What keeps a marriage together? – Lessons from Little House

First posted August 11, 2004.

                      
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A few years ago, I read several blog articles about the decline of marriage in the United States. The blogger suggested that the problem with marriage is that we are working too much for too little. He concluded that this is the primary reason that marriages break up.

The blogger continued to work out his plan for saving marriages. He said something about paid time off for just about everything. Yet, I  couldn’t help but think about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books. Farmer Boy in particular comes to mind.

The reader can’t miss how much work Almanzo Wilder and his family did all the time.  For Mrs. Wilder, life was a continuous ongoing attempt to keep the family fed. She provided a hearty breakfast, a huge lunch, and an even bigger dinner! The entire family was doing a lot of physical labor.   

In between times, of course, there was laundry, housework, mending, etc. But the biggest part of her day was getting enough calories into the men. They needed nutrition to sustain the hard work they were doing outside on the farm! There were no fast foods, frozen dinners, drive through at McDonald’s. This was all from scratch, from the farm or the market, tasty, simple, home cooking.

The men were busy taking care of livestock, planting, cultivating, sowing, and repairing buildings and equipment. This was every day, day in and day out, throughout the seasons regardless of the weather.

At night they read a bit, but basically when the sun went down, so did the Wilders. It seems to me that they had less “quality” time together than the average American Worker. Certainly, they worked for less pay and definitely more strenuous physical labor. Yet, THEIR marriages stayed together!

Marriage and work

Come to think of it, my own grandparents worked pretty hard too. My grandfather worked the farm at night, but during the day he worked on the assembly line for Chevrolet. My grandma did housework, and farm work, and even worked as a church secretary for a time. They were married until my grandmother’s death after 52 years of marriage. I don’t think the hard work, the low pay, and the lack of “quality time” hurt their marriage and I’d venture to guess that since the divorce rate didn’t start soaring until the 1960s, there are other more primary factors that are tearing marriages apart nowadays.

Children were also part of the family

In the Little House Books, but also in early 20th century America, children weren’t incidental to the family. They were a big part of the family and when they were old enough, they helped to work for the family – whether it was farm work or domestic work.

Is it a surprise that with the advent and widespread use of birth control, and mandatory school for children, the dynamic of the family changed to such a degree that the divorce rate soared? I would argue that it wasn’t that the mother and father work working too much for too little, but that their focus wasn’t on sustaining the family but on sustaining things outside of the family.

Maybe what we can learn from the example in Farmer Boy, is that good hard work, done through and for our vocation as husband and wife, is actually good for a marriage. And that an early bedtime can’t hurt either!