Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing (review)

This book, authored by four accomplished sociologists at Pennsylvania State University, makes very valuable additions to our understanding of continuity and change in marriage quality and marriage meaning. The central feature of the book is its utilization of two rich comparable cross-sectional surveys of married Americans – one conducted in 1980 and the other in 2000.

One thesis of the book is that couples had significantly less interaction together in 2000 than in 1980. This included less time eating the main meal of the day together, shopping, visiting friends, working on projects around the house and going out for recreation. This trend in marital interaction was paralleled by declines in the number of friends reported, the number of friends shared between spouses, and memberships in organizations.

Additional trends include declines in reported marital problems and conflict. No significant trends in mean levels were reported in marital happiness and divorce proneness. The authors also report that support of life-long marriage increased and the support for divorce declined from 1980 to 2000. The authors remind us that this trend pertains only to currently married people rather than to the entire U.S. population and is a departure from earlier trends. The book also provides an interesting chapter on the changing division of labor and authority within families.

The authors also study social and economic factors influencing marriage and examine which socioeconomic changes have been associated with the changes in marriage. The book accomplishes this goal by conducting sophisticated decompositions of the trends, while recognizing the difficulties associated with such efforts.

An important strength of the book is that it used many different measures of marriage. Nevertheless, the authors suggest that future research include additional measures of interpersonal behavior of spouses along the lines pioneered by John Gottman and colleagues (Gottman and Notarius 2000). The authors also advocate for the measurement of marital commitment, arguing that individuals have implicit theories about marriage, happiness, commitment and the relationships among them – with these implicit theories having relevance for marriage behavior and meaning. The authors' call for the measurement of such implicit theories especially intrigued me as it is consistent with my own argument that researchers should consider the theories that people in everyday life have about families, economic well-being, and their causal interconnections (Thornton 2005).

The authors' advocacy for additional indicators also made me wonder about other measures of marital interaction. The book's important finding of a decline in marital interactions from 1980 to 2000 is based on questions asking respondents how often they and their spouses jointly engage in different activities, with the response categories being never, occasionally, usually and almost always. It would be very useful to know if the authors' conclusions about declining marital interaction would be supported by trend data using time diaries or random beeper calls eliciting more accurate reports of activities and interpersonal associations.

The book's tight focus on the 1980-2000 period – a focus largely dictated by the data sources used – is a strength, but I would have found additional historical perspective to be useful. To be sure, the authors do utilize the framework of Ernest Burgess and colleagues, suggesting a long-term trend from institutional to companionate marriage, a trend the authors suggest has continued through the year 2000. Although I agree that many changes in marriage have occurred, I am less sanguine about the usefulness of the institution-to-companionate interpretive framework. As the authors acknowledge (pp. 14 and 244), marriage in the Western past had important companionate elements. Also, the institutional-companionate trend originally suggested by Burgess and colleagues (Burgess and Locke 1945, chapters 1 and 2) was based at least partially on the widespread practice among scholars of their era of representing family life in the Western past with data from societies outside the West, a practice that has led to many false understandings of the Western past (Thornton 2005). Of course, for their own analyses...