Adding Children To The Equation

Children change a marriage.

This is not a lament. It's not a hallelujah, either. It's just a fact.

That whole greeting card promise, "And baby makes three," doesn't begin to explain what happens when a couple makes room for someone else who isn't meant to walk on all fours.

Children set the marital earth to trembling with their first wail of welcome. They cement the bond between committed lovers, or they deepen the divide in an already shifting alliance. As my friend Robin, a happily married mother of four, puts it, "If your marriage is already good, children make it better. If it's already bad, children make it worse."

One thing is certain: Children are never inconsequential. Ecologically speaking, they are a giant carbon footprint on the flora of love.

Americans used to think children were crucial to a successful marriage.

When I was a kid, all you had to do was look up and down the street to understand how life was supposed to work: You got married, you had kids and your husband went from boyfriend to breadwinner in the time it took to snap your first Onesie.

A marriage without children was a marriage to pity, and I can remember my mother's coffee klatches bubbling with wild speculation over the supposed unhappiness of the occasional childless couple in the neighborhood.

Inevitably, we ended up calling these couples "aunt" and "uncle" to make them "feel better." They usually had big cars and even bigger vacations, but that wasn't something you mentioned in a room full of harried mothers.

As recently as 1990, 65 percent of Americans said children were "very important" to a marriage.

Not anymore. A new study by the Pew Research Center suggests that, when it comes to what makes a marriage work, today's adults have a different take on the perks of procreation.

Pew interviewed 2,020 adults, and one of the more startling findings was that Americans declared, by a three-to-one margin, that the purpose of marriage is "mutual happiness and fulfillment," rather than "bearing and raising children."

This is not to say children don't matter.

About 85 percent of those with children under age 18 described these relationships as a top source of personal fulfillment, above all other relationships. But when asked to rank nine indicators for a successful marriage, children came in eighth.

Here's the list:

— Faithfulness (93 percent)

— Happy sexual relationship (70 percent)

— Sharing household chores (62 percent)

— Adequate income (53 percent)

— Good housing (51 percent)

— Shared religious beliefs (49 percent)

— Shared tastes and interests (46 percent)

— Children (41 percent)

— Agreement on politics (12 percent)

In some ways, the list is encouraging. After years of tuning in to the sexual escapades of "Sex and the City" and "Grey's Anatomy," Americans have decided they're for monogamy after all. And the high rank of shared household chores suggests that men are finally understanding the seductive pull of a trash bag's well-timed twisty tie.

But what's up with the children? Some marriage experts are already bemoaning this as proof that American grown-ups are anything but.

Maybe so. But I keep thinking of the long ago advice from a friend who is now in her late 80s. Her husband has been gone for more than 20 years, but the mere mention of his name still brings the same sweet smile to her face.

She always told me that, when he was alive, he was No. 1 and everybody knew it, including her three kids.

"The couple has to come first," she always said. "All good things flow from that."

Children will always change a marriage. But they don't have to change the couple.

Maybe that's what we're finally figuring out.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… And His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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