It’s no secret that the rate of marriage in the United States has been steadily declining over the last few decades.In the state of California alone, only 51 percent of adults over 18 are married, according to theSacramento Beein 2016, down from about 74 percent in 1960.The New York Times even reports that being from a city like San Francisco might make you less inclined to get married. Nationwide, instead of legalizing their long-term partnerships, more and more American adults are simply choosing to cohabitate instead.
Why is this happening?
I decided to talk with Bay Area residents — those who are single, dating, engaged and married — to find out.
Mia Hagerty, a 22-year-old writer, believes that there are two main reasons: love and societal pressure. “I think the subconscious bias toward marriage when you’re 25 to 35 plays a huge role in people’s minds,” she said. “We’re just not as acutely aware of it.”
For Rebekah Miller, a 23-year-old administrative assistant living in Berkeley who recently tied the knot, marriage was a public declaration of her commitment to her wife. “My wife and I knew we’d be married, and we were going to wait; however, we realized that we didn’t know for whom we were waiting!” she said. “So we decided to get married to confirm our love for each other with the witness of God and family…and the State of California.”
But Emma also doubted the utility of the practice — “Love and commitment to one person seem to be impractical.”
Georgina Dawson, a 26-year-old tech implementation manager who is engaged to be married, acknowledges the societal factor in her own decision as well. “We’re getting married because it’s the socially acceptable thing to do. All the people I know who have been with someone for a long time and are around my age got married,” she said. Of course, Dawson also attributes being in love as the other reason behind her decision, saying, “It actually makes me love him more to get married.” Emma,* a 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in a committed long-term, long-distance relationship, agreed that people get married “mostly [for] societal reasons.” But she also doubted the utility of the practice — “Love and commitment to one person seem to be impractical.”
Emma isn’t alone in thinking this — and it’s no surprise to anyone living here that nonmonogamy is certainly becoming more popular. Reading an excerpt from Emily Witt’s Future Sex is a good first-timer guide on what a polyamorous relationship set in Silicon Valley would look like today. Or browse through CNN’s slightly dated but still relevant series of articles on sex and drugs in Silicon Valley. That series features the story of Miju Han, a product manager with four relationships, as well as the perspective of Chris Messina (the guy who invented the hashtag). Messina argues that since Silicon Valley is “data-positive and solution oriented,” seeing a “product (i.e., marriage) that is failing for 50 percent of your customers” allows him to see the “need to fix it or offer something better.”
Kate Horowitz, CEO of Organ House, is certainly playing a key part in shaking up the traditions: not only has she been in a committed polyamorous relationship for eight years, but also she has been married to her partner, Ben, for three of those years. You can learn more about the intricacies of how Horowitz and her partner deal with dating other people while still being married here, but what interested me more was their decision to make it legal, especially if they were keeping their options open anyway.
Horowitz explained to me that she and her partner are in a hierarchical poly-relationship, in which they both come first for each other even if they are in other relationships—just not necessarily emotionally. “It’s not that I love him more than I’m ever going to love anyone else. There’s going to be times when people fall in and out of love,” Horowitz said. “It’s less about being more emotionally involved with each other and being more about a team — we have very clear financial and business goals.”
Wanting to have children one day is one of the reasons Horowitz has her financial goals in alignment with her partner’s, and why they decided to take on the legal responsibilities that come with marriage. “There are some legal protections in place when you’re married, a template for how that structures your assets when you pass away and how your children will be taken of,” she said. “We liked the ease of that.” But Horowitz doesn’t want you to think that she and her partner are just “shrewd and savvy, laser-focused on these shared goals and not in love.” And I have to admit, the thought crossed my own mind even as I sat across from Horowitz during our interview. “Ben is my everything, and I couldn’t be who I am without him. But our relationship is so much more than ‘he’s my lover,’ you know?” she explained. “He’s my partner in crime, my best friend, my rock.”
One of the other labels Horowitz and her partner share, aside from being married, is business partners. They’ve worked on a couple of business ventures together, the third being Organ House — a Bay Area community that organizes consensual and egalitarian “play parties” and in the process is redefining marriage. Horowitz talks about welcoming many married couples to her parties, from couples looking to experiment sexually beyond their own marriage to poly partners to monogamous couples who are exhibitionists. Horowitz believes that more people are open to options beyond the traditional constructs of marriage simply because it’s just that much harder to cheat in the digital age. “People are realizing that if they’re going to have a difficult conversation, they might as well have a difficult conversation up front rather than later when they’ve done something wrong,” she said. “That’s going to be a more painful conversation.”
“One could say that many people in tech tend to be more analytical and let their thinking dominate their feelings — that’s not always a great recipe for lasting relationships,” Andersen said.
Matchmaker Amy Andersen of LinxDating, on the other hand, caters to a clientele that still craves something more traditional. “I have a handful of extremely accomplished women come to my office sharing that they have just gotten out of a very complicated polyamorous relationship and at the end of the day want a one-woman-one-man relationship,” she said. Andersen’s clients come to her with more than just the prospect of dating, but rather “finding lasting love with the end goal being marriage.” In the era of “Big Dating,” when countless dating prospects await with a single swipe, it’s certainly an interesting choice to go to a matchmaker. Andersen attributes it to the fact that her clients are “notoriously private,” that the idea of “swiping through potential matches vis-à-vis a dating app or online is often a non-starter for them,” and how the opportunity of her being an “old-world matchmaker” presented itself.
With her unique perspective, I asked Andersen why she thinks fewer and fewer Bay Area residents are tying the knot today. “One could say that many people in tech tend to be more analytical and let their thinking dominate their feelings — that’s not always a great recipe for lasting relationships,” she said. But Andersen doesn’t believe that a decline in the Bay Area’s marriage rates has any causal effect on the decline of nationwide marriage rates. “Many people, anywhere, are fearful of what could happen and look at the statistics around them, creating trepidation and skepticism about marriage in general,” she said. “Amongst the uber-wealthy, often the only way to even think about getting married is having an iron-clad prenup created and hoping their partner will agree to it.” Since California has legalized no-fault divorce since the ’70s, it seems especially important for Millennial couples wanting to protect their assets to have one — the SF Chronicle recently provided a prenup primer for that matter.
“If there was going to be any place where the rules of marriage were changing, it would be here,” Horowitz said. “And I think that everything else I’ve seen in the disruption that this city has caused has led to beautiful, innovative, exciting outcomes! So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with shaking that up.”
What will the future of marriage look like? It’s hard to tell. Andersen thinks “anything is possible within the next 50 to 100 years from now,” including “cyborg love, like falling in love with your smart car, your computer or a robotic-looking human.” With the evolution of sex robots, we never know when a situation like Spike Jonze’s Her will start becoming more reality than sci-fi. But Miller reminds us that before we allow technology to entangle with legislature in terms of marriage, there’s a necessary step for the kind of being we already have today. “Before we look into AI and robotics, we have to remember that transgender people are just being recognized by law,” she said. “We need to allow all humans to marry with their names and pronouns that they prefer, before we allow AI and other future technology any rights or privileges.”
Whatever the future holds, it’s no surprise that the Bay Area is redefining what marriage looks like. “If there was going to be any place the rules of marriage were changing, it would be here,” Horowitz said. “And I think that everything else I’ve seen in the disruption that this city has caused has led to beautiful, innovative, exciting outcomes! So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with shaking that up.”
*Name has been changed to protect privacy
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