Institutional Re-scripting: How Gay Men Reinforce Marriage Over Time by Changing its Meanings

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 21. Intimacy and Gender

Abstract

How and why do institutions endure? This paper looks at one institution that has persisted over time – marriage – to answer this question. While family scholars have argued that a culture of marriage keeps this institution relevant across multiple domains of life, they have paid less attention to the way this culture manifests in people’s narratives about the marriage institution. I address this gap by looking at the way how individuals draw on scripts of marriage over time to construct their relationship desires and expectations. I focus on the marriage scripts of gay men, who until recently were excluded from marriage and who have historically had ambivalent attitudes toward this institution. Drawing on 30 interviews conducted with 15 men in 2016 and 2025, I find that these men drew on different scripts over time when describing marriage, a process I term re-scripting. While many respondents became less hopeful about getting married during that decade, they continued to value the institution. Over time, respondents began to imagine marriage as an institution that could accommodate their changing ideologies and increasingly viewed it as a symbol of hope against the backdrop of struggles to find a partner. My findings suggest that individuals’ treatment of marriage as a flexible institution – and their ability to draw on its different scripts as their goals change – might be a key factor helping the marriage institution persist.

Author

• Giora Ashkenazi, Stanford University