The Marriage Institution in Choosing Mates the American Way - Article Example

According to the author, this marketplace psychology in choosing spouses has only helped to challenge America’s premarital Puritanism, leading to increased instances of premarital cohabitation before marriage. In the survey involving 459 women, the researcher found that through dating does not work and the marketplace learning viewpoint is merely a misguided perception when it comes to spouse selection, marital success is not totally unpredictable as it is to a large extent reinforced by love and other factors that structure a couple’s day-to-day marital relations.

A good way to generalize the points made by the author is to synthesize the most fundamental points that may lead to success in the marriage institution. It has been suggested that although dating may have its own advantages in terms of assisting couples to know each other better before entering into a marital relationship, it cannot in itself lead to a successful marriage. In this perspective, it is important to highlight the factors that have been known to lead to a successful marriage in American society, such as love and commitment, sharing power and decision-making in the family, pooling resources, enjoying similar leisure-time activities, having shared values and morals, as well as having mutual friends.

Individuals wanting to have successful marriages should desist from selecting their spouses the same way they would buy a car in the marketplace, or undertake dating or courtship for long periods of time as all these variables are not related to marital success. Ultimately, upon personal reflection, marital success is brought by a life-long commitment to each other, respect, love, and sharing in similar family-related attributes and functions. The two questions to guide classroom discussion include (1) can arranged marriages lead to lower divorce and/or separation levels in the American society, and (2) why is selecting a  spouse for life-long companionship quite different from buying a car?

 In this article, the author sets out to “explore the power dynamic of marriage promotion, particularly in terms of the enforcement of heterosexuality and hierarchies of gender, race, and class.” Through undertaking an ethnographic study in  Oklahoma in 2004, it is clear that the author’s salient points include (1) marriage promotion initiatives are guided by an assumption that heterosexual pairings define social institutions like marriage and family, (2) U.S. federal and state law attaches a substantial number of advantages to heterosexual marriage, (3) there exists a gap between the stated objectives of marriage promotion initiatives and the realities on the ground.