Crestwood, a town in St. Louis County, has changed its definition of “family” to include unmarried couples and their children. The change was made at the request of housing advocates to fit the new reality. Before the change, public housing units there were restricted to two or more people related by blood, marriage or adoption. Many of to-day’s households don’t fit those specifications.
Crestwood officials reasonably decided that it wasn’t up to them to decide how people decide to pair up and multiply.
Their decision brought to mind a conversation with my grandson, Tim Stauffer, who is serving with the Peace Corps in El Salvador. Tim lives with a peasant family in the countryside which scrapes together a Spartan existence through hand labor farming, as do most who live in the village he serves.
The topic turned to the formation of families and Tim said young men and women there rarely married. They met, discovered they liked each other, moved in together and had babies.
Considering that El Salvador is predominantly Catholic, as are all of the countries of Central and South America, that bit of social news was surprising.
Tim explained that getting married costs money. Besides, it wasn’t considered necessary and the local priests did not discriminate against the informal family formations.
SURELY sociologists by now have done elaborate studies of informal family formation in the U.S. and produced scholarly explanations of today’s living-together scene, which is by no means limited to the young.
Sometime within the last 30 years or so, it became acceptable for older men and women to pair off after their re-spective spouses died or moved away. Marriage was deliberately avoided in some cases for income and estate reasons. Others just didn’t get around to it when their friendships developed into mutual dependency and became a marriage, in fact if not in law.
Some young couples I know moved into intimacy in their teens, stayed together through college, but haven’t married for an unarticulated combination of reasons that include an unwillingness to comply and a firm conviction that marriage would add nothing to their sense of stability and commitment.
What do these new morals and mores portend for American society? When it comes to the happiness level between couples, very little. To-day’s young couples in Kansas and the other 49 states, like those in El Salvador, and throughout this wide, wide earth will fall in love, pair off and, if they are so blessed, have children. Some will marry; some will not.
Some of them will subsequently pack up and leave their partners — and that family will then be broken and feel wrenching pain, whether or not its breaking was formalized in a court.
THIS IS NOT to disparage marriage. The formal ceremony, done be-fore family and friends, does add force to the decision to become a couple. Promises made sincerely do bind.
Marriage vows can keep a couple together through rough times who might have separated without them.
And the legal contract adds immeasurable security to the lives of children, divorced spouses, widows and widowers when the wealth to provide that security exists.
There’s the nut of the matter. In the end, marriage matters most for those whose lives are ordered by religious codes, for those with property and most of all when both moral and material strictures apply.
It is a very useful institution which society should nourish.
