The price of housing is based on people’s ability to pay for it. The desire to own a house is so strong that people will make huge life changes to afford it. I think this buying power of a two-income couple is a major incentive for marriage. But it’s a race to the bottom: couples get married because single people can’t afford houses; single people can’t afford houses because couples are buying them.

Cultural desire for the actual ritual of marriage has decreased as desire to own a house has increased. Market timing adds an urgency to house buying while there’s no obvious time to get married. So now common-law couples buy houses together. Building a home together is a similar commitment to building a family together:

• a shared mortgage forces financial interdependence
• consequences of a split are just as serious as a divorce
• the community recognizes the sanctity of joint ownership
• housewarming parties are like wedding receptions

Besides raising kids, a traditional marriage is an exchange of financial support for domestic products (“home economics”). These days men are better at producing their own domestic products and these products are more available on the open market (heat & serve meals, housekeeping by the hour, etc.). Women can get jobs that make enough to support themselves.

It has been argued that contemporary marriages are consumption partnerships. But I say marriages are still about producing something: relationship products. These are all the activities you like, from long walks on the beach to footrubs to sex that your friends don’t produce.

The two relationship products that men particularly benefit from consuming are:

• emotionally-intimate talking: for most men their only really good friendship with a woman is their partner
• social network building: in most marriages the woman manages social relationships from dinner parties to family gatherings

Single women are not missing such vital relationship products, which explains why married men are statistically happier than single men but single women are happier than married women. Men get married instead of serially date to ensure a reliable supply of relationship products. Women can get relationship products without marriage, so advertisers create the need for marriage-as-romance. Marriages centred around relationship product production are “companionate marriages”.

About a Boy is a story of two lone wolves, Marcus and Will, moving to build a tribe around them. This project has only started by the end of the narrative (better implied in the movie than the book, I think); here are two snippets from the final chapters:

Ali: Do you still want him to marry your mum?
Marcus: Naah. See, I don’t think that’s the right way. When people pair off it’s more insecure because they’ll split up, or go mad or something.
Will: What if we stay together forever?
Marcus: Fine. Great. Prove it. I just don’t think couples are the future.

Marcus: I feel safer than before, because I know more people.
Marcus’ Dad: They won’t be around forever.
Marcus: Some of them will, some of them won’t. You can find people. It’s like those acrobatic displays. Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn’t really matter who they are as long as they’re there and you don’t let them go away without finding someone else.

In the second quote Marcus uses a network perspective: the structure of the system is more important than the elements that make it up.