As Frank Sinatra's 1955 hit song affirmed: Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. But federal and local governments across the nation have begun to believe that things like education, wealth and physical well-being go with - and are even actually caused by - marriage, and lawmakers continuously implement policy to reflect this erroneous association.
Last year, the Texas Senate unanimously approved a bill that would double marriage license fees from $30 to $60 unless couples undergo prenuptial counseling. While the House threw out the fee hike, the Senate kept an increased rate for couples who refuse the class; those who take it would get a free license. We cringe at the thought of our tax dollars going toward deliberation on this unnecessary "marriage tax," but the reality is that this bill was only one of several bills introduced in Texas to promote marriage and intervene in citizens' love lives.
On the federal level, the U.S. government spends about $150 million each year on programs to market marriage and decrease divorce rates. We see the reasoning behind this - According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there is clear evidence that prosperity is related to successful marriage and that poverty increases proportionally to failed marriage. While a white, married, educated woman has a less-than-1-percent likelihood of ending up in poverty, a single, uneducated Hispanic or black woman is almost guaranteed to raise her children in poverty.
Believing that one somehow causes the other, however, is putting the carriage before the horse. Policymakers must see the relationship between marriage and prosperity as correlative and not causal, and they should stop trying to turn back the dial in an effort to reverse inevitable trends. The fact is, the skills that are necessary for a functional marriage (or any relationship, for that matter) tend to be the same as those possessed by successful people. The ability to communicate, empathize and practice basic hygiene count for a lot in this world, but you better believe that no amount of government training will get you to stop leaving the toilet seat up.
Furthermore, while love and marriage certainly go together for some, for many, love goes just fine with being single, cohabitating or having a partner of the same sex. Maybe if Americans didn't live under such great pressure to adhere to the systematic social standard of having a significant other and marrying that person, more people would appreciate the other things in life that can be loved. We like to think these things could increase prosperity and be more useful in one's self-preparation for marriage than any government-mandated marriage counseling.
Sinatra may have been right when he sang that love and marriage go together, but there is no rationalization for forcing public policy into our relationships. Perhaps the time has come for a national realization that, when it comes to love and marriage, it's an institution we can safely disparage and that you definitely can have one without the other. After all, it's not 1955.
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