English · Chapter 16
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Stephen L. Nock was an American sociologist at the University of Virginia who spent his career studying marriage, family life and the roles of men. This essay is an excerpt from his book Marriage in Men's Lives (1998), whose larger thesis is that marriage changes men because it places them inside an institution with rules that everyone recognises. In the NEB Grade 12 course the piece is read as an expository essay. It defines a familiar word in a precise sociological way, supports the definition with the norms that govern American marriage, and invites students to compare those norms with the marriage customs they know in Nepal.
Nock begins with a deceptively simple question: what is marriage? Most people think of it as a private relationship between two people who love each other. Nock accepts that love and choice matter, but he insists that marriage is much more than a personal arrangement. It is a social institution, that is, a pattern of behaviour governed by rules, expectations and beliefs that are shared across a whole society. When a couple marries, they enter a relationship whose basic terms have already been written for them by law, religion, custom and public opinion.
To show what this means, Nock contrasts marriage with unmarried cohabitation. Two people who simply live together must work out for themselves how to share money, whose family to visit, how faithful to be, and what each owes the other. Nobody outside the couple knows quite what to expect of them. A married couple, by contrast, inherits a ready-made script. Relatives, employers, neighbours, courts and the state all know what a husband and a wife are, and they treat the couple accordingly. This is why marriage is a public matter even when the couple regard it as personal: their behaviour is judged against widely shared standards, and departures from those standards attract comment, disapproval or even legal consequences.
Nock then describes what he calls normative marriage, the model of marriage that Americans hold in their minds even when their own marriages fall short of it. He identifies six dimensions. First, marriage is a free personal choice, based on love rather than on arrangement by families. Second, maturity is a presumed requirement, so very young people are not expected to marry. Third, marriage is a heterosexual relationship between one man and one woman. Fourth, the husband is the principal earner, even when the wife also works. Fifth, both spouses are expected to be sexually faithful to each other. Sixth, marriage typically involves children, so parenthood is treated as a natural part of married life. Nock notes that these norms are reflected in law and public policy and in the way ordinary people react to couples who break them.