‘Harvard Thinking’: Is marriage worth saving?

Debora Spar: We desperately need to restore community and restore physical institutions and organizations. That alone won’t save marriage. But I think it will take the burden off. Because it is absurd if you think about it, that one single person, even the most wonderful person in the world, can be your lover, your soulmate, your co-parent, forever.

Samantha Laine Perfas: Just as society has changed, so has marriage, including the problems and rewards that come with it. Research suggests its benefits show up in your physical and mental health, but it might not seem like it when you’re buried in the second job of managing a household. With greater social acceptance of a variety of lifestyle choices, many people, especially young women, are thinking twice before tying the knot. Should you?

Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today we’re joined by:

Spar: Debora Spar. I’m a professor at the Harvard Business School.

Laine Perfas: She’s written a number of books that look at the interplay between technological change and relationships, including marriage. Then:

Richard Schwartz: Richard Schwartz. I’m an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Laine Perfas: He studies marriage with his wife, Jacqueline Olds, who is also a psychiatrist at the Medical School. They’ve written about both marriage and loneliness. And finally:

Eve Rodsky: Eve Rodsky. I’m the New York Times bestselling author of “Fair Play.”

Laine Perfas: She’s also a graduate of Harvard Law School, class of 2002. And I’m your host, Samantha Laine Perfas. I’m a writer for The Harvard Gazette. Today, we’re going to talk about marriage and whether the challenges are worth the benefits.

Historically, what role did marriage play in society?

Spar: Well, it’s always very harsh to say this, but marriage as we know it actually emerged as a real estate transaction. If you go way back in time, our early ancestors didn’t marry at all. They lived in tribes and children were sort of raised communally, and it was only with the advent of the agricultural society that marriage became necessary. It was a way of ensuring that property was maintained between generations. It was a way, way before DNA testing, for men to know who their children were, which became important once you invested in property and farming and land. And so marriage emerged as a way of creating these family bonds that would enable property to be maintained and society to be stabilized. And I always hate to say this because I feel like the rat at the party, but if you go to most marriage ceremonies, even today, across religions, you can hear the echoes of the real estate transaction: that the father gives the daughter away, promising that she will remain faithful to one other human being for the rest of her life as long as they both shall live — which as my students are fond of reminding, me is a very long-term contract — and with the promise that they will be fruitful and multiply, which we now hear as romantic. But back then, being fruitful and multiplying was the way of creating labor, which was, along with land, the most valuable commodity. So, sorry to be anti-romantic, but marriage really has a history as an economic transaction.

Rodsky: Up until the third wave of feminism, marriage was assumed to be a man and a woman, and that man would protect and provide for that woman in exchange for that woman doing all of the unpaid labor to allow him to do that. But then as we rose in the third wave of feminism, where we were told that women were getting all of these gains in the workplace —  so I’d say up until today, the way I look at marriage is, well, that social contract needs to be completely rewritten. Because the fourth wave of feminism is not about getting women gains in the workplace; it’s about having men make gains in the home. Otherwise, that social contract to me is completely dead. We’re sort of a downer, Debora and me.

Schwartz: I don’t know if this is cheering things up anymore, but I just add that Debora is describing how marriage begins as basically a land and property arrangement. You extend it, and it becomes a division of labor for the sake of the family-unit arrangement, and those are the primary roles it plays. It seems to me that it has also traditionally played two more roles. One is essentially to corral sexual activity into a defined space where it doesn’t interfere with and get in the way of other kinds of relationships that are important for the functioning of the community. And the other thing that it does, of course, is to stabilize raising children. And I think that was an equally important role that it has played.

Laine Perfas: I am not going to lie, I did not anticipate that our episode on marriage would start on such a depressing note. But marriage has clearly evolved since its inception, same-sex marriage being one obvious example. What other ways has it shifted?

Spar: It’s gone through many evolutions, some more subtle than others. But if we take the initial piece as this real estate deal, it was really around the industrial revolution when the farming economy begins to decrease in importance that this idea of companionate marriage or romantic marriage becomes much more prominent. So it’s not our generation that discovered the idea of romance and love in marriage. It’s been around for a long time. And of course, to be less depressing, love’s been around for a really long time. It just wasn’t necessarily connected with marriage. We start to see this idea in the late 19th century, maybe even a little earlier, that love and marriage do in fact go together. I think what we’ve seen most recently, though, is that the other economic reasons and societal reasons for marriage have more or less gone away. A man doesn’t have to be married to have sex. A woman doesn’t have to be married to have sex. Men and women don’t have to be married to have children, because we’ve had the advance of reproductive technologies and the decrease in stigma around single parenthood. So I actually see this as rather a beautiful trend because now the only reason to be married is because you love someone. We don’t need it anymore. Which in many ways, I think, contributes to the decline in marriage because certainly many people, and increasingly women, are saying, if I don’t need to be married, why bother? But there’s still an awful lot of people saying, I don’t need to be married, but I really love this person and I do want to spend the rest of my life with him or her.

Laine Perfas: Let’s unpack that statement: Why bother? There have been many studies out there that show marriage does have benefits. It benefits individuals, it benefits communities, it benefits children. Could one of you talk a little bit about those benefits?

Schwartz: There have been a whole group of studies that have suggested that marriage has benefits in three main areas. One is in health, one is in happiness, and one is in how children do over time. Children raised by two parents do better academically, do better economically. Boys are less likely to end up in prison. Girls are less likely to end up depressed. And most of those studies have held up, although there’s now increasing debate about how it looks. It is clear that the health benefits for men are greater than they are for women. There are recent studies that suggest that maybe the happiness benefits are also greater for men than women. It’s hard to judge that when a new study comes out, that seems different from the historical ones that have shown that women benefit in happiness from marriage. And now there’s a new one that suggests maybe that’s not really true. Hard to know if that’s things changing, if that’s just difficulty in methodology with one study or another. We just have to wait and see on that.

Rodsky: I think what Richard said is very true. We are seeing that the benefits of marriage really do accrue to men — and back to Debora’s romantic love, I’ll just tell you a quick story. I was with nine women, Oscar-winning producer, the head of a stroke and trauma unit at a big hospital. There were 10 of us at this breast cancer march. This was 2011. We were there to honor a friend who had been recently diagnosed, and it was a beautiful morning. We were all covered in pink carrying signs that said things like “not just a women’s problem.” But then around noon, Sam, everyone started looking at their phones and everyone looked desperate to get out of there. We were supposed to go to lunch. And every one of those women married to a man were looking at texts from their partners with things like, “Where did you put Hudson’s soccer bag?” … “If you want me to go to the birthday party, did you leave me a gift?” … “I can’t take the baby to the park because you didn’t leave me any clean diapers.” My favorite was my friend Kate, the one who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Her husband at noon texted her, “Do the kids need to eat lunch?” And so what I want to say about that day, because I write about it in my first book, “Fair Play,” all those strong women said to me, “I left my partner with too much to do.” Before we left, I asked those women to count up how many phone calls and texts we’d received. We had 30 phone calls and 46 texts for 10 women over 30 minutes. That’s the cost of marriage. Romantic love is pretty much unpaid labor unless you do some serious work at the beginning of your marriage. I think that a lot of women are saying, “What’s in it for me?”

I would say that what Richard said is right: We are actually not sure what the benefits are to women anymore. I think until we rewrite the social contract, it’s going to be really hard to sell the benefits of marriage to women.

Spar: Let me push back a little bit. Going back to what Richard said, it’s almost incontrovertible that marriage is good for children. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a legal marriage. It doesn’t have to be a heterosexual marriage, but as Eve’s talking about, raising kids is hard. It’s really hard. It does take a village, it takes a tribe, it takes cousins and grandparents. And part of the societal problem we’re living with is we’ve all moved away from our birth families. And we know fertility numbers are shrinking, so the village is disappearing, which puts all of the pressure on the marriage, on two feeble, fragile people to raise a child. As Marx and Engels pointed out many years ago, the original division of labor was within the family. And the math is pretty straightforward. If you have two parents, one can be the income earner and one can be the housekeeper. It works. It’s not fun for those, you know —  it’s historically been women who have been stuck with the housework, but the math works. What’s happened in the past 50, 70 years is women have — and God knows, I’m a beneficiary of this — decided, I don’t want to just be changing diapers. I want a job, I want a life, I want friends. I want to go to marches and walks and all these things. The problem is we didn’t find anyone else to take over the housework. And so we’ve created a problem, and this isn’t to get the lazy husbands off the hook. It’s, as I’m fond of saying, it’s a math problem. We don’t have another set of hands to take care of the labor that women are no longer willing to do by themselves. And the last thing I’ll say is, women, for better and worse, have come up with multiple identities since feminism. We can be working moms and we can be single mothers, and we have a range of identities. Men are still largely defined by their role as economic breadwinners. It’s not only that we need to rearrange women’s roles. We need to rearrange men’s roles as well. And we need perhaps to come up with a new version of the nuclear family because the math doesn’t work once women go to work.

Rodsky: Amen. That is right.

Schwartz: I think that’s an incredibly important point. Years ago, my wife and I did a small study of the effect of different work and homemaking responsibilities among men and women with young children. And one of the things that turned up that we didn’t expect and had nothing to do with what we were actually looking at is all the men in this sample had children under 5. And one of the things that they described is that they all wanted to be more involved with their children than their fathers had been with them. And they wanted to be just as involved and committed to work as men have always needed to be. And they couldn’t fit everything in, and something had to give. And what gave for almost all of them was friendships, and they basically fell out of connection with their friends over a long period of time. That speaks to the problem that men have in trying to maintain the work role that they’ve always had while somehow adding something else into it. And you can’t do that without cutting something else out.

Laine Perfas: It is meaningful to see the current generation of fathers not having a model and still trying to figure it out anyway, and it’s messy. But one of the things that I saw — I think it was a few years ago — this study came out, it was looking at the division of labor in the house, but then also the perception of that division of labor. And women tend to take on about two-thirds of the workload at home, but men perceive that they are doing it equally, which as you can imagine is incredibly infuriating for both parties. What’s going on there? Why is there that gap in perception?

Rodsky: This is what I study and I will say that what we did with “Fair Play” is we created a system so that perception would be equalized, because there is a perception gap. But there’s a perception gap because, as Arlene Kaplan Daniels — she was a sociologist — in 1987, she said that the work of the home was invisible. So in our studies, we started to ask couples, hetero, cisgender couples especially, who does what in the home? Who handles groceries, who handles middle-of-the-night comfort? Who handles transporting your kids to school? Who handles medical and healthy living? And the answer was, we both do. But the problem with that data was that men were overreporting, women were underreporting. So we changed the question. The question that broke open the data was, instead of asking who handles X, it was, How does mustard get in your refrigerator? Because I could ask that in 27 countries. And the beauty of that question was that we saw that women — even in the Nordic countries where we think that we’re doing it better because there are policies to support marriage — women were the ones who said to me, “I’m the ones who notices that our pediatrician said our son is iron deficient, and that he needs mustard on his protein so that he can get more iron.” In the workplace, we call that conception. And then women were the ones saying that they monitored the mustard for when it ran low, and they got stakeholder buy-in for what that family needed for the grocery list. That’s planning. And then men were involved, but they were going to the store to buy the mustard that Johnny needed. But Richard, you’re bringing home spicy Dijon every time, and I asked you for yellow, and then the presenting problem is not the real problem, right? It’s not about the mustard, or as Debora said, about whether or not somebody is asking, “Do the kids need to eat lunch?” This is about the thing that marriage needs, a home-organization needs, that has been eroding since I’ve been doing this work for 10 years. Women say to me, “I’m not going to trust my husband with my living will because Richard can’t even bring home the right type of mustard.” And then women start to say to themselves, “In the time it would take me to tell him what to do, I should do it myself.” And we start to get into this race to the bottom in marriage. And then what happens to the person who’s just executing and not doing cognitive labor is that they lose psychological safety in that home organization. Men are saying to me, “I’m never going to do anything again in the home because I can’t get anything right.” In 10 years of doing this work, every single divorce that we’ve found, every person we’ve talked about, always has division of labor as part of their story. And so that to me is the crux of the issue.

Schwartz: I think it’s interesting that when you talk about making the invisible work visible, you mentioned the cognitive labor. That’s very hard to make visible, but an important part of the picture: I do my share of the cooking and shopping, but what I don’t do my share of is the meal-planning, of knowing what we’re going to do. And that is a big part of the job that is hard to make visible.

Spar: I’ll throw just one more source of blame here, and there’s data to back this up. One of the things that’s also happened is we’ve sort of raised the bar on homemaking. When I was a kid, for Halloween, you went to the drugstore, you bought a mask and you put it on. Now women are somehow supposed to macrame these elaborate chipmunk costumes for their kids. I mean, it’s nuts.

Laine Perfas: And then come Halloween, your kid won’t put the costume on anyway.

Spar: Exactly! And yet, rather than doing the logical thing —  if I want to have kids and to have a job, which let’s be honest, is a choice for both women and men — if you want to make that choice, then something’s got to give. And yet, rather than normalizing a more minimal version of housekeeping, we’ve actually upped the ante in insane ways. Our houses are too big. We have too many cars. Our yards are too big. So there’s a series of societal decisions that we should at least be aware of.

Schwartz: And I would extend that to child-rearing. One of the most surprising statistics these days is that parents who are both also working are spending more time supervising their children and transporting their children than combined parents did in the days when one parent was just a home worker and just alone with the kids. That obviously is untenable. I think it also has something to do with what Debora was talking about earlier, the falling away of the larger community taking care of children so that it all has to be done by parents.

Laine Perfas: It almost seems like we’ve fallen into the trap of just, more is better. And yes, as a parent of two young children — I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old — it is hard. And somehow, no matter how much you do — and I am blessed to have a really great co-parent in my husband — and even then we still fall into, “Well, I thought you were … I need space.” “No, I need space …” It’s just, kids are tough, man. That’s the reality.

Spar: I am sorry, Sam, you haven’t even hit the worst part yet.

Laine Perfas: Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me that!

Spar: Don’t worry, it only lasts another 25 years and then you’re good.

Laine Perfas: I was thinking about marriage. Back to our pre-kids days. So take kids out of it. I was thinking about how, when we talk about marriage, the language we use: You need to find the one. You need to find someone with whom you have perfect sexual chemistry. You need to find someone who’s going to be a teammate, a partner, who’s also hilarious and going to make you laugh. And I’m wondering if our expectations are just too high?

Schwartz: The way you asked the question, I think, answers it as well: Yes.

Spar: There’s some realization that we’ve lost community. That Bob Putnam was completely right when he wrote “Bowling Alone” many decades ago. And Richard, you mentioned this with men, but it’s very true, I think, for women as well. We put all of the burden on the nuclear family. We don’t have the friends, the cousins, the bowling leagues, the Elks groups, which helped with these chores. And my great fear about the moment we’re in technologically, just putting marriage aside, is that we’re retreating more and more into an individual focus. People are living their lives by themselves on their phones, and we desperately need to restore community and restore physical institutions and organizations. That alone won’t save marriage, but again, to your point, Sam, I think it will take the burden off. Because it is absurd if you think about it, that one single person, even the most wonderful person in the world, can be your lover, your soulmate, your co-parent, forever. We have to rearrange those expectations — and that doesn’t mean lowering them, it just means shifting them and allocating the burden to some of the other pieces of society.

Schwartz: The ability to do things that you couldn’t do before. You mentioned that a woman can support herself alone, can have a house, an apartment alone. There’s no need to have anybody else involved in it. It’s wonderful to have that freedom, but those choices don’t always lead you to a better place. One of the most amazing demographic shifts over the last century is that the number of households that consist of one person living alone has risen every census over 100 years, which has brought us to a point where I think people are doing that because they’re able to and couldn’t in the past, but doing what they’re able to do has ended up with people much more lonely, disconnected, and unhappy than they would be without making the choice that they want to make.

Laine Perfas: With marriage and birth rates declining, there have been political efforts to encourage people to get married and have kids, or if they already have kids, to have more kids. Should marriage be incentivized?

Rodsky: I think there should be incentives to encourage marriage. There should be incentives. When it works, it’s a great transaction. People are richer. People do have good health outcomes for it. There should be incentives — not the incentives of — not getting rid of no-fault divorce and ways to force people to stay into marriage. But I think tax incentives, childcare incentives, free childcare. I mean, this gets back to what we were saying earlier. It’s too hard to do alone. But the problem is it’s not going to be solved by your PTA, and unfortunately, it’s not going to be solved by your church. The only way it’s going to be solved is by government policies. We have to give people access to more affordable childcare. We have to give people access to ways for them to be able to sustain a family. Affordable housing. Better schools, right? So if we start to reimagine our social contract, actually it would be taking away a lot of the economic scholarship of the ’80s and the ’90s, which is the scholarship that showed that the government is your enemy. So I do say that, yes, more than just tax incentives, we have to start encouraging our government and forcing our government to deal with the affordability crisis in this country, and especially childcare.

Laine Perfas: What tools do you see being beneficial for people to work on changing their marriage into the marriage they want it to be, one that is fulfilling and beneficial for both parties?

Rodsky: I think this is the biggest irony about the expectations, that the three most toxic words that I’ve heard about marriage keep coming up over and over again. When I ask people, how are you going to handle the division of labor in your home, how you can handle all these challenges, almost every single couple that I’ve interviewed over a decade has said, “We’re going to figure it out.” “Figure it out” is a terrible way to enter any sort of social contract. First off, our home is our most important organization. Couples who believe that do really well because they understand that organization, to succeed, needs three things. It needs boundaries, which means, as Richard said, we get time to shut our identities off as a parent, partner, professional, and have those friends, have other experiences that are not just our caretaking responsibilities. We need systems. And we need communication. Now, one of the funniest conversations I had was with this huge systems engineer of this big tech company who is a great dad. And we were talking, and he told me that in their home, their biggest fight is that they wait to decide who’s taking the dog out every single night before it’s about to take a pee on the rug. That is the opposite of the systems that he’s designing. But I think people are so afraid of coming to the table to say, “We need to practice systems; we need to practice boundaries; and especially we need to practice communication.” We did one survey of 1,000 people on social media: What is your most important practice? Some people didn’t understand the question. Some people said religious practices. Some people said meditation. Not one of the thousand people in our survey said communication is their most important practice. And what I’m here to say is that we’ve seen over 10 years of our data that when people practice communication when emotion is low and cognition is high, and really sit for those check-ins, like they would a staff meeting, like they would any other transactional relationship where they sit and invest in communication, that those relationships do a lot better.

Spar: I would just add lower expectations, by which I mean, don’t settle, but going back to what you had mentioned earlier, Sam, trying to understand that this person isn’t going to be the be-all and the end-all for everything for the rest of your life. Try to maintain other people in your life. It’s hard to maintain friendships when you’re in the crazy years of marriage and young kids. Try to maintain those friendships. Try to do the girls’ nights out, the boys’ baseball games, whatever. And try, going back to what I said earlier, try to get rid of the stuff that’s not critical. One of the lightbulb moments for me was when I came home at the end of the day, I was racing around, I was throwing dinner on the table because I had to get out to the PTA meeting. And my son said, indignant at the ripe old age of 7, “Why are you going to the PTA meeting?” And I yelled back, “Because this is for you, this is for your school.” He said, “I don’t care if you go to the meeting.” And it was a lightbulb moment. I thought I was doing something for him, but I wasn’t. He wanted me to stay home and read him a book. And I realized, my hack became, volunteer for cleanup duty. Because I did, I wanted to participate in my kids’ community, but they didn’t really need me at the three-hour PTA meeting. They needed me to clean up the trash after whatever events. And so I was No. 1 trash collector. But it was efficient, and it enabled me to contribute while spending more time with the more important stuff at home. So, outsource whatever you can. Let somebody else do the stuff that they can do. And try to minimize. Cut the corners in ways that matter.

Laine Perfas: What advice do you have for the folks listening who find themselves in a marriage that’s not quite where they want it to be, and perhaps the marriage skeptics out there? What might they consider as they think about whether or not to tie the knot with someone?

Spar: Don’t give up on love. But realize love, like anything else of importance, involves hard work. And don’t sign up for anything, whether it be marriage or children or a job, unless you’re willing to commit and do the work, and be as honest about it as you possibly can be.

Schwartz: For the people in marriage who are questioning whether or not to leave it, there was a wonderful letter from a divorce lawyer, I think, in the Boston Globe many years ago that said, “It’s my business to help you through divorce, but before you do this, think about your life and think about how much in your life is actually dependent on your marriage and how much of it you’ll lose if you leave that. Because everything will be different, and you should appreciate that first.” And I thought that was incredibly useful advice to give.

Rodsky: And what would I say for those marriage skeptics? So what I’d say for them is that there’s ways to practice marriage before you enter the social contract. I say to my son, he’s 17 years old, right? You can start practicing marriage by understanding how much emotional labor the men do around you. There are ways to practice. There’s ways to ask questions. Girls will say to me, how do I know if I want to date this person? I say, you can start to look and see what type of thoughtful person that is. You can see the patterns earlier. You can ask, “What was the last best gift you gave?” If someone says, “Oh, I don’t know, my mom helps me with all that,” or “I’ve never given gifts,” or “Those aren’t important to me.” Or someone who says, as my son just said to me about my 8-year-old daughter, she wants a Labubu, but there’s a new Labubu out there that he wants, and he has to get online and search at Pop Mart to make sure that Labubu is there — that type of emotional labor, investment in relationships, you can see earlier. What I’m saying is, there’s lots of beautiful signs out there of people who are committed to the unpaid labor, to the emotional labor of relationships, who you see are there for their parents and their grandparents. What I would say is, look for those people. There are good ones out there. And you can practice spotting these patterns before you enter the social contract of marriage.

Laine Perfas: Thank you all for this great conversation.

Schwartz: Thank you.

Rodsky: Thank you.

Spar: It’s been a great pleasure. Thanks.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. To find a transcript of this episode and all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. And if you like this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Every review helps others find us. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Paul Makishima, and Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2026.