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I Don’t: The Case against Marriage…

IAIRTH – Interesting Article I Read This Week

In the Newsweek, I read an interesting, thought provoking yet troublesome and unsettling. The main argument of the article is plainly stated in the title: I Don’t: the Case against Marriage.

The numbers are familiar but staggering: Americans have the highest divorce rate in the Western world; as many as 60 percent of men and half of women will have sex with somebody other than their spouse during their marriage. Maybe it’s a testament to American crass consumerism, but despite those odds, we still manage to idealize the ceremony itself, to the tune of $72 billion a year.

To me that is a shocking number. 60% seriously? This got me thinking about the essay  The Life Cycle of Empires and America's Destiny. And how people are no different today than they were thousands of years ago. Here are just two excerpts from the essay:

The growth of wealth and comfort clearly can undermine the values of character that led to a given empire’s creation through self-sacrifice and discipline when it began.During the last stages of decadence and decline, an empire’s people often think most highly of and imitate the athletes, musicians, and actors. They tend to do this regardless of how corrupt these celebrities’ private lives are.

More generally, what are some common features of an empire’s culture in its declining period? Glubb Pasha and Bernard Goetz in “When the Empire Strikes Out” (which usefully summarizes Glubb’s book) describe developments like these: 1. The decline of sexual morality, an aversion to marriage in favor of “living together,” and an increased divorce rate all combine to undermine family stability. This happened in the upper class of the late Roman Republic and early Empire. The first-century A.D. writer Seneca once complained about Roman upper class women: “They divorce in order to re-marry. They marry in order to divorce.”

Does that describe some people? Kobe Bryant anyone? Tiger Woods? I, too, get caught up in celebrity's great feats rather than their character…

He goes on to argue several other criteria in declining empires:

• The increased economic and political power of women
• Many foreign immigrants settle in the empire’s capital and major cities
• Both irresponsible pleasure seeking and pessimism increase among the people and their leaders.
• The government provides welfare for the poor extensively.

I think I see a problem here...

But anyways, back to the Newsweek article:

The percentage of married Americans has dropped each decade since the 1950s, and the number of unmarried-but-cohabiting partners has risen 1,000 percent over the last 40 years. At 28 for men and 26 for women, the median age at which Americans are marrying is at its highest point ever—and even higher among our cohort of urban and educated. Turns out that waiting is a good idea: for every year we put off marriage, our chances of divorce go down.

As of 2013, “unwed Americans may find it even more advantageous—financially, anyway—to stay single.”

Not to be cynical but that would be another factor that people got married, although probably very low on the list, hopefully last or not even thought of, was the tax breaks married people would get compared to their individual counterparts. Now it looks like there will be legislation that may switch it around…

To tell you what you already know, the American family is in the throes of change. Gone are the days of the nuclear nest; in its wake is a motley mix of single parents, same-sex couples, and, yes, unmarried monogamists.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studies the nature of love, might say that’s a symptom of our biology: she believes humans aren’t meant to be together forever, but in short-term, monogamous relationships of three or four years. For us, it’s not that we reject monogamy altogether—indeed, one of us is going on six years with a partner—but that the idea of marriage has become so tainted, and simultaneously so idealized, that we’re hesitant to engage in it.

Another puke statement. For the first part, the crazy thing is it won't be a shock to see that in our lifetime. I mean it already is happening.

Since the early 1900s, the driving force behind marriage, along with procreation, was that women couldn’t land well-paying jobs: we relied on our husbands to survive. As recently as 1967, two thirds of female college students (versus 5 percent of men) said they would marry somebody they didn’t love if he met their other criteria—primarily, the ability to support them financially. But today, we no longer need to “marry up”: women are more educated (we make up nearly 60 percent of college graduates) and better compensated (urban women in their 20s actually outearn their male peers). We are also the so-called entitled generation, brought up with lofty expectations of an egalitarian adulthood; told by helicopter parents and the media, from the moment we exited the womb, that we could be “whatever we wanted”—with infinite opportunities to accomplish those dreams.So you can imagine how, 25 years down the line, committing to another person—for life—would be nerve-racking.

The result, they say, is “a generation that loves choice and hates choosing.”