast as well. Because we go so much deeper than beauty.

[Stephanie Coontz]

I talk to incredible and inspiring people

[Elise Hu]

from across industries about their relationship with beauty.

[Stephanie Coontz]

You'll also hear from skincare experts. We break down lots of myths in the beauty industry.

[Dory Shafrier]

If this sounds like your thing, search

[Stephanie Coontz]

for naked beauty on your podcast app and listen along.

[Elise Hu]

I hope you'll join us.

[Dory Shafrier]

Welcome to Forever35. We are really excited to get to talk to you today.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, thank you.

[Dory Shafrier]

We start conversations with the same question which we will now ask you, which is what is something you do for yourself that you would consider self care?

[Stephanie Coontz]

Foraging for mush Wild mushrooms.

[Elise Hu]

Oh, you're a forager.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Yes, I am a forager. It's the closest I can get to meditation because I can't think about anything else except what's hiding behind this bush and is it a poisonous one or is it not? So that is one of my major forms of self care.

[Dory Shafrier]

How long does it take to become familiar with the species of mushroom that are poisonous versus not? I'm always very intrigued by this.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, I was lucky enough to have a colleague who's one of the best mycologists in the country, so I could always and can always take him things that I can't identify. But I have to admit that it's not the science that drops drives me in this case. So basically I memorize the ones that I must never touch and I memorize the ones that I can gather and the rest are what we call LBMs, little brown mushrooms. And I don't bother with the scientific names.

[Dory Shafrier]

I love that.

[Elise Hu]

Well, we are having you back on because you are out with your latest book on marriage and you set out to explore how the rewards and risks of modern marriage are changing. So the big question is how are they changing and what did you find?

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, let me they're changing in a lot of ways and some of them good because it turns out that egalitarianism is really a benefit to marriages, even for. Even for people who don't know that it's a benefit. It turns out that the studies show that a marriage in which women and men heterosexual marriage, we can learn a lot from same sex marriages in this regard who share housework and childcare. Their love tends to build over time and ones who don't, even if the love started out very strong, it tends to waver a little bit over time. Now, these are all averages, right? But one of the lovely things that we are finding out for women like you and me and others who may be listening to this is the ones who really want to have egalitarian relationships. Men are getting much better at accepting it. They're doing much more housework and hands on childcare. It's not even yet, but it's come a long, long way. They're no longer threatened when a woman has more education. Right up through the 70s, it raised your risk of divorce if you had more education or earned more money than your husband. Now it doesn't. And so there's a lot of things that are good happening between individuals. And especially when men take paternity leave, it really increases their understanding of what goes on at home. And even after the paternity leave, they do more housework and childcare and have fewer arguments. They've actually documented that. I don't know what kind of research to do that, but they did. But on the other hand, there are all of these other pressures coming down on us. Economic pressures, time pressures, work pressures, one of the worst social programs for supporting families in the entire modern world. So all of those are huge challenges. And something that I spend a lot of time on in the book, because I'm a historian, I guess, is we also have all of these things we've inherited myths about the past, ideas that were drilled into our head as kids about what girls do and boys do and all of these kinds of things. I call them earworms in the book. And they kind of repeat themselves in their head and they get in the way of our being able to figure out how to do the kind of new marriages that we want. And it's important, you know, that we cut ourselves some slack, ourselves and our partners. We're trying to do something nobody's ever tried to do before in history, that is to get relationships and marriages that are free from coercion by who you have to marry, who you can't marry, what you have to do in a marriage, rigid gender roles, you know, that's uncharted territory and we're just finding our way. So I think that we have to be, you know, to keep moving forward, but at the same time to recognize that we're going to occasionally take a wrong turn in our marriages and we're going to have to backtrack a little bit and get it straight.

[Dory Shafrier]

Stephanie, can I ask if we could just sort of back up a bit and hear about how you became interested in marriage in the first place.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, when I was back in a long time ago in the 60s, I was very. I was a young historian and you know, people, it was all the history was about men and wars and stuff like that. So I was really interested in. In a family life and women and in integrating blacks and working people and people who had been left out of history. And I was very active in the civil rights movement and in fact left my PhD unfinished to work against the war in Vietnam. And so finally somebody. I had been teaching informal classes on women's history and black history. And I finally got hired at Evergreen State College. And then a publisher approached me and said, would you do a book on the history of women? Well, that was in the mid-70s and there were a lot of books coming out with what's been done to women through the ages or what some women have done without it. So I decided, well, I wanted to bring women and men into interaction and there weren't many places, you know, in the workforce or anything. Finally I said, oh, like family. So that's how I started studying family. And I really didn't pay a lot of attention, attention to marriage itself. The way that I began to do that was reporters started asking me questions I couldn't answer. So I'd have to say, well, wait a minute. Well, it turned out wait five years. And I went back and wrote a whole history of marriage that came out in 2005, I think it was. So. And then ever since, that's really been the thing that has propelled my writing and thinking.

[Elise Hu]

One question about your first point about how things are getting better for women in marriages when it comes to division of labor, and that heterosexual marriage is becoming more egalitarian in the aggregate. What explains then, if things are getting better, what explains then the ambivalence about marriage among young women these days?

[Stephanie Coontz]

It's interesting. I think the ambivalence is not because we don't think marriage is a decent thing. Most people do want to get married or have a marriage like relationship eventually. It's not that we have lower standards for marriage or lower valuation of it. We both have higher standards for what a marriage involves, how much mutual commitment it involves. And the result is that we're a little hesitant to enter into it. I think one of the most interesting polls I've seen is that young people today are far less likely than they were in the past to say, to tell pollsters that they're confident that they'll be an excellent marriage partner. And I think that shows us it's not that they don't want marriage. It's that they have very high standards for what makes a marriage. They worry whether they're up to it. They worry about whether their partner will be up to it.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, the bar is too high.

[Stephanie Coontz]

I don't think it's too high. Listen, I spent a lot of my life spending studying marriages where the bar was really low. And you don't want to do that. I mean, just the other day I ran across an interview note from a woman in the 1970s who married in the 60s. And the interview asked her, you know, how are you doing? Because she worked. She said, you know, she said, well, my husband doesn't help me. It gets to be pretty hard with five kids. But he says, you know, this is a lot more than my mom had. I got a man who doesn't drink too much and hardly ever gets violent. And any woman with that doesn't have a bunch to complain about. That's what she was saying in the 70s. So we've come a long way since then.

[Elise Hu]

You have to admit there's another stat I'd love for you to share with our listeners from your book about how long people used to date before getting married and how long they're dating now

[Stephanie Coontz]

before they get married. Yeah. Yeah. Frank Furstenberg is a sociologist. We don't have exact numbers, but estimated that it was about six months that people went out with each other before they decided to marry. And the oral histories that I've done really go with that. It's like, you know, people just was, let's, let's just do it. It's something that you have to do. You do it. If, if that's a woman and she looks like she'll be a good mom, go for it. And if it's a man and he's earning the kind of salary that at that point you couldn't earn at all, well, then I got a chance at a home of my own, so let's do it. And, you know, some of that worked out, but there was a lot of misery in that over the long run. So nowadays, people spend a lot. They expect. They want to know themselves better to make sure they're ready to be the kind of partner. They want to know their partner better. And they also, and a lot of marriage promoters think this is a bad thing. They also want to be more economically or educationally set before they enter into it. And they may not know the reams of research that show what happens to a marriage when people are under economic stress or not wondering if, you know, not sure whether they're going to get a job and what their future's like and if they're going to be able to pay for their kids. They know in practice what it means. And what the research shows is that it's a much bigger predictor of bad communication and bad interactions in marriage than childhood origins issues like when your parents had a divorce or even how much you really do care about each other. So they're making a sensible decision to say, I want to wait until we're absolutely sure that we're on the kind of footing that we can give the attention, care and mutual support that people didn't really expect from marriage in the past, but that we think is vital nowadays. And I think that's a good thing, but it is a hard thing, especially in our current economic and political situation.

[Dory Shafrier]

Yeah. You brought up something that I wanted to ask you about, which you do talk about in the last couple chapters of the book, which is the differences in class when it comes to marriage. I was hoping you could kind of unpack that a little bit for our listeners. What have you learned in your research and how has how has that changed over the last few decades?

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, right up until the 70s, people basically married at about the same rates, whatever their educational levels and their income levels. And now there is just a chasm between the marriage rates and also the chance of divorce if you do marry in terms of low income. So, so one of the things that just drives me crazy with some of the debates about this is people say, well, it's just that people aren't patient anymore. And I point out to them, no, what we were talking about, it's that they expect more and they have a right to expect more from marriage and as parents than in the past. And they know from tremendous, tremendous watching other people or maybe their own experience that these kinds of stresses and pressures of jobs that are irregular or unsure and economic stress, it leads to all sorts of bad communication patterns. Sometimes it's so bad that it drives people into behaviors that are stress reducers for them individually, like drinking or using drugs, but that are relationship killers. So that people are not being dumb, they're not being, you know, too picky to say, let's make sure that we've met a certain kind of security bar or economic bar before we start start off on this new adventure that is that will take us places, you know, our forefathers and mothers never got to go, but that will take us places only with a lot more work than they had to put in.

[Dory Shafrier]

So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back. This podcast is brought to you by Children's Salon have you ever tried dressing your children and as you look around in their wardrobe, nothing matches or it all looks a bit tired? Well, instead of panicking, visit childrensalon.com the place for beautiful children's clothes. It's home to over 200 designers, big and small that are loved around the world. Children's Salon has been family run since 1952 with its boutique still nestled in the historic spa town of Royal Tunbridge Wells, England. So whether you're shopping for occasions which call for something picture perfect or to bring a little magic to their everyday wardrobe, Children's Salon has lots to discover. Oh, and there are plenty of exclusive designs that you won't find anywhere else. From traditional children's wear to gifts to treasure. Visit childrensalon.com to dress your little ones beautifully every day.

[Elise Hu]

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[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, first of all, if you go back to why marriage was invented originally, it had less to do with the relationship between the man and the woman was something that I think we often forget. It was a way of expanding your connections to others. And I'd like to say that my son and daughter in law, when they got married, instead of her parents giving her away to him, they gave their parents away to each other, trying to build upon that old idea that marriage is a way of expanding your social ties. We know that there have been marriages in the past and there were for thousands of years that were not as oppressive as they got when you got the development of very strong class societies and patriarchal societies. And yes, we have a very long history that we have to overcome on that. But I am cautiously optimistic that we can. We know that so many of these patterns, for example, the heteropessimism seems to me to really neglect how rich the history is about how many alternative ways there are to organize our lives, our relationships, our gender roles. For example, you just go back to the early American history for all of the issues with that and the problems. Men were so much more open about their feelings to each other as well as to women. We have these letters that remind me of me as a teenager writing to my girlfriend.

[Elise Hu]

You mean the affection, like the affection between male friends and holding hands? Yes, yes. Men holding hands with each other. Yes. They weren't scared to quote unquote, seem gay or whatever the masculine tropes are.

[Stephanie Coontz]

And to write to each other saying, you know, the way we now think girls Write, you know, I miss you. Why haven't you written me this sort of thing? All of these letters from men and in their courtships too, in the 19th century, men were much more open about their feelings. One line that occurs to me from the letter was, where thou art not there is a sort of death, said one man to his fiance. You know, this is the sort of thing that men would just like, oh my gosh, how could they talk about that? But it was only in the late 19th century that men were told it was unmanly and women wouldn't like you if you were weak that way. And occasionally women have bought into this too. You know, there's that funny, supposedly funny saying that some women say, well, I like a man who's sensitive as long as he doesn't cry. So there, this is the way, you know, we were socialized in ways that really need overcoming and we need to work at overcoming them. But I'm cautiously optimistic that given the real efforts on our part and a little more social support for family life than we get from our current economic and political system, that it will work for us. And in fact, one of the things that I really appreciate about the legalization of same sex marriage is that they teach us a lot about how to do these things because they also come to marriage with socialization. But because there's two men or two women, they can't say, well, you do this because you're a woman and I'll do this because I'm a man. They have to negotiate it and think it through in ways that I think heterosexuals have been very late in coming to.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dory Shafrier]

Could you also just talk a little bit about the whole recent obsession with trad wives in popular culture and on social media and why you think this is happening? Yeah, just kind of curious.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, it's interesting that you say that because my, my feelings about how to deal with it have evolved. One of my first, most popular book was called the Way We Never American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. And I came down pretty hard on idealization of 1950s families with very good reason. You know, I mean, this was a period when it was totally legal to rape your wife, even violently. Domestic rates of domestic violence were much bigger. I mean, they were. These families are nothing to idealize. But on the other hand, I think that there has been ever since that people have started out looking for egalitarianism and find that it's very hard to attain, especially in today's economy, and that some of the things that families face today are worse than the 50s. The problem is they're different than what people assume. It's not the male, female relations or the family forms that we should be missing. It's the broader trends that were helping people improve their lives. I mean when you look at. So, so I've come to the point where I've come to think of the nostalgia for families not so much as, oh, it's all in your heads, you know, you're just imagining that it was better. But as what physicians talk about referred pain, that where you have, you know, our brain, my son is a doctor, so he explained that to me that our brain isn't really good at figuring out exactly where pain originates. If it starts in an internal organ, like if starts in your stomach somewhere, you may feel it in the back of your neck, it tells us it's somewhere on the surface of your body. And I think that's a great analogy to think about why people are looking back to the 50s. They're looking back to a time where for me, for men at least, wages were going up very, very steadily. The inequality was going down. Two Rand economists recently estimated how much more money people would have had today. Whatever your low income, you would have had 60 to 70% more income today if the trends in income from the 1945 to 1973 had continued.

[Elise Hu]

Holy cow. Yeah.

[Stephanie Coontz]

But instead we've seen this incredible increase in wealth and the averages don't tell us how much it hurts us as individuals because what's happened with, with this huge concentration of wealth at the top, they've become the people who are. They account for 50% of consumer spending and so they account for a lot more than 90% of many companies attention. And that's often at our expense. That's why inflation, with the things that families used to do, buying homes, going on vacation, going to Disneyland, all have risen at much greater rate than the average rate of inflation. College tuition, medical care, all those things. And so as we start thinking about how can we form a family or trying to, the stresses of it are immense. And then on top of that, there's all the kind of insults that you get from a society where the rich get top priority. They get to board the airplanes first, they get to talk to a real person first. And we got all these stresses going on. And so I'm beginning to understand why people look around for something, think that something's lost. And unfortunately there is. There's a whole economic, political and right wing religious coalition that doesn't want to talk about the economics and keeps Telling them, well, what's wrong is that people have sex before their marriage or they have no fault divorce. Which by the way, one of the results of no fault divorce in every state that developed it was domestic violence rates fell dramatically and so did wife suicide rates. So you don't want to go back to that.

[Elise Hu]

So if quote unquote, traditional marriage and you kind of take a hatchet to the idea of traditional marriage again and again in all of your work. But if marriage, heterosexual marriage that was modeled in a very violent period for women, the 1950s is not the answer. And you just explained the attraction of it, at least for certain, certain sectors of our culture. Why do people still seek marriage today? What's the value of it to you as somebody who has studied this?

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, you know, I'm in a marriage myself, so yeah, especially at my age, a little older than yours, it's nice to have somebody that I married who respected me and that I respected and that we have this long history of social activism together and of helping each other out. And that's very nice to have when you get to be not 35, but like in your 70s and approaching your 80s. So that's one reason that people want to have it. I mean, you can have a perfectly satisfactory life outside marriage, of course, but it looks like the majority of people do want something akin to marriage, some long term relationship that, and most of them want it reasonably monogamous and at least consensual, that they don't want people non consensually having experiments. And so marriage, for better or worse and worse, as the book title said, is what we think of as the way to do that. And why not? It's just that we need to make sure that people know there are alternatives, that single people can be extremely happy. One of the secrets it seems to me that we are learning about what's good about a good marriage and a good single life is not putting all your eggs in the basket of one other person, of really reaching out and having friendship networks and having social networks that aren't particularly deep friendships. I was telling my husband about the research about what some people call consequential strangers. The interactions with people that you'll never be friendly, you'll never spend time with, but that you, you know, you, you see every couple days and, or you're standing in a line and you have it. And I was telling him about how important those seem to be to people's morale. And you know, fortunately he's willing to take advice from a female so he said that he came back to me a couple of weeks later and he said, you know, I started talking to people in grocery lines and started talking to the checkout. And it's true, I felt better all day for having done so.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, that's so funny. There's a bunch of social science research that supports that, too, because it's something that Dory and I have actually talked about on our recent episode because I just saw a TED Talk on it. But before we let you go, Stephanie, it's just been so fascinating getting to hear about your work and the decades and decades of research that you've done on this topic. Before we let you go, I'm just curious, what do you feel or what have you found are the greatest predictors of marital satisfaction action today in modern life?

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, I, you know, I'm not a psychologist, and I won't play one on a podcast, you know, so I don't know the research on that, but there's enough research and enough personal experience for me to. To say that mutual respect is absolutely critical and loved. You know, you can love someone without really respecting them. You know, at the most extreme, I love my cat, but I don't particularly respect my cat. You know, and there's a lot of that sort of confusion of getting something from another, being fond of another, getting and confusing that with really respecting the other. And from my own experience, and I don't have reams of research to back this up, that if you don't find that, you just respect somebody's opinion, respect somebody's dedication to their life, and respect what they're willing to tell you about yours, including being able to tell you, you know, not like an AI companion, but being able to tell you when you're wrong. I think that you're missing something really important.

[Elise Hu]

That's a great way to end it. Tell everybody where to find you and where to find your book.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Well, the book is available from all the usual outlets. It's published by Viking Penguin, and I live in Olympia, Washington, a little bit outside of town, and we're it. I come from a pioneer family, so we've had a little bit of stability there, Although I never came back here until I was an adult, but now we're happily ensconced here.

[Elise Hu]

Very cool. Stephanie. KZ thank you so much.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Thank you so much. Thank you.

[Dory Shafrier]

All right, well, Stephanie was great. She said she was going to listen to our show, so I wonder. Wonder if she's listening right now.

[Elise Hu]

She listens to this one.

[Dory Shafrier]

Yeah. All right, well, getting into the intention zone. I think I fulfilled my intention from last week, which was to enjoy myself at my tennis party.

[Elise Hu]

You sure did.

[Stephanie Coontz]

You sure did.

[Dory Shafrier]

You know what else I did that I just want to note is I didn't, like, overthink the planning too much.

[Elise Hu]

Good. Do you have a tendency to when you host something?

[Dory Shafrier]

Yeah.

[Elise Hu]

Okay.

[Dory Shafrier]

But I remember, like, you were texting me, like, do you have this? Do you have that? And I was like, no. Yeah. Like, I was just kind of like, I don't know. It'll be fine.

[Elise Hu]

I'm happy to bring anything. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dory Shafrier]

Like, I was just like, I got the cake. We're gonna order pizza. I'm getting some drinks at Costco. The end, you know, like, I was just kind of like, it's all good, which is unlike me. So I was proud of myself for that. And then this weekend, I have sectionals yet again. There's always some sectionals going on. Going to San Diego this weekend for sectionals. Again, I have, like, very low expectations. We have. We have eight people going, and you need seven per match, and we have three matches. So people are going to be playing a lot of tennis, and, like, oh, my gosh. I don't. I. I'm like, I have not been feeling great, so I'm just like, how's this gonna go?

[Stephanie Coontz]

Right?

[Dory Shafrier]

But I'm just gonna go and have fun. The weather's supposed to be amazing, and I'm just gonna be like, you know what? I'm in San Diego for the weekend to play some tennis. Like, life could be worse, and you

[Elise Hu]

get to be on your own. Right. You're leaving Matt and Henry at home? Yes. Yes. Oh, see, that's like a vacay then.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Yeah.

[Dory Shafrier]

One of my teammates booked an Airbnb house nearby near the tennis courts, and so we will be staying there, so.

[Elise Hu]

Love it.

[Dory Shafrier]

Yeah. How about you?

[Stephanie Coontz]

You?

[Elise Hu]

My intention was to ask for more help driving, which I did, and I'm glad I did, because both dads were out for half of the week and all of the weekend. And so it took a village, and the village showed up in lots of different ways, and the kids showed up. The kids were able to entertain themselves and stay home alone, and when I needed to go and get other kids and things like that. So it ended up working out quite well.

[Dory Shafrier]

Great.

[Elise Hu]

So praise to the kids. This week. I'm going to. I know I've said this before, and then I dropped off. I'm going to get back into some strength training. I'm going to take some classes. It's really fallen off because of Maysember. Yeah, this particular year, part of the year where there's like 8,000 commitments every day. But I'm going to do it because otherwise I start feeling like kind of like I've been in the house all day. Like very early Covid periods where I just haven't left the house and I'm still in my soft pants. And you know, I didn't even leave the house to drop off a kid today. So maybe the intention is really like leave the house in the morning and not appear only after sundown like a vampire. Yes. But no. Strength training will be the concrete tactic I will take.

[Dory Shafrier]

Amazing. I love that. Well, this is also the episode where we thank our Patreon supporters at the spa and suite level. Elise, I'm going to ask you to read this because I have been coughing, so if you wouldn't mind taking it away.

[Elise Hu]

Thank you to LM Alvin, Ariel C Laura Ciccone, Sarah Liska, Felicia Justice Bureau Jasmine DeJesus, Christy Caitlin H. Katie Ashley Taylor, Teresa Anderson, Nicole Gas, Maya Barbara C. Amy Amy Schnitzer, Megan Shelley Lee, Cookie Townsend, Sarah Boozi, Allison Cohen, Melissa McLean, Jackie Leventhal, Fran Kelsey Wolf Denay, Laura Eddy, Jettle Apte, Valerie Bruneau, Julie Daniel E. Jackson, Alicia Katherine Burke, Amy Maseko, Liz Rain, JDK Hannah M, Julia P Maddie Marissa, Sarah Bell, Maria Diana St, Coco Bean, Laura Haddon, Josie H. Nikki Bossert, Juliana Duff, Chelsea Torres, Tiffany G, Olivia Fahey, Elizabeth A Christine Bass is Jessica Gale, Zulima Lundy, Carolyn Rodriguez, Carrie Golds, Antique Catherine Ellingson, Kara Brugman, Sarah H, Sarah Egan, Jess Combin, Jennifer Olson, Jennifer hs, Eliza Gibson, Jillian Bowman, Brianne Macy, Elizabeth Holland, Katie Jordan, Sarah M. Blanca, Kate M, Josie Alquist, Tara Todd, Elizabeth Cleary and Monica. Thank you all so much.

[Dory Shafrier]

So much. And just a reminder, Forever 35 is hosted and produced by me, Dori Shafrier and Elise Hu and produced and edited by Sam Hunio. Sammy Reed is our project manager and our network partners, Acast. Thanks everyone.

[Stephanie Coontz]

Bye bye.

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[Dory Shafrier]

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