Stephanie Coontz People Quotations

Even 25 years ago, most people were reliant on their friends to fix them up. People in their 40s and 50s don't want to be hanging out at bars. Now they have access to this incredible pool of single people their age.

This is a new phenomenon ? not the mercenary quality, but the fact that people are willing to risk this kind of money, just to say they're married. Love has been so idealized that at the top, the rich are willing to throw good money after bad to see if they can get the magic ring.

Singlehood is not longer a state to be overcome as soon as possible. It has its own rewards. Marriage is not the gateway to adulthood anymore. For most people it's the dessert - desirable, but no longer the main course.

There is a lack of collective support or social support for working people in America. We're told, "You can be, as an individual, anything you want to be, but it must be at something else's - or somebody else's - expense."

Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used tobe." But that doesn't mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it's cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.