The primary purpose of marriage is and has always been to reduce violence between men competing for mates. An extremely obvious example: every time I pass up the opportunity to hit on a woman because she is wearing a wedding ring, a potential violent conflict with her husband is prevented. Preventing that conflict isn't as important as it was in the Middle Ages, however. Westerners are much less violent than we were only a few hundred years ago, and other peoples possibly are as well. We are far less likely to die by violence. Have we become so nonviolent and orderly that marriage has lost its raison d'etre? Would marriage still be going strong in spite of the easy availability of birth control and employment for women if trying to kill your wife's lover were normal behavior?

It is difficult to find good data to test such hypotheses, but the General Social Survey does give us the opportunity to see whether traditional attitudes towards marriage are more prevalent among people who live in the more violent segments of society. Specifically, we can see whether people who are afraid to walk in their neighborhood at night feel that marriage is not taken seriously when divorce is easy - certainly a traditional attitude.

Answers to both questions were available for 792 individuals, so it's not a small sample. Of those who agreed or strongly agreed that marriage is not taken seriously when divorce is easy, 237 were afraid to walk in their neighborhood at night and 245 were not. Of those who disagreed or strongly disagreed, 52 were afraid to walk in their neighborhood at night while 98 were not. People who feel safe in their neighborhood are considerably more likely to hold the nontraditional view that easy divorce does not weaken marriage.

Also, we can take a look at those who feel that a bad marriage is better than no marriage at all. This is an extremely traditional view, and not very popular. This time data was available for 1811 people. Of those who were afraid to walk in their neighborhood, 33 agreed or strongly agreed with this statement. Of those who were not afraid, 36 disagreed. Looking at those who disagreed or strongly disagreed, 722 were afraid in their neighborhood while 930 were not. Again, we see that the more traditional view is more common among those for whom violence is a reality, or at least a real fear. I also looked at support for homosexual marriage, but found only a weak pattern there. Perhaps gays and lesbians are less prone to killing each other over mates than heterosexual men are.

An international comparison would be good, perhaps using data from the CIA World Factbook, but at least within the US the trend is clear. All this is not to say that we need more murder to save marriage; nor do I think that marriage serves no other purpose and is therefore doomed in low-violence societies. However, when the main reason why we developed a core social institution becomes much less important, we cannot expect that institution to remain unchanged. More importantly, we must not forget what that reason was.