Illustration: Chris Sharp

The benefits of marriage have been often documented. Married people are less likely to abuse drugs, commit crimes, or subsist below the poverty line; they tend to live longer; their children are healthier, better behaved, and more likely to go to college. So, is there a downside?

Last fall, Natalia Sarkisian, a Boston College assistant professor of sociology, and Naomi Gerstel, a sociology professor at UMass–Amherst, published “Marriage: The Good, the Bad, and the Greedy” in Contexts, a journal of the American Sociological Association, in which they concluded that “marriage and community are often at odds with one another.” The authors analyzed data from the 1992–94 National Survey of Families and Households (provided by the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Demography) and the 2004 General Social Sur­vey (from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center). They found that partners in marriage are less likely than single people to call, write, or offer emotional and practical support, such as help with household chores or transportation, to their parents and siblings. They also determined that marriage diminishes socializing with and helping out friends and neighbors.

For example, asked if they had called or written to their parents in the last month, more than 80 percent of never-married individuals said yes, compared with some 60 percent of married people. Similarly, about 70 percent of unmarried people said they’d socialized with friends in the last month versus 30 percent of the married respondents. According to Sarkisian, these findings contradict “the conventional wisdom in which marriage is portrayed as the primary building block of community and unmarried people are viewed as isolated and alone.” As Gerstel puts it, “Marriage is greedy for emotion and time. It cuts off help to other people in the community.”

The “greedy” effects of marriage are evident in the data regardless of gender, age, race, and social class, although there are some exceptions and differences of degree. For instance, the drop-off in phone calls to parents and siblings by married individuals is much greater with men. The authors surmise that this is because “many husbands rely on wives to call their relatives.” And the “marriage penalty” with regard to giving practical help to friends exists only among white couples, not among African-Americans or Hispanics.

Not all who study marriage embrace the notion of marital greed, including David Popenoe, an emeritus sociology professor at Rutgers University and codirector of the National Marriage Project, a nonpartisan think tank that supports marriage research. “The vast majority of married couples—at great self-sacrifice and financial cost—produce children,” Popenoe notes in an e-mail commenting on the study. And indeed, Sar­kisian and Gerstel have found that the presence of children in a marriage does seem to affect friendship positively. Overall, married individuals with children tend to offer just as much emotional and practical support to friends and neighbors as do unmarried people. They just don’t “hang out” with them as much, the researchers say. Still, when it comes to connecting with and helping out parents and siblings, married people with and without children both come up short compared with single individuals.

Sarkisian, who is married, emphasizes that her research does not call into question the societal worth of marriage per se, but rather the “exclusionary” view of marriage that prevails in Western societies, by which “married couples are supposed to be self-reliant in terms of emotional and practical support.” In their article in Contexts, she and Gerstel highlight the honeymoon, a custom that arose in Western cultures in the 19th century, “when the idea of marriage as a private intimate relationship, set off from community life, began to take hold.” They contrast this understanding with that of other cultures, in particular preindustrial societies, where the emphasis in marriage is on newly formed kin ties, “rather than the special relationship of the marital pair.”

“Such societies do not have honeymoons,” the authors write. “It is not appropriate to leave the community behind to go off on some private adventure.”

According to Sarkisian, “married people and society as a whole would benefit if we had a more inclusive view of marriage.” Sarkisian and Gerstel plan follow-up studies of marriage in other countries.

Chris Berdik is a writer based in Boston.

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