Tag Archives: Marriage

Commentary

The meaning of marriage: a lecture at Google by Tim Keller

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Disclaimer: I have reservations about Tim Keller. I consider him to be too liberal for my tastes, especially on scientific (intelligent design) and political/economic issues. However, I think he did a good job explaining marriage in the lecture below.

Here’s the the video:

Details:

Timothy Keller visits Google’s New York, NY office to discuss his book “The Meaning of Marriage.” This event took place on November 14, 2011, as part of the Authors@Google series.

Timothy J. Keller is an American author, speaker, preacher, and the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. He is the author of several books, including “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.”

“The Meaning of Marriage” touches on topics that all readers can relate to, starting with the role of marriage in our culture, its history and the pessimism that is often associated with it. The Kellers also discuss the feelings of and acts of love, romantic relationships, gender roles, singleness, and the role of sex in a marriage.

I saw a lot of things in his lecture that echo my own views. One point where we agree is on not just looking for traits and virtues in the other person, but in seeing how they handle conflict and solve problems with you.  You have to give the other person things to do and see if they make progress and work cooperatively with you. Wes, who linked me the lecture, introduced the link by saying that this is the way that Christians should explain marriage to non-Christians. I agree, and I’ve added the book to my cart.

Here’s an article entitled “You Never Marry the Right Person“, that discusses one of the points in the lecture.

Excerpt:

In generations past, there was far less talk about “compatibility” and finding the ideal soul-mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.

[…]The Bible explains why the quest for compatibility seems to be so impossible. As a pastor I have spoken to thousands of couples, some working on marriage-seeking, some working on marriage-sustaining and some working on marriage-saving. I’ve heard them say over and over, “Love shouldn’t be this hard, it should come naturally.” In response I always say something like: “Why believe that? Would someone who wants to play professional baseball say, ‘It shouldn’t be so hard to hit a fastball’? Would someone who wants to write the greatest American novel of her generation say, ‘It shouldn’t be hard to create believable characters and compelling narrative’?” The understandable retort is: “But this is not baseball or literature. This is love. Love should just come naturally if two people are compatible, if they are truly soul-mates. “

The Christian answer to this is that no two people are compatible. Duke University Ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas has famously made this point:

Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

Hauerwas gives us the first reason that no two people are compatible for marriage, namely, that marriage profoundly changes us. But there is another reason. Any two people who enter into marriage are spiritually broken by sin, which among other things means to be self-centered—living lifeincurvatus in se. As author Denis de Rougemont said, “Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love … ?” That is why a good marriage is more painfully hard to achieve than athletic or artistic prowess. Raw, natural talent does not enable you to play baseball as a pro or write great literature without enduring discipline and enormous work. Why would it be easy to live lovingly and well with another human being in light of what is profoundly wrong within our human nature? Indeed, many people who have mastered athletics and art have failed miserably at marriage. So the biblical doctrine of sin explains why marriage—more than anything else that is good and important in this fallen world—is so painful and hard.

When you are courting, don’t worry about appearances and feelings and passion so much, because that is all subject to change over time, and those things won’t help you with the real challenges you’ll face in a marriage. Worry about whether they are the kind of person who can make commitments and love other people self-sacrificially – even if they are unlovable. In the long run, their ability to read and understand issues, to care for others and serve them, to keep promises, to be respectful and supportive, to argue respectfully and reasonably, and to solve problems constructively, will all be far more important than appearances and feelings and passion.

And let me be clear again: give them things to do that challenge them during the courtship and see how they handle being given responsibilities – giving a person hard things to do is a much better way to test a person than recreational nights out with recreational drinking, recreational dancing and recreational sex. Marriage means commitment and hard work, not recreation. And that’s what you should test for – the ability to work hard at the relationship and to keep promises and commitments and to communicate reasonably and to work through difficulties fairly.

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News

New study: lesbian women twice as likely to “divorce” their partners as gay men

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There’s a myth going around that women are fond of commitment and that men are beastly commitment-phobes. But what does science say?

Here’s a new study that’s been reported in the leftist UK Independent. (H/T The Elusive Wapiti)

Excerpt:

Lesbian couples are nearly twice as likely as gay men to end a civil partnership, according to the latest government figures.

The number of same-sex couples ending their civil unions leapt by 20 per cent last year, seven years after their introduction in 2005. Overall there were 794 dissolutions in 2012, almost 60 per cent of which were female couples, figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.

In the seven years since gay couples were able to have civil partnerships, 3.2 per cent of male unions ended in dissolution, compared to 6.1 per cent of female couples.

Sociologists believe the lower rates of ‘divorces’ among gay men may reflect a trend of women committing sooner and having higher expectations for a relationship. Women in civil partnerships tie the knot at an average age of 37.6, compared to men, for whom the average age is 40. Erzsebet Bukodim, sociologist at the University of Oxford, said: “In heterosexual marriage the divorce rate is higher if you enter marriage at a very young age. That might be one of the reasons we’re seeing this [high dissolution rate for women] in civil partnerships.”

Gunnar Andersson, professor of demography at Stockholm University, has found in successive studies that women in Norway, Sweden and Denmark are twice as likely to dissolve their civil partnerships than men. He said: “This reflects trends in a heterosexual marriage because women are more prone to say they want to marry – but they’re also more likely to initiate a divorce. Women usually have higher demands on relationship quality, that’s often been said in studies. Even if you control for age there is still a trend of more women ending partnerships than men.”

Previous figures show British women in heterosexual relationships are more likely to file for divorce than men. Women initiated the divorce in two thirds of cases in the UK in 2011.

The Elusive Wapiti comments on the new study:

I used to frequent the once-defunct-now-rebooted “Family Scholars” blog ten years ago. In that forum, whenever I mentioned the now well-accepted fact of a 2:1 ratio of female/male initiation in divorce, I was repeatedly, reliably, and indignantly informed by the liberalists and anti-traditionalists in the crowd that the problem wasn’t with women’s trigger-happy dissolutive behaviors, but with straight men, whose insufferable and abusive natures all but forced their women to divorce them and take their kids, half their stuff, and 1/3 of their paycheck for 20 years. Men sucked so bad at being husbands, it was contended, that women had little choice but to kick them to the curb.  They deserved all the divorce-rape they got, the bastards.

So imagine my surprise to see the same ratio between female and male divorce initiation  that we’ve observed in straights for decades now, mirrored in the homosexual community. This has gotta be bad news for the fish-bicycle set that loves to blame masculine misbehavior for, well, everything, including female-initiated divorce.  Instead, we now see that when woman is paired with woman, the dissolution rate is twice that of male-male couplings, just like it is with straight couples.

Just to support his assertions, here is a quotation from p. 340 of “Handbook of Interpersonal Commitment and Relationship Stability”, edited by Jeffrey M. Adams and Warren H. Jones, published by the academic press Springer in 1999:

The differential breakup rates of married versus same-sex couples point to the role of marital institutions, but male and female couples exhibit differences in stability as well, suggesting that the influence of gender needs to be explained. With a small cross-sectional sample of 25 gay men and lesbians each, Duffy and Rusbult (1986) found that lesbians had longer relationships. But in the only two studies ever conducted with large samples of same-sex relationships (over 1,000 couples in each), consistent differences have been found between gay men and lesbians in breakup rates, both in the late 1970s and the late 1980s: Lesbian relationships, whether measured longitudinally (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983) or retrospectively (Bryant & Demian, 1994), were of shorter duration than gay male relationships. The gay men in couples surveyed by Bryant and Demian (1994) reported a mean duration of their current relationships of 6.9 years, compared to 4.9 years for lesbians (p. 104). Furthermore, though both gay men and lesbians reported spending roughly the same total amount of time in their lives in major same-sex relationships, the women reported more past relationships, suggesting that those relationships as well had been of shorter duration. Finally, there was a small but potentially meaningful difference in the proportion of lesbians (92%) as opposed to the pro-portion of gay men (96%) reporting commitment to their current partner for a lifetime or “a long time.” These findings run counter to general expectations (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983; Eskridge, 1996) based on beliefs about women’s greater desires and capabilities compared to men in creating and maintaining intimacy and connection in intimate relationships.

Lesbian couples also have the highest rates of domestic violence. Higher than gay males, and much higher than married couples.

Excerpt:

  • A study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence examined conflict and violence in lesbian relationships. The researchers found that 90 percent of the lesbians surveyed had been recipients of one or more acts of verbal aggression from their intimate partners during the year prior to this study, with 31 percent reporting one or more incidents of physical abuse.[46]
  • In a survey of 1,099 lesbians, the Journal of Social Service Research found that slightly more than half of the lesbians reported that they had been abused by a female lover/partner. The researchers found that “the most frequently indicated forms of abuse were verbal/emotional/psychological abuse and combined physical-psychological abuse.”[47]
  • A study of lesbian couples reported in the Handbook of Family Development and Intervention“indicates that 54 percent had experienced 10 or more abusive incidents, 74 percent had experienced six or more incidents, 60 percent reported a pattern to the abuse, and 71 percent said it grew worse over time.”[48]

This is not even to mention the concept of “lesbian bed death“, which is the frequently occurring cessation of sexual activity in lesbian relationships. A recent study on that is here.

Liberal women and fear of commitment

So what causes liberal women do break commitments more than men, whether they are straight or gay? I think there is a reason and it is gender-specific, but it can be mitigated by male leadership and influence in the relationship. And here it is: liberal women think of relationships as being more about emotions and peer-approval than about planning, hard work and results. Liberal women have a notion about marriage being something that will allow them to live happily ever after – and be approved of (or envied) by their peers. Liberal women believe that it is their partner’s job to give them that, and if they don’t get it, then the relationship isn’t working, and can get jettisoned.

Studies have shown that liberal women have difficulty evaluating men to see if a man is suitable to perform traditional male duties in marriage. Typically, liberal women try to judge men based on how the man makes them feel. Having been raised to be feminists, they just don’t believe that men have any distinct “male” capabilities that they need to evaluate. Liberal women tend to believe that they can tell a man’s suitability for marriage by looking at his appearance, or by asking their liberal female friends what they think of the man. These standards are heavily influenced by the culture, as well – movies, TV, music, and so on.

Liberal women also don’t generally view marriage as a long-term enterprise that has definite goals that may differ from their own personal goals. Liberal women tend to rebel against strict moral boundaries and exclusive religious truth claims, because they restrain them from making relationships (with men or children) all about themselves. They have to be convinced to see the value of moral boundaries and religious truth claims, and they usually haven’t done the work themselves to have that capability. A strong male leader who is focused on moral and religious issues can mitigate the liberal female tendency towards narcissism, but liberal women tend to avoid such men as being “too strict” or “too controlling” – even if the leadership is to make the woman grow and get better.

Any structure or plan to the relationship is viewed with suspicion because it distracts from the goals of liberal women: feeling good and having social acceptance. That’s why young, unmarried liberal women marry people like Bill Clinton, John Edwards and Tiger Woods who know nothing about morality and religion. It’s not rational, but the lack of moral standards and religious truth claims makes them feel safe and autonomous. And that is more important than being led and having the safety of a man who takes morality and religion seriously. One lesbian I know recently told me that discussing morality and religion objectively should not be done because people with strong views on morality and religion are “too mean”.

It’s up to sensible, moral, religious men to come along and civilize these young, unmarried feminist-influenced liberal women. We need to cause them to think about what marriage really is, what marriage really requires from each partner, and what children really require from marriage. We need to push the engineering approach to marriage during the courtship phase, and wean them off of the crazy emotional vain selfish view of marriage. If men don’t lead liberal women during the courtship to think deeply and rationally about marriage, then liberal women will not be prepared or capable of commitment over the long-term. If a man doesn’t take the time during the courtship to lead and grow a woman before the wedding, he is taking chances with his future and the future of his children. Not to mention his service to God, which will be negatively impacted by a divorce. At the very least, there will be a financial loss that cuts off charitable giving. At the worst, the potential impact that a good marriage and good Christian children have for the Kingdom will be lost.

News

New study: a divorce of a friend or close relative dramatically increases odds of divorce

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From the left-leaning Pew Research.

Excerpt:

As if married people don’t have enough to worry about, a new study suggests that the divorce of a friend or close relative dramatically increases the chances that you too will divorce.

A research team headed by Rose McDermott of Brown University analyzed three decades of data on marriage, divorce and remarriage collected from thousands of residents of Framingham, Massachusetts.

McDermott and her colleagues found that study participants were 75% more likely to become divorced if a friend is divorced and 33% more likely to end their marriage if a friend of a friend is divorced.

So divorce is contagious…and you can catch the divorce bug from your friends—even from a friend of a friend?

[…]Examples of social contagion run the gamut from adolescent sexual behavior to the spread of phantom diseases in a workplace. Economist Ilyana Kuziemko reported in a 2006 paper titled “Is Having Babies Contagious?” that brothers and sisters are significantly more likely to have a child soon after a sibling gives birth. A research team in Arkansas tracked how obesity appeared to spread in elementary school classrooms.

[…]Overall, they found that the divorce of a friend or close relative significantly increased the probability of divorce. For example, about 9% of the adult children of the 1948 study group were divorced at least once.  The findings suggest that the chances of divorcing increase to approximately 16% if a friend or close family member has been divorced — an increase of 75% over the overall divorce rate. The probability of divorce rises to roughly 12% if  friends and relatives of the participant’s friends and relatives divorces.  But the effect then vanishes, and the divorce of someone three degrees removed—a friend of a friend of a friend—does not significantly change the likelihood that a couple will separate.

“We suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages might serve to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship,” they conclude.  “Although the evidence we present here is limited to a single network…marriages endure within the context of communities of healthy relationships and within the context of social networks that encourage and support such unions.”

Other insights from the study:

  • People in the study group who have been divorced are more likely to marry someone else who has been divorced, particularly those who re-couple relatively soon after they end their previous marriage. Compared to others, those who remarried since the last study period were four times more likely to marry a divorcee.
  • Divorced participant became less popular, in part because they may lose as friends members of their former spouse’s friends network. “In addition, newly single people may be perceived as social threats by married friends who worry about marital poaching.”
  • More popular people—participants with more friends in their social network—were less likely to divorce than those with fewer friendships. Part of the reason may be that “a strong, supportive friendship network” protects a couple’s marriage by “mak[ing] it easier for individuals to weather inevitable marital stresses.”

I think there’s a lot of good tips in that study about how to safeguard your own marriage (or future marriage). For one thing, marry someone who has solidly married friends. Nurture the marriages of your friends. If you’re like me, then you’re diligent enough to teach your friends how to get married and even suggest sensible mates for them. There’s nothing that annoys me more than women choosing men who can’t be good protectors, providers and moral/spiritual leaders. Why not give them a helping hand before they make a poor decision? That’s what parents should be doing, especially – minimizing the influence of culture and peers on their children and helping young people take a long-term view of marriage.

I think that the importance of peer-pressure in decision making is very widespread among young people, and especially among young women. It doesn’t just work for bad things, but also for good things. I spoke to one woman recently who sounded nearly crazy with envy over her friends who were getting married and having children. Now this particular woman had excellent skills and a pretty good idea of what she wanted to achieve with a marriage. But imagine what it is like for women who have no idea how marriage works and basically just getting into a “monkey see, monkey do” situation.

The scariest thing for me is how people see movies and TV shows where things that are potentially very harmful (e.g. – the gay lifestyle, divorce, single motherhood) are made to appear normal and healthy, and so people are tempted to actually do these things. A better way to make decisions is to turn off the TV and the movies and derive a set of goals of your own. Then look to better sources of wisdom (the Bible, parents, older people, great literature, empirical studies) in order to figure out how to reach those goals.