The American Marriage Narrative: Culture, Structure, and Unmarrieds’ Resistance

A qualitative sociological study of American/cultural marriage logics and social structure was carried out using oral history interviews that provided narrative data from 13 individuals who are in long term intimate relationships that do not include marriage. Information about magnified moments across their life course related to intimacies, sexuality, marriage, and family formation coalesce to provide insight into growing up as an American cultural citizen who is expected to marry as the impetus to family formation. Findings suggest that there exists a cultural and social structure of marriage in the United States of America that serves to enforce and reinforce participation in the legal institution of marriage in order to have an “American Family.” “The Family,” characterized in this way is a rigid, boundary-laden, social construct against which all family forms are compared and, in many cases, subjugated, marginalized, and relegated to an inferior family status compared to those who choose to include legal marriage in their family formation. In other words, there are consequences for deviating from the normalized path to forming family in the United States. Family form inequality and marriage inequality presents a crisis tendency in the fabric of American culture. Since the passage of “Marriage Equality” in 2015, marriage and family formation rules and norms are made more visible. In sum, American families that do not include marriage and the visibility of a federally legitimated form of family (those that include marriage that now lesbian and gay same-sex partners are able to take part), throws into stark relief for whom marriage and family formation boundaries are meant to keep out and are most constraining. That is, families that do not include marriage highlighted in this research experience micro- and macroaggressions (consequences at the individual and systems level of society) related to their unmarried family status.