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"I know what is going on with my daughter, but I don't want to see it, and I don't want to discuss it with her," says Harry, who lives near Detroit. His daughter, age 26, now lives in New York. "This generation has no qualms about sharing a bedroom before marriage. I accept the right of young women to make that decision, but I don't see that they are much happier. And it's very difficult for me. I have a lot of personal feelings on it."
"Young people living together before marriage doesn't disturb me at all," says Mary K. Ellis, 60, a Detroit housewife, mother of two, grandmother of five. "In fact, I think it's sometimes a good idea. I feel people have a right to do what they want in their own private quarters. But I don't like to see sex being peddled on the streets. We had mothers in the neighborhood being accosted simply because they happened to be women." Mrs. Ellis organized her neighbors and picketed prostitutes and a motel they frequented. Result: a police raid, 19 arrests.
"Intellectually, I think it's fine to sleep around," says Linda Gams, 25, a teacher who lived with her husband Bob for a year before marrying him two years ago. "But emotionally I'd be very, very upset if Bob slept with another woman. I wish I could be more liberated about this. I always felt I had conquered this until I started living with Bob and got dependent on him. It's a definite split in me."
"A lot of people accept intellectually that their spouse will probably have an extramarital affair," says Joan, who was married to a Chicago psychologist who often advocated "open marriage." She took him at his word and had an affair. When he found out, it broke up the marriage. Says Joan: "It's easy to be glib about it when it's not happening to you."
One theme emerges through all such comments: the existence of a residual respect for the much-maligned institutions of marriage and family, and the personal commitment implied in those institutions. Adultery is often frowned on as a betrayal, and an illegitimate birth is regarded as an act of irresponsibility.
After declining 10% between 1972 and 1976, the rate of marriages is now rising (the 279,000 June brides this year made up the largest such group since 1969). Though the divorce rate is still climbing, so is the rate of remarriages. The number of people marrying for a second time has roughly tripled since 1960. And the people who have taken to living together (some 1.3 million, up 100% since 1970, but the Census Bureau does not make any effort to ascertain whether such cohabitation involves sexual relations or not) are inclined to talk about their loyalty to each other in much the same tones that newlyweds once used. Indeed, to the extent that cohabitation is now widely accepted as a fact of life, it is a modern version of the old view that sex among the young was tacitly permissible if they were planning to get married or at least were in love. It was sex between strangers, sex for the sport of it, sex for money that always aroused the strongest opposition—and still does.