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Divorce rate aside, number of 50th anniversaries rising
Sunday, April 11, 1999 By Diana Block, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Bernice and Michael Ratway didn't have it easy when they married in 1949.
Their families initially opposed the union for religious reasons - she was Roman Catholic, and he was Greek Catholic.
The young couple started out living with Michael Ratway's parents. When Bernice Ratway became pregnant, Michael worked long hours to earn enough so they could buy a house. They had five children in five years. Times were tough, but they pulled through.
And they kept on pulling through, despite occasional rough spots, until they arrived at the golden milestone of their 50th wedding anniversary, which the Mount Washington couple celebrated Feb. 17.
The Ratways are two of the roughly 1.21 million people who have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversaries in the past five years. They are part of what's known as the World War II generation, and more than any other group this century, they seem synonymous with marital stability.
The statistics bear that out. Whether it was because of economic need, family pressure or cultural expectation, 70 percent to 80 percent of the couples who married in the 1950s stayed married until one partner died.
That might seem to indicate that there will never be another generation that reaches 50th wedding anniversaries as often as theirs.
But that's not what the experts say. Because their average life expectancy was 67, only about 13 percent of all couples in the World War II generation made it to their 50th wedding anniversaries, said Jim Weed of the National Center for Health Statistics.
The baby boomers, on the other hand, have a life expectancy that ranges from 72 for men to 78 for women. So even though their divorce rate on first marriages is 45 percent, their greater life span means that an estimated 16 percent of them will make it to their golden wedding anniversaries, Weed said.
And since there are so many more of them than in their parents' generation, the actual numbers of 50th anniversaries are expected to soar.
Still, that can't obscure the fact that marriage today is an entirely different proposition than it was for such people as the Ratways.
One of the biggest changes has been society's acceptance of divorce, which was scandalous in the 1950s.
Richard Mackey, a social work professor at Boston College, interviewed 60 couples for his book "Lasting Marriages." He found that young people after World War II didn't think of their marriage vows as something they could break.
"You married for life, and it wasn't even a matter of being madly in love," he said. Mackey heard older couples repeat phrases such as "a deal is a deal," and "you made it for life."
That was true for the Ratways, who didn't even consider divorce, despite the pressures they faced in the early years of their marriage.
Bernice Ratway remembered a time when her husband had been drinking a lot. "We thought about parting," she said, but only for a separation. Even that fell through, though.
She threatened to throw him out of the house. He packed his clothes in her brand new suitcase, and said he was going to leave - to live with her mother.
"I said, 'Come back in here. How can I let you leave if you're going to live with my mother?' "
By contrast, few younger adults today believe that a marriage should continue if a couple no longer wants to be together.
Religion and people's personal ideals don't seem to make any difference on that score, either.
In one study, neither religious beliefs nor a person's opinions at age 18 had any bearing on whether they got divorced later in life, said Bahira Sherif, who teaches family studies at the University of Delaware.
"I think if you've grown up in a family where you've seen divorce, there's not the same shame associated with it."
Today, 28 percent of all American children live with just one parent, according to federal figures. So it's no surprise that our divorce rate is the highest in the world, Sherif said.
"They're coming from homes where I think that divorce is the norm."
Another factor affecting modern marriages is economics.
Ironically, as financial security for families improved after World War II, marriages became less stable.
"Affluence has given people much more individual freedom of opportunity than they ever had before, and that's a large part of the problem," said David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
When Phyllis and Stanley Haduch of Mount Washington were married after World War II, they would have had a hard time supporting themselves if they hadn't been together.
"Money was tougher," Mrs. Haduch said. "We never had a lot. But we never knew we were poor because we had a happy childhood. And I think that [attitude] kind of goes on into your married life.
"Today, I think people have jobs on the outside, and they can really support themselves without a husband or a wife. I think that's great," but it makes leaving easier, she said.
People work more and marry later today. Since 1960, the median age of marriage has risen from 20.3 to 24.5 for women, and from 22.8 to 26.7 for men, according to American Demographics Magazine.
The lack of economic necessity for marriage has put a much greater burden on the emotional quality of relationships, said Popenoe.
"It's held together by love, and that often proves to be a rather fragile ingredient."
No one disputes that love must go into a marriage, but younger people today tend to demand more sharing of the emotional burdens than their parents or grandparents might have.
Phyllis Haduch's grandson, Stan Haduch, said his grandparents' relationship was different from what he and his friends experience. The Mount Washington resident is 25, and has no plans to marry in the near future. Although some of his peers are happily married, he's not encouraged by the fact that many of his slightly older co-workers are divorced. He said his friends fought over problems that just didn't bother his grandparents.
His grandparents, he said, "were brought up to let things drop, and not to be confrontational about certain things, or not to let certain things get to them to the point of actually getting to a divorce situation."
Gilda Stefano, who has lived with her husband in Mount Washington since 1948, agrees that younger people today seem less patient with each other, and less willing to accept each other's weaknesses.
"Marriage is not 50-50. Sometimes it's 100 percent. Sometimes it is 10-90. From the very beginning, we decided that whatever had to be done, we would help one another."
Social roles in her generation were defined so that women were generally responsible for maintaining the peace at home, even if it meant being the ones who always had to compromise, Mackey found as he interviewed older couples.
There aren't such well-established roles for today's young couples. Marriage must be renegotiated, Mackey said.
"There will be different types of equity in a marriage. With both men and women in the labor force, there's going to be a different power distribution in the relationship," he said.
"I think that women are gaining and men are losing [compared with the past] .... It's going to be very potentially disruptive."
Society also delivers many anti-marriage messages, Popenoe says.
Today, he said, there is "the bombardment of culture by advertising and by the organized entertainment industry through television, films and music, which tend to be basically anti-marriage, and in favor of a do-your-own-thing kind of individualism."
Given those kinds of stresses on marriage, couples today often need extra support.
Mackey said such needs as child care may produce that kind of support by bringing extended families back together; his wife cares for their grandchild, for instance, when both his son and daughter-in-law are working.
"It's terribly stressful for nuclear families today - a father, mother and a kid - to survive, unless they have support."
Even if families pull together more, it is hard to know whether there will be a backlash against the divorce culture of the boomers -one that might make for even more 50th wedding anniversaries in the future.
But there are a few signs of hope.
Already, the divorce rate has dropped from 55 percent in the late 1980s to 45 percent today. And college students, often the products of divorce, want to patch up what they see as broken American family life.
"The interesting thing here is that young people, far more than the baby boomers, feel that family life has taken a turn for the worse," Popenoe said. "They're placing a much greater premium on family life ....
"We're certainly not going back to the '50s, but there may be ... some sense in which all of this may be a little bit cyclical. That's one of the encouraging signs."
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A divorce culture