[LINK] "Gay Marriage Made Me Get Married"

[rfmcdonald]

Writing at the Everyday Sociology Blog, Jonathan Wynn writes about his recent marriage, and marriage generally, from a sociologist's perspective. (If you're curious about the title, with same-sex marriage being legal in the Massachusetts where he lives, neither a common-law relationship nor a registered civil union would have resulted in his partner's health benefits being available to him.)

Here’s that greater heft: Despite dire predictions about the institution of marriage crumbling due to homosexuals earning the same rights as the rest of us, the wheels have not come off. Massachusetts’s divorce rates have not skyrocketed since the state Supreme Judicial Court opened the doors for all to marry in November 2003. They are the lowest divorce rates in the nation, below pre-WWII levels.

My colleague, Professor and Director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration, M.V. Lee Badgett, compares across countries in her book When Gay People Get Married and concludes: “nothing much changed as a result of recognition of same-sex couples.” Numbers from the CDC indicate that, after a slight uptick in Massachusetts’ marriage rates, they returned to their normal trajectories after 2004’s legal decision. Maybe it is dawning on us as a nation: last year marked the first time a majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage.

[. . .]

The National Organization for Marriage and the Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance argue for marriage based upon values, but there are plenty of ways to understand why we would engage in this kind of social activity outside of “traditional values.” As Robyn and I planned our wedding (we did a surprise wedding which is a whole other story, but one that turns out to be quite in vogue), I could not help but chuckle that I had long used marriage as an example of Max Weber’s verstehen and theory of social action. (Everyday Sociology blogger Sally Raskoff wrote a post about that, too.)

There are, in Weber’s lights, four reasons for social action: affective (emotion-based), traditional (habit or tradition-based), value-rational (based upon values deemed as paramount), and instrumental-rational (based upon efficiency). Marriage, I tell my Introduction to Sociology students, could be analyzed through this lens.

Two people who just love each other to pieces get married for affective reasons. Robyn’s parents, it turned out, got married so they could live together off base while he was serving in the military (i.e., instrumental-rational). Marriage in this day and age has all sorts of instrumental-rational reasons: the tax incentives to filing jointly, legal ramifications, and, as I already mentioned, health care concerns. Marriage is a social action that requires analysis from the perspective of the acting subjects, and that’s where verstehen comes in: empathetic understanding of the actors themselves. These are not mutually-exclusive. An interpretative understanding means that you can tease out the multiple reasons for a social act. To say that I got married for health care alone isn’t quite accurate. There are affective reasons as well!