For Better and for Worse: Confronting the Complicated Past and Contested Future of Marriage
Stephanie Coontz
May 2026 · Penguin Random House Audio
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About this audiobook
Twenty years ago, Stephanie Coontz asked of traditional marriage, “What tradition?” Now she returns to examine its contemporary state—what threatens its prevalence and what freedoms it can create for all people.
Ninety percent of the world’s people live in countries where marriage rates have plummeted since the 1980s, with the Western world experiencing especially steep drops. Almost everywhere, marriage has declined most among men and women with the lowest levels of education or earnings. And highly-educated and high-earning women are actually more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than in the past. But such women often express more ambivalence about getting married than other women—and typically postpone doing so until later in life.
Still, rather than devaluing marriage, people all around the world overwhelmingly describe it as the highest expression of commitment they can imagine. And most people say they eventually want to marry even while they increasingly express uncertainty about whether they will end up doing so.
In her new book, For Better and Worse, Stephanie Coontz unravels the origins of these paradoxical trends. Using the past to illuminate the present, she shows how shifting marital ideologies, gender relations, sexual mores, and emotional mind-sets over time have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory expectations and habits that often sabotage our attempts to build mutually satisfactory relationships. “Traditional” roles and values that once promoted successful marriages are now a recipe for relationship failure. Only by undoing the legacy of marriage’s “problematic past,” Coontz argues, can we help individuals and society at large navigate the “challenging future” of marriage.
Ninety percent of the world’s people live in countries where marriage rates have plummeted since the 1980s, with the Western world experiencing especially steep drops. Almost everywhere, marriage has declined most among men and women with the lowest levels of education or earnings. And highly-educated and high-earning women are actually more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than in the past. But such women often express more ambivalence about getting married than other women—and typically postpone doing so until later in life.
Still, rather than devaluing marriage, people all around the world overwhelmingly describe it as the highest expression of commitment they can imagine. And most people say they eventually want to marry even while they increasingly express uncertainty about whether they will end up doing so.
In her new book, For Better and Worse, Stephanie Coontz unravels the origins of these paradoxical trends. Using the past to illuminate the present, she shows how shifting marital ideologies, gender relations, sexual mores, and emotional mind-sets over time have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory expectations and habits that often sabotage our attempts to build mutually satisfactory relationships. “Traditional” roles and values that once promoted successful marriages are now a recipe for relationship failure. Only by undoing the legacy of marriage’s “problematic past,” Coontz argues, can we help individuals and society at large navigate the “challenging future” of marriage.
About the author
Stephanie Coontz is the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of history and family studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She currently serves as an adviser to MTV for its anti-bias campaign. She is the author of five books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the US Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. In addition to long-form and academic writing, you may have seen her on television, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Today show, and PBS News Hour, or heard her interviewed on NPR. Coontz’s articles have appeared in both popular and academic media, from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Journal of Marriage and Family. As a passionate advocate for academics in public life, Coontz conducts media training workshops around the country, both for professional groups and at academic institutions, including Notre Dame, Columbia, and UCLA.
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