My book, Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution is Changing Same-Sex Relationships (2024, University of Chicago Press) focuses on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) individuals who gained access to legal marriage. Drawing on in-depth interview and survey research with 116 participants, it examines the institutional mechanisms through which marriage impacts their couple relationships, and what this teaches us about the enduring power of marriage as an institution.

Marriage Material presents a challenge to dominant ideas about the decline of marriage, making clear that gaining access to legal marriage has transformed same-sex relationships, both for better and for worse. Marriage remains strong enough to make LGBQ people embrace its meanings, rituals, and practices even without legal access to it, persuade the staunchest critics to get married, and shape a range of relationship behaviors, including communication, financial, and sexual practices.

I look to same-sex couples to illuminate the complex ways institutional mechanisms work in tandem to govern the choices and behaviors of individuals with different marriage experiences. I argue that contemporary marriage works most powerfully through taken-for-granted cultural scripts, emphasizing that even if rule-and norm-based institutional mechanisms have weakened, shared cognitive understandings have not.

Highlighting the complex interplay between institutional constraint and individual agency, I explain how ordinary individuals attempt to change the institution, but the difficulties of doing so without a broader range of alternative cultural models available to them. Ultimately, I argue that marriage has a more transformative power over same-sex relationships than LGBQ individuals have over the meanings and practices of marriage.

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