When I came of age in the 1950s, Frank Sinatra was crooning that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, and my girlfriends and I jumped rope on the schoolyard chanting, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes [Judy] with a baby carriage.” That was a time when such platitudes were uncontroversial and almost as empirically accurate as they were morally prescriptive, a time when, in the eyes of many voters, divorce rendered presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson unfit for office, and marital infidelity turned Hollywood heartthrob Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish star of Casablanca, into a pariah denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as “Hollywood's apostle of degradation” (http://www.ingridbergman.com). Those were the days, of course, when any sort of love other than heterosexual monogamy dared not yet whisper its name, and nobody would have thought to specify the sexual orientation of the imaginary blissful couple that the song and the jump-rope jingle celebrated.

No 1950s rope jumper, 1970s feminist, or family sociologist, like me, could possibly have imagined a world in which an unwed pregnant teenager and her boyfriend would mount the dais at a Republican presidential convention to join the proud family tableau as her mother, a right-wing governor, accepted the party's nomination for vice president of the United States. But that, of course, was what happened when Sarah Palin became Republican John McCain's running mate in 2008. Clearly, the intervening decades had unsettled long taken-for-granted assumptions about the links between love, marriage, and babies. Lots of horses and carriages had come unhitched.