John and Eleanor agreed to meet at a neutral spot.
They parked their cars on the town's main street. John, who had moved out of the house two days earlier, climbed into Eleanor's car."What are you going to do?" Eleanor asked.
"Well," her husband stalled. "I'm not sure . . . "
"Make up your mind," she snapped. "Now."
The 35-year-old accountant sat quietly. Did he want to end this marriage? "That wretch" had whined about his career, his traveling. Other women were looking good. Then again, she was a good mother. He thought of their two sons in elementary school. If he had to maintain two households, they would all be broke. He had no choice.
"I'll be home after work," he said.
Now, after 42 years of marriage, John says he is "in heaven." He and his wife, who've asked that their last names not be used, not only stayed together; they also grew to love each other. These days, sitting in their sunny den on a cozy Charlotte, N.C., street, surrounded by photos of their children and grandchildren, they laugh about their romanticized expectations of marriage when they were young.
And John has strong words for parents thinking about divorce: "The function of marriage is survival," he says. "Love is when two suffering people commit themselves forever to the stability of their children."
*****
IS MARRIAGE really about money and responsibility? Is the 20th-century model of marriage for romantic love just fantasy? Is it not OK for parents to divorce anymore just because romance has died or because your spouse hogs the remote control?
This sort of talk skewered Dan Quayle last May. But this view - that the two-parent home is in most cases the best place to raise a child and government ought to get behind it - is gaining momentum. It's jumped party lines. It's in the White House.
Among the believers: William Galston, domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.
"It is no exaggeration that a stable, two-parent family is an American child's best protection against poverty," writes Galston in "Mandate for Change," a recent book endorsed by Clinton. The book was prepared by the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council, which Clinton once headed.
Nobody's saying divorce is always wrong. Certainly, there are times when it's the best decision for everyone, such as when a wife is battered or a child abused. But if last year's "Murphy Brown" fiasco is any preview, this philosophical shift could spark a national slugfest. In one corner are the academics and Washington policymakers, armed with bar charts and line graphs. In another corner, single parents and some feminists, bristling at preachy finger-wagging.
For nervous politicians, booby traps are everywhere.
Should states make it harder for parents to get divorced?
Should schools hand out condoms?
Should the president use his bully pulpit to campaign against unwed moms?
John has an idea: "Parents who want to divorce should be taken down to the public square and whipped."
*****
THE CASE for the two-parent family comes down to this: The vast majority of children who grow up with two parents will never be poor. Most children with a single parent will be poor at some time.
Here are often-cited statistics:
- Children who live with single parents are five times as likely to be poor as children with two parents.
- One of every five children is poor now. The number would be a third less if we rolled back to the single-parent rates of 1960.
- Family poverty has little to do with lack of education. Even when both parents are high-school dropouts, they are far less likely to be poor if they are married (25 percent) than if they are single (62 percent).
- Family type is more important than race in determining poverty. Two-thirds of black single-parent families are poor, compared with 17 percent of black two-parent families.
But hasn't the fact that more women are working meant they are better able to support a family by themselves? "Just the reverse," says Galston. "Families need two incomes to maintain even a marginally middle-class existence." Not only do wives need husbands more; he says husbands also need wives more.
The problem isn't all money, says Robert Rector, senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington. There is the separate issue of fathers as role models. "Ripping the father out of the house is doing something very bad to those children," says Rector.
Today, about a third of all American children live apart from their fathers. Among the children of divorce, half have never visited their father's home.
"The issues have to do with the contributions fathers make to parenting," says John Guidubaldi, a psychologist at Kent State University in Ohio. "Discipline and control. Role modeling. A purveyor of values."
An ongoing 11-year study by Guidubaldi follows 699 families in 38 states. It shows that children of divorce are more likely to have poor self-confidence and more frequently get in fights and use drugs. Guidubaldi says the adverse effects hold up across cultures (he's followed families in China, too) and regardless of family income.
Psychologist Judith Wallerstein's 1989 book, "Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce," supports this view and has helped spawn a trend in counseling toward saving marriages. Her studies showed boys are apt to experience the greatest trauma at the time of divorce and suffer most from father-absence.
The result of all this data is a wide range of family experts calling for government to adopt policies that promote two-parent families, including the 1991 bipartisan National Commission on Children headed by Sen. Jay Rocke-feller, D-W.Va.
Shortly after the honeymoon, John began to ruminate that he'd married the wrong woman.
He had made the decision hurriedly in 1950, he told himself. He was just a frightened 23-year-old Army corporal, fearful of going to war in Korea. "I thought I had to hurry up and get married and experience life," he says.
In his mind, Eleanor had turned out to be a helpless Southern "magnolia" - sometimes too shy to go out of the house. John, on the other hand, became a traveling salesman.
Temptation knocked constantly. "When you're young and full of testosterone, and your marriage is a shambles, it's hard not to think, `Right over there is happiness,' " he says.
One day the couple were fighting. John was telling her "what an awful wife she was."
Eleanor shot back, "You're no bargain either."
Says John: "That just shut me right up."
The couple held on, while the divorce rate in America doubled.
Notes Professor Guidubaldi: "People don't invest much effort in trying to resolve the issues in the marriage."
*****
IN STATE legislatures, liberals and conservatives alike are talking about such reforms as "two-tier" divorce laws. Childless couples could split at will. Those with children would face restriction. For example, says White House adviser Galston, they might have a longer waiting period during which they would have to seek counseling.
Rector, of the Heritage Foundation, would even go so far as to roll back "no-fault" divorce, 1970s legislation that eliminated the need for couples to assign blame for the divorce.
Harvard University law professor Mary Ann Glendon says judges in divorce proceedings should adopt a "children first" principle when awarding marital property. All property and income, no matter when or how acquired, would first be used to meet the needs of children and their caretaker before any other factors are entertained. For example, instead of dividing the savings account equally between husband and wife, judges might take into account the decreased earning power of mothers and give more money to them.
Government could help poor families stay together in other ways, many say, provided taxpayers want to spend the money.
One would be by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, which means government sends more money to working parents who are poor. Democrats and Republicans are sure to differ on specifics, but both parties endorse the general idea.
Updating the tax exemption for children is another possibility both parties are toying with. Last year, the exemption was $2,300. If it had been indexed for personal income growth when it was created in 1948, it would be about $8,000 per child now according to the Urban Institute.
Get-tough child support enforcement, experts believe, could also encourage married parents to think long and hard before splitting up. It would make clear that parents who ditch a marriage can't ditch responsibility, too. Only one in four women receives the full amount of child support she is due, according to the Census Bureau.
In early February, Rep. Henry J. Hyde, R.-Ill., introduced a bill that would require the IRS to collect the money. The proposal would be paid for by eliminating $700 million a year in federal grants now given to states to help them collect support payments.
DIVORCE isn't the only reason children have single parents. Another reason is out-of-wedlock births. This is where consensus breaks down. How to prevent such births gets tangled in the hot issues of religion and racism.
More than a quarter of all single mothers never married. Births to unmarried mothers hit a record high in 1990 - up 75 percent over the decade, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
One issue: whether to give kids sex education and contraceptives or teach abstinence.
"You want to get people upset, talk about this," says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values. "You'll get them to an `8' on the Richter scale pretty fast."
Blankenhorn sides with parents who view sex education in the schools as "imperialism from educators." He thinks children should learn about sex from their parents.
On the other side are people like Barbara Huberman, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition on Adolescent Pregnancy. She points out that almost two-thirds of high-schoolers are sexually active. She advocates sex education "taught by a competent, sensitive teacher, not the coach who's been hired for basketball."
White House adviser Galston tiptoes down the middle: "There is no agreed-upon administration position," he says. "It's an issue that has to be dealt with very, very carefully."
Some say trying to prevent teen pregnancies isn't the whole answer and could be a subtle form of racism - an attempt to hold down the black population.
Some 43 percent of black families are headed by a single mother, as compared with 9 percent of white families, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Ahmad Daniels, a Charlotte, N.C., activist, touched off a flurry of letters when he wrote The Charlotte Observer last year: "I believe the Creator has decreed these African-American girls to be the vehicle for offsetting our devastation."
Efforts to legislate parents' moral behavior rankles some traditional liberals.
Marian Wright Edelman, head of the Children's Defense Fund, which has launched extensive campaigns against teen pregnancy, says she is tired of the debate over "what perfect form families should take.
"I think two parents are always better than one, OK?" she told The Charlotte Observer in an interview last fall. "But millions of kids have only one parent. We need to support them. I save judgment about families and their behavior to the Lord."
When Michael Gartsu of Huntersville, N.C., turned 11 last month, his parents threw a roller-skating party. Both Mom and Dad drove a carload of playmates to the rink. While Carol Gartsu supervised the party, Mark Gartsu picked up pizza. Then Carol snapped photos of father and son grinning together.
When the party was over, Carol Gartsu tucked Michael into bed and Mark drove to his house four miles away. The Gartsus divorced seven years ago.
Carol Gartsu, a social worker, says her ex-husband has never missed a child-support payment. Mark Gartsu attends every one of Michael's basketball games and coached his soccer team.
"I am fed up with people equating `single parent' with a lack of family values," fumes Carol Gartsu. "To assume that because I'm single my child is doomed to a life of despair. I have no intentions of producing a failure, and my son has no intentions of living a life of crime."
What would Galston say about this?
"This is not a moral judgment on the millions of single parents who are struggling against daunting odds to do right by their children," Galston says. "It's the issue of what have we learned in the past generation. We've learned that a lot of kids are paying a pretty heavy price for the family changes in the past generation."
John and Eleanor have certainly learned a lot. To see them now, one would never believe they had marital difficulties. They work together in a small furniture business and enjoy pampering their four grandchildren.
"It's almost funny now, looking back on it," Eleanor laughs.
John credits his wife with keeping their marriage together.
"People live their lives up to a certain point believing there's some circumstance out there that will make them happy," Eleanor explains. "The bottom line is you have to find within yourself the wherewithal to make yourself happy. If you can do that, you can live with or without anybody."
John credits his children with teaching him about unconditional love.
"There wasn't anything I wouldn't do to protect them," he says. "Including staying married."
*****
(Additional information)
Was former v.p. right after all?
If consensus is building to promote two-parent families, what was the "Murphy Brown" fuss? Here's what then-Vice President Dan Quayle said on May 19, 1992: "Bearing babies irresponsibly is wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. It doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown - a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman - mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice."
William Galston, President Clinton's domestic adviser, explains the Democrats' view: "The data suggest that the best anti-poverty program for America's children is a stable, intact family. The Bush administration was using (the Murphy Brown' debate) as a red herring to distract attention from the fact that they were doing nothing to help the families they claim to value."
Robert Rector, senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, says everyone agreed with Quayle all along. Quayle was "just such a punching bag," he says. "I don't think he could say apple pie is good without getting roasted. But it's very easy to carry the day on this issue. All you have to do is read the data."