One final interview excerpt from The Americans, the 1970 book by David Frost which also gave us the Jon Voight and Ralph Nader pieces. Here’s an exchange in which the TV host and the author and politician Clare Boothe Luce talk about the future of marriage in the U.S.:

David Frost:

Do you think marriage will change, Clare?

Clare Boothe Luce:

Oh, I think it’s changing very rapidly, yes. In some states in the Union now there are definite proposals that marriage should be contractual over a period of time, like any other human engagement. And they’re proposing in some states that marriage contracts should automatically dissolve at periods, say, of ten years, when the children presumably are grown.

I think that the reasons for this are, first and most importantly, that ours is now a very mobile world. And people move around very fast. The old traditions, all of them, religion, all the rest of them, seem to be collapsing. One out of every three marriages today ends in divorce. 

And there is a drive now to legalize that thing, so that there’ll be no more divorce trials, and no more struggles over alimony. Simply that people marry, and the union dissolves every ten years.

Now as a Catholic and a Christian, I deplore this. But this seems what is likely to happen. And another thing too, we’ve got to remember that the life span has been greatly lengthened, and that people now live to be eighty. Women outlive the men. In the old days, not a hundred years ago, you go into a New England graveyard and you’ll see on the gravestone, over and over again, ‘Here lies John Jones and his first wife, Mary, and his second wife, Jean, and his third wife, Kate. A man wore out three women, of course, that was before they conquered childbirth fever.

Now women outlive men, according to statistics, by five years. So any kind of Christian marriage, normal marriage, will probably last fifty years. And it’s highly debatable how many people there are in the world who aren’t sick to death of one another after twenty, no less fifty.•