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Love and marriage, love and marriage

They go together like a horse and carriage

This I tell you brother

You cant have one without the other

In the turbulent culture wars over sex, love, poverty and the future of the American family, Isabel V. Sawhill, a blunt, influential and formidable voice, has long come down squarely on the side of marriage.

Though she is a Democrat and a former Clinton administration official, Sawhills staunch defense of marriage has often put the economist at odds with some thinkers on the left who have dismissed the institution as an oppressive vestige of patriarchy.

Unlike conservatives, who see marriage as sacred and the key to a society based on traditional values, Sawhill based her argument simply on the data, which shows that marriage promotion programs havent worked and that children born to married parents tend to fare far better in life than do children in other family arrangements.

So it is no small thing that the 77-year-old author and editor of more than 19 books, papers and manuscripts, many of them on matrimony, is now saying that marriage at least for a vast swath of Americans may be dead.

In Generation Unbound, a book released this past fall that has opened a new front in the culture wars, Sawhill, who works at the Brookings Institution, argues that it is high time we stopped trying to revive marriage. Instead, she says, we need to figure out what will replace it if we are to stem the rise in single-parenting that has done more in the past few decades to increase child poverty than some of the biggest social programs, such as food stamps, have done to decrease it.

Maybe some people will be married, or have some kind of commitment to each other, but theyll live in separate places, she speculated in an interview. Or maybe there will be marriages with upfront time limits. Not, We thought we were going to be married forever and decided in the middle to get divorced. But marriages where you say to the other person upfront, How about a five-year contract to be committed to each other, and then reassess?

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A longtime proponent of marriage wants to reassess the institutions future