Marriage remains a perennially popular institution—otherwise why would same-sex couples be clamoring to share in it?—and yet after the first bloom of love fades, marriage faces an inherent problem. You have to hammer out a life with another person who may not find it particularly easy to hammer out a life with you. Many couples work out what to do on their own. But what should clashing couples do?

Marriage counseling became a popular answer to that question after marital referees first appeared in the U.S. in the 1930s. As Rebecca L. Davis notes in "More Perfect Unions," a history of marriage counseling and the "American search for marital bliss," the Depression was a ripe time for troubled couples to begin looking for outside help. Economic upheaval destabilized many marriages. Americans increasingly were turning to social-welfare agencies for assistance with a multitude of problems, and the rising popularity of psychoanalysis promised that the sources of emotional troubles were simply hidden and awaiting discovery. "Specialists such as social workers, physicians, sociologists and eugenicists," Ms. Davis writes, "believed that they could perform the roles that village elders, parents or clergy might have filled in the past, shepherding youth to suitable matches and mediating their conflicts."

Counseling for couples gradually grew to be an entrenched social phenomenon. The American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, founded in 1942 with 35 members, now has "approximately twenty-four thousand members; many times that number of professionals are licensed marriage and family therapists." Marriage counseling may be popular, in part, because it appeals to Americans' can-do spirit: Ms. Davis quotes an expert who says that counseling's message boils down to this: "There is an alternative to staying in a bad marriage or divorcing, and the alternative is to improve it." Ms. Davis, an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware, deems it a "uniquely American obsession" to "hope that with enough effort and the right guidance, more perfect marital unions are within each couple's and the nation's reach.

Labels: culture, divorce, Marriage, marriage counseling

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