Marriage Material by Abigail Ocobock explores the transformative impact of same-sex couples on the institution of marriage in 21st-century America. Drawing on interviews and survey data, Ocobock effectively challenges the narrative that marriage is in decline, showing how same-sex couples are at the same time redefining and sustaining marriage’s cultural and social relevance, writes Khushbu Sharma.
Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships. Abigail Ocobock. University of Chicago Press. 2024.
“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?” This famous quip by the 20th-century actor-comedian Groucho Marx has gained more relevance over the years to become a common view of marriage in the 21st-century United States. This idea of “marriage on the decline” finds huge currency, not just in popular media but in the dominant scholarship on marriage, family and kinship as well. Since the beginning of the last century, the divorce rate in the US has increased tremendously, reaching its peak of 22.6 per cent in the 1980s, signalling the possible erosion of the institutional power of marriage. This is reinforced by the data released by American Community Survey which shows the marriage rate among young American women has also seen reduction between 2011 to 2021 (16.3 down to 14.9 marriages per 1,000 women).
As we move closer to the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, it seems that people are becoming increasingly disillusioned with marriage and are supposed to be moving towards finding alternative ways to organise their dyadic intimate relations and companionships. With the rise of queer rights movements in several parts of the world, this understanding becomes much stronger since these “new claimants” to the right to love do not “fit” as easily into an institution which is heteronormative and patriarchal.
Drawing on this qualitative data, Ocobock contests the dominant claim by family sociologists, institutional scholars and sexuality studies that marriage is an institution on the decline.
It is against this backdrop that sociologist Abigail Ocobock’s work presents a fresh enquiry into the state of marriage in 21st century America. Unlike the mainstream scholarship on marriage which has largely focused on the experiences of heterosexual couples, Ocobock has centred her work around the marital decisions and lived experiences of same-sex couples who won the right to legal marriage quite recently .The beginning of gay rights movement in the US dates back to 1920s with the founding of Society for Human Rights in Chicago, and gained momentum in the wake of the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969. It was not until 2004 that Massachusetts became the first state to legalise same-sex marriages. More than a decade later, on the 26th of June, 2015 the US Supreme Court in the legal suit between Obergefell vs. Hodges recognised the legal validity of same-sex marriages in 50 states in the US.
The author argues that while heterosexual marriages have seen a decline, after the recognition of marriage equality rights for LGBTQ+ communities, there is a whole new set of people who were hitherto outside its institutional ambit are now entering it. The American Community Survey for 2022 revealed out of 1.3 million same-sex households in the US for that year, 58 per cent were married couples (7,40,523 in terms of numbers). Such data suggests that the marginal decline in overall marriage rates might see a reversal in the near future.
In many marriages, monogamy was not seen as antithetical to commitment.
The study is based on in-depth interviews and survey data gathered from 116 LGBQ people (trans people do not form a part of this study), both married and unmarried, who have been cohabiting with their respective same-sex partners for at least a year. Drawing on this qualitative data, Ocobock contests the dominant claim by family sociologists, institutional scholars and sexuality studies that marriage is an institution on the decline. The couples she interviewed were all living in the pioneering state for same-sex marriage, Massachusetts. As the newest group afforded the right to legal marriage, Ocobock argues that her in-depth analysis of the lives of same-sex couples reveals that these relationships have transformed the institutions of marriage in unexpected ways which can hardly be explained through terms like decline, erosion or weakening. Far from loosening its hold, marriage has also reciprocally transformed same-sex relationships in quite unique ways.
In a 2014 piece published in the Guardian, Hugh Ryan, commenting on the consecutive judgements which legalised same sex marriage in several American states one after the other, wrote that “We didn’t queer the institution of marriage. It straightened us.” This echoes the concerns of many queer rights activists who underlined that marriage, being intrinsically heteronormative, could never be the right kind of arrangement for queer people. This brings into relief the unmalleability and rigidity of marriage as an institution and dismisses the possibility of any transformative potential in it for queer relations. However, Ocobock argues that LGBQ individuals whom she interviewed tailored their marriages to suit their own terms and requirements (what she calls “DIY Marriages”) which empowered them and made them more socially secure. For instance, most of her participants were consciously crafting their own marriages in unique ways without strict adherence to heterosexual norms, including a sexed division of labour and strict performance of gender roles.
In many marriages, monogamy was not seen as antithetical to commitment. As one of the participants, Heather, emphasises about her own non-monogamous marital arrangement: “You have a couple of drinks and start kissing someone. Some people think, “Oh my gosh, they cheated on you!” But she’s married to me and responsible for coming home to me. Sex is sex but being married to each other is a lifelong commitment that we made.” For same-sex couples, being married to partners who shared such an understanding of marriage as them made it more socially comfortable and opened more secure avenues to further explore their sexual lives. Even those couples who did not approve of monogamy for their own relationships reinforced that they did not “judge” people who do, and have no inherent opposition towards it.
Do queer movements and the alternative social arrangements they provide signal the end of marriage or can marriage co-opt these alternative queer arrangements?
Despite these modifications some of the core rituals and signifiers around marriage and the social force that it retains as a legitimate way of organising one’s intimate relationship remains in place. As the interview narratives suggest, most of the participants or their partners have internalised the cultural script that marriage offers in terms of organising proposals, wedding ceremonies, expressing commitment, managing finances etc. Not only that, such strategies at DIY-ing marriages did not preclude these couples from seeing marriage as the most secure social form through which love and commitment can be expressed. Added to that is the social security, legal privileges and financial benefits that marriage provides, which cumulatively enhance its pull. In the absence of any other institution which provides all these benefits together, even some self-proclaimed adamant critics of marriage that Ocobock interviewed were not critical enough to resist its appeal.
Through these six chapters, Ocobock effectively defies the marriage decline thesis to argue that change in an institution does not necessarily degrade it or erode its social influence, and same-sex couples are active participants in this ongoing qualitative. The text is methodologically sound and offers an exemplary way of presenting how lived experiences can be effectively intertwined with theoretical debates to produce intellectually provocative arguments. It tries to fill the scholarly gap in family sociology by presenting a full-fledged study on the married lives of same-sex couples and therefore also opens up newer and less explored paths for sexuality studies. Though it is based in a single state in the US, this work converses with several other contexts outside the US, like my own in India, where the queer rights movement is in the ascendance and the socio-legal contestations over marriage equality are underway. What do same-sex marriages have in store for queer relations and for the future of marriage as an institution? Do queer movements and the alternative social arrangements they provide signal the end of marriage or can marriage co-opt these alternative queer arrangements? These are some of the questions that Ocobock’s work tries to answer in ways that are helpful for queer rights movements, scholars of family and relationships and all others interested in whether marriage will survive into the next century.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: Nancy Beijersbergen on Shutterstock.
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