Prodding the Poor to the Altar.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Group encourages paying poor women to marry

A new survey from the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University finds romantic love on the ascendancy among the young. A full 94 percent of never-married singles in their twenties are looking to marry a "soul mate, first and foremost," as opposed to, say, a breadwinner, a sex object, or a person who is capable of repairing a leaky faucet. Among the women surveyed, more than 80 percent agreed that it is "more important to them to have a husband who can communicate about his deepest feelings than to have a husband who makes a good living."

Good news, right? At least it should be good news for those of us who grew up in the pre-feminist era, when marriage was supposed to be a sex-for-food exchange, as in prostitution or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?

But the authors of the study, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, are already grumping that the young may be setting their sights too high, on an overly "exalted and demanding standard of a spiritualized union of souls." You will perhaps remember that these are the same folks who brought us dire warnings, a year ago, on the dangers of pre-marital cohabitation. Since couples who cohabit are somewhat more likely to divorce when they do marry, Whitehead and Popenoe announced that prior cohabitation predisposes people to divorce--overlooking the more likely possibility that those who are unconventional enough to cohabit may also be quicker to leave an unhappy marriage. Never mind the unconventional--the National Marriage Project and cultural conservatives in general want to see everyone (every heterosexual, anyway) married. And if that means lowering your standards to the point where you'll accept anyone who doesn't activate the gag reflex, so be it.

So far, the advocates of early (just do it!) and eternal marriage have been frustrated by the romantic predilections of the public. Most of us insist on marrying potential soul mates and, of course, divorcing them when our souls begin to flutter apart. Ultra-tight "covenant marriages," which are difficult to get out of unless a spouse commits a felony, have found few takers, even though they are available in Arizona and Louisiana. More Americans every year choose not to marry at all rather than settle for a sub-perfect spouse.

But there is one group that may have little choice in the matter: poor women on welfare. Conservative policy wonks are cooking up schemes to get welfare recipients married off as quickly as possible. Others may be...