Stephanie Coontz: This Is Not a Self-Help Book
In this interview, author Stephanie Coontz discusses researching and writing about modern marriage in her new book, For Better and Worse.
Stephanie Coontz is the Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families and Professor Emerita in History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. She has authored five earlier books, including The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap; Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, and A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
In this interview, Stephanie discusses researching and writing about modern marriage in her new book, For Better And For Worse, her advice for other nonfiction writers, and more.
Name: Stephanie Coontz
Literary agent: Susan Rabiner
Book title: For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage
Publisher: Viking
Release date: May 26, 2026
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Previous titles: The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap; The Way We Really Are; Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage; A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
Elevator: Marriage has never been more egalitarian—or more demanding. This book uncovers how the past still shapes our relationships in hidden ways, and why modern marriage feels both more rewarding and more risky than ever.
What prompted you to write this book?
I wanted to answer the common complaint that Americans no longer value marriage. In fact, we have higher standards for how married partners treat each other and their children than ever before. But for the first time ever, we’re trying to organize intimate relationships on a basis free from coercion—by parents, by government, by laws about who can and cannot marry or divorce, by men’s power over their wives and children, or by rigid rules about who must play what role in a marriage. Our high aspirations clash with historically entrenched gender inequalities and intensifying socioeconomic ones to create new risks along with new rewards in our relationships.
I examine five historical periods whose differing marital patterns, sexual mores, and cultural values have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory beliefs, habits, and emotional “earworms,” making it hard to achieve the egalitarian, mutually supportive relationships most people now desire. In our current economic and social environment, many values and behaviors that once promoted successful marriages have become recipes for relationship failure. The good news is that new “rules of engagement,” both personal and political, can make modern marriages work.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
It took almost six years, precisely because the idea changed. I originally intended to focus on refuting the rosy myths about marriages of the past that have led to pessimistic handwringing about the current state of family life. After all, the majority of Americans still marry eventually, domestic violence rates are lower than in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, murder rates have fallen dramatically since the late 1980s and early 1990s, there’s far less child abuse than in the past, and divorce rates have been falling for more than 40 years.
But as the family-values culture wars intensified during COVID, I decided it wasn’t enough to expose the myths about 1950s families promoted by Tradwife influencers. It was equally important to acknowledge the new insecurities and social pressures that have made some people nostalgic for that era. Doing the research and finding the words that might help people on both sides deepen their understanding of what’s actually happening to families today, for better and for worse, was a more challenging task than I had anticipated.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I was surprised by how long it took me to winnow down all the things I wanted to tell people about how and why marriage has changed to the few things they might actually want to know. I ended up realizing I had to cut my early chapter drafts in half, and that was an unpleasant surprise.
But there were also fun surprises. I was fascinated to discover how recently our current ideals of feminine and masculine physical attractiveness arose, and how foreign they are to people in foraging, herding, and horticultural societies. I also had to rethink my understanding of patriarchy when I found that patriarchal societies actually tend to have fewer stereotypes about female aptitudes and preferences than more democratic societies. My favorite surprise there was learning that under patriarchy, the prefix Mrs. originally identified a woman’s social status, not her marital status. The practice of identifying women by their husbands’ first and last names, with a Mrs. in front, was an innovation of democratic market societies.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I had never before been asked to weigh in on the index of any book I’d written, and I was shocked by how hard it is to figure out what and what not to include.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
This is not a self-help book. But I hope it demonstrates that many of the struggles we face in our relationships are not the result of personal flaws in ourselves or our partner. Some stem from the clash between our new aspirations and the conditioned reflexes and social norms we’ve all inherited from the past, no matter how “liberated” we think we are. Other result from economic pressures and social policies that originate outside the family, creating dilemmas that not even the most collaborative couple can make disappear, especially once children arrive. I hope that when people get a clearer grasp of the social origins of many of their conflicts and setbacks, this can take some of the heat out of the negotiating they need to do to make their relationship work for both themselves and any children they have.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
The most useful piece of advice I can give from my own experience is for people who write research-based nonfiction, especially people trained in academic circles. By all means, run your data and conclusions past people who are experts in your field, but don’t rely on those people for feedback about the narrative. Try summarizing your argument in plain English to someone who has no prior knowledge about the topic you’re writing on and doesn’t love you enough to sit still for a long lecture. What can you tell them that might make them want to tell a friend or partner that they just heard something really interesting? And can you tell it to them simply enough that they can summarize it in their own words? It’s hard, to do this, and I don’t always succeed in explaining my own ideas and topics that simply, but when I do, it always improves what I’ve written.
