Getting Married

📘 About This Book

In Getting Married, Carrie Yodanis and Sean Lauer examine the social rules and expectations that shape our most personal relationships. How do couples get together? How do people act when they’re married? What happens when they’re not? Public factors influence our private relationships. From getting engaged to breaking up, social rules and expectations shape and constrain whom we select as a spouse, when and why we decide to get married, and how we arrange our relationships day to day. While this book is about marriage, it is also about sociology. Yodanis and Lauer use the case of marriage to explore a sociological perspective. Getting Married will bring together students’ academic and social worlds by applying sociology to the things they are thinking about and experiencing outside of the classroom. This book is a useful tool for many sociology courses, including those on family, gender, and introduction to sociology.

📖 Summary

Getting Married by Carrie Yodanis, co-authored with Sean Lauer and published in 2016, is a concise yet deeply insightful social science text that unpacks the intricate social rules and expectations shaping our most intimate relationships. Spanning 127 pages, the book bridges the gap between public structures and private lives, demonstrating how broader societal forces constantly influence the seemingly personal decisions we make regarding romance, commitment, and partnership. The authors begin by examining the foundational questions of how couples first get together, revealing that partner selection is rarely a purely random or purely individualistic choice. Instead, societal norms, cultural expectations, and systemic pressures heavily constrain whom we meet, consider desirable, and ultimately select as a spouse. By looking at courtship through a sociological lens, the text encourages readers to look past romantic myths and recognize the invisible frameworks guiding their romantic lives. Moving past the initial stages of relationship formation, the book explores the dynamics of everyday married life. How do people act when they are married? What daily routines, obligations, and cultural scripts dictate marital behavior? Yodanis and Lauer explain that marriage is not merely a private agreement between two people, but a heavily institutionalized status governed by shared public understandings. Social expectations dictate how spouses should divide labor, communicate, present themselves to the community, and navigate conflict. The authors also address the darker or more disruptive side of relationships, asking what happens when they do not work out. From engagements that fall apart to eventual breakups and divorces, the dissolution of a relationship is also managed and shaped by social rules. The societal weight placed on marriage makes breaking up a complex social process fraught with expectations, grief, and structural hurdles. Throughout the book, marriage serves as a brilliant case study for introducing the core tenets of sociology. Yodanis and Lauer purposefully connect academic concepts with the lived experiences and everyday thoughts of students and general readers. By examining something as familiar as getting married, the authors demystify sociological perspectives and show how public factors continually influence private relationships. Ultimately, Getting Married invites readers to step back and analyze their own romantic trajectories, providing a compelling framework for understanding how society constructs the milestones of love, commitment, and partnership.

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