The Decline of marriage?
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
He brings up an example of hating Teller, but never hurting him because there's no money to be made as a single stunt magician.
In the 60's everyone was casting off (often shitty) cultural restraints, but it was an overcorrection that was almost completely narcissistic. Suddenly you have no fault divorce and a culture that increasingly doesn't view that as a problem. Fast forward 40 years and my generation is largely self-serving paxil-popping automatons. :-)
Facebook brings us together but it ultimately doesn't make us really sacrifice for each other. That's an infinitely harder problem that technology will probably never solve.
That blew me away... I would of never guessed it was that high.
I would have expected about half of that, at most.
Marriage is mostly a social construct but a large part of it is also religious in nature. In large part it serves to conserve the tradition and culture of society or a community.
As social relationships become less centered on family bonds, marriage will weaken. And as western societies become less and less religious, there's less motivation for any couple to get married.
This is not even unintentional. I think at the heart of the feminist movement lies a belief that marriage is a tool devised by society to control women, or something of that sort.
I find it always funny when unmarried couples with children are looking for a legal contract of some kind to ensure things are official between them in case something bad happens. They just see marriage as the complicated traditional thing that (they feel) is supposed to be forever. It doesn't have to be.
The way incentives are set up now, there is simply no way I would enter into a marriage in most western countries. That doesn't mean I wouldn't want a means of committing to a legal contract to make things official; it's just the terms of the default contract that I disagree with.
I don't know about where you are but there are a few different standard terms of marriage even without drafting your own custom contract. The situation is just less clear and more trouble in case things go bad if you are not married... and I don't mean divorce or separation, I also mean death, being incapacitated, stuck in a foreign country etc. And that is not even when children are involved.
Why do you think that? As far as I know, the feminist movement is a part of a greater civil rights movement focused on equal political, economic, and social rights regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, and yes, in the particular case of feminism, gender. What makes you say that feminism is mainly focused on destroying marriage?
On a separate anecdotal note, I grew up in the former Soviet Union where religion was largely absent and yet marriage was very strong.
For all I could tell, they couldn't care less.
But from what I understand, they have this notion of the "patriarchal society" where the males control everything, including language, and gender roles, and everything else. It's obvious that marriage is a byproduct of this patriarchal structure.
I've heard a certain feminist (who happens to be married) say on TV that marriage is an old and failed system that we should get rid of. I think this is not too inconsistent with what the western culture(s) subconsciously believe.
The point of marriage is the creation of families in a social structure where pre-martial sex is strongly frowned upon, and where the social network is built mostly on top the "family" unit.
In the west, pre-martial sex is rather encouraged, and the social structure is not built on top of the "family" unit.
There are over 6 billion people on Earth. Many of those people are just insane. And television shows have an incentive to bring on the real nuts in order to keep things exciting. As such, the fact that you heard one representative from group X go on TV and say something nutty doesn't allow you to make any inferences about what the median person in group X actually believes.
I think this is not too inconsistent with what the western culture(s) subconsciously believe.
Strange. If western culture "subconsciously believes that marriage is a failed system that should be disposed of", then I don't see why marriage is (1) held in high esteem and (2) heavily subsidized. I mean, when I got married, everyone I knew was delighted and no one told me "this is a terrible idea -- marriage is a failed system". Why would the government give me money once I got married if there was a social consensus that marriage is a failed system?
The problem with asserting things about an entire society's "subconscious beliefs" is that your assertions are impossible to refute. Which suggests that these assertions are meaningless garbage.
While I agree that person I heard from on TV is a nut, she's a rather prominent figure among the feminist movement in the middle east (Nawal El Saadawi).
In the west, marriage is the last step after a long long relationship. In the middle east, it tends to be the first step. This already suggests that marriage is much less important than it used to be, and I can only see it getting less and less important as time goes on.
I think your arguments would be more convincing if you spent less time worrying about other people's emotional states and more time making claims that are testable.
I note that you haven't disputed my point that claims about what entire societies subconsciously believe are meaningless since you can't prove anything about them.
While I agree that person I heard from on TV is a nut, she's a rather prominent figure among the feminist movement in the middle east (Nawal El Saadawi).
Um, how do you know? It seems like you've never actually read any feminist writings...am I wrong? And it also seems like you've never discussed feminism with any actual living feminists. So how exactly would you know how well this one person on TV represents living breathing feminists?
In the west, marriage is the last step after a long long relationship. In the middle east, it tends to be the first step.
I've read this half a dozen times and I still can't figure out what it means.
> I've read this half a dozen times and I still can't figure out what it means.
When a man and a woman fall in love, the first thing they try to do in a traditional/conservative society is to try and get married. In the west, the first thing they do is go out together, make out, have sex, maybe move in and live together for years and have children without ever officially getting married.
Unless you want to say this only happens in F.R.I.E.N.D.S but not in real life.
I didn't claim you made it up; but your presentation doesn't strike me as very accurate. In particular, "It's obvious that marriage is a byproduct of this patriarchal structure" seems wrongheaded. Marriage is a social institution; that means that the structure of marriage reflects the existing power structures in society.
Even in the most egalitarian societies, like Sweden, people still get married in great numbers. What's more, many of those who don't get married in fact do get married in all but name: they live together like a married couple indefinitely. Since there are often few benefits to explicit marriage, their choice represents little more than a willingness to forgo a religious ceremony. But it shouldn't surprise us that people in very secular countries decide to avoid big religious ceremonies; that's just common sense.
When a man and a woman fall in love, the first thing they try to do in a traditional/conservative society is to try and get married. In the west, the first thing they do is go out together, make out, have sex, maybe move in and live together for years and have children without ever officially getting married.
As I understand it, a great number of unmarried couples in traditional societies make out and have sex; the big difference is that they sneak around when doing so. But if you like, we can pretend that everyone in traditional societies actually strictly observes all their social norms.
Moreover, a great many people in western countries get married and stay married for many years. It seems silly to pretend that they don't exist. Your claims would be more persuasive if they were backed up by numbers.
This might indeed explain why she's radical in her views.
If you get some friends on board and act like what you're doing is perfectly normal, you probably won't be hassled about drinking in public. Everyone will assume that you're supposed to be doing whatever it is you're doing.
I have no problem if people don't want to get married, but if you do, I wish more couples would discuss that before they get hitched.
Other than that, I think it's pretty archaic. Also note I don't want children... that might affect such things, too.
The bond of family is unlike any other bond.
Friendships, business partnerships, strategic alliances, romances, all of them are transient in ways that family is not.
But the family you're born with is a happenstance. Apart from marriage and adoption, what other discretionary act allows two adults to create a new, deliberate familial bond?
I don't want to get too "no true Scotsman" about this; I accept that there is divorce (partly because we've embraced divorce as a culture, partly because we've embraced casual marriage as a culture, and yes, partly because as a society we have rightly grown out of practices that secured marriage, such as single-income households) and failed marriage.
But marriage as a concept has a clear, practical value. It's more challenging to realize the concept in 2010 than it was in 1910, but that doesn't mean the concept itself is outdated.
The only value it actually holds is getting certain benefits from organizations that are still structured around the idea that a man and a woman end up loving each other very much, and decided to be together forever. That's the concept I'm talking about when I mean it's 'outdated,' I think that the vast majority of relationships won't actually last forever, nor should they.
Home ownership is also a good thing. Clearly, everyone should not be buying houses; even if you have the means, it often makes the best economic sense to rent. But neighborhoods are still built on a foundation of homeowners.
There is a notion that everyone should own a home. There is a notion that everyone should be married. Those notions are what is archaic.
I think we're in agreement. I do know... three people my age who think marriage is a good idea. One is now divorced, the second one is getting married soon, the third is pretty happy. I'm fine with people doing whatever they feel is great, I'm not opposed to other people getting married, just like I'm not opposed to other people doing anything else I find to be kinda silly.
It's just not for me, nor many other people that I know around my age.
Just trying to add a data point. I'm 24, my parents were already married and pregnant with me by this point. That's a screwy thing to think about...
Its just a way to say, ok we plan to be together for a while and we'll share a lot of what we have. Let make that official and even have a contract about it. What is outdated about that?
Is there a marriage ceremony anywhere in the mainstream of western culture that doesn't involve promising, in effect, to make the relationship permanent?
The bond of family is unlike any other bond.
You don't need a marriage to have a family; if you disagree with this, I worry you are getting concepts and titles knotted to tightly with one another.
Family as a concept has a clear, practical value; this much I will totally agree with. I don't think it is as important the shape that family makes, though, and thus far marriage has only lent legitimacy to certain forms of family -- one man, one woman, largely responsible for the welfare of the offspring they produce. I can think of a lot of ways in which this is suboptimal.
But marriage having clear, practical value? It seems the practical value you call out in marriage is that it acts as a sort of moralistic glue to hold a marriage together when other means of adhesion -- trust of one another, emotional support, physical attraction, etc -- have fallen by the wayside. If this need to not fail against some societal title bestowed upon a couple is all that is left holding them together, why is this good? How does "'till death do us part" help when it is more of a constraint and/or threat than a promise? And if the couple already has a sufficient number of these things gluing them together, why do we need this additional social glue?
So I'd like to see what marriage is meant to represent separated from the actual institution, and considered separately. If a couple has what a marriage represents, but lacks the title, I don't see how this is worth distinguishing -- or a union in general for that matter; I think single man/woman couples are more of a historical accident than anything. If a couple has the title of marriage, but has a substantive lack of what a marriage represents, I don't see how the title is going to make either of their lives better. It only makes them feel guilty for not living up to what they labeled themselves as, and I've never seen the benefit in that.
I am married, and there are few things that mean less to my and my wife's relationship than that title. It isn't the glue that bonds us, and it would not be the glue that would keep us together if everything else fell apart. But enough other people think it is that we found not being married a huge inconvenience; society in general, and the government in particular, are heavily tilted toward engineering couples into marriage. We'd have been happy remaining unmarried the rest of our lives if everything weren't so constructed to engineer us into wedlock, but we also didn't want to be so financially penalized for not behaving.
So we're married, but there are few things that mean less to us; we were married in all practical purposes before we had the title. Getting the title was strictly pragmatic. If this is part of what is tearing marriage apart, so be it; perhaps it would be better if the institutions that stood so much on ceremony faded into insignificance, and we started focusing more on the things those ceremonies are meant to cement.
* Adopt.
* Have a child.
Is there a third non-marriage event that creates new family member?
You develop a familial bond if and only if you have introduced an child as a family member.
Is this a necessary condition? If so, I suspect we are stuck until we revise one or both of our working definitions of family.
I had no idea geeks were so against marriage.