MARRIAGE AND THE  CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

Peter L. Berger and Hansfried Kellner 

   

   

   (z: Berger, L. P.; H. Kellner: "Marriage and the Construction of Reality." Diogenes (1964),
   No. 46, 1-23.)

   

   

   Ever since Durkheim it has been a commonplace of family sociology that marriage serves as a
   protection against anomie for the individual. Interesting and pragmatically useful though this
   insight is, it is but the negative side of a phenomenon of much broader significance. If one
   speaks of anomic states, then one ought properly to investigate also the nomic processes that,
   by their absence, lead to the aforementioned states. If, consequently, one finds a  negative
   correlation between marriage and anomie, then one should be led to  inquire into the character
   of marriage as a nomos-building instrumentality, that is, of marriage as a social arrangement
   that creates for the individual the sort of order in which he can experience his life as
   making sense. It is our intention here to discuss marriage in these terms. While this could
   evidently be done in a macrosociological perspective, dealing with marriage as a major social
   institution related to other broad structures of society, our focus will be 
   microsociological, dealing primarily with the social processes affecting the individuals in
   any specific marriage, although, of course, the larger framework of these processes will have
   to be understood. In what sense this discussion can be described as microsociology of
   knowledge will hopefully become clearer in  the course of it.^1

   Marriage is obviously only one social relationship in which this process of nomos-building
   takes place. It is, therefore, necessary to first look in more general terms at the character
   of this process. In doing so, we are influenced  by three theoretical perspectives-the
   Weberian perspective on society as a network of meanings, the Meadian perspective on identity
   as a social phenomenon, and the phenomenological analysis of the social structuring of reality
   especially as given in the work of Schutz and Merleau-Ponty.^2 Not being convinced, however,
   that theoretical lucidity is necessarily enhanced by terminological ponderosity, we shall
   avoid as much as possible the use of the sort of jargon for which both sociologists and
   phenomenologists have acquired dubious notoriety.

   The process that interests us here is the one that constructs, maintains and modifies a
   consistent reality that can be meaningfully experienced by individuals. In its essential forms
   this process is determined by the society in  which it occurs. Every society has its specific
   way of defining and perceiving  reality-its world, its universe, its overarching organization
   of symbols. This is already given in the language that forms the symbolic base of the
   society.  Erected over this base, and by means of it, is a system of ready-made typifications,
   through which the innumerable experiences of reality come to be ordered.^3 These typifications
   and their order are held in common be the members of society, thus acquiring not only the
   character of objectivity, but being taken for granted as the world tout court, the only world
   that normal men can conceive of.^4 The seemingly objective and taken-for-granted character of
   the social definitions of reality can be seen most clearly in the case of language itself, but
   it is important to keep in mind that the latter forms the base and instrumentality of a much
   larger world-erecting process.

   The socially constructed world must be continually mediated to and actualized by the
   individual, so that it can become and remain indeed his world as well. The individual is given
   by his society certain decisive cornerstones for his everyday experience and conduct. Most
   importantly, the individual is supplied with specific sets of typifications and criteria of
   relevance, predefined for him by the society and made available to him for the ordering of his
   everyday life. This ordering or (in line with our opening considerations) nomic apparatus is
   biographically cumulative. It begins to be formed in the individual  from the earliest stages
   of socialization on, then keeps on being enlarged and modified by himself throughout his
   biography.^5 While there are individual biographical differences making for differences in the
   constitution of this apparatus in specific individuals, there exists in the society an overall
   consensus on the range of differences deemed to be tolerable. Without such consensus, indeed,
   society would be impossible as a going concern, since it would  then lack the ordering
   principles by which alone experience can be shared  and conduct can be mutually intelligible.
   This order, by which the individual comes to perceive and define his world, is thus not chosen
   by him, except perhaps for very small modifications. Rather, it is discovered by him as an
   external datum, a ready-made world that simply is there for him to go ahead and  live in,
   though he modifies it continually in the process of living in it. Nevertheless, this world is
   in need of validation, perhaps precisely because of an ever-present glimmer of suspicion as to
   its social manufacture and relativity. This validation, while it must be undertaken by the
   individual himself, requires ongoing interaction with others who co-inhabit this same socially
   constructed world. In a broad sense, all the other co-inhabitants of this world serve a
   validating function. Every morning the newspaper boy validates the widest co-ordinates of my
   world and the mailman bears tangible validation of my own location within these co-ordinates.
   However, some validations are more significant than others. Every individual requires the
   ongoing validation of his world, including crucially the validation of his identity and place
   in this world, by those few who are his truly significant others.^6 Just as the individual's
   deprivation of relationship with his significant others will plunge him into anomie, so their
   continued presence will sustain for him that nomos by which he can feel at home in the world
   at least most of the time. Again in a broad sense, all the actions of the significant others
   and even their simple presence serve this sustaining function. In everyday life, however, the
   principal method employed is speech. In this sense, it is proper to view the individual's
   relationship with his significant others as an ongoing conversation. As the latter occurs, it
   validates over and over again the fundamental definitions of reality once entered into, not,
   of course, so much by explicit articulation, but precisely by taking the definitions silently
   for granted and conversing about all conceivable matters on this taken-for-granted basis.
   Through the same conversation the individual is also made capable of adjusting to changing and
   new social contexts in his biography. In a very fundamental sense it can be said that one
   converses one's way through life.

   If one concedes these points, one can now state a general sociological proposition: the
   plausibility and stability of the world, as socially defined, is dependent upon the strength
   and continuity of significant relationships in which conversation about this world can be
   continually carried on. Or, to put  it a little differently: the reality of the world is
   sustained through conversation  with significant others. This reality, of course, includes not
   only the imagery by which fellowmen are viewed, but also includes the way in which one views 
   oneself. The reality-bestowing force of social relationships depends on the degree of their
   nearness,^7 that is, on the degree to which social relationships occur in face-to-face
   situations and to which they are credited with primary significance by the individual. In any
   empirical situation, there now emerge obvious sociological questions out of these
   considerations, namely, questions about the patterns of the world-building relationships, the
   social forms taken by the conversation with significant others. Sociologically, one must ask
   how these relationships are objectively structured and distributed, and one will also want to
   understand how they are subjectively perceived and experienced.

   With these preliminary assumptions stated we can now arrive at our main thesis here. Namely,
   we would contend that marriage occupies a privileged status among the significant validating
   relationships for adults in our society.  Put slightly differently: marriage is a crucial
   nomic instrumentality in our society. We would further argue that the essential social
   functionality of this  institution cannot be fully understood if this fact is not perceived.

   We can now proceed with an ideal-typical analysis of marriage, that is, seek to abstract the
   essential features involved. Marriage in our society is a dramatic act in which two strangers
   come together and redefine themselves. The drama of the act is internally anticipated and
   socially legitimated long before it takes place in the individual's biography, and amplified
   by means of a pervasive ideology, the dominant themes of which (romantic love, sexual 
   fulfillment, self-discovery and self-realization through love and sexuality, the  nuclear
   family as the social site for these processes) can be found distributed through all strata of
   the society. The actualization of these ideologically predefined expectations in the life of
   the individual occurs to the accompaniment of one of the few traditional rites of passage that
   are still meaningful to almost all members of the society. It should be added that, in using
   the term  "strangers," we do not mean, of course, that the candidates for the marriage come
   from widely discrepant social backgrounds - indeed, the data indicate  that the contrary is
   the case. The strangeness rather lies in the fact that, unlike marriage candidates in many
   previous societies, those in ours typically come from different face-to-face contexts-in the
   terms used above, they come from different areas of conversation. They do not have a shared
   past,  although their pasts have a similar structure. In other words, quite apart from
   prevailing patterns of ethnic, religious and class endogamy, our society is  typically
   exogamous in terms of nomic relationships. Put concretely, in our mobile society the
   significant conversation of the two partners previous to the  marriage took place in social
   circles that did not overlap. With the dramatic redefinition of the situation brought about by
   the marriage, however, all  significant conversation for the two new partners is now centered
   in their relationship with each other-and, in fact, it was precisely with this intention that
   they entered upon their relationship.

    It goes without saying that this character of marriage has its root in much broader
   structural configurations of our society. The most important of these, for our purposes, is
   the crystallization of a so-called private sphere of existence, more and more segregated from
   the immediate controls of the public institutions (especially the economic and political
   ones), and yet defined and utilized as the main social area for the individual's
   self-realization.^8 It cannot  be our purpose here to inquire into the historical forces that
   brought forth this phenomenon, beyond making the observation that these are closely connected
   with the industrial revolution and its institutional consequences. The public institutions now
   confront the individual as an immensely powerful and alien world, incomprehensible in its
   inner workings, anonymous in its human character. If only through his work in some nook of the
   economic machinery, the individual must find a way of living in this alien world, come to
   terms with its power over him, be satisfied with a few conceptual rules of thumb to guide him
   through a vast reality that otherwise remains opaque to his understanding, and modify its
   anonymity by whatever human relations he can work out  in his involvement with it. It ought to
   be emphasized, against some critics of  "mass society," that this does not inevitably leave
   the individual with a sense of profound unhappiness and lostness. It would rather seem that
   large numbers of people in our society are quite content with a situation in which their
   public involvements have little subjective importance, regarding work as a not  too bad
   necessity and politics as at best a spectator sport. It is usually only intellectuals with
   ethical and political commitments who assume that such people must be terribly desperate. The
   point, however, is that the individual in this situation, no matter whether he is happy or
   not, will turn elsewhere for  the experiences of self-realization that do have importance for
   him. The private sphere, this interstitial area created (we would think) more or less
   haphazardly as a by-product of the social metamorphosis of industrialism, is mainly where he
   will turn. It is here that the individual will seek power, intelligibility and, quite
   literally, a name-the apparent power to fashion a world, however Lilliputian, that will
   reflect his own being: a world that, seemingly having been shaped by himself and thus unlike
   those other worlds that insist on shaping him, is translucently intelligible to him (or so he
   thinks); a world in which, consequently, he is somebody - perhaps even, within its charmed
   circle, a lord and master. What is more, to a considerable extent these expectations are not
   unrealistic. The public institutions have no need to control the individual's adventures in
   the private sphere, as long as they really stay within the latter's circumscribed limits. The
   private sphere is perceived, not without justification, as an area of individual choice and
   even autonomy. This fact has important consequences for the shaping of identity in modern
   society that cannot be pursued here. All that ought to be clear here is the peculiar location
   of the private sphere within and between the other social structures. In sum, it is above all
   and, as a rule, only in the private sphere that  the individual can take a slice of reality
   and fashion it into his world. If one is aware of the decisive significance of this capacity
   and even necessity of men to externalize themselves in reality and to produce for themselves a
   world in  which they can feel at home, then one will hardly be surprised at the great
   importance which the private sphere has come to have in modern society.^9

   The private sphere includes a variety of social relationships. Among these, however, the
   relationships of the family occupy a central position and, in fact, serve as focus for most of
   the other relationships (such as those with friends, neighbors, fellow-members of religious
   and other voluntary associations).  Since, as the ethnologists keep reminding us, the family
   in our society is of the conjugal type, the central relationship in this whole area is the
   marital one. It  is on the basis of marriage that, for most adults in our society, existence
   in the  private sphere is built up. It will be clear that this is not at all a universal or
   even cross culturally wide function of marriage. Rather has marriage in our society taken on a
   very peculiar character and functionality. It has been pointed out that marriage in
   contemporary society has lost some of its older functions and taken on new ones instead.^10
   This is certainly correct, but we  would prefer to state the matter a little differently.
   Marriage and family used  to be firmly embedded in a matrix of wider community relationships,
   serving as extensions and particularizations of the latter's social controls; There were few
   separating barriers between the world of the individual fami1y and the  wider community, a
   fact even to be seen in the physical conditions under which the family lived before the
   industrial revolution.^11 The same social life pulsated through the house, the street and the
   community. In our terms, the family and within it the marital relationship were part and
   parcel of a considerably larger area of conversation. In our contemporary society, by
   contrast, each family constitutes its own segregated sub-world, with its own controls and its
   own closed conversation.

   This fact requires a much greater effort on the part of the marriage partners. Unlike an
   earlier situation in which the establishment of the new marriage simply added to the
   differentiation and complexity of an already  existing social world, the marriage partners now
   are embarked on the often difficult task of constructing for themselves the little world in
   which they will  live. To be sure, the larger society provides them with certain standard 
   instructions as to how they should go about this task, but this does not change the fact that
   considerable effort of their own is required for its realization. The monogamous character of
   marriage enforces both the dramatic and the precarious nature of this undertaking. Success or
   failure hinges on the present idiosyncrasies and the fairly unpredictable future development
   of these  idiosyncrasies of only two individuals (who, moreover, do not have a shared past) -
   as Simmel has shown, the most unstable of all possible social relationships.^12 Not
   surprisingly, the decision to embark on this undertaking has a critical, even cataclysmic
   connotation in the popular imagination, which is underlined as well as psychologically
   assuaged by the ceremonialism that surrounds the event.

   Every social relationship requires objectivation, that is, requires a process by which
   subjectively experienced meanings become objective to the individual and, in interaction with
   others, become common property and thereby massively objective.^13 The degree of objectivation
   will depend on the  number and the intensity of the social relationships that are its
   carriers. A  relationship that consists of only two individuals called upon to sustain, by 
   their own efforts, an ongoing social world will have to make up in intensity for  the
   numerical poverty of the arrangement. This, in turn, accentuates the  drama and the
   precariousness. The later addition of children will add to the, as it were, density of
   objectivation taking place within the nuclear family,  thus rendering the latter a good deal
   less precarious. It remains true that the establishment and maintenance of such a social world
   make extremely high  demands on the principal participants.

   The attempt can now be made to outline the ideal-typical process that takes place as marriage
   functions as an instrumentality for the social construction of reality. The chief protagonists
   of the drama are two individuals, each with a biographically accumulated and available stock
   of experience.^14 As members of a highly mobile society, these individuals have already
   internalized a degree of readiness to re-define themselves and to modify their stock of
   experience, thus bringing with them considerable psychological capacity for entering new
   relationships with others.^15 Also, coming from broadly similar sectors of the larger society
   (in terms of region, class, ethnic and religious affiliations), the two individuals will have
   organized their stock of experience in similar fashion. In other words, the two individual's
   have internalized the same overall world, including the general definitions and expectations
   of the marriage relationship itself. Their society has provided them with a taken-for-granted
   image of marriage and has socialized them into an anticipation of stepping into the
   taken-for-granted roles of marriage. All the same, these relatively empty projections now have
   to be actualized, lived through and filled with experiential content by the protagonists. This
   will require a dramatic change in their definitions of reality and of themselves.

   As of the marriage, most of each partner's actions must now be projected in conjunction with
   those of the other. Each partner's definitions of reality must be continually correlated with
   the definitions of the other. The other is present in nearly all horizons of everyday conduct.
   Furthermore, the identity of each now takes on a new character, having to be constantly
   matched with that of the other, indeed being typically perceived by the people at large as
   being  symbiotically conjoined with the identity of the other. In each partner's 
   psychological economy of significant others, the marriage partner becomes the other par
   excellence, the nearest and most decisive co-inhabitant of the world. Indeed, all other
   significant relationships have to be almost automatically re-perceived and re-grouped in
   accordance with this drastic shift.

   In other words, from the beginning of the marriage each partner has new modes in his
   meaningful experience of the world in general, of other people and of himself. By definition,
   then, marriage constitutes a nomic rupture. In  terms of each partner's biography, the event
   of marriage initiates a new nomic process. Now, the full implications of this fact are rarely
   apprehended by the protagonists with any degree of clarity. There rather is to be found the 
   notion that one's world, one's other-relationships and, above all, oneself have remained what
   they were before-only, of course, that world, others and self will now be shared with the
   marriage partner. It should be clear by now that  this notion is a grave misapprehension. Just
   because of this fact, marriage now propels the individual into an unintended and unarticulated
   development, in  the course of which the nomic transformation takes place. What typically is 
   apprehended are certain objective and concrete problems arising out of the marriage-such as
   tensions with in-laws, or with former friends, or religious differences between the partners,
   as well as immediate tensions between  them. These are apprehended as external, situational
   and practical difficulties. What is not apprehended is the subjective side of these
   difficulties, namely, the transformation of nomos and identity that has occurred and that
   continues to go on, so that all problems and relationships are experienced in a quite new way,
   that is, experienced within a new and ever-changing reality.

   Take a simple and frequent illustration-the male partner's relationships with male friends
   before and after the marriage. It is a common observation that such relationships, especially
   if the extra-marital partners are single, rarely survive the marriage, or, if they do, are
   drastically re-defined after it. This is typically the result of neither a deliberate decision
   by the husband nor  deliberate sabotage by the wife. What rather happens, very simply, is a
   slow process in which the husband's image of his friend is transformed as he keeps talking
   about this friend with his wife. Even if no actual talking goes on, the mere presence of the
   wife forces him to see his friend differently. This need not mean that he adopts a negative
   image held by the wife. Regardless of what image she holds or is believed by him to hold, it
   will be different from that held by the husband. This difference will enter into the joint
   image that now must needs be fabricated in the course of the ongoing conversation between the
   marriage partners-and, in due course, must act powerfully on the  image previously held by the
   husband. Again, typically, this process is rarely apprehended with any degree of lucidity. The
   old friend is more likely to fade out of the picture by slow degrees, as new kinds of friends
   take his place. The process, if commented upon at all within the marital conversation, can
   always be explained by socially available formulas about "people changing," "friends
   disappearing" or oneself "having become more mature." This process of conversational
   liquidation is especially powerful because it is onesided - the husband typically talks with
   his wife about his friend, but not with his friend  about his wife. Thus the friend is
   deprived of the defense of, as it were,  counter-de6ning the relationship. This dominance of
   the marital conversation over all others is one of its most important characteristics. It may
   be mitigated by a certain amount of protective segregation of some non-marital  relationships
   (say "Tuesday night out with the boys," or "Saturday lunch with  mother"), but even then there
   are powerful emotional barriers against the sort of conversation (conversation about the
   marital relationship, that is) that would serve by way of counter-definition.

   Marriage thus posits a new reality. The individual's relationship with this new reality,
   however, is a dialectical one-he acts upon it, in collusion with  the marriage partner, and it
   acts back upon both him and the partner, welding together their reality. Since, as we have
   argued before, the objectivation that constitutes this reality is precarious, the groups with
   which the couple associates are called upon to assist in co-defining the new reality. The
   couple is pushed towards groups that strengthen their new definition of  themselves and the
   world, avoids those that weaken this definition. This in  turn releases the commonly known
   pressures of group association, again acting upon the marriage partners to change their
   definitions of the world and of  themselves. Thus the new reality is not posited once and for
   all, but goes on  being redefined not only in the marital interaction itself but also in the 
   various maritally based group relationships into which the couple enters.

   In the individual's biography marriage, then, brings about a decisive phase of socialization
   that can be compared with the phases of childhood and   adolescence. This phase has a rather
   different structure from the earlier ones.  There the individual was in the main socialized
   into already existing patterns.  Here he actively collaborates rather than passively
   accommodates himself.  Also, in the previous phases of socialization, there was an
   apprehension of  entering into a new world and being changed in the course of this. In 
   marriage there is little apprehension of such a process, but rather the notion that the world
   has remained the same, with only its emotional and pragmatic  connotations having changed.
   This notion, as we have tried to show, is illusionary.

   The re-construction of the world in marriage occurs principally in the  course of
   conversation, as we have suggested. The implicit problem of this  conversation is how to match
   two individual definitions of reality. By the very  logic of the relationship, a common
   overall definition must be arrived at - otherwise the conversation will become impossible and,
   ipso facto, the relationship will be endangered. Now, this conversation may be understood as
   the  working away of an ordering and typifying apparatus-if one prefers, an objectivating
   apparatus. Each partner ongoingly contributes his conceptions of reality, which are then
   "talked through," usually not once but man times, and in the process become objectivated by
   the conversational apparatus. The  longer this conversation goes on, the more massively real
   do the objectivations  become to the partners. In the marital conversation a world is not only
   built,  but it is also kept in a state of repair and ongoingly refurnished. The subjective
   reality of this world for the two partners is sustained by the same conversation. The nomic
   instrumentality of marriage is concretized over and over  again, from bed to breakfast table,
   as the partners carry on the endless conversation that feeds on nearly all they individually
   or jointly experience. Indeed, it may happen eventually that no experience is fully real
   unless and until it has been thus "talked through."

   This process has a very important result-namely, a hardening or stabilization of the common
   objectivated reality. It should be easy to see now how this comes about. The objectivations
   ongoingly performed and internalized by the  marriage partners become ever more massively
   real, as they are confirmed  and reconfirmed in the marital conversation. The world that is
   made up of  these objectivations at the same time gains in stability. For example, the images
   of other people, which before or in the earlier stages of the marital conversation may have
   been rather ambiguous and shifting in the minds of the  two partners, now become hardened into
   definite and stable characterizations. A casual acquaintance, say, may sometimes have appeared
   as lots of  fun and sometimes as quite a bore to the wife before her marriage. Under the
   influence of the marital conversation, in which this other person is frequently  "discussed,"
   she will now come down more firmly on one or the other of the  two characterizations, or on a
   reasonable compromise between the two. In  any of these three options, though, she will have
   concocted with her husband  a much more stable image of the person in question than she is
   likely to have  had before her marriage, when there may have been no conversational  pressure
   to make a de6nite option at all. The same process of stabilization  may be observed with
   regard to self-definitions as well. In this way, the wife in  our example will not only be
   pressured to assign stable characterizations to  others but also to herself. Previously
   uninterested politically, she now identifies herself as liberal. Previously alternating
   between dimly articulated  religious positions, she now declares herself an agnostic.
   Previously confused  and uncertain about her sexual emotions, she now understands herself as
   an  unabashed hedonist in this area. And so on and so forth, with the same  reality -and
   identity - stabilizing process at work on the husband. Both world and self thus take on a
   firmer, more reliable character for both partners.

   Furthermore, it is not only the ongoing experience of two  partners that  is constantly shared
   and passed through the conversational apparatus. The  same sharing extends into the past. The
   two distinct biographies, as subjectively apprehended by two individuals who have lived
   through them, are overruled and re-interpreted in the course of their conversation. Sooner or
   later,  they will "tell all"-or, more correctly, they will tell it in such a way that it fits 
   into the self-definitions objectivated in the marital relationship. The couple  thus construct
   not only present reality but reconstruct past reality as well,  fabricating a common memory
   that integrates the recollections of the two individual pasts.^16 The comic fulfillment of
   this process may be seen in those  cases when one partner "remembers" more clearly what
   happened in the other's past than the other does-and corrects him accordingly. Similarly, 
   there occurs a sharing of future horizons, which leads not only to stabilization, but
   inevitably to a narrowing of the future projections of each partner.  Before marriage the
   individual typically plays with quite discrepant daydreams in which his future self is
   projected.^17 Having now considerably stabilized his self-image, the married individual will
   have to project the future in  accordance with this maritally defined identity. This narrowing
   of future  horizons begins with the obvious external limitation that marriage entails, as, 
   for example, with regard to vocational and career plans. However, it extends  also to the more
   general possibilities of the individual's biography. To return  to a previous illustration,
   the wife, having "found herself' as a liberal, an  agnostic and a "sexually healthy" person,
   ipso facto liquidates the possibilities  of becoming an anarchist, a Catholic or a Lesbian. At
   least until further  notice she has decided upon who she is-and, by the same token, upon who 
   she will be. The stabilization brought about by marriage thus affects that  total reality in
   which the partners exist. In the most far-reaching sense of the  word, the married individual
   "settles down" - and must do so, if the marriage is to be viable, in accordance with its
   contemporary institutional definition.

   It cannot be sufficiently strongly emphasized that this process is typically  unapprehended,
   almost automatic in character. The protagonists of the marriage drama do not set out
   deliberately to re-create their world. Each continues to live in a world that is taken for
   granted-and keeps its taken for granted character even as it is metamorphosed. The new world
   that the married partners, Prometheus-tike, have called into being is perceived by them as 
   the normal world in which they have lived before. Re-constructed present and  re-interpreted
   past are perceived as a continuum, extending forwards into a  commonly projected future. The
   dramatic change that has occurred remains,  in bulk, unapprehended and unarticulated. And
   where it forces itself upon  the individual's attention, it is retrojected into the past,
   explained as having  always been there, though perhaps in a hidden way. Typically, the
   reality  that has been "invented" within the marital conversation is subjectively  perceived
   as a "discovery." Thus the partners "discover" themselves and the  world, "who they really
   are," "what they really believe," "how they really feel,  and always have felt, about
   so-and-so." This retrojection of the world being  produced all the time by themselves serves
   to enhance the stability of this  world and at the same time to assuage the "existential
   anxiety" that, probably  inevitably, accompanies the perception that nothing but one's own
   narrow  shoulders supports the universe in which one has chosen to live. If one may put it
   like this, it is psychologically more tolerable to be Columbus than to be Prometheus.

   The use of the term "stabilization" should not detract from the insight into the difficulty
   and precariousness of this world-building enterprise. Often  enough, the new universe
   collapses in statu nascendi. Many more times it continues over a period, swaying perilously
   back and forth as the two partners try to hold it up, finally to be abandoned as an impossible
   undertaking. If one  conceives of the marital conversation as the principal drama and the two 
   partners as the principal protagonists of the drama, then one can look upon  the other
   individuals involved as the supporting chorus for the central  dramatic action. Children,
   friends, relatives and casual acquaintances all have their part in reinforcing the tenuous
   structure of the new reality. It goes  without saying that the children form the most
   important part of this supporting chorus. Their very existence is predicated on the maritally
   established  world. The marital partners themselves are in charge of their socialization into
   this world, which to them has a pre-existent and self-evident character.  They are taught from
   the beginning to speak precisely those lines that lend  themselves to a supporting chorus,
   from their first invocations of "Daddy" and "Mummy" on to their adoption of the parents'
   ordering and typifying apparatus that now defines their world as well. The marital
   conversation is now  in the process of becoming a family symposium, with the necessary
   consequence that its objectivations rapidly gain in density, plausibility and  durability.

   In sum: the process that we have been inquiring into is, ideal-typically, one  in which
   reality is crystallized, narrowed and stabilized. Ambivalences are  converted into
   certainties. Typifications of self and of others become settled.  Most generally,
   possibilities become facticities. What is more, this process of  transformation remains, most
   of the time, unapprehended by those who are  both its authors and its objects.^18

   We have analyzed in some detail the process that, we contend, entitles us to  describe
   marriage as a nomic instrumentality. It may now be well to turn  back once more to the
   macrosocial context in which this process takes  place-a process that, to repeat, is peculiar
   to our society as far as the institution of marriage is concerned, although it obviously
   expresses much more  general human facts. The narrowing and stabilization of identity is
   functional  in a society that, in its major public institutions, must insist on rigid
   controls  over the individual's conduct. At the same time, the narrow enclave of the  nuclear
   family serves as a macrosocially innocuous "play area," in which the  individual can safely
   exercise his world-building proclivities without upsetting  any of the important social,
   economic and political applecarts. Barred from  expanding himself into the area occupied by
   these major institutions, he is  given plenty of leeway to "discover himself" in his marriage
   and his family,  and, in view of the difficulty of this undertaking, is provided with a number
   of  auxiliary agencies that stand ready to assist him (such as counseling, psychotherapeutic
   and religious agencies). The marital adventure can be relied  upon to absorb a large amount of
   energy that might otherwise be expended  more dangerously. The ideological themes of familism,
   romantic love, sexual  expression, maturity and social adjustment, with the pervasive
   psychologistic  anthropology that underlies them all, function to legitimate this enterprise.

   Also, the narrowing and stabilization of the individual's principal area of conversation
   within the nuclear family is functional in a society that requires high  degrees of both
   geographical and social mobility. The segregated little world  of the family can be easily
   detached from one milieu and transposed into  another without appreciably interfering with the
   central processes going on in  it. Needless to say, we are not suggesting that these functions
   are deliberately  planned or even apprehended by some mythical ruling directorate of the 
   society. Like most social phenomena, whether they be macro- or microscopic,  these functions
   are typically unintended and unarticulated. What is more,  the functionality would be impaired
   if it were too widely apprehended.

   We believe that the above theoretical considerations serve to give a new  perspective on
   various empirical facts studied by family sociologists. As we  have emphasized a number of
   times, our considerations are ideal-typical in  intention. We have been interested in marriage
   at a normal age in urban,  middle-class, western societies. We cannot discuss here such
   special problems  as marriages or remarriages at a more advanced age, marriage in the
   remaining rural subcultures, or in ethnic or lower-class minority groups. We feel  quite
   justified in this limitation of scope, however, by the empirical findings  that tend towards
   the view that a global marriage type is emerging in the central strata of modern industrial
   societies.^19 This type, commonly referred  to as the nuclear family, has been analyzed in
   terms of a shift from the so-called family of orientation to the so-called family of
   procreation as the most  important reference for the individual.^20 In addition to the
   well-known, socioeconomic reasons for this shift, most of them rooted in the development of
   industrialism, we would argue that important macrosocial functions pertain to the nomic
   process within the nuclear family, as we have analyzed it. This  functionality of the nuclear
   family must, furthermore, be seen in conjunction  with the familistic ideology that both
   reflects and reinforces it. A few specific empirical points may suffice to indicate the
   applicability of our theoretical  perspective. To make these we shall use selected American
   data.

   The trend towards marriage at an earlier age has been noted.^21 This has  been correctly
   related to such factors as urban freedom, sexual emancipation  and equalitarian values. We
   would add the important fact that a child raised  in the circumscribed world of the nuclear
   family is stamped by it in terms of  his psychological needs and social expectations. Having
   to live in the larger  society from which the nuclear family is segregated, the adolescent
   soon feels  the need for a "little world" of his own, having been socialized in such a way 
   that only by having such a world to withdraw into can he successfully cope  with the anonymous
   "big world" that confronts him as soon as he steps outside  his parental home. In other words,
   to be "at home" in society entails, per  definitionem, the construction of a maritally based
   sub-world. The parental  home itself facilitates such an early jump into marriage precisely
   because its  controls are very narrow in scope and leave the adolescent to his own nomic
    devices at an early age. As has been studied in considerable detail, the adolescent peer
   group functions as a transitional nomos between the two family  worlds in the individual's
   biography.^22

   The equalization in the age of the marriage partners has also been noted.^23 This is certainly
   also to be related to equalitarian values and, concomitantly,  to the decline in the "double
   standard" of sexual morality. Also, however, this  fact is very conducive to the common
   reality-constructing enterprise that we have analyzed. One of the features of the latter, as
   we have pointed out, is the  re-construction of the two biographies in terms of a cohesive and
   mutually  correlated common memory. This task is evidently facilitated if the two partners are
   of roughly equal age. Another empirical finding to which our considerations are relevant is
   the choice of marriage partners within similar socio-economic backgrounds.^24 Apart from the
   obvious practical pressures  towards such limitations of choice, the latter also ensure
   sufficient similarity in the biographically accumulated stocks of experience to facilitate
   the  described reality-constructing process. This would also offer additional explanation to
   the observed tendency to narrow the limitations of marital choice  even further, for example
   in terms of religious background.^25 There now exists a considerable body of data on the
   adoption and mutual  adjustment of marital roles.^26 Nothing in our consideration detracts
   from the  analyses made of these data by sociologists interested primarily in the processes of
   group interaction. We would only argue that something more fundamental is involved in this
   role-taking-namely, the individual's relationship to  reality as such. Each role in the
   marital situation carries with it a universe of  discourse, broadly given by cultural
   definition, but continually re-actualized  in the ongoing conversation between the marriage
   partners. Put simply: marriage involves not only stepping into new roles, but, beyond this,
   stepping into  a new world. The mutuality of adjustment may again be related to the rise of
   marital equalitarianism, in which comparable effort is demanded of both  partners.

   Most directly related to our considerations are data that pertain to the  greater stability of
   married as against unmarried individuals.^27 Though frequently presented in misleading
   psychological terms (such as "greater emotional stability," "greater maturity," and so on),
   these data are sufficiently  validated to be used not only by marriage counselors but in the
   risk calculations of insurance companies. We would contend that our theoretical perspective
   places these data into a much more intelligible sociological frame of  reference, which also
   happens to be free of the particular value bias with which the psychological terms are loaded.
   It is, of course, quite true that married people are more stable emotionally (i.e., operating
   within a more  controlled scope of emotional expression), more mature in their views, (i.e., 
   inhabiting a firmer and narrower world in conformity with the expectations  of society), and
   more sure of themselves (i.e., having objectivated a more  stable and fixated
   self-definition). Therefore they are more liable to be psychologically balanced (i.e., having
   sealed off much of their "anxiety," and  reduced ambivalence as well as openness towards new
   possibilities of self-definition) and socially predictable (i.e., keeping their conduct well
   within  the socially established safety rules). All of these phenomena are concomitants  of
   the overall fact of having "settled down"-cognitively, emotionally, in  terms of
   self-identification. To speak of these phenomena as indicators of  "mental health," let alone
   of "adjustment to reality," overlooks the decisive  fact that reality is socially constructed
   and that psychological conditions of all  sorts are grounded in a social matrix.

   We would say, very simply, that the married individual comes to live in a  more stable world,
   from which fact certain psychological consequences can be readily deduced. To bestow some sort
   of higher ontological status upon these psychological consequences is ipso facto a symptom of
   the mis- or non-apprehension of the social process that has produced them. Furthermore, the
   compulsion to legitimate the stabilized marital world, be it in psychologistic or in 
   traditional religious terms, is another expression of the precariousness of its 
   construction.^28 This is not the place to pursue any further the ideological  processes
   involved in this. Suffice it to say that contemporary psychology functions to sustain this
   precarious world by assigning to it the status of "normalcy," a legitimating operation that
   increasingly links up with the older religious assignment of the status of "sacredness." Both
   legitimating agencies  have established their own rites of passage, validating myths and
   rituals, and  individualized repair services for crisis situations. Whether one legitimates 
   one's maritally constructed reality in terms of "mental health" or the "sacrament of marriage"
   is today largely left to free consumer preference, but it is  indicative of the
   crystallization of a new overall universe of discourse that it is  increasingly possible to do
   both at the same time.

   Finally, we would point here to the empirical data on divorce.^29 The  prevalence and, indeed,
   increasing prevalence of divorce might at first appear as a counter-argument to our
   theoretical considerations. We would contend that the very opposite is the case, as the data
   themselves bear out.  Typically, individuals in our society do not divorce because marriage
   has  become unimportant to them, but because it has become so important that  they have no
   tolerance for the less than completely successful marital arrangement they have contracted
   with the particular individual in question. This is  more fully understood when one has
   grasped the crucial need for the sort of  world that only marriage can produce in our society,
   a world without which  the individual is powerfully threatened with anomie in the fullest
   sense of the  word. Also, the frequency of divorce simply reflects the difficulty and
   demanding character of the whole undertaking. The empirical fact that the  great majority of
   divorced individuals plan to remarry and a good majority of  them actually do, at least in
   America, fully bears out this contention.^30

   The purpose of this article is not polemic, nor do we wish to advocate any  particular values
   concerning marriage. We have sought to debunk the familistic ideology only insofar as it
   serves to obfuscate a sociological understanding of the phenomenon. Our purpose has rather
   been twofold. First, we  wanted to show that it is possible to develop a sociological theory
   of marriage that is based on clearly sociological presuppositions, without operating with 
   psychological or psychiatric categories that have dubious value within a sociological frame of
   reference. We believe that such a sociological theory of marriage is generally useful for a
   fully conscious awareness of existence in contemporary society, and not only for the
   sociologist. Secondly, we have used the  case of marriage for an exercise in the sociology of
   knowledge, a discipline  that we regard as most promising. Hitherto this discipline has been
   almost  exclusively concerned with macrosociological questions, such as those dealing  with
   the relationship of intellectual history to social processes. We believe that  the
   microsociological focus is equally important for this discipline. The sociology of knowledge
   must not only be concerned with the great universes of  meaning that history offers up for our
   inspection, but with the many little  workshops in which living individuals keep hammering
   away at the construction and maintenance of these universes. In this way, the sociologist can
   make  an important contribution to the illumination of that everyday world in which  we all
   live and which we help fashion in the course of our biography.

   

   NOTES 

   1. The present article has come out of a larger project on which the authors have been engaged
   in collaboration with three colleagues in sociology and philosophy. The  project is to produce
   a systematic treatise that will integrate a number of now separate  theoretical strands in the
   sociology of knowledge.

   2. Cf. especially Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tuebingen: Mohr  1956), and
   Gesammelte Aufsaelze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tuebingen: Mohr 1951);  George H. Mead, Mind,
   Self and Society (University of Chicago Press 1934); Alfred  Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der
   sozialen Welt (Vienna: Springer, 2nd ed. 1960) and  Collected Papers, 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff
   1962); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard 1945) and La
   structure du comportement  (Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1953).

   3. Cf. Schutz, Aufbau, 202-20 and Collected Papers, I, 3-27, 283-6. 

   4. Cf. Schutz, Collected Papers, I, 207-28.

   5. Cf. especially Jean Piaget, The Child's Construction of Reality (Routledge &  Kegan Paul
   1955).

   6. Cf. Mead, op. cit. , 135-226.

   7. Cf. Schutz, Aufbau, 181-95.

   8. Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter (Hamburg: Rowohlt  1957), 57-69 and
   Anthropologische Forschung (Hamburg: Rowohlt 1961), 69-77,  127-40; Helmut Schelsky,
   Soziologie der Sexualitaet (Hamburg: Rowohlt 1955),  102-33. Also cf. Thomas Luckmann, "On
   religion in modern society," Journal for the  Scientific Study of Religion (Spring 1963),
   147-62.

   9. In these considerations we have been influenced by certain presuppositions of  Marxian
   anthropology, as well as by the anthropological work of Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and
   Arnold Gehlen. We are indebted to Thomas Luckmann for the  clarification of the
   social-psychological significance of the private sphere.

   10. Cf. Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales, Family: Socialization and Interaction Process
   (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1956). 3-34, 353-96.

   11. Cf. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Knopf 1962), 339-410. 

   12. Cf. Georg Simmel (Kurt Wolff ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Collier-Macmillan 1950),
   118-44.

   13. Cf. Schutz, Aufbau, 29-36, 149-53. 

   14. Cf. Schutz, Aufbau, 186-92, 202-10.

   15. David Riesman's well-known concept of "other-direction" would also be applicable here.

   16. Cf. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la memoire (Paris: Presses  universitaires de
   France 1952), especially 146-77; also cf. Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology-A Humanistic
   Perspective (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-Anchor 1963),  54-65 (available in Penguin).

   17. Cf. Schutz, Collected Papers, I, 72-3, 79-82.

   18. The phenomena here discussed could also be formulated effectively in terms of  the Marxian
   categories of reification and false consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre's recent  work, especially
   Critique de la raison dialectique, seeks to integrate these categories  within a
   phenomenological analysis of human conduct. Also cf. Henri Lefebvre,  Critique de la vie
   quotidienne (Paris: 1'Arche 1958-61).

   19. Cf. Renate Mayntz, Die moderne Familie (Stuttgart: Enke 1955): Helmut  Schelsky,
   Wandlungen der deutschen Familie in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Enke  1955); Maximilien Sorre
   (ed.), Sociologie comparée de la famille contemporaine  (Paris: Centre National de la
   Recherche Scientifique 1955); Ruth Anshen (ed.), The  Family-Its Function and Destiny (New
   York: Harper 1959): Norman Bell and Ezra  Vogel, A Modern Introduction to the Family
   (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1961).

   20. Cf. Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory (Collier-Macmillan 1949),  233-50.

   21. In these as well as the following references to empirical studies we naturally  make no
   attempt at comprehensiveness. References are given as representative of a  much larger body of
   materials. Cf. Paul Glick, American Families (New York: Wiley  1957), 54. Also cf, his "The
   family cycle," American Sociological Review (April  1947), 164-74. Also cf. Bureau of the
   Census, Statistical Abstracts of the United States 1956 and 1958; Current Population Reports,
   Series P-20, no. 96 (Nov. 1959).

   22. Cf. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press  1953), 29-40;
   Frederick Elkin, The Child and Society (New York: Random House  1960), passim.

   23. Cf. references given above note 21.

   24. Cf. W. Lloyd Warner and Paul Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven: Yale
   University Press 1941), 436-40; August Hollingshead, "Cultural factors in the selection of
   marriage mates," American Sociological Review (October 1950), 619-27. Also cf. Ernest Burgess
   and Paul Wallin, "Homogamy in social  characteristics," American Journal of Sociology
   (September 1943), 109-24.

   25. Cf. Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday  1961), 48-50.

   26. Cf. Leonard Cottrell, "Roles in marital adjustment," Publications of the  American
   Sociological Society (1933), 27, 107-15: Willard Waller and Reuben Hill,  The Family-A Dynamic
   Interpretation (New York: Dryden 1951), 253-71; Morris  Zelditch, "Role differentiation in the
   nuclear family," in Parsons and Bales, op. cit.,  907-52. For a general discussion of role
   interaction in small groups, cf. especially  George Homans, The Human Group (Routledge & Kegan
   Paul 1951).

   27. Cf. Waller and Hill, op. cit., 259-71. For an excellent summation of such data. 

   28. Cf. Dennison Nash and Peter Berger, "The family, the child and the religious  revival in
   suburbia," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Fall 1962), 85-93.

   29. Cf. Bureau of the Census, op. cit.

   30. Cf. Talcott Parsons, "Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States," American
   Sociological Review (December 1942), 604-I6; Paul Glick, "First marriages and remarriages,"
   American Sociological Review (December 1949), 726-34:  William Goode, After Divorce (Chicago:
   Free Press 1956), 269-85.

   ^