A few months ago, one of my best friends told me that she and her boyfriend had gotten engaged. Engaged? I thought. What for? She has two young kids and has never been married; he’s older; they each have their own apartment; she seemed happy with the way things were. “Congratulations!” I said, because he’s a good person, and I love my friend. Then I asked where they were going to live, and she laughed in my face.“Oh, we’re not moving in together,” she said. She’d assumed I would have known that. They might do it someday, sure. But for now they can afford to keep paying for two homes, and she’s prioritizing the children’s stability, and everyone’s space and sanity.In a way, I was as surprised by my surprise as my friend was. It’s not as if my life is normal. Recently I picked my kids up at their father’s place and one of them ran over and hit me in the face with a big white pillow. When I turned the pillow over, I saw it was printed with a cute photograph of my ex-husband’s girlfriend; someone must have given it to him as a joke—and it was funny. My friends are divorced, separated, married, single mothers by accident, single mothers by choice. And yet the only radical thing I had assumed you could do to a marriage was to open it up and start taking dating-app pics for your spouse. It had honestly never occurred to me that my friend could get married and not cohabit with her husband.I think Stephanie Coontz would like my friend’s story. For more than 30 years, Coontz has been trying to convince Americans of three things: Our ideas about traditional marriage are holding many people back from getting and staying married; also, our ideas about traditional marriage are incorrect; also, “there is no such thing as the traditional marriage.” What would happen, she asks in her latest book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, if we could get it through our skulls that the male-breadwinner model of a marriage was the norm for only a short period in the 20th century, and that history is full of an “astonishing variety” of partnerships and forms of desire? Coontz’s hope is that learning how much marriage has changed over the centuries can liberate more people to imagine different kinds of marriages that might suit them better. Depending on the reader, her argument will scan as either modest or profound: “We have more latitude in how to organize healthy intimate relationships than most people realize.”[From the November 2011 issue: All the single ladies]That is not to say she thinks anyone has to marry. The first sentence of For Better and Worse is: “This isn’t a book about why you ought to marry.” Nor does she think that marriage is necessarily doomed; it’s simply no longer required when there are plenty of other ways “to achieve economic security, political advancement, social respect, legal protections, and a loving partnership.” This has contributed to a deep pessimism around marriage. But Coontz points out that it is not altogether a bad thing for people to have higher standards for entering a marriage, and for them to know that if they want that marriage to last, they have to keep their partner happy.Coontz is concerned, though, that many people who might benefit from marriage can’t see themselves making a go of it. More than a quarter of American 40-year-olds have never been married; that’s a record, and it’s rising. Researchers at the University of Michigan have been asking high-school seniors about marriage since the 1970s. In 1976, 84 percent of girls and 73 percent of boys said they expected to marry, according to one analysis of the data. By 2023, only 64 percent of girls said that, whereas about three-quarters of boys still expected to get married. Have so many young women turned against marriage itself, or only against a persistent 1950s vision of it, one that is no longer viable or desirable?At 81, Coontz is now mostly retired from teaching American history, but she remains on the faculty of Evergreen State College and is the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan think tank that dove into the “family values” debates of the 1990s. Coontz started going on television to deflate panic about high rates of divorce and single motherhood, and she has been a public figure ever since, promoting her view of marriage as protean rather than brittle. For Better and Worse continues that argument, with a swift, myth-dispelling survey of family arrangements down the centuries that focuses on periods when ideas about pair-bonding and marriage shifted in significant ways.The Stone Age (not her specialty) goes by fast. We learn that women sometimes hunted big game, and that child-rearing was a collective enterprise. Coontz debunks pop evolutionary-psych factoids, such as that many women like stronger, older men because our Paleolithic ancestors needed mates who could support their offspring. In fact, food was hunted and served communally, meaning that a brawny man’s children got the same helpings as the kids of weaklings and dead men. Not so the filii nullius of premodern England and America; the illegitimate “children of no one” were brutally neglected, she writes, which helped ensure that young people complied with marriages arranged to maximize their family’s power and property. At one point in between, Jesus entered briefly, preaching that strangers were just as deserving of charity as nuclear-family members—a view that might have made more sense to the early hunter-gatherers than to many of his future followers.Men obviously dominated in public life for centuries, and in private life too; the history of repressive marital laws is long. And yet, Coontz recounts, the necessities of survival led husbands and wives to share many of their cares and responsibilities. In 17th-century England and colonial America, farmwives and fishwives contributed to the household budget. One account describes women hitting the alehouse on their way back from the market, ending the day with “their heads full of wine, and their purses full of coin.” Both husbands and wives supplemented the family’s income through the “putting-out system” (not what you think—at home, they stitched parts for leather shoes, twisted cotton into lace).But the rise of wage labor in the industrializing 18th century began to drive men and women apart: Husbands were out circulating in the marketplace, and wives were more confined to the home. (Middle-class wives, at any rate; many single and poorer women had to keep showing up for their shifts at the factory spinning machine.) Enter romance. Soon businessmen were swooning for love matches and stroking the silken hair of Victorian ladies too good for this mercenary world. At last, Coontz arrives at the 1950s, with the “much-mythologized” male-breadwinner family that, thanks to decades of sitcom reruns and Boomer nostalgia for half-remembered childhoods, has deformed our understanding of the institution ever since.[From the March 2020 issue: David Brooks on how the nuclear family was a mistake]This speed date with history is Coontz’s seventh book. The book that earned her a wide audience, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992), was more narrowly focused on the white, suburban, one-income families that became the archetype not just of the ’50s but of marriage itself. The single-earner nuclear families of that time weren’t simply carried along on the broad backs of hardworking fathers, she argued. They were made possible by postwar government policies such as education benefits, job training, and cheap housing loans, and an economy that supported an unprecedented rise in wages. Many Americans benefited—which is one reason the upsides are better remembered than the downsides. More than half of two-parent Black families lived in poverty in the ’50s, and white resistance to integration sabotaged Black people’s efforts “to participate in the American family dream.” Even those who lived the dream didn’t always enjoy it; as feminists soon made clear, much suffering was caused by stripping women of their wartime jobs and expecting them to be perfect wives and mothers.In 2015, Coontz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, was cited in the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. The book, published a decade earlier, traced the shift away from a vision of marriage as “far too vital an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved” and toward the idea of a love match, with the high hopes for lifelong fulfillment that such a love promises; Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on it in his opinion endorsing the right of all to marry for love.But Coontz didn’t just take the win. She fact-checked the justice. Marriage, Kennedy wrote, had always “promised nobility and dignity to all persons.” Not so, Coontz said: “For thousands of years, marriage conferred nobility and dignity almost exclusively on the husband, who had a legal right to appropriate the property and earnings of his wife and children and forcibly impose his will upon them.” Her belief that the decision was right didn’t stop her from noting that both Kennedy’s opinion and John Roberts’s dissent—which argued that marriage had always referred to “the union of a man and a woman” whose primary purpose was the stable upbringing of children—were “at odds with historical reality.”For Better and Worse arrives at a moment when the sexes are more polarized—at least politically—than ever. Coontz is trying to address two extremes: those who reject egalitarianism in favor of a romanticized past, and those who reject heterosexual marriage as inherently exploitative. She avoids culture-war zeal, aiming to approach everyone with sympathy. In her earlier work, she went after “unhealthy nostalgia.” Here she acknowledges having been “too dismissive” of how fears of losing money and status can encourage fantasies of an idealized past. Psyches are a “jumble of internalized messages and habits” that defy reason. Talk to any couple made up of two good people. Even those who want to change often struggle to do it.Coontz, incidentally, is married, though she doesn’t talk much about it in her books. Early in her career, she got engaged, but “the wedding fell through,” she once told The New York Times. It then turned out she was pregnant. She was a single parent for a dozen years until she reconnected with, and married, the man who’d been her college sweetheart. The writing of For Better and Worse was delayed by the birth of her first grandchild. The book is dedicated to him.For Better and Worse struck me as particularly generous toward young men. When Coontz started studying the history of the family, she was focused on “what women lost when they were denied access to the expanding economic and political rights that White men gained in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Now she is “more aware of what men lost” when work pulled them away from the intimacies of family and community life.In the Victorian era, men wrote love letters expressing their longing and devotion: “I cannot have a separate existence from you, I breathe by you; I live by you.” Before his wedding to Alice Lee in 1880, the 21-year-old future Rough Rider and then-virgin Teddy Roosevelt boasted in his diary: “Thank heaven I am absolutely pure. I can tell Alice everything I have ever done.” But this more sensitive masculinity didn’t much help men in a commercial world that rewarded strength and assertiveness, even ruthlessness. Women who depended on men for their livelihood began to prize those traits as well. The idea of the attraction of opposites took hold, and Coontz quotes women worrying in their diaries and letters that potential suitors were “too soulful”—not “masterful” enough. For many, Coontz writes, the ideal man was “powerful, stoical, and forceful.”Coontz has sometimes asked students to read those Victorian men’s letters aloud. Most boys can’t handle it: They get sarcastic, “distancing themselves from the emotion.” Some even blush. What’s wrong with these supposedly enlightened modern guys? One explanation is that we’ve come to think of being a man as the opposite of being a woman. This might seem natural, but Coontz observes that manhood was once counterposed more against childhood than womanhood. Maturity was what turned a boy into a man—the development of self-control and judgment, not aggressiveness. Understanding the tangle of valued traits, she confesses, has made her “a bit more forgiving of ‘mansplaining’ than some of my friends”—and more optimistic that partnerships between men and women can evolve.Yet the old idea that men and women should inhabit separate spheres still distorts relationships today, Coontz writes. Couples are especially plagued by the expectation that women be responsible for the “invisible labor” of managing people’s needs and emotions. And many women are really sick of doing most of the dishes. It’s notable that the major decline in marriage expectations in the survey of high-school seniors occurred only among the girls. It’s also notable that most divorces are initiated by women.Coontz’s obvious advice—always worth repeating—is that men and women share their burdens. (Plenty of same-sex couples squabble over chores too, of course, but they’re less trapped by gender roles.) “Couples with egalitarian arrangements of household labor and childcare report increases in their levels of love over time,” she says; couples with more traditional divisions of labor report the reverse. Well into the 2010s, magazines were arguing that women were actually turned off when their husbands did more “feminine” chores, but that was based on a study of people who were interviewed in the early ’90s. Recent research finds that egalitarian couples report good sex, and more of it. At times, the book gave me the feeling that marriage could be saved in two ways: by women freeing themselves of outdated assumptions, imagining radical new forms of marriage, and having the resources to enact them—or by more men rinsing out their cups more often.[From the June 2013 issue: Liza Mundy on the gay guide to wedded bliss]But I did find it helpful to encounter familiar compulsions in their historical context. For instance, do so many women feel pressure to keep a clean house because they’re innately neat? Perhaps, Coontz writes, their need to tidy is “a holdover from the new class aspirations that turned female domesticity into a status symbol during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” And I was comforted to be reminded that, instead of blaming one another so much—for never marrying, or for marrying the wrong person—we could acknowledge how much we are responding to circumstances beyond our control: financial stresses, a lack of social supports, habits inherited from centuries past. In that sense, history can cut us some slack.Still, every marriage, however it’s shaped by the marriages before it, is its own mystery, or rather dense with many mysteries: the gestures made and missed, the sink and the compost, the closeness, the glances, the jokes, the bodies, the in-laws, the children, the mornings, the years. At one point in Don DeLillo’s The Names, a character who is trying to win back his wife thinks that “marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it’s improvised, it’s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It’s too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.”After going through a divorce, I can’t imagine getting married a second time. If marriage once offered stability, it now seems an extraordinary risk. Coontz compares it (both accurately and unappealingly) to a “high-stakes real estate deal, with feelings as well as finances” on the line. Also, no one has asked me lately. But according to Coontz, I’m in the minority; two-thirds of people who divorce go on to remarry.[Read: How I demolished my life]Maybe, for some, the risk is part of the appeal. After my friend came back from the courthouse, I asked her why she did it. “Romance,” she told me, and “fun.” And then she used the word propriety, but she made it sound almost dirty—as if monogamous marriage were a hot new kink they’d discovered.In the end, she said she couldn’t quite explain it. There was just something special “about merging into someone else.”A blur.* Photo-illustration sources: L. Willinger / FPG / Getty; SSPL / Getty; Sjöberg Bildbyrå / ullstein bild / Getty; Debrocke / Classicstock / Getty; Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / Getty; Jena Ardell / Getty; William B. Plowman / Getty; Boyer / Roger Viollet / Getty; Joe Raedle / Getty; Michael Springer / Getty; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Afro American Newspapers / Gado / Getty; Kirn Vintage Stock / Corbis / Getty; Corbis / Getty; Samantha Vuignier / Corbis / Getty; Kryssia Campos / Getty; Juanmonino / Getty; Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group / Getty; Kirk and Sons of Cowes / Getty; Jack Mitchell / Getty; Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Getty; Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Getty; JHU Sheridan Libraries / Gado / Getty; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty; George Marks / Retrofile / Getty; Art Media / Print Collector / Getty; Kirn Vintage Stock / Corbis / Getty; Buyenlarge / Getty; Fine Art Photographic Library / Corbis / Getty; The Print Collector / print collector / Getty.This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “The Surprising, Liberating History of Marriage.”