I Do (I Think): Conversations About Modern Marriage

Novelist Raskin (Overthinking About You) takes a scrupulous look at what it means to get married at a time when fewer social and economic factors than ever necessitate it. Drawing on interviews with couples, divorce lawyers, financial advisers, sociologists, and therapists, she traces how marriage shifted from a primarily economic and social agreement to a vehicle for personal happiness in the 1960s and 1970s, as increases in women’s financial freedom and the popularity of divorce drove down marriage rates. Yet marriage still retains many of its traditional, patriarchal structures, as evidenced by the 70%–80% of heterosexual women who still change their last names and the unequal distribution of labor in the home (for heterosexual women, getting married “tends to be associated with more unpaid labor”). Elsewhere, Raskin considers the merits of partnered cohabitation versus marriage (married couples may “mentally and emotionally depend on their partners more,” though marriages are also harder to leave) and the value of premarital counseling. She assumes a refreshingly agnostic attitude throughout, neither crusading for or against marriage and encouraging those who decide to tie to the knot to “build your own definition” of partnership, for which she includes useful question prompts. Couples debating whether to take the leap would do well to check this out. Oct.)