Posted by
Playful Walrus on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 4:39:03 PM
It pains me to write this, but I fear that something I myself have embraced is dead.
Before I explain why I think marriage could be dead, let me first examine some of the favorite chestnuts of the marriage-bashers and some others who champion unmarried life:
“For the first time in our history, there are more households of single people than married.” I’ve dealt with that extensively before. That statistic counted households married people who were legally separated or were separated due to military service, work, or incarceration as being “single”. Nor did truly “single” people make a majority of households. Even if married households were to actually be a minority, they’d be the biggest minority, almost matching all single households, shack-up households, same-sex households, divorced households, and widowed households combined. While people may be getting married later, or be married for shorter amounts of time, or living longer (due to increased life expectancy) as divorced or widowed, all such people have either been married or will marry, so they either “believed in” marriage or did marry at some point. Finally, each married household represents at least two adults (and possibly voters), while each single household represents one. So clearly, marriage still has a popular advantage, despite this chestnut that is thrown out. On the other hand, it may be only a matter of time before the implied point behind it is actually true.
“Half of all marriages end in divorce.” Granting that this is true (and there is some dispute about that), what happens to that statistic if you only count first-time marriages? It goes down considerably. In other words, people are more likely to get divorced if they have been divorced before, so divorces from second, third, (etc.) marriages are skewing the statistics. Marriage isn’t for everyone. For example, radio show host Tom Leykis, who says that marriage is of no benefit to a man, has been married and divorced four times. He makes no secret of that, saying it took him a long time to finally realize that he isn’t cut out for marriage, even with an extensive pre-nup. So, if you take Tom Leykis and you take me, you get an average that says that chances are, a man will get divorced twice. You greatly reduce your chances of getting divorced if you: 1) wait to marry until you are in your late twenties and have established yourself as a mature individual; 2) choose a person with whom you are fundamentally compatible (same religion, same goals as far as childrearing, etc.); 3) wait until you have been regularly spending time together for at least a year before marrying; 4) you do not shack up; 5) you do not have intercourse before marriage; 6) you undergo some form of premarital counseling/instruction. I’d like to see what the divorce statistics are for couples who meet all of those criteria.
“Half or a significant percentage of married people are unhappy.” Coupled with the previous assertion, this is powerful argument against marriage - at first glance. After all, if the odds are that you’re going to either be unhappily married or go through a divorce, then the odds say it is better not to marry. But like what I wrote above, there are things people can do to make it more likely that they will be happy in their marriage. But I have not seen this claim that half of married people are unhappy matched up against any control. How many completely single people are unhappy? How many people who are in some form of unmarried relationship are unhappy? If you tend to be an unhappy person, marriage will not change that, especially if you marry someone like you. Furthermore, as with the first point – a married couple is, of course, two people, while a single person is one. If you take one unhappy married couple and one happy single person, you might be able to make it look like you are twice as likely to be unhappy if you are married.
I have broken this into two pieces to keep it from being excruciatingly long. Now that I’ve gone over these points, I will soon blog about why I think marriage may be dead.