Marriage Quote by Mary Douglas

A dry list of social trends becomes, in Mary Douglas's hands, a warning shot about what happens when the old scaffolding of everyday life starts to wobble. The cadence matters: "more volatile", "more ephemeral", "more intensified", "weaker". Each comparative pushes the reader into a world where nothing holds for long, where the institutions that once absorbed risk (marriage, steady work, stable neighborhoods) no longer buffer people from turbulence. It's not nostalgia; it's diagnosis.

Douglas, best known as an anthropologist of risk and social order, is pointing to a post-1970 shift in how uncertainty is distributed. The subtext is structural, not sentimental: when jobs churn and people move more, relationships take on the stress of being asked to do too much. Marriage isn't just romance; it's an organizing technology, a way societies once routinized dependency, caregiving, and status. When its "stability" weakens, the fallout isn't only private heartbreak. It changes how communities enforce norms, how people plan time, how they interpret obligation.

The date stamp is doing quiet work. "Since 1970" evokes deindustrialization, the rise of service work, second-wave feminism reshaping gender expectations, easier divorce, and a culture of self-actualization that treats mobility as virtue. Douglas isn't moralizing those changes; she's tracking their side effects: a society more flexible, yes, but also more anxious, with fewer durable scripts for what a life is supposed to look like.