Yikes.
The news story was apparently regarded as an odd human interest story, so it made it all the way to print in New Zealand, where it actually gave more details:
Yikes again.
FWIW, for most of Western society, including American society, marriages involving very young couples, let alone teenagers, were uncommon. Marriage ages change a lot less than people generally think, as we reported here:
But what a strange story.8
Obviously there was more to this story than the press reported, although there are hints at it. Fighting a duel for the affections of a twelve-year-old is exceedingly odd under any circumstances, however. Linkfield was shot in the duel, but apparently only Carpenter was locked up. Why? Dueling was illegal under any circumstances at the time. Did getting shot suffice for Linkfield's punishment, or was Carpenter regarded as the aggressor?
Also hinted at, Linkfield and the young object of his affection obviously met back up, as she was almost certainly a pregnant 13-year-old when they married, which is more than a little icky. As the young husband, married to a true child bride, apparently had no means of support for a family, they moved in to his parent's home.
It's hard to imagine this story developing this way today. Almost impossible, in fact. And that it was treated somewhat as a love story in the paper is a bit hard to fathom.
If you look at the Reddit entry, you'll see that by and large people were pretty shocked by the 1922 story, and I can include myself in that group. As always with such stories, you get a minority who will come in with the "well, back in the day everyone married young", or "at one time child marriages were common". Nope, they weren't, and they haven't been since the Church decreed that marriage could only occur with consent and in particular with the consent of the bride.9
Burnett did marry Linkfield, as noted, which gets us back to the law, as noted when we took this diversion. The retained set of laws, and we'll get more into the law in a moment, are those dealing with "statutory rape", the concept that below a certain age people cannot consent to sex. How this works varies by state, and indeed it changed in my own state over time. I haven't kept up with it as it's outside my area of the law, but all US jurisdictions and probably every Western World jurisdiction has a law that essentially says that below a certain age, consent doesn't matter, it's rape. Some modify this with age provisions, such as if the couple is both below the age of consent but close in age, or if the couple is close in age, etc. As noted, I haven't kept up with it, and I'm not going to bother to look it up.
All states also have provisions that hold that below a certain age, you can't consent to marriage. Again, I'm not going to see what it currently is here, but at least when I was first practicing law, you had to have your parent's permission if you were younger than 18 years of age, and the court's permission if you were younger than 16 years of age.
As noted above, I have known some people who were married younger than age 18, but frankly the youngest of them would be about 60 years of age now. This isn't common at all, and it hasn't been at any point in my lifetime. It hasn't been for eons, frankly, and it's a super rarity now. The very few people I know, outside of one example, who fit in this category would be up in their 80s or 90s now, but for the fact that they're dead.
Save for one example I know of in which a couple, originally from Louisiana, were married when he was 19, and she was 13.
That's strange, to be sure. She wasn't, I'd note, "in trouble".
Anyhow, I digress. The point here is that if you read the story of Linkfield and Burnett, it's pretty clear that she was "in trouble" and the options that were left were to marry her off to the father or send him to the pokey. Marrying her to the father relieved, at some point, the parents of Linkfield and Burnett and provided some sort of family for the child. Sending Linkfield to reform school or jail would have left her in desperate straights, along with the child, and would have imposed a financial burden on her parents and probably a hostile financial burden on his parents.
Not as romantic as the news stories made it appear, but then they were written at a time when the readers understood all of this without having to have anyone explain it.
Which brings us to shacking up, or um, cohabitation.
These laws changed over time, but if you combine the civil law and the statutory law, generally what you find is that cohabitation was illegal in some places, or it resulted in common law marriage in others. A promise to marry, an engagement, was legally enforceable and "calling off an engagement" could result in a civil action by the party that had not sought to call it off (breach of promise). Divorce was generally allowable, but there had to be a cause, such as abandonment or cruelty, to justify it.
So what was the thinking?
It's pretty straight forward, actually.
Rather than the current mushy thinking about male/female relationships, our ancestors knew that at a certain point in time in our development, once we passed our childhoods, we were male and female, and attracted to the opposite, and at some point that could lead to children.
We've dealt with this before, so I won't go into it in great detail here, but laws regarding men, women, marriage and divorce, and everything related to the topic, was, in some way or another, related to that. Cohabitation was illegal or brought about "common law" marriages, as the law didn't want society to be responsible for any children that came about by way of the relationship. In other words, the law operated to attempt to force men to comply with their obligations to their offspring, and to protect the long term economic best interest of those offspring.
Breach of promise type actions existed, as there was a general assumption that a single woman who had accepted a proposal of marriage might now be "damaged goods" that other suitors would avoid. In a world in which female employment was harder to come by, particularly good paying jobs that didn't involve manual labor, there was a fear that a woman who had been engaged, with her fiancé backing out, would be left "ruined". Burnett, for example, certainly would have been and likely would have had to face life as an extremely young mother basically alone, her moral status irreparably tarnished, and her child a problem for any potential suitor that wouldn't have existed had the father been absent due to death, rather than disinterest.
And this all ties into another set of statistics, part of which involve cohabitation, and part which don't.
Let's go back to the "divorce rate".
Frankly, the divorce rate was probably never as high as people imagined it was, and according to even a news story that has it a lot higher than Census Bureau reports, it reached a fifty-year low last year. Not that this would be great, as 1972, fifty years ago, is when things started to climb.
Percentage of divorces per 1,000 is one figure, but the overall number of marriages that end in divorce is quite another.
When we look at the start of the 20th Century and the overall low divorce rate, that equated pretty well, without really looking it up, with a generally low overall percentage of the population that divorced I.e., some marriages ended in divorce, but they were few, and the implications were pronounced. Being tagged a "divorcee" wasn't a good thing. This remained the case up until the 1970s really, although to less of a degree than had previously been the case.
Indeed, by way of a couple of examples, when I was young there was a neighboring couple that my parents really liked, but it was noted from time to time that they'd both been divorced prior to their current marriage. My parents didn't hold it against them, but it was sort of a mark against them. It was an odd character defect, if you will.
As another example, my mother was friends with a woman who had at one time worked for a friend of my father's. My father's friend was divorced and remarried, which was likewise regarded as a bit of a character defect. My mother's friend held it bitterly against him, her former employer, even though she was herself divorced. She may have felt liberty to criticize as her divorce from her husband, whom I understood to be an alcoholic, may have left her raising their son alone, but she never remarried. She remained faithful, in essence, to her marriage by not remarrying.
Or, as a final example, two of the kids I was friends with in grade school lived in homes in which their mother's had divorced their fathers and remarried. It was regarded as so unusual it was a topic among parents, and we were all very conscious of it.
Now, meeting divorced and remarried people are very common. I'm sure hardly anyone can't list several friends or associates that haven't been divorced, and some have been divorced and remarried.
It may be just me, but I think I see a bit of a trend here as well.
I know several people that have been married multiple times, but interestingly, this seems to be something that applies mostly to a generation that cuts off at age 50. I may be wrong, but I don't really see younger generations getting serial divorces. Part of the reason for that may be the rise in cohabitation. I'll go onto that in a moment, but of those whom I know who have had serials marriages, a couple of them probably fit into that category of too immature to marry when they first married, and maybe when they married a second time, but the third time it really stuck. On the other hand, some just seem to have a light attachment to the meaning of marriage, or they have bad skills in regard to whom they have chosen to marry.
Some would now claim that the rise of cohabitation has caused the drop in the phenomenon noted immediately above, but there's no evidence of that. On the contrary, statistically it's been shown cohabitation does not in any fashion make subsequent marriages more stable. Quite the opposite is true, it increases the instances of divorce.
And indeed, cohabitating men in particular never quit looking. It's been shown that by not being bound, they really don't regard themselves as bound. Quite a few, to at least some degree, still are heding their bets just a little.
And in someways this takes us to what we might call "stealth divorces".
As we noted above, cohabitation was generally illegal, certainly in the 19th Century, and in some places in the early 20th Century. It was societally regarded as absolutely scandalous. That taint began to wane with the Sexual Revolution.
Now, we don't want to fall into the error of claiming that before 1968 everyone's behavior was absolutely correct. Having said that, studies in more recent years have shown that the groundbreaking sexual studies of the late 40s and early 50s were erroneous to a whopping degree. Indeed, well into the 1950s, most men and women had no sexual relations with anyone until they were married. This was the societal standard, and it was very largely adhered to. Not absolutely, but fairly well.l
The Second World War clearly made some inroads into that, and frankly the Great War had dented it as well, but after both wars the standards revived, even if they'd temporarily eroded during the war. They started to steadily erode starting in 1954 following the December 1953 release of Playboy magazine, and that definitely had a cultural impact that's apparent in films of the late 50s and early 60s. The 1960s, however, bust things wide open, which exploded all over the 1970s in the form of the Sexual Revolution.
It's a fairly short line from sex outside of marriage to cohabitation, but here again it didn't happen instantly. Even as late as the 1980s when I was in university, cohabitation was regarded as semi scandalous society wide. People really didn't know how to take it, and where it occurred it was pretty uniformly regarded as a temporary arrangement. Again, by way of personal recollections, one politically highly liberal friend of mine was scandalized by the conduct of a female roommate who, well, we will skip it, but this is in the mid 1980s. Of my college friends who married about that time, only one had "lived with" his girlfriend prior to their marriage, although their story presents an interesting one in terms of trends.
By the late 90s things were really changing in this regard, and you started to run into couples, for the first time, that seemingly cohabitated with no thought of getting married.
Having said that, some of this trend, like much in the way of widely reported social trends, may be exaggerated. Nonetheless, the trend is there, and in 2019 the Census Bureau found:
In 2018, 15 percent of young adults ages 25-34 live with an unmarried partner, up from 12 percent 10 years ago.
It further reported:
Fifty years ago, in 1968, living with an unmarried partner was rare. Only 0.1 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 0.2 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds lived with an unmarried partner, according to the Current Population Survey.
The measurement of cohabitation from 1968-1995 was less precise. The estimate came from an indirect measure of opposite-sex partners sharing living quarters, and the late 1960s through the early 1970s had particularly low reports of cohabitation.
Also, when comparing 2008 to 2018, years in which the Current Population Survey asked a direct cohabitation question, cohabitation only increased for 25- to 34-year-olds and slightly decreased for 18- to 24-year-olds.
So, although cohabitation has increased for young adults over the last 50 years, it is important to note the limitations in measurement and that certain periods of time did not produce increases in unmarried young adults living together.
In contrast to the rising rates of cohabitation, the proportion of young adults who are married has declined over time.
Today, 30 percent of young adults ages 18-34 are married, but 40 years ago, in 1978, 59 percent of young adults were married.
So, what the Census Bureau found was that, basically, cohabitation had jumped enormously for young adults in fifty years, but was decreasing for other sections of the population. Also of note 59% of young adults, if we run the "young" criteria up to age 34, which is a questionable way of doing it (at one time 34 was actually considered "middle age", and not all that long ago) were married. Now, 30% of the population in that age range is, although it's still the case overall that the majority of Americans live in married households.
That is quite the change, but I'd also note that it actually sort of, but only sort of, replicates a situation that had existed in the 19th Century when "common law" marriages came about. That legal creation was created by the courts to deal with the byproducts of just such unions and to handle the legal problems they created. And in looking at that, we an find a surprising number of notable common law marriages in the United States in the 19th Century, particularly in the wilder regions of the country.
Indeed, looking back even further, it's hard not to recall that it was not until well into the Middle Ages that marriages needed to be witnessed at all.
Some of the current cohabitation going on is basically in the nature of common law marriages, even if not recognized as such. This is particularly true of the ones that use the extremely irritating word "partner" to describe the putative spouse. Others are just examples of people playing house, and there's everything in between. We note it here, however, as these couples do split up, and often without any sort of intervention of the law at all, and therefore they create a sort of stealth divorce.
Some of how this works overall, as a social observer, is interesting. Some of these couples get around to marrying later, some never do, but with some it's almost impossible not to view them as common law marriages. It speaks in part, however, to the breakdown in standards in society, but this thread is already broad enough without going there.
So what is going on here?
It's actually pretty hard to say.
When I started this thread off, I had intended to look at the often claimed link between "marry in haste" marriages during World War Two leading to a breakdown in marriage itself, which isn't a theory that I came up. However, much like the popular theory that "World War Two caused women to enter into the work force forever" claim, it really doesn't have the facts to back it up. There was in fact a jump in divorce rates after the war, but it wasn't titanic, and overall societal divorce rates returned to what they had been just before the war and remained there into the late 1970s. And frankly, attitudes towards divorce, while they changed, didn't change all that much until the 80s.
So if the war played a role, it was indirect.
What does seem to have played a role, however, was the combined impact of increased wealth and a big focus on materialism, and we're still living with that, although it seems to be breaking down in recent years, with a boost in that from COVID 19.
For most of human history marriage played a variety of roles, but the big societal one was making sure that children were protected, and then widows were. This doesn't mean that marriage doesn't have an important religious aspect to it, particularly in Apostolic Christian churches. It does. But societies, and by this we mean all societies, regulated male/female interactions for the reasons noted above, as society didn't want the tribe, the village, the shire, or whatever, to be stuck with the burden of raising children or taking care of widows.
There was really no thought at all to doing so until the post-war era, for the most part. "Mistakes of nature", as children born out of wedlock were sometimes referred to, were a disaster, for the most part, for the economic well-being of the mothers, save for the instances when the fathers were well-to-do. Contrary to what progressives like to claim, however, the overwhelming majority of women took the children to term. Giving the children up for adoption was a very common option, particularly for teenage and early twenties mothers, who were often "sent away" for a time until the children could be delivered in hopes of trying to salvage some element of the girl's reputation. Quick marriages, or the proverbial "shotgun marriage", were also solutions, and there's some question of whether the Linkfield marriage described above may have been one of those.
Anyway you looked at it, abortion and living with heavy public support were not options. As readers here will note, I don't feel that abortion should be now. But its undeniable that public money to aid the mothers of unwed children, and the children, came about following the introduction of the Great Society. Indeed, the often heard claim of people for sympathy about a protagonist that "she's an unwed working mother" just would not have been made prior to that time, and probably not until the 1990s really.
What also came about was a change in sexual behavior due to the Sexual Revolution, with the Quartermaster of the Revolution being pharmaceutical birth control. We've dealt with that before here as well, but the overall mix of birth control combined with Playboy's separation of the concept that sex can result in children really hit in the 1960s, right at the time that a youth rebellion was underway. None of the results would have been possible without that combination, and added to it was the post World War Two massive increase in societal wealth.
The huge increase in societal wealth meant that it was possible for government to imagine, if erroneously, that it could address the desperate plight of unmarried mothers and their children, which came partially, but only partially, true, just at the same time that the Sexual Revolution broke down sexual mores.
And added to that was the change in people's views about what their own lives were for that accompanied the backside of the youth rebellion.
As we've noted here before, prior to the 1960s, and very much prior to World War Two, the United States may have been a capitalistic society, but it was also one which, for most people, was actually family oriented. When the authors of I'll Take My Stand assaulted the New Deal, they in part emphasized that, as it was so much the case. I.e., they expected a sympathetic audience to the argument that Rooseveltian capitalism/liberal government was super pro business and was destroying familial leisure. A person can take that for what it's worth, but in the 1970s that really became true. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, you'd still occasionally hear parents encouraging their children in post high school academic careers on the basis that "you'll get a good job, so you can support a family".
I haven't heard that argument made for decades now.
Now, people are urged to get a good job as it'll produce a high income and that means lots of stuff. And that's the real difference between then and now.
People now routinely leave friends and family for their careers, and in doing so abandon their spouses and "others". Since the 1970s, and very much since then, societal propaganda has been full of "fulfilling career" arguments, arguing, particularly to women, that their path to a meaningful life and a sense of self-worth is solely linked to their careers and completely internalized.
Of course, another concept that didn't exist is that people had to approach something really serious, sex, as entertainment and that they were doing something wrong if they weren't acting like alley cats in heat in at least a certain point in their life.
The basic psychology of sex is pretty well known in our species, and it does in fact vary enormously by species. As we've gone into that before, we'll not plow into it again, but sex serves more than reproductive purposes in our species, which is one of the reasons we're one of the few mammals that will act sexually in spite of a female not being "in season". Cattle, for example, don't act that way. If a cow isn't in season, they're perfectly content just lying around doing nothing, and they don't hit on the cows.
The basic reason has to do with our evolutionary biology, which has a child-rearing strategy that entails along childhood. Given that, children need a long period of nurturing and protection, and that means that both of the parents need to be involved.
Interestingly, that also forms a certain basis for why women and men are not the same in regard to sex drive. Once a source of 1950s and 1960s style ribald jokes, women, particularly if they have children, are less interested than men, which doesn't mean disinterested. Anyhow, according to evolutionary biologists, the deal that nature imposed on our DNA is that men would stick with their mates and secure them food and protection, with the biological bargain being struck in favor of sex.
Now, modern social critics, who often have a poor understanding of biology, fail to note one thing and miss another entirely here.
The missed one is that it's well demonstrated that psychologically sex trips a trigger in our psychology and that what it does to us, in terms of the opposite, is to create a bond pretty much instantly. That bond never goes away. Indeed, old romantic tales of people pining for a "lost love" or somebody that they met decades ago are probably related to, or barely disguised depictions of, people having this intimate bond very early and then moving on for some reason, but not getting over it.
The thing social critics bring up about this is "what about cheating men", etc…, but that says something, once again, about wealth.
And survival.
As early in our species' history, by which we pretty much mean up until last Thursday, women died at a high rate, in part because of child bearing, men tended to outlast them. As recently as the early history of the United States, this remained so much the case that an average "middle class" or "upper class" man was presumed likely to have at least two or three marriages during a lifetime. It's grim, but it was accepted that women stood a fairly high chance of dying relatively young. Indeed, not only was this the case for women, but children struggled to make it past about age seven.
A good example of this is provided by Martha Jefferson, who was just 33 years old when she died. Her health was wrecked by multiple exposures to disease and bearing very heavy children. But the example doesn't stop there.
Martha Jefferson had been born Martha Wales. Her father was John Wales and her mother, Martha Wales, née Eppes. Her parents were married just two years at the time of her birth, Eppes was a widow when they married, when she was 27 years of age. Her first two children were born stillborn and the third, the woman who would grow to adulthood and marry Thomas Jefferson, lived, but she died five days latter, essentially a casualty of the birth.
Her father then married Tabith Cocke, who died sometime prior to 1860, meaning that they'd been married six to ten years (her date of death isn't really known). Martha, her stepdaughter, didn't get along with her. Her father then married Elizabeth Lomax, who was a widow, and who died but a year later. Martha didn't get along with her either. Her father then took his slave Betty Hemings, who was "half white" by descent (her father was an English sea captain) into a sexual relationship, producing more children.
Martha Jefferson make Thomas Jefferson promise not to remarry, as she didn't want her children to endure a stepmother. Jefferson didn't, but then took one of the Hemings as his concubine, or what have you. This relationship was fairly widely known of, but less well known today is that Sally Hemings was, according to the way Americans account "race" now, 3/4s white and 1/4 black. Indeed, it was often noted that she bore a resemblance to Martha Jefferson.
Now none of this is meant to be a charming story. Some of it is downright creepy. But what we see from it is that people were dying left and right all the time, and women were particularly likely to die young. Men usually remarried within a couple of years. In this instance, the perversion of slavery made it easy for both of the men involved to end up taking enslaved concubines, with whom they actually shared a close cultural connection. Jefferson upheld his promise to Martha not to remarry in that fashion, but only in a deeply weird and sort of technical way. What this shows us overall is that a biological imperative operating in nature basically regards men as incompetent to raise children on their own and then, death having intervened, they're off and running looking for new female help.
Now things have dramatically changed, and life is about self fulfillment and the like, and if people get in the way of that, even if they are infants, they are to be dumped.
Prior to the 1970s people didn't really have that concept.
Because its not true.
And therein, more likely than not, lies the answer.
If its all about you, after all, leaving them, whomever they are, is not only easy, its the right thing to do.
Of course, it isn't. And there's some indication that the generations Post Generation Jones know that. As we noted the other day, they're Quiet Quitting and Laying Flat. And there's some indication that they're groping back to social conservatism as well
The Wayles and Jefferson story provides additional illustration of a fundamental truth. We live in a fallen world, so this area of our lives, like all of our basic genetic instructions, can be set to run off kilter, and sometimes in a very destructive way.
Just as the imperative to eat can go awry in some people to their ultimate demise, the sexual one can get pretty fouled up, and fouled up society wide, as well. In Wayes and Jefferson's day, that was obviously operating, in that they'd defeated the basic human rights of women to say yes or no to a married relationship. We can't know what conversations Wayles and Hemmings had with two different generations of Hemings women, but we sure know that they were at a colossal disadvantage. Both women were born into bondage, and saying no was going to be pretty freaking difficult for them. We don't really know if they ever had said no, as slavery silenced their voices.
So there we have a massive perversion, although certainly not one without a historical precedent. Arab raiders took Irish women for sex slaves in raids designed just for that purpose, for example.
We benighted souls, of course, endure no such horrors in our modern lives.
Or do we?
In our live the grand perversion, already referenced, is the divorce of sex from reproduction and sex from reasons. As a super rich society, we've reduced everything to entertainment.
This corruption came first in those parts of our society with the most money and the most free time. The lives of noble aristocracy, for example, reads like a novel sold that should be sold in a brown paper bag. Even such a figure as Czar Nicholas II, who was fiercely devoted to his wife and who lead a very conventional moral life as the Russian Emperor, no matter what else we might think of him, had a mistress early on who went on to be his brother's mistress.10 In North America, real libertine behavior or hit first in Hollywood where there was a large surplus of cash, time and superficiality, leading to scandals of all sorts, but more thing that simply never became scandals. Indeed, even in pre-1945 North America the commonality of divorce amongst celluloid entertainers, when it was fairly rare for everyone else, was blistering.
Mathilde Kschessinska, Czar Nicholas II's mistress prior to his marriage, who survived the revolution, moved to Parish, and died at age 100.
The association here with Hollywood is important, actually, as the entertainment industry became an agent for the pornographication of the culture and an ally of the destruction of standards during the Sexual Revolution. Why wouldn't it have been? Sex sells, as everyone knows, and in many ways when Hollywood portrayed something in an "avant-garde" fashion, it was merely portraying its own moral standards as practiced behind the movie screen. People have a long history of normalizing their own conduct, no matter what it is.
And that went on to convert the culture from one in which sex was in fact relegated to marriage as a standard and in reality, to one in which such shows as The Big Bang Theory or Friends operated to tell people there as something wrong with them if they didn't engage in sex readily and casually, and with multiple partners.
Which is a corruption of the basic genetic roadmap nearly as profound as that of Wayles and Hemings taking enslaved women to bed.
And this has had the impact of wearing the trigger.
Even in the early history of the country, in which more than one wife was common, we're really just looking at men who had a handful of "sexual partners". For Jefferson, it was basically two. For Wayles, it was four. It's extremely unlikely there were anymore. And there is no evidence that the triggers were pulled again until their first "partner" had died.
Playboy, on the other hand, came around and told American men that women should be putting out constantly as women were sterile ditzes and male urges were all that mattered. The Sexual Revolution came about and changed the standards, and it was really women who were made to suffer. Their trigger falls, if you will, on a much harder hammer, and they are accordingly much less likely to move on, not having the same evolutionary drive to the same extent as men, as in antiquity, while they might need to move on, they were less likely to. Additionally, choosing wisely was always more of a concern for women, biologically, as they were going ultimately end up with the product of the relationship, children, no matter what. Single fathers exist, in other words, but not at the same rate as single mothers.
Added to that, the study of pedophiles has shown that one of the statistical factors in their backgrounds is having had five or more sexual partners. I.e., the risk factor that somebody will become a pedophile increases when they reach that level, which makes sense as by that time the natural unifying aspect of sex is pretty clearly breaking down to yielding instead to urges. If a person can, in other words, defeat their DNA to the extent that satisfying the base urge, it seems to break down other barriers to satisfying it. When we realize that when we started off looking at this, most Americans did not have sex until they married, and now the average number of "partners" in the US is seven.
This matters to our story as it demonstrates another part of this story. If the "there's something wrong with you if you aren't doing it" view can break down a person's ingrained inclinations to view the opposite gender as potential lifelong mates and allow some people's eyes to turn to children, it's pretty clearly going to weaken the inclination to stay together at all.
Now, for most people, this isn't going to be the factor leading to a divorce. It's only one of the background factors in society at large, and that's the overall story.
Most people live according to societal standards pretty much, and accept societal standards pretty much. Indeed, even in areas as substantial as the ones we're talking about, people will tend to live up, or down, to societal standards. More than that, they'll tend to comport with them and incorporate them into their own views.
We've already noted some of this. When the standard we're addressing here, that regarding divorce, had a pretty high bar, society at large also had one. For example, there were real questions on whether or not Ronald Reagan could be elected President, as he was a divorced and remarried man. In contrast, this didn't even come up with Donald Trump, who is a serial polygamist.
In other words, all that we've discussed above operated to weaken the bounds of marriage in general and make divorce more common. It also operated to change the nature of marriage in American society in particular, and in the Western World in general, different from what they had been, which made the obligation to enter it to in a somewhat grave fashion, or enter into it at all, lighter.
Indeed, due to the latter, a lot of divorces might really be compared to that oddly disused means of separation, annulment. People tend to think of annulment solely as a religious procedure, but it isn't. Wyoming, for example, has statutes covering legal separation, annulment, and divorce. Annulment is rarely used, and legal separation has fallen into disfavor as well. People simply get divorced.
But things may seem to be slowly changing, at least by observation.
That the Sexual Revolution was a complete and utter disaster is clear. It turned out that people didn't go on to happy lives a la Friends or The Big Bang Theory. Their lives tended to end up a mess. And over time it seems that younger, post Boomer generations, or at least those that followed after the forgotten and trapped Generation Jones, have tended to grope back, although largely in the dark as all the lights are off, to the prior standards. Average sexual partner figures were dropping, albeit slightly, for those between 25 and 49. A separate figure for those now in their teens so surprised the figures at the highly conservative and religious First Things that they did a podcast episode on it noting, in their (rather odd here) view, that teens were abstaining in record numbers for recent times, but for the wrong reasons, giving us once again the odd Boomer view that Gen X,Y, & Z can't do anything right.
Now, it's probably not safe to assume that we're going to return to the standards of the middle 20th Century anytime soon, but by the same token, things are changing. And in terms of what this blog serves to do, we've certainly seen an interesting long term trend that's important to appreciate. Starting with the 1960s, fictional depictions of past eras tended to present them with modern, or rather Hollywood modern, mores. But that what things were like.
Which were never accurate, actually. Divorce rates were never as high as thought to be, and experienced a rise, and fall.
Where we are now, is not where we are going. Having experimented, it seems younger generations are deeming the experiment a failure, and looking, at least to some extent, for a way back.
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