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71 Chapter 4 THE MARRIAGE GAP: HOW AND WHY MARRIAGE CREATES WEALTH AND BOOSTS THE WELL-BEING OF ADULTS MAGGIE GALLAGHER For understandable reasons, the marriage debate in this country has concentrated on the welfare of children. When mothers and fathers do not get and stay married, children are at increased risk for a whole host of problems and disorders: mental and physical illness, crime and delinquency, school failure, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy. Two decades of research has made clear that, as more than a hundred scholars and community leaders who signed a document titled “The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles” in the summer of 2000 put it, “Children do better, on average, when they are raised by their own two married parents” (Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education et al. 2000, 10). However, there is another case for marriage that is less well known. The evidence has been quietly building for decades that marriage is also a powerful creator and sustainer of adult well-being. Our book, The Case for Marriage (Waite and Gallagher 2000) reviews the vast scholarly literature on the relationship between marriage and adults’ health, longevity, happiness, and financial success. The weight of evidence strongly points to marriage as a powerful generator and sustainer of adult human and social capital, arguably one as important as education in building the wealth and welfare of adults and communities. Yet because marriage is increasingly being privatized in our society—conceptually reduced to an emotional relationship between two individuals, of little concern to anybody else except (possibly ) their own children—the wealth that marriage produces is being very unequally distributed in our communities. In a culture in which marriage is viewed as just a private relationship, the vast benefits of marriage will be (and are) increasingly flowing to the 72 BLACK FATHERS IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SOCIETY already advantaged: those who are white, well-educated, higherincome , and whose parents got married and stayed married. As M. Belinda Tucker (2000) has noted, “African Americans marry later, are about twice as likely to divorce, and are less likely to marry ever, yet Blacks’ views of the importance of marriage are similar to those held by members of other ethnic groups” (see also Bachrach, Hindin, and Thomson 2000). By age thirty, 80 percent of white women, but only 45 percent of black women, have married. Meanwhile, in 1995, 32 percent of the marriages of wives who are high school graduates had ended by the ten-year mark, compared to 18 percent of the marriages of college-educated wives (Abma et al. 1997, table 36). Marriage is, to put it crudely, in itself a form of wealth. The unequal distribution of marriage in different communities feeds not only moral and spiritual distress but also pervasive inequalities in material health, wealth, and well-being among adults as well as children. This is the case for marriage that has not yet been heard. It is of special interest for African American fathers and for those who care about building human and social capital in African American and other less-advantaged communities. For years social scientists toiling in their own fields have amassed powerful evidence of the benefits of marriage for adults. Labor economists researched the marriage premium for men; health researchers looked at the effect of marital status on illness; demographers calculated the longer life spans of the married; economists looked at wealth acquisition; research psychologists documented the better emotional and mental health of the married ; and sexologists, at long last, created nationally representative studies of sexual behavior that also confirmed a powerful marital advantage. But few scholars have crossed disciplines to pull together this broad and deep body of evidence. What do we know about how much marriage matters for adults? Let’s begin with a topic of overwhelming interest in our aging society : long life and good health. Here the advantages of married life are truly astonishing. For example, Lee Lillard and Linda Waite (1995) looked at a large, nationally representative database to see how marriage , divorce, and remarriage affect men and women’s mortality rates. How big a difference did marriage make? Put it this way: take twenty middle-aged men (forty-eight years old). Make them as alike as social scientists know how in terms of race, income, education, and health history, except that half are married and half are not. What are the chances these two men will make it to age sixty-five? The [18...

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