Family Values

Bryan Levey and Lisa D'Annolfo Levey, 39 & 36, Woburn, Massachusetts
After the birth of Skylar, software engineer Bryan Levey decided to downshift his career and only work four days a week. His wife, Lisa, now pregnant with the couple's second child, cut back on her work as well. They may have fewer possessions as a result, but they have abundance in their lives -- an abundance of time, security, and flexibility.

Jeffrey Lutzner and Jessica DeGroot, 39 & 39, Philadelphia
Some women imagine their weddings, dreaming as kids of the dresses that they'll wear or of their first dances. Jessica DeGroot spent years imagining her marriage -- how she and her husband could combine professional achievement with active parenting. The result? A marriage that tests norms and pushes the envelope.

Roger Mummert and Robin Mummert, 46 & 46, Syosset, New York
It's a role reversal that makes plenty of sense, but that takes a lot of confidence to pull off. Roger Mummert has been a work-at-home dad for the past 10 years. Meanwhile, Robin Mummert has pursued a fast-track career in the fashion industry. Both appreciate the roles and responsibilities that the other has taken on -- and both are a bit jealous of each other.

Jessica DeGroot was born in 1961 into the sort of family that formed the bedrock of American society. Her father was a physician and a research scientist. As she remembers, he left each weekday at 7 AM, returned at 7 PM, and then retired to his study after dinner to pore over medical journals. Her mom raised five kids, ran the household, and volunteered in the community.

These were the conventional design specs for most marriages back then. The husband went to work. The wife stayed home. Not all couples stuck to the formula, of course, and not everyone got married. Yet by 1961, the single-breadwinner family had become the presumed norm, hardwired into the formula of how the world operated.

Then, without much warning, things changed.

Over the next three decades, women stampeded into the labor market, punctuating and reinforcing one of the most emphatic cultural transformations in history. Suddenly, men weren't just married to women; they were married to fellow workers. By 1997, both parents worked for pay, either full-time or part-time, in two-thirds of marriages, up from about 35% of marriages when DeGroot was young, according to a University of Chicago analysis.

Imagine the opportunity promised by such an upheaval. This change liberated women to consider new roles and paths in society. But it also liberated marriages from their old definition -- from any definition. As women were released from the confines of the home to work, men were freed, in theory, from their old breadwinner duties. Men could do household chores and get involved with their kids -- or else feel guilty about not doing so. The structure and strategy of marriage was suddenly wide open to reinterpretation.

But today it's clear: For all of the rhetoric about new gender roles, the ghosts of a past generation still linger. Yes, men cook, and women run marketing departments. But surveys consistently show that husbands' careers still take priority over those of their wives -- and that women still rule at home. Employers fill manuals with "family-friendly" policies, but when it's crunch time, married workers are pressed into action as if it were 1961 and everyone still had a wife at home. Through policy and culture, the workplace reaffirms the old divide between men and women, and therefore between work and life. "We are living in a half-changed world," says Cornell professor Phyllis Moen, 58, who has studied working couples for 20 years.

So for most people, the reality is this: In the absence of societal support, marriage has simply become more complex, more stressful, and more difficult. It is harder to stay sane when you have to negotiate two lives, two careers, and the care of children or of elderly parents -- not to mention an intimate human relationship. Even mundane decisions become opaque and multilayered, like a 3-D chess game. You have to work late tonight? Well, who's going to pick up the kids, cook dinner, and do the laundry?

Can this marriage be redesigned? Re-enter Jessica DeGroot. Now 39, she's an activist, a feminist, a mother, and a wife. Her fledgling ThirdPath Institute, a nonprofit based in Philadelphia, aims to change the way people think about marriage, family, and the workplace. As a society, she believes, we are on precisely the wrong track, allowing an archaic workplace to dictate the rules. DeGroot wants to help couples come to terms with their values and their priorities, nudging them to explode old boundaries and explore liberating alternatives. In workshops and through publications, she urges husbands and wives to map out innovative plans for themselves. She gets them to start rethinking work on their own terms and helps them to design the support communities that will make new solutions sustainable.