The Millennial Marriage

Brian Willoughby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000283365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

This essential text explores the concept of "Me-Marriage"—a marital relationship that blends individualized life goals and interests—and draws from research on the current benefits and costs of marriage to consider how to achieve success, both individually and relationally. Chapters explore the larger patterns at play and identify the trends about what a modern "healthy marriage" looks like for this new generation. Brian J. Willoughby combines a review of the latest social science research on the benefits and costs of marriage with new quantitative and qualitative data from married and single adults. The book explores how marriage has fundamentally shifted in the Western world due to the changing values and approaches to relationships by the Millennial generation that is now largely transitioning to marriage.

This book is an ideal text for clinicians and practitioners (particularly those working with young married populations) looking for guidance on how to understand the increasingly complex ways that adults are navigating their relationship landscape, as well as students and scholars in the fields of psychology, family studies, and sociology and those interested in individual development, relational development, and demographic trends on the family.

1 Why Millennial Marriage?

My Academic Journey to Studying Millennial Marriage

Have millennials fundamentally altered the landscape of marriage forever? This question was what drove me to write this book, exploring how millennials, who have been scorned and ridiculed in the media for their unique approach to relationships, are faring now that many of them have married. I hope that through the pages and chapters of this book, you will come to appreciate the unique hopes, challenges, and pitfalls that millennials face as they strive for love and happiness. However, before we jump straight into the pool, there is some important background information to cover, not about millennials themselves but about your guide (me!).

Any book is a journey in which the author’s primary job is to guide the reader through whatever narrative or subject matter the author has deemed worthy of the reader’s attention. In that way, a book is an inherently biased and skewed endeavor, molded by the author’s views, background, and personal opinions. While completely avoiding this bias is likely impossible, I believe in the importance of understanding the motives and background of the guide whenever beginning such a journey. After all, each guide has certain quirks, favored routes, and unique biases that change the course and nature of the journey itself. For that reason, before jumping straight into a discussion of the millennial generation and what its members may or may not be doing to the nature of marriage, I think it’s important to start with a little personal history. All academic scholars who have ever attempted to study relationships have their own personal journey that took them from wandering, mostly lost, undergraduates to focused (at least most of the time) explorers seeking to uncover the secrets of love and romance.

The personal journey that would eventually lead me to write a book about how millennials may be fundamentally changing the institution of marriage began in a dark and dreary lab of a geneticist whose name I have long since forgotten. This particular lab resided on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I was a pre-med student, majoring in genetics and planning on a long, dull, but financially lucrative career as a pathologist. As part of my major, I was tasked (likely by some wise department chair who had seen countless undergraduates embark on a career path they did not truly understand) with interviewing someone who had the career I aspired to. I honestly don’t remember much about the person I interviewed—including their age, gender, or really anything about them. Nor do I even recall what was said. I really only remember one specific thing from that encounter—the persistent thought that kept occurring to me about how dark, lonely, and depressing this lab seemed to be. The pathologist I interviewed was hunkered over a desk and seemed to me to be sad and alone. The lab itself, with various specimens, microscopes, and lab equipment strewn about, seemed empty and desolate. Whether my own young adult brain was projecting such thoughts or this particular researcher was merely having a bad day (trying to entertain a young freshman who was attempting to complete a course requirement probably wasn’t helping), didn’t change the fact that I decided that day I needed to change course in my education and career. After transferring to a university across the country, I settled into the major of many lost and confused university souls: psychology.

Psychology was fascinating to me. I enjoyed learning about cognition and emotion, sensation and perception. I was later introduced to the field of relationship and family science through an elective class that sunk me further into my fascination with romantic relationships. I found romantic relationships and marriage to be particularly fascinating at the time, likely due to my own newlywed status. What made people get married? How and why did healthy marriages last? Why did divorce happen? My own fascination with these topics, combined with some stellar and influential mentoring, made me decide to pursue a career in academics and to make the study of romantic relationships and marriage my primary goal. I elected to complete my graduate education at the University of Minnesota, where I studied under Dr. William Doherty, perhaps one of the best minds on the planet when it comes to marriage. It was during the five years of my Ph.D. program that the seeds that would eventually become this book took root.

I arrived in Minnesota determined to understand and study healthy marriage and divorce. However, while I was working through my graduate program, I began assisting on a new project that focused not on married couples but on younger, premarital couples. This project wasn’t aligned with my primary interests, and, at first, my excitement level for the project was relatively low. But like many graduate students before and after me, I did what was asked with no public protest. I told myself that perhaps there was something I could glean from the young couples in the study that would help me in my future work on real marriages. The “Fragile Families Project,” as it was called, was aimed at identifying young, non-married parents in the Minneapolis area who expressed an interest in marriage. The project was an intervention study, aimed at determining if project resources might help these young families build a solid foundation on which to create a healthy marriage. The project and research assistants would regularly interview the couples and then provide targeted resources and mentors for them. In the mid-2000s, this project was a part of many similar research projects around the country that were capitalizing on new federal funding under the Bush administration that was created to promote marriage across the United States.

Much to my surprise, the work I would do on this project would change the course of my professional career forever. As I worked with and interviewed these young couples, I became more and more interested in their stories. They were roughly my age but had a dizzying array of thoughts, approaches, concerns, and views of marriage. Perhaps this was one of my first true brushes with diversity, but it launched within me a fascination with not just marriage but also the premarital process itself. I wanted to learn more about these young adults and how they dated and made sense of later marriage; I wanted to understand my fellow cohort and the decisions its members were making that were different from my own. I wanted to know why some embraced marriage and relationships while others seemed petrified by it. Where did these thoughts come from, and how did they change the very relational landscape and trajectories of these people’s lives?

These experiences in graduate school led me to a career focused on what would become known as the study of emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000). I found myself in a unique niche in this field. In the years before I began my work, the study of the third decade of life had been revolutionized by Arnett’s argument that a new developmental stage had emerged (pun intended). Unique educational, cultural, and relational changes (Arnett, 2000, 2007; Arnett & Tanner, 2006, p. 3) had created a unique developmental landscape for those in their 20s. Despite the variety of topics such a new field provided, most of the emerging adulthood field was composed of scholars of the adolescent stage who were taking their adolescent focus and moving later into the life course. I, along with a handful of my colleagues, were unique. We were relational and marriage scholars stepping backward in the life course—taking our unique focus on relational development and couple processes to a period in the life course where finding and sustaining love was getting more and more complex. I dove into this work and spent the better part of a decade focused squarely on what individual, cultural, and relational factors turned these emerging adults toward or away from marriage.

The Doom and Gloom Approach to Studying Millennials

I can remember, early in my career as a scholar, sitting at many academic conferences and listening to well-informed speakers tell me repeatedly how emerging adults were on the road to personal apocalypse. This message was not just relational; it also cut across many aspects of development. Young adults were selfish, flocking away from institutional pillars like religious organizations and steady blue-collar jobs to find self-fulfillment and personal edification through travel, leisure, and a unique brand of moral relativism. Though some of my colleagues took the stance that emerging adults were doomed to a future of lonely individualism, others were quick to defend this new and confusing generation. Debate raged regarding if such emerging adults were flourishing or floundering (Nelson & Padilla-Walker, 2013). Relationally, the conversation was similar. Casual sex and hook-up rates were up (Garcia et al., 2015; Grello et al., 2006), and marriage rates were down (Parker & Stepler, 2017). Not only were emerging adults changing the core ways in which they dated (more on this in Chapter 2), but they were also changing their fundamental views on relationships in general. I was on the forefront of scholars pointing out how single young adults had developed potentially harmful, and in most cases paradoxical, views of long-term relationships including marriage (Willoughby & Carroll, 2015; Willoughby & James, 2017). I would relay these messages of doom and gloom to my college students, often joking that most scholars and presenters didn’t blame them for their perceived inadequacies in life, but rather their baby-boomer parents who were too soft and too freeing in some areas and too suffocating in others.

These academic dialogues, focused as they were on a new and debated developmental area, were happening concurrently with a larger cultural dialogue about these young adults. Here, the discussion and debate was not about identity development or relational progression, it was about millennials—the term coined to describe those born roughly between 1980 and 2000. These were the same emerging adults we were studying as researchers, and the larger public had come down on them—hard. Headlines across the world noted how dysfunctional, disillusioned, and just disrespectful this supposedly self-focused generation was. Millennials were called the “Why Worry Generation” due to their care-free attitudes (Warner, 2010). They were changing the very nature of the workplace with their unique demands (Safer, 2007). They were abandoning the religion of their families in droves (Gilgoff, 2010). During the recession of the late 2000s, they were also uniquely affected by a weak and sobering job market (Samuelson, 2010), which elicited equal parts pity and snickering from their older counterparts. In 2010, Business Insider called millennials the “Most Broken Generation Ever” (Synder, 2010). The ridicule has spread far and wide, going so far that, just recently, millennials have even been accused of ruining Disneyland (Abell, 2019).

A quick sidenote and admission: In the interest of full disclosure, my own birthday puts me squarely on the border between the Gen X and Millennial crowds—a convenient place to be if one wished to claim the best and avoid the worst from both cohorts. Part of my own scholarly fascination with this group came about because I was, in some ways, part of it. I understood millennials’ approach to the world and understood their frustrations and anxieties. As I sat in and engaged with the scholarly community, largely dominated by baby boomers at the time, I felt myself torn. Do I defend my own generational cohort? Do I acknowledge its members’ unique challenges and try to help? Or do I attempt to do what many scholars do—be a robotic and detailed observer, simply driven to report the facts and figures? As a young scholar, it was the latter approach that mostly drove my early scholarship. It is and was a publish-or-perish world in academia and I felt this strategy was a necessity for survival. But over a decade later, with tenure and other academic milestones now behind me, I began to wonder if perhaps it was time to wade more into the weeds when it came to the good and bad of millennial relationships after all.

The Classroom Moment That Birthed a Book

While this background provides the context of why I decided to write a book on millennials generally, I have yet to touch on the flame that really ignited what would become my central goal for wanting to write about millennials and their marriages. As a professor, one gets into a certain cadence with teaching and talking to students. Professors often have certain jokes, stories, and examples that they tell semester after semester. I believe the best professors are those who can connect with their students—to make the material come alive and make the terms and concepts applicable to them. For years when I would teach students about marriage and marital communication, I would use clips from one of the original reality television programs shown on MTV in the early 2000s, Newlyweds. This show chronicled the first years of the marriage between pop singer Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, one of the singers from the ‘90s boy band 98 degrees. For years, this illustration was a hit. Students loved analyzing the clips we viewed in class, dissecting the relationship between Nick and Jessica and considering why their eventual divorce might have happened. Then, a few years ago, I noticed something in my class. When I introduced the show, I was met with a room full of blank stares. I realized that the students no longer connected with the material because most of them no longer knew who Jessica and Nick were. Jessica, Britney, and Christina had been replaced by Gaga, Ariana, and Taylor. The bands 98 degrees, N’ Sync, and the Backstreet Boys had been replaced by BTS and One Direction. I think teachers may get this experience—of realizing our generation has been replaced by one younger—more than others (somehow, the students stay the same age, year after year, while we keep getting older). Regardless, over the next few years I became increasingly aware that my pop culture references were becoming dated and less relevant. Millennials had moved on and were being replaced by what some are calling the rising iGen generation (Twenge, 2017). It was official: I was now part of an “older” generation.

While my interest in emerging adults continues, this experience started a train of thought in my mind. This cohort of millennial young adults I had been studying for a decade, a cohort I had written about and theorized about in dozens of papers and a previous book, were now full-grown adults. In addition, if they were in fact adults, they were likely getting married. “But wait!” I thought. Much of my theorizing had been about what would happen if and when these young adults did get married. I realized that there was no longer a need to theorize when we could see what happened. At some point along the way in my study of marriage, I had forgotten that I didn’t need to just theorize about what would happen to the millennials—eventually they would show us.

And so here we are, a moment in history where we can look, with evidence, at what is happening to the institution of marriage as one of the most unique and debated generations in human history enters the fourth decade of life. For years, other researchers and I have been painting a picture of future relationship failure, largely believing that marriage would either die with the millennials as they rejected it or that their own marriages would fail to have the power of marriages in the past. We reasoned that their more individualistic and self-centered approach to life would not mesh well with what we knew was needed to sustain a long-term healthy relationship. But was this the case? At the heart of this question is one that is fairly straightforward. Would the new trends we saw among millennials that created something so unique that scholars needed to create a new development period in emerging adulthood also create a new type of adulthood and marriage? Or would such trends eventually be shown to be unique to young adulthood, with the millennials eventually looking very similar to their parents once they “matured”? These questions harkened back to my early years as a scholar when I focused on marriage.

In the early 2000s, much was being made in the social sciences about the “case for marriage.” Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s (2000) book, The Case for Marriage, was a touch point in social science scholarship. These scholars laid out a compelling and empirically driven argument that marriage benefited the individuals and couples involved. It has since been cited north of 2,500 times since its publication. Much of the current scholarship at the time suggested that marriage was a relationship that improved people’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Why Millennial Marriage?
• 2 Millennials and the New Marriage
• 3 Me-Marriage: A New Type of Marriage for Millennials
• 4 Me-Marriage and Marital Quality
• 5 Balancing Education and Career Trajectories
• 6 Mental Health and Physical Well-Being in Me-Marriage
• 7 Parenting Within a Me-Marriage
• 8 Religion and Spirituality in Me-Marriages
• 9 Gender and a Role-Less Marriage
• 10 Modern Diversity in Marriage
• 11 A New Case for Marriage
• Index