Young adults still tend to view marriage as an important life commitment to which they aspire, results of a new U.S. study suggest.
The findings appear to contradict public and academic anxiety over the state of marriage, and surprised even the researchers.
“What was so striking about what the young people said is that no one really described rejecting marriage,” said lead author Maria Kefalas, a sociology professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “I had a category all written -marriage rejector -and we couldn’t find any. There was no one who said, ‘Marriage is meaningless and I don’t want to get married.’ ”
The researchers uncovered a divide between rural and urban young adults after examining interviews with 424 people aged 21 to 38 who lived in New York, San Diego and Minneapolis/St. Paul or rural Iowa.
Young adults in small towns and rural areas -dubbed “marriage naturalists” -generally have a 1950s view toward marriage, they found, seeing it as the inevitable “next step” in a long-term relationship.
“It was like a time capsule,” Ms. Kefalas said. “Marriage was expected. It wasn’t fretted about, there was very little hand-wringing about it. A lot of the pressure for marriage was external in terms of social expectation that that’s what you do.”
In contrast, urban young adults -dubbed “marriage planners” by the researchers -had high standards for potential marriage partners and a strong sense that marriage was something they had to be “ready for.”
[…]Ms. Kefalas said she believes declining marriage rates in Canada and the United States are due to a shifting economic landscape that makes it more difficult for young adults in the Millennial cohort born in the 1980s and 1990s to get the education, career, housing and general stability they feel they need before saying “I do” -not a lack of interest in the institution itself.
“One of the great myths has been that young people, in particular millennials, are saying, ‘We don’t want to get mar-ried and marriage is irrelevant to us,’ and that’s not true,” Ms. Kefalas said.
The paper is to be published in the Journal of Family Issues.
I think the problem I see, and this is something for Christians to research, and for churches to get serious about – is that we need to help young people to translate these aspirations to marry into a solid plan for how to get married well. That means telling them how to prepare themselves to be married, how to find and evaluate another person for marriage, and how to court another person in a way that will result in a stable, loving marriage. Young people need to understand things that social scientists know – like the fact that chastity is good for marital stability, and that cohabitation is bad for marital stability. We need to study these factors and then inform the young people in winsome ways.
WALLACE: Congressman West, as we saw in the special election up in New York state this week, where the Democrat beat the Republican and Medicare was a big issue, as we see in the national polls a lot of people, especially seniors, don’t want to see Medicare changed this way.
WEST: Well, I think when you look at Paul Ryan’s plan, first of all, there is no change for anyone who is a senior 55 years and above. But as I sit here right now, I’m 50 years of age. And we already know that the board of trustee has said, you got 13 years and something very bad is going to happen with Medicare. So, what is going to be there for myself when I get 63 to 65?
So, I think the thing that we see is at least there’s a plan out there to try to have some type of reform.
And there was a great article by Mr. Stanley Druckenmiller in The Wall Street Journal back in the 15th of May that talked about the fact that the financial markets, a lot of these, you know, bond markets are looking to see: are we going to have some type of long- term viable solution and plan as we go forward?
WALLACE: But let me pick up on that, Congressman Edwards, because the knock against the Democrats is you don’t have a plan, that congressional Democrats didn’t pass a budget last year. Senate Democrats aren’t offering a budget this year — President Obama talks having an independent panel of medical experts who are going to find $20 billion of cuts somewhere. At least they’ve got a plan.
EDWARDS: Well, I think it’s not true that we don’t have a plan. And, in fact, when we passed the Affordable Care Act last year, we put in some real markers for Medicare that in fact reduced Medicare costs. We invested in preventive care for seniors because we know that the real drivers of Medicare are these long-term costs for chronic care that happens at the — you know, at the end of life.
You know, Republicans are very interesting because in their budget what they would do is repeal preventive care. Prescription drug coverage — we also closed the donut hole there, which is costing seniors a boatload of money and is not very efficient on the system.
So, to say that Democrats don’t have a plan I think is incorrect. I mean, in fact, the plan is to preserve and protect Medicare for future generations. And Republicans want to dismantle that.
WEST: Yes, but I think as you sit here and look at the two of us, one of us has voted to cut Medicare. When you look at the fact you voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which had $500 million of cuts of Medicare. And we also have this independent payment advisory board, these 15 bureaucrats, that are supposed to control the cost of Medicare. I mean, that’s something that really does scare seniors.
What we are talking is something that does not affect any senior, anyone 55 years and above. We’re talking about something that does put in some type of viable plan to sustain Medicare for the future, because as we know, it was put out three weeks ago, it won’t be there.
EDWARDS: Well, the congressman thinks the seniors are only interested in what’s good for them. And what we know about seniors, whether they’re in south Florida or in Maryland, is that they actually care about what happens with that next generation. They care about whether we’re going to cover preventive care and prescription drug.
WEST: But if you don’t have a plan, there is nothing for the next generation.
EDWARDS: And that they are — and that they are not sent in the private market to negotiate with insurance companies. We know that that would be a failure. And that’s exactly what the Republican plan calls for. I can’t negotiate on —
WALLACE: Let me move on to another thing, because the biggest difference, it seems to me, looking at your two positions on how to deal with the deficit is over taxes.
Congresswoman Edwards, you have a big plan to increase revenues. And let’s put it up on the screen. You would raise tax rates for the wealthy. You would raise the estate tax. You would tax capital gains and dividend as ordinary income and you would end tax subsidies for oil and gas companies.
So, raise taxes in the middle of a weak recovery?
EDWARDS: Well, let’s be clear — raise tax on the wealthiest 2 percent who have run away with the store for the last 10 years and haven’t put money back into the economy. I mean, that’s a fact, because if that trickle-down theory had worked, our economy would be in good shape right now.
And so, we do — I do subscribe to a plan that says, you know what? Middle income earners, you’ve already shared a fair burden of your taxes. But the wealthiest 2 percent have not.
And there’s no excuse whatsoever for continuing taxes for people who make over $500,000 a year.
WALLACE: Congressman West, you got something there?
WEST: Yes. I got a very interesting article which was written on the 26th of May by Steven Moore for The Wall Street Journal that talks about — we are talking about a 62 percent top tax rate and the absolutely abysmal effects that it will have on this economy.
And one of the great things he says here is, in the end, “The Tax Foundation recently noted that in 2009, U.S. collected a higher share of income and payroll taxes, 45 percent, from the richest 10 percent of tax files than any other nation, including some such socialist welfare states.”
So, I think that we are already getting a lot of the juice from those top brackets. But go back and look at history, Donna, when we looked at Coolidge and Harding. It took those marginal tax rates down to 29 percent. And the percentage of revenues for GDP grew. But after them came Hoover and Roosevelt who took it from 24 percent up to 83 percent, and the percentage of revenues decreased. Even John F. Kennedy, when he came in and saw a 91 percent marginal tax rate said that was too high. He took it down to 71 percent.
He seems to have all the facts and figures at his fingertips! Just like William Lane Craig, except he’s a former Army Lt. Colonel.
Same sex couples have had the legal right to form domestic partnerships in several European countries. Denmark was the first to introduce registered partnerships, in 1989. Norway was second, in 1993, then Sweden in 1995. Data from 2 of these landmark countries, Norway and Sweden, as well as California, have been studied enough to answer this question:
What types of unions have the highest rates of divorce?
Opposite sex married couples: men and women are so different, it is a wonder they ever stay married.
Male unions: men are naturally less committed, and less monogamous, so their partnerships don’t endure.
Female unions: women get so emotionally distraught over things. A union of two women, without any male counter-balancing their roller-coaster, is very unstable.
Hint: the answer is the same in all three countries!
And here’s the answer:
Female unions seem to have the highest divorce rates, followed by male unions, followed by opposite sex unions.
“For Sweden, the divorce risk for partnerships of men is 50% higher than the risk for heterosexual marriages, and that the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men.”
“For Norway, divorce risks are 77% higher in lesbian partnerships than in those of gay men.” (The Norwegian data did not include a comparison with opposite sex couples.)
In California, the data is collected a little differently. The study looks at couples who describe themselves as partners, whether same sex or opposite sex. The study asks the question, how likely is it that these couples live in the same household five years later. Male couples were only 30% as likely, while female couples were less that 25% as likely, as heterosexual married couples, to be residing in the same household for five years.
The only contradictory data I have found to this pattern is from the Netherlands. In the Dutch data, same sex couples have a 3.15 times greater dissolution rate than opposite sex cohabiting couples, and a 3.15 x 3.66 or 11.5 times greater dissolution rate than opposite married couples. But, female couples seem to be more stable than male couples.
Do you know what else is bad for relationships? Premarital sex and cohabitation. And that’s not my opinion, those are the facts. (See the studies below) Either we are going to get serious about constraining our selfish behavior to protect children from instability, or worse, or children are going to suffer. When adults substitute their own selfish ideologies for God’s design for marriage, children suffer.
WINTERY KNIGHT 