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Dychtwald cites the late anthropologist Margaret Mead as a pioneer of the kind of serial monogamy that may become popular in the next century. Mead liked to say that she was married three times, all successfully. Mead's husbands suited her needs at different points in her long and varied life. Her first partner, whom she called her "student-husband," provided a conventional and comfortable marriage. As her career progressed, however, she $ sought a traveling partner who was interested in her fieldwork. Finally, she found a romantic and intellectual soul mate.
It will still be possible for a husband and wife to endure together the vicissitudes of many decades, but Dychtwald believes such couples will be rare. Once society has lost most of its taboos against divorce, it will take unusual commitment, flexibility and loyalty (perhaps fortified by a religious vow) to stick it out. Couples who endure to celebrate their golden anniversaries "will have mastered marriage," says Dychtwald. "It will be like mastering the violin or the cello."
The nonvirtuosos will spend significant stretches of their adulthood rediscovering the single life. Current trends suggest that this will be particularly true of women, both because they live longer than men and because they are less likely to remarry. Women will adapt by developing new types of relationships: dating younger men, seeing more males in platonic friendships and living together in groups with other women, not unlike the Golden Girls model. Computer and videophone dating services will help with matchmaking far more than they do today.
Serial monogamy will make family structures a great deal more complicated. The accretion of step-relatives and former in-laws will be legally messy and increasingly bewildering to children, who will have to divide their loyalties and love among stepmothers, birth mothers, biological fathers and ex- stepparents. An entire new body of case law will unfold as courts try to settle complex custody disputes and determine where a child's best interest may lie in a forest of hyphenated relatives.
The growth of the extended family does not mean that huge clans will gather under one roof. "They'll want intimacy at a distance," says Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. The extended family will be more of a network of crisscrossing loyalties and obligations. As life-spans lengthen and marriages multiply, middle-aged couples could find themselves crushed by the responsibilities of caring all at once for aging parents, frail grandparents, children still completing their education and perhaps even a stepgrandchild or two. In short, the "sandwich generation," already feeling so much pressure in the 1990s, could give way to a multilayered club sandwich.
As family relationships grow more complex, role confusion is bound to become epidemic. More battles will be fought over household turf, inheritance and rivalries for affection. Even incest, long considered an absolute taboo, will become a more complicated issue because the fracturing of families will make it harder to define. If nonrelatives within a family have sex, is that incest or something else?