Is Marriage Individualized? What Couples Actually Do

We address an idea in the study of families that is growing in acceptance—marriage today is individualized. Using a new institutional perspective, we review the literature to evaluate whether marriage is actually individualized. We discuss the commonly used indicators of individualization, questioning some of the key indicators and calling for a greater focus on the examination of actual behaviors of married spouses. We also review the empirical evidence for individualized marriage. We conclude that more attention should be paid to data showing that the majority of spouses engage in interdependent and integrated behaviors and that trends are not clearly in a trajectory toward individualization. Institutions, including formal and informal rules and taken-for-granted assumptions, do not change easily.