A Couple-Partnership: An Alternative to Heterosexual Marriage

For many years, men and women have been changing the way we interact with each other. The traditional family, with marriage as the fundamental building block of society, is being challenged. According to the American Psychological Association, approximately 40-50% of first marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate for second marriages is even higher, with approximately 60-67% ending in divorce.

Why Marriage?

Marriage as a social institution was designed to serve two main purposes: to create a stable society and to ensure paternity.

Anthropologists believe stable social arrangements were needed when loosely organized groups of hunter-gatherers settled into agrarian civilizations. A significant element of this new social arrangement is that it bound women to men, guaranteeing that a man’s children were his true biological offspring.

The Industrial Revolution ushered in the emphasis on gender with the separation of the sexes into different silos: husbands became wage earners outside the home. Wives became homemakers. Loving and being loved was understood in terms of the gender of the partners.

Stability Morphs Into Rigidity

In the 1940s, the concept of “social role” became a prominent theory that accounted for how people behaved. The terms “sex role,” “male role,” and “female role” began to be widely used based on the assumption that men and women were different kinds of people. Men were viewed as stronger, bolder, more logical, and more reasonable; women were seen as weaker physically but stronger morally, more refined, more understanding, and more sensitive. These differences were explicitly associated with the different spheres men and women occupied, public and private, respectively.

"Husband" and "wife" became our assigned roles. These roles told us how to act, feel, and know how we were doing. They shaped how we thought, our behavior, and what was real. Husband and wife come with marriage—a package deal.

Trying to Fix Marriage

Here are a few ideas about how marriage should change to make it less bound by assigned sex roles

• In Marriage is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It, 10 professionals from various areas offer suggestions, e.g., a wife keeping her name.
• Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institute calls for marriage based around egalitarianism between men and women but also wants a shared commitment to kids.
• Vicki Larson, co-author of The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists, and Rebels, suggests different types of marriages like starter marriage or parenting marriage but notes both men and still think of marriage in terms of women’s and men’s roles.
• Researchers K. R. Blaisure and K. R. Allen found in a study of female and male feminists that the women remained responsible for emotional intimacy, adapting their sexual desires to their husbands’, monitoring the relationship, and being as independent as possible without threatening their husbands' status.¹
• I wrote a book, A Marriage of Equals, hoping to provide a guide to how to de-gender marriage.²

Efforts to "fix" marriage fail to challenge the idea of assigned sex roles. Social constructs like "husband" and "wife" are the shared ideas or perceptions that exist because we accept them. Social constructs like adulthood, gender roles, and marriage do not have inherent meaning. They are cultural creations rather than biological dictates. The only meaning they have is the meaning we give them. Efforts to fix marriage do not work because they do not change the constructs "marriage," "husband," and "wife."

A Couple-Partnership Instead of Marriage

Marriage as an institution has provided several important social functions, such as:³

• The basis for establishing a family which includes children.
• Identification of the partners in the marriage as ‘husband’ and ‘wife.’
• Establishing the mutual rights and obligations of the couple.
• Vowing a commitment to each other.

Interestingly, your marriage vows provide for your spouse, not you. You take a vow “to love, to honor, to cherish, (to obey), to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for better for worse, until death do us part.” Divorce lawyer Forrest Bayard considers marriage an institution comprised of non-negotiable rules called vows. However, these "rules" do not tell you how your marriage will work. These vows do not tell us how to:

• Resolve differences
• Decide who is accountable for what in the marriage
• Talk about what is important for you to flourish
• Listen to and support your partner.

A couple-partnership can fulfill the important social functions of marriage without its rigid social roles. It can specify obligations to the children born to or adopted by the partners and outline ways that the interpersonal relationship between the partners can work.

Marriage Essential Reads

3 Signs That Your "Marriage Identity" Is Bulletproof

How Men and Women Find Fulfillment in Their Families

Rethinking the Interpersonal Relationship in a Couple-Partnership

Moving from “marriage” to “partnership” invites us to think about how the interpersonal relationship between “partners” can be designed. Instead of the structure of the designated role of husband and wife, we can now work to have a partnership of equals. The partners can now collaboratively negotiate what each wants out of life, i.e., their individual life goals. Partners can negotiate the never-ending issues in establishing an ongoing relationship. We can now have a partnership of equals. Negotiating collaboratively supports both partners in seeing themselves as individuals and as a couple. Responsibility and accountability are negotiated, not assigned by what your designated sex role is.

Negotiating collaboratively in your partnership is how to:

• Achieve individual and partnership goals
• Resolve differences equitably
• Manage conflicts
• Create and sustain a satisfying sex life
• Agree on what it means to be sexually faithful
• Agree on having and caring for children
• Agree on having or not having careers

Collaboratively negotiating how your couple-partnership can work versus adopting rigidly defined social roles of husband and wife may elicit different kinds of motivation.⁴ Negotiating one’s partnership responsibilities lends itself to what psychologists identify as intrinsic motivation, i.e., doing something because it is inherently valuable. In contrast, responsibilities that accrue to your role as husband or wife may function more like extrinsic motivation, doing something because it fulfills assigned duties.

Making the Couple-Partnership Legal

We now have civil unions⁴ or civil partnerships, legal agreements between two people with many of the same legal protections as marriage. However, these civil partnerships are recognized only by individual states rather than federal law. Nor do they necessarily include the obligations of the partners to their children.

Merle Weiner, a professor at the University of Oregon Law School, has proposed a “parent partnership” to address the current social situation that about 50% of births are to unwed couples. Weiner proposes concrete legal obligations that would arise automatically between parents upon the birth or adoption of a child.

As noted, a couple-partnership can fulfill the important social functions of marriage without its rigid social roles, specify obligations to the children born to or adopted by the partners, and outline ways that the interpersonal relationship between the partners can work. Establishing the legal obligations for the partners in a couple-partnership, including their parental commitments, will be necessary if this new construct is to replace the construct of marriage.