The next century of partnership

A century ago, marriage in most societies bundled: sexual access, reproductive partnership, household economics, legal recognition, immigration eligibility, healthcare decision-making, inheritance, social status. Each function has been progressively detached. Sex outside marriage is normalized across most cultures. Reproductive technology decouples parenting from coupling. Cohabitation laws in most developed economies provide most of marriage's legal benefits without the contract. Same-sex couples have, in dozens of jurisdictions, access to the legal package without the historic gender script. The bundle still exists for those who want it, but the components are increasingly available separately.

Eli Finkel's synthesis of decades of marriage research argues that contemporary American marriages are simultaneously the best and the worst in history, depending on which marriage you sample. The reason is escalating expectations: where marriages once needed to provide economic survival and basic companionship, they now must provide self-actualization, sexual fulfillment, intellectual intimacy, parenting partnership, and personal growth, all in a context of declining external support (extended family, religious community, neighborhood). Marriages that meet the bar are better than ever. Marriages that fail to meet the bar are emptier than ever. The middle has hollowed out.

Esther Perel's clinical observation that the modern couple is asked to provide what an entire village used to provide is the most influential single frame in popular relationship discourse. Belonging, security, mystery, eroticism, mentorship, friendship - all loaded onto one other person. The structural overload explains a great deal of contemporary partnership dysfunction. The next century will partly involve the reconstruction of supplementary structures: friendship networks with more institutional weight, chosen-family arrangements with legal recognition, communal parenting and elder care, intentional communities. Some of this is already happening in the form of co-housing, friend-based co-parenting, and the rise of long-term friendship as a primary relationship category.

Hawon Jung's reporting on South Korea documents the most extreme contemporary case of partnership exit. Korean women report that the marriage market still demands they perform a 1950s wife role while holding professional jobs, and a critical mass have decided not to participate. The 4B movement is small but symptomatic. Korea's fertility rate of around 0.78 means the population will roughly halve every generation if it persists. Japan, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and increasingly China are on similar trajectories. The demographic and economic consequences will be among the central facts of the next century.

A partnership system that produces too few children for population replacement is not stable indefinitely. Some countries will accept population decline. Some will respond with pronatalist policies (cash payments for births, parental leave, subsidized childcare) with mixed results. Some will rely on immigration. Some will turn coercive in ways that backtrack on partnership autonomy. The most successful pronatalist policies, in Nordic countries, have produced fertility rates that have nonetheless drifted downward over time. The honest projection is that most developed economies will spend the next century below replacement, and the partnership institution will not, on its own, fix this.

Reproductive technology will continue to expand the range of partnership configurations that can produce children. Single parenthood by choice, same-sex parenthood, multi-parent arrangements, surrogacy, IVF, egg freezing, artificial wombs (if the technology matures), and synthetic gametes are each at different stages of development and legalization. Each further decouples reproduction from partnership. The legal architecture of parentage will need extensive revision. Naomi Cahn's work on the legal regulation of the fertility market is one of the few sustained scholarly efforts to map what this revision requires.

Consensual non-monogamy is not new but is, for the first time in modern Western history, openly practiced by a small but visible minority. Estimates from research surveys suggest 4 to 5 percent of adults in the U.S. are currently in some form of consensually non-monogamous arrangement, and a larger percentage have been at some point. Legal recognition is essentially absent in most jurisdictions, though Somerville, Massachusetts and a few other cities have begun recognizing polyamorous domestic partnerships. The next century will produce some legal accommodation of these arrangements; the speed will depend on political dynamics that are hard to forecast.

The unbundling that began in Europe and North America has spread, unevenly, across the world. Latin America has seen rapid increases in cohabitation. East Asia has seen marriage delay and decline. Sub-Saharan Africa is changing more slowly but is changing. The Middle East is the most resistant region in aggregate but contains substantial internal variation, with Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon further along than the Gulf states. The convergence will not be complete by 2125, but the direction is consistent enough that the variation in 2125 will be smaller than the variation today.

The unbundling of partnership has not been gender-symmetric. Women in most contexts still perform more domestic labor, more emotional labor, and more caregiving even in dual-career partnerships. The "second shift" Arlie Hochschild named in the 1980s is smaller but not gone. The next century's partnership equality will depend on continued movement in the division of unpaid labor, which has been the slowest-moving variable in the entire revision.

Family law in most jurisdictions still presumes the married heterosexual nuclear family as the default, with other arrangements treated as exceptions. The legal infrastructure - tax codes, immigration rules, healthcare systems, inheritance defaults, parental presumptions - encodes assumptions that fewer and fewer families match. The U.S. is particularly behind because state-by-state family law makes coherent national revision difficult. The European Union is slowly building a common framework. The next century will produce a more substantial legal reconstruction than the previous one, because the pressure of mismatch keeps growing.

One of the more interesting trends is the formal expansion of "family" beyond the biological and romantic. Long-term friendships are increasingly being given legal weight - some jurisdictions allow designated caregivers, healthcare proxies, and inheritance designations that recognize friendship as on par with kinship. Chosen-family configurations, particularly common in LGBT communities, are spreading. The next century may see the formal recognition that "family" is whoever you decide it is, with legal infrastructure to match.

The trajectory is not guaranteed. Authoritarian regimes have, throughout history, used partnership policy to enforce political control - pronatalism, anti-LGBT laws, restrictions on divorce, criminalization of cohabitation. The current global drift toward authoritarianism in several large countries includes partnership-policy components. The next century will not be a linear extension of the late twentieth. There will be reversals. The question is whether the long-run trend toward more chosen, more diverse, more consent-based partnership reasserts itself after each reversal, or whether some reversals stick.

Underneath all the institutional change, the human want that partnership tries to meet is stable. People want to be known, to be loved, to build something with another person, to have a witness to their life, to share a bed and a meal and a long horizon. The institution that holds these wants has changed many times. The wants have not. The next century of partnership will be the next chapter in trying to build a container that matches the wants, with fewer of the coercions that previous containers used. Whatever emerges will be imperfect. It will be more chosen than what came before, and that is the only honest measure of progress in this domain.

1. Finkel, Eli J. The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work. New York: Dutton, 2017. 2. Finkel, Eli J., Chin Ming Hui, Kathleen L. Carswell, and Grace M. Larson. "The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow Without Enough Oxygen." Psychological Inquiry 25, no. 1 (2014): 1-41. 3. Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. New York: Harper, 2006. 4. Perel, Esther. The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. New York: Harper, 2017. 5. Jung, Hawon. Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2023. 6. Cahn, Naomi. Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation. New York: NYU Press, 2009. 7. Cahn, Naomi, and June Carbone. Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 8. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin, 2005. 9. Cherlin, Andrew J. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Knopf, 2009. 10. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. New York: Penguin, 2012. 11. Edleson, Jeffrey L. Children Exposed to Domestic Violence. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2011. 12. Klinenberg, Eric. Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. New York: Penguin, 2012.