Singleness and Marriage after Christendom

Being and Doing Family

Lina Toth

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781532635564, 9781532635588
• eBook ISBN: 9781532635571
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Momentous change is taking place in Western societies and churches. Singleness is on the rise, along with growing interest in different pathways to human happiness. However, we still largely consider coupledom as the norm and a symbol of the good life. This is especially true in the Christian context, where the decline of "traditional" marriage and family patterns is often presented as an erosion of the Christian way of living. Yet when the church was very young, the world was also very concerned with the demise of traditional family ways--but the culprits accused of destroying family values were none other than Christians. A considerable number of them willingly chose to forego marriage, embracing Jesus's vision of a new kind of a family: the church.This book follows the changes in the practice of marriage and singleness, from those early days of the Christian movement to our modern preoccupation with romance and coupledom as essential ingredients of a happy, fulfilled life. It argues that the current surge in the number of single people is actually an opportunity for us to reconsider both singleness and marriage in the larger context of a community of faith.

1

Uncharted Territory

Single Households and the Crisis of the “Traditional” Family Model

The State of Affairs: Statistics and Categories

Although there is evidence in a multitude of national contexts showing that singles are being discriminated against less and less, individuals are still socialized and educated to get married and strive to build stable family type units. As a result, singlehood has largely been and still frequently viewed negatively in the eyes of both society and the individual, and in some cases particularly for women.8

A few years ago I wandered into a china shop, and there I came across a collection of six different glasses for six kinds of drinks. The box had a picture of a Buddha-like woman with six hands. In each of her hand she was holding a glass for a different drink.

Maybe I should have bought that box, because it represented the very change I am exploring in this book. It would be difficult to imagine such a consumer item selling half a century, or even just a few decades, ago: something designed for the pleasure of one person and their one-person household. Now, however, the market for goods aimed at single people is booming: single-portion ready-meals in supermarkets; L-shaped snuggle pillows; smaller living spaces, solo travel packages, and so on. Technology has been an important factor in enabling such changes, but so have society’s attitudes, and business has been catching up with the demand.

Statistics tells us of a striking, and continuing, increase of single people and single-person households throughout the Western world. In many countries, such as the United States or United Kingdom, single people now comprise about half of the population—a 50 percent rise since mid-twentieth century.9 In the United States, people now spend a greater proportion of their adult lives single than married.10 The trend is expected to continue: it is estimated that, compared to 2018, the proportion of single people in Europe, for instance, is going to rise by another 30 percent by 2030.11 People are also marrying later, and, although the divorce rate has somewhat recovered from its all-time high a few decades ago, it has been partly due to people cohabiting, rather than marrying, in the first place.12

The mention of cohabitation, however, is a reminder that statistics does not paint the whole picture. Cohabiting is on the rise, representing almost 20 percent of the population in the United Kingdom and Australia and just over 20 percent in Canada.13 Yet the fastest-growing household type in many Western countries is that of a single-person household. In the United States, the proportion of solo households has doubled over the last fifty years, and in Nordic countries such as Sweden and Norway around half of all people now live on their own.14 Of course, a small proportion of couples may be running two households (sometimes referred to as “living apart together”), but a much greater proportion of single people are likely to live with parents, share a household with housemates or friends, or raise children as single parents.

All of this is to say that although the distinction between “married” and “single,” or “coupled” and “solo” is not always clear-cut, the general trend is undeniable: marriage rates are falling, and while cohabitation is on the rise, single living is also soaring. More and more people are embracing their single status, with the media increasingly zooming on “single-positive” and “self-partnered” celebrities and trends.15 Importantly, such attention also points to the changing attitudes towards the ingredients required for happiness and fulfillment—an important theme later on in this book.

Another area of great change is the diversification of family types. Beside two-parent and single-parent families, other units are described by such terms as “blended,” “binuclear,” or “step-families.” Same-sex couples are now able to legalize their relationship in a number of countries, and may be raising children together. Adult children are often staying at home for much longer than in the past decades. Where economic emigration is rife, a parent may be working abroad, and the children may be mainly reared by a grandparent. We may also note alternative arrangements, such as polygamy amongst some Utah Mormons, recently given a boost by the amendment to Utah’s law against bigamy.16 Polyamorous relationships—that is, romantic or sexual bonds between more than two people—are more openly practiced and discussed in culture at large, and are beginning to gain attention in the context of the church too.17 Such changes reflect a growing degree of cultural acceptance of different family models.

All of this may feel completely unprecedented, and disorientating—and in a number of aspects, it is indeed. On the other hand, the chapters that follow will point out that for much of the history of the West, societies have often worried about the “demise” of marriage and family values, that there have been different family models practiced in the past, and that a significant number of people never married, or spent much of their life unmarried.18 If anything, it is the years following the World War II until the 1970s that are unusual in their assumption of marriage and nuclear family model as the norm for more or ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Uncharted Territory
• Chapter 2: Back to the Roots
• Chapter 3: Life in the New Family
• Chapter 4: Living Like Angels
• Chapter 5: After Constantine
• Chapter 6: Towards the Romance of the Nuclear Family
• Chapter 7: “And They Lived Happily Ever After”
• Chapter 8: Re-learning Love and Happiness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography