Why is family structure weakening?: Developmentalists

The container problem

We see the same couple over and over. Married in their mid-twenties, genuinely in love. By thirty-five, one has changed. Not betrayed — changed. The person who was perfect for the twenty-five-year-old self is now experienced as a constraint by the thirty-eight-year-old, and neither has the language because the culture gave them only two scripts: working or broken.

Psychological development does not stop at twenty-five. The research of Robert Kegan, a Harvard developmental psychologist who studies how adults evolve through stages of meaning-making, converges on a finding the marriage debate ignores: the meaning-making system at twenty-five is not the system at forty-five. At twenty-five, most adults define identity through relationships and belonging. Marriage is an identity project. By forty, identity organizes around internally generated values. The partner who was the center of a socialized identity becomes one commitment among many.

The Catholic Social Teaching camp calls this a failure of commitment. We call it a failure of the container. Paul Zohav’s work points in this direction: couples that survive rebuild the partnership at each developmental threshold. The woman in the oncology ward — we honor her. We notice that what she describes as endurance may be a late-stage developmental achievement. Millions of people are staying in marriages producing numbness and resentment and calling it virtue.

What Josefine studies about power dynamics in relationships points to something the other frameworks miss: when the power arrangement calcifies, the relationship fossilizes.

Where we concede ground: Our framework requires privilege — you don’t grow through Kegan’s stages working two jobs to cover rent.

What would change our mind: Developmentally advanced couples showing no better relationship quality than those at earlier stages.

Read the full synthesis: Why is family structure weakening?