Wide Open: The New Marriage

What About The Kids?

It’s only reasonable to wonder about the ultimate effect of these new styles of marriage on the offspring of those marriages. A great many questions present themselves. Is it good or bad to grow up with a father and two mothers? What happens when children find out that their parents are swingers? Or should the fact be kept from them in the first place?

In almost all instances, persons enthusiastic about their particular form of marriage will argue that their children will be at worst unaffected, at best favorably affected, by the manner in which they have structured their particular relationship. And in almost all instances I suspect that they are less free from anxiety on this point than they prefer to let on — whether to me, to each other, or to themselves. No previous generation has recognized as thoroughly as the present one the extent to which family relationships influence the development of personality. The importance of providing the best possible atmosphere for children is a serious concern of every responsible parent, and even in the most conventional household one finds parents anxious that they may not be doing the right thing. Because no one seems to know what the right thing might be, and everyone can point to children from seemingly ideal backgrounds who have become criminals, drug addicts, psychotics, or whatever. Given this combination of great concern and great uncertainty, one can hardly expect parents with radical life styles to be supremely confident.

It would be easy enough to cite a variety of cases showing how children from an unconventional marriage turned out badly, and demonstrating inferentially how the structure of the parental marriage might be blamed for the results. It would be no more difficult to do the opposite, holding up presumably well-adjusted children and crediting their soundness to the honesty and courage their parents have shown in marching to a different drummer. Finally, I could present examples to prove both sides, which would make me appear either a man of balanced judgment or a wishy-washy milksop, as you prefer.

Instead, I’m going to pass on the question.

I think it’s unanswerable at the present time, on a par with inquiring into the possible long-term effects of a drug that came onto the market only a year ago.

I suspect that the idealism inherent in a large portion of permissive marriages and plural marriages could have a very beneficial effect upon children, if only because the heightened importance attached to making the marriage itself a vital and honest relationship would likely carry over into the performance of parental functions. I also suspect that the lack of stability of so many of these marriages could have a distinctly bad effect. Children might grow up proud of their parents’ hipness and refusal to conform to societal norms; on the other hand, they might yearn to have been raised Like All the Other Kids.

There are certain childhood experiences which are readily associated with specific behavior patterns in adult life. As one example, sexual seduction by the father or a father figure before puberty is a background element in the history of a significant number of prostitutes, to the point where some sort of causal relationship is considered to exist. But, just as one need not have gone through this experience in order to become a prostitute, neither do all girls thus seduced wind up as prostitutes. Indeed, some actually wind up with no visible emotional scars whatsoever.

Another argument against trying to estimate the effects of unconventional marriage on children is that we do not yet know just how unconventional these relationships will seem a few years from now. Some swingers recently brushed aside the question with the suggestion that, by the time their children are old enough to know what’s happening, swinging will be accepted throughout society as normal and legitimate. This sounds like overstatement, but any examination of current social trends leads to the supposition that social attitudes will continue to increase in permissiveness for some time to come.

Some other thoughts on children might not be out of place here. Even as the structure of marriage is increasingly being altered, so is the relationship of marriage and child-raising coming to a point where it is no longer to be taken for granted.

Until very recently, the intentionally childless marriage was an unusual occurrence. And, until about as recently, it was virtually unheard of for a person to intentionally conceive and raise a child out of wedlock.

Admittedly, there has been no mass movement in the opposite direction. The great majority of couples who marry do so with the eventual plan of raising children. The great majority of single women continue to find the prospect of unmarried motherhood unattractive. But departures from both of these norms are being actively considered by a significant number of people, and actually undertaken by some of them.

Similar factors are responsible for both phenomena. The most obvious one is the extent to which childbirth has become voluntary. Improved contraceptive techniques, opportunities for sterilization, and the increasing availability and moral acceptability of abortion have made parenthood far more a matter of choice than it has ever been in the past.

Ecological considerations have lately led more and more people to view the childless marriage as not only possible but morally preferable. While the more vocal advocates of Zero Population Growth, like the loudest spokesmen for most causes, impress most people as monomaniacal and unrealistic. Young married couples are not often inclined to dismiss all of their arguments out of hand. I’m sure only a handful of couples fervently desire to reproduce themselves and deny themselves this satisfaction out of consideration for the planet’s welfare. But couples who would prefer not to have children anyway find it far easier to act on this preference. Not long ago a couple who remained intentionally childless was apt to be regarded as selfish for refusing to play their biological roles, even sinful for ignoring the divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply. Now the same couple is more likely to be considered selfless for subordinating their desires to the good of the world in general. Social pressures which might have made them act against their own deepest wishes no longer have much force.

It may seem paradoxical that single women are electing to have children at the same time that married women are electing not to. Again, the element of choice plays a part. The single woman who realizes her freedom to avoid conception or to abort an unintentionally conceived fetus realizes in turn her freedom not to avoid motherhood. I know two girls who had had several illegal abortions between them prior to the legalization of abortion in New York State; both found themselves pregnant again shortly after the change in the law, and both elected to have the children, a step neither had seriously considered before.

The alternative of abortion has the additional property of reducing the number of marriages which result from undesired pregnancies. A man is less likely to marry a woman out of a sense of noblesse oblige if he knows that she can easily and safely terminate the pregnancy. Here a young woman describes the thought processes involved in her decision to keep her child:

“He wasn’t interested in marriage, and I didn’t feel I could pressure him into it, or that it would be desirable to marry a man who didn’t want to marry me. And I had always thought abortion was all right, and I still think it’s morally right for other people, but I found that it was not something I could go through with. The same feeling of responsibility that kept me from having an abortion made it impossible for me to put the baby up for adoption. And when I had her, and she was so beautiful, I cried with joy knowing I had made the right decision.”

JWW: The prospect of raising a child in a fatherless home holds less dread than it did. The public example of several women in the entertainment industry is often cited as contributing to a change in attitudes. I don’t doubt this has an effect, but even more influential is the example of the many women who have borne children in wedlock and raised them much as unmarried mothers do.

“My first reaction was, how can I support myself and take care of a child at the same time, because I would have to work and like that. Then I thought about all the women I know who are mothers holding down full-time jobs. It doesn’t really matter if they’re married or not. It comes down to the same thing — they have to make arrangements for daycare. You don’t need a husband to do that. There are all these working wives, and there are all these divorced women who have no choice because they’re not getting child support, and there are widows, and it should be easier for them, there should be public daycare centers, but they don’t have that hard a time of it. Any married woman who works will tell you she does it because she wants to. So I thought it out, and I figured what’s the difference between a working wife and a working divorcée and a working unmarried mother in terms of the hassle involved, and I couldn’t see any difference. And I liked the idea of having a child, so why not just have it?”

JWW: These are negative decisions — the decision not to have an abortion, not to give a child up for adoption. They are decisions undertaken after the fact of unwanted pregnancy is confirmed. Most single women who decide to have children make that decision under such circumstances. Some may unconsciously choose to be pregnant by being lax in contraceptive procedure — one can always play with that type of hypothesis, and I’m sure it’s sometimes valid — but on a conscious level the decision is made after conception, not before it.

But in a small proportion of cases, conception is purposefully undertaken by women who come to the rational conclusion that (a) they do not want to be married and (b) they do want to experience motherhood. Here’s a good articulation of this motive:

“I knew I didn’t want to get married again. I was married and divorced, and maybe I would be ready to get married someday, but for the time being it was not what I wanted. And I was getting close to thirty, and I don’t think it’s good to become a mother too much after that, and the desire for a child was pressuring me to seek marriage, which at the same time I knew I could not handle. I was very calculating. I went through the men I knew and picked the one I thought was most suitable from a genetic standpoint. Maybe it wasn’t that scientific. Let’s say I picked him because I thought I would most want to have children that were like him.

“He was a man I had slept with a couple of times, and I thought of just starting an affair with him and not letting him know I was getting pregnant, but I rejected that. I felt the dishonesty would ultimately have detrimental effects to me and to the baby. So I went to him and told him what I wanted.

“He was stunned, but he managed to be cool about it. He said he wanted to think about it. A few days later he told me he felt enormously honored, it was a tremendous ego thing for him, and he felt he could get pleasure out of fatherhood without participating in the bringing up of the kid. But he also felt he would feel a responsibility, and yet he didn’t want to take on a financial burden. We decided that he would not give me any money for the baby’s support but that he would carry two insurance policies, one that would cover the child’s college education whether he lived or died, the other to pay a large sum to me in trust for the child in the event of his death. His argument was that he wanted to guarantee the kid’s education, and he also wanted to guarantee his ability to provide help in emergency circumstances. In other words, I was to feel free to go to him in time of stress for help, and the second policy was to make sure that he could render this help from the grave if he happened to die.

“I expect that I may decide to marry at some future time. I recognized this possibility when I decided to do all of this. If any husband would be turned off by the fact that I have a child, he’s a man I wouldn’t want to be married to anyway. And whatever happens, I’m leading a life I find fulfilling, and find myself less hung up about being single than I was before the baby was born.”

JWW: A man will less often decide to father a child out of wedlock, if only because he feels the decision is not his to make. I think it’s a biological imperative that men will display a more cavalier attitude here. There’s a pop poster of a man with an enlarged abdomen and the caption, “Wouldn’t you be more careful if it was you who got pregnant?” The poster is designed to stress the male’s responsibility for birth control, but to my mind it defeats its own purpose by virtue of its inherent truth. Yes, to be sure, men would be more careful if they bore the burden of pregnancy, but men don’t get pregnant, and probably never will, and thus will never be quite so intimately concerned as women always will.

There are cases of single men who elect to raise their children themselves. Lately single men and single women have begun to adopt children, and this trend is one which I believe is likely to increase dramatically. There is a disconcerting division in the area of adoption; “ideal” babies are in chronic short supply, while less ideal prospects for adoption — biracial children, children more than a few months old, et al. — are so excessively available as to be a drug on the market. Public and private adoption agencies are coming to realize that their standards must be revised if they are to comply with laws of supply and demand, and persons who heretofore assumed adoption was closed to them are coming to realize their potential for fatherhood or motherhood.

There are instances, too, where a male will accept fatherhood after an involuntary pregnancy, or seek it actively. I am personally acquainted with both types of incidents. One man I know impregnated a girl with whom he had a casual acquaintance, found the prospect of abortion personally insupportable, and persuaded the girl to marry him (so that his legal rights to the child would be defined), then obtain an immediate annulment and leave him to raise the child. His daughter is now three years old, and he has contended with the problem of raising her in a motherless home, and if he has ever regretted his decision, he has kept that regret a secret.

Another friend, in the course of an extramarital affair, found that he desired to have a child by his mistress. He had already had three children with his wife, and enjoyed paternity. His mistress rejected the idea at first, accepted it on reflection, and has since given birth to the child. He sees the infant regularly and contributes substantially to its support. His wife is unaware of the circumstances.

JWW: We could go on this way, but I think the point is clear enough. Changes in our concepts of marriage are being echoed in a variety of ways by changes in our concepts of parenthood.

Which should not be surprising. The French have assured us that the more things change, the more they remain the same. This has almost always been true. Yet I am nearly persuaded to believe that there are times when the old maxim does not apply, times when, the more things change, the more they change. We are living through precisely such a time, and I cannot believe that the substantive changes in every stratum of society will not amount to a genuine change in the nature of the human life experience.

Ah, but let’s not get into that. Let’s leave this book as what it set out to be, a discussion of the changes in marital relationships. Let’s get off the stage before it turns into a heavy rap on the several ways in which the world is coming to an end — or coming to a beginning.