Tag Archives: Courting

Polemics

New study: unmarried parents four times more likely to split up than married couples

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Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Unmarried parents are four times more likely to split up than those who have wed, research revealed yesterday.

It also indicated that co-habiting couples with children under 16 are now responsible for the majority of  family breakdowns.

On average, 5.3 per cent of these relationships ended each year from 2009-12, according to the study.

But among those who had taken their vows, the average rate was only 1.3 per cent, said the Marriage Foundation think-tank and university academics.

The high rate of co-habiting parents in family splits comes despite these couples making up only a fifth of those with children.

The figures were gathered from the findings of a £50 million state-sponsored research project, the Understanding Society survey.

Over the last 20 years, it has gathered information on the progress of families and now tracks events in 40,000 homes.

I have a friend who moved in with a non-Christian guy before she became a Christian and they broke up. She told me all about it. When I was listening to her, the thought occurred to me that women and men think that co-habitation is leading to different places. And it turns out that there is some evidence to support this intuition.

Consider  this fascinating article from the Atlantic, authored by marriage researcher W. Bradford Wilcox. The article discusses the variances between cohabitating men and women regarding goals and expectations.

Excerpt:

According to a new paper from RAND by sociologists Michael Pollard and Kathleen Mullan Harris, cohabiting young adults have significantly lower levels of commitment than their married peers. This aversion to commitment is particularly prevalent among young men who live with their partners.

Pollard and Harris found that the majority of cohabiting young men do not endorse the maximum indicator of relationship permanence: 52 percent of cohabiting men between ages 18 and 26 are not “almost certain” that their relationship is permanent. Moreover, a large minority (41 percent) of men report that they are not “completely committed” to their live-in girlfriends. By contrast, only 39 percent of cohabiting women in the same age group are not “almost certain” their relationship will go the distance, and only 26 percent say they are not “completely committed”. Not surprisingly, the figures above and below also indicate that married women and men are much less likely to exhibit the low levels of commitment characteristic of many cohabiting relationships today.

Women are thinking that it is going to lead to some deeper commitment from the man, but men are thinking that they are getting what they want already (sex) and that they want to avoid the higher risks of making a more formal commitment.

Polemics

Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Elin Nordegren, Elizabeth Edwards and Maria Shriver

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All of these women were cheated on, to some extent, by their spouses:

  • Hillary Clinton is the wife of Bill Clinton.
  • Huma Abedin is the wife of the Anthony Weiner.
  • Elin Nordegren is the wife of Tiger Woods.
  • Elizabeth Edwards is the wife of John Edwards.
  • Maria Shriver is the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So what do they all have in common?

They all picked secular men with liberal views on social policy and they all got cheated on.

So how should women test men for marriage?

Here are some questions that the five women who chose these disgusting creeps for husbands SHOULD have asked:

  1. What is the public purpose of marriage?
  2. What are the expected public outcomes of a good marriage?
  3. Does chastity before marriage provide any indication about a person’s ability to stay faithful in a marriage?
  4. What should men and women bring to a relationship so that they are able to perform expected marital behaviors?
  5. Is marriage more about self-indulgence or about self-sacrifice? Can you get used to self-sacrifice by being self-indulgent?
  6. If a person is pro-abortion, what do they believe about taking responsibility to avoid harming others with their poor decisions?
  7. If a person is pro-same-sex marriage, what do they believe about the needs of children compared to the needs of adults?
  8. If a person believes in wealth redistribution, do they have a correct understanding of working, saving and investing?
  9. Does a person’s superior appearance, wealth, or power determine whether they will be faithful in a marriage?
  10. Can you cause your spouse to be faithful by spending a lot of money on a wedding?
  11. Can you cause your spouse to be faithful by inviting famous people to your wedding?
  12. Is it a good idea to choose someone to marry who your parents and elders disapprove of?
  13. Is it a good idea to choose whether to have sex with someone using “the 180-second rule”?
  14. Is it a good idea to choose someone to marry in order to impress your friends (or to make them jealous)?
  15. Is it a good idea to marry someone because most of your friends are getting married?
  16. Is it a good idea to avoid studying the effects of divorce on children prior to marrying?
  17. Can you expect a spouse to adhere to objective moral obligations without a knowledge of God’s existence, grounded on evidence?
  18. Can you expect a spouse to adhere to objective moral obligations without a knowledge of God’s character, grounded on evidence?
  19. Does holding a Bible for a photo-op make someone into a William Lane Craig or a Wayne Grudem?
  20. Does singing praise hymns in church make someone into a William Lane Craig or a Wayne Grudem?

Those last items are to show that you really cannot have a moral standard that is binding unless there is some way that the universe ought to be, because it was designed to be a certain way by a Designer. If a person is convinced that there is a Designer who made people, it rationally grounds the idea that there is a way that humans ought to act – independently of how we may feel individually, or even in different cultures in different places and times. The more a man knows whether God exists and knows what God is like as a person – based on evidence – the more seriously that man will try to incorporate God’s personality into his decision making. A serious study of the evidence for God’s existence and character helps people to take moral obligations to others more seriously – especially when they don’t FEEL LIKE IT. That is why marriages where both spouses attend church regularly last. I can guarantee you that there are times when people don’t feel like going to church, e.g. – bad weather days. But people who attend church regularly have trained themselves to take their relationship with God more seriously than their own comfort. That is a useful prerequisite for marriage, especially if the church attendance spills into even harder things like theology, philosophy of religion, ethics and apologetics. Women need to be asking men these worldview and morality questions, and insisting on seeing the behaviors that raise the probability of having a stable marriage to a faithful man.

Basically, instead of relying on feelings and peer approval to choose a man, women need to ask men questions to find out whether they are trustworthy and equal to the tasks that men perform as husbands and fathers. I don’t think that women who were cheated on really asked questions about their chosen spouse’s worldview, and how the man’s worldview grounded moral obligations, such as the obligation NOT to cheat. It seems that today, a well-grounded worldview that grounds moral obligations is regarded by some women as being superfluous to marital stability. I guess they think that fidelity is basically random – that Elliot Spitzer is as likely to be a faithful spouse as James Dobson. They just don’t ask men to explain what they believe and why, and why any particular man can be trusted to make moral decisions. And they shouldn’t be satisfied with words – they should demand to see evidence that the man has studied these issues, written about them, debated with others about them, and acted on these convictions personally.

I think that women today are also giving up their responsibility to read about marriage and parenting, to read about risks and challenges that threaten stable marriages, like no-fault divorce laws and cohabitation, and to read about how important it is to stay married because of how divorce affects children. Women should not abdicate the responsibility to judge men, they should not say that “men are unpredictable”, and they should not set themselves up as helpless victims. They need to keep men at arm’s length, keep their wits about them and do the work of evaluating men for the roles that men play in marriage and family.

Character and knowledge count. Just because a man can put on a show for you, it doesn’t mean that he is capable of producing the results of a thoughtful Christian worldview.

What does Dr. Laura say about marriage?

“Commitment to marriage and child rearing was once viewed as the pinnacle of adulthood identity, so that women looked carefully for the “right” man for the job, and parents were consulted for opinions and blessings.”
Source: Dr. Laura Schlessinger, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, page 53.

Find the right man for the job. You wouldn’t resort to feelings to hire someone for your company, so why resort to feelings when it comes to picking a husband and father to your children?

Related posts

News

Two things you can do to make your marriage last a lifetime

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The first thing is obvious: don’t have sex before you’re married.

Life Site News explains.

Excerpt:

Couples who reserve sex for marriage enjoy greater stability and communication in their relationships, say researchers at Brigham Young University.

A new study from the Mormon college found that those couples who waited until marriage rated their relationship stability 22 percent higher than those who started having sex in the early part of their relationship. The relationship satisfaction was 20 percent higher for those who waited, the sexual quality of the relationship was 5 percent better, and communication was 12 percent better.

The study, published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Family Psychology, involved 2,035 married individuals who participated in a popular online marital assessment called “RELATE.” From the assessment’s database, researchers selected a sample designed to match the demographics of the married American population. The extensive questionnaire included the question “When did you become sexual in this relationship?”

Couples that became sexually involved later in their relationship – but prior to marriage – reported benefits that were about half as strong as those who waited for marriage.

[…]Sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study, responded to its findings, saying that “couples who hit the honeymoon too early – that is, prioritize sex promptly at the outset of a relationship – often find their relationships underdeveloped when it comes to the qualities that make relationships stable and spouses reliable and trustworthy.” Regnerus is the author of Premarital Sex in America, a book forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Because religious belief often plays a role for couples who choose to wait, Busby and his co-authors controlled for the influence of religious involvement in their analysis.

“Regardless of religiosity, waiting helps the relationship form better communication processes, and these help improve long-term stability and relationship satisfaction,” Busby said.

Second, make sure you attend church regularly after you’re married.

From Citizen Link.

Excerpt:

It’s a number that is trumpeted from the rooftops — and the pulpit: Half of marriages among Christians and non-Christians alike end in divorce.

But the reality is that Christians who attend church regularly get divorced at a much lower rate.

Professor Bradley Wright, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, found that among people who identify as Christians but rarely attend church, 60 percent have been divorced. Of those who attend church regularly, 38 percent have been divorced.

W. Bradford Wilcox, a leading sociologist at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, found a nearly identical spread between “active conservative Protestants” who regularly attend church and people with no religious affiliation.

Professor Scott Stanley from the University of Denver, who is working on the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, said couples with a vibrant religious faith have more and higher levels of the qualities that marriages need to avoid divorce.

“Whether young or old, male or female, low-income or not, those who said that they were more religious reported higher average levels of commitment to their partners, higher levels of marital satisfaction, less thinking and talking about divorce and lower levels of negative interaction,” he said. “These patterns held true when controlling for such important variables as income, education and age at first marriage.”

I think that young people who are serious about having a successful marriage also need to study research to find out what how to make a marraige that lasts (chastity, pre-marital counseling, church attendance, etc.). Being marriage-minded means developing those skills before the marriage, and working with your partner to the develop the skills that they will need when they take on their role in the marriage.