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The Decline of Marriage

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Re: The Decline of Marriage

#51

Post by abfan1127 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #34
pyrrhotech wrote: post #25

Monogamy isn't dead as the author seems to imply by the falling marriage rates. Many people I know are not married but are in 10+ year long-term monogamous relationships (myself included). We don't ever plan to get married because I don't like the government telling me what to do and how our assets must be split in the case we decide to break up (though we never plan to). We also are vehemently anti-religious and wou…

> We don't ever plan to get married because I don't like the government telling me what to do What about the government telling other people what to do about your relationship? If one of you were seriously hurt, would the hospital accept the other's instructions as a medical or legal proxy, etc?

I have power of attorney over my dad, in the event a decisions needs to be made.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#52

Post by schwap »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #25

Monogamy isn't dead as the author seems to imply by the falling marriage rates. Many people I know are not married but are in 10+ year long-term monogamous relationships (myself included). We don't ever plan to get married because I don't like the government telling me what to do and how our assets must be split in the case we decide to break up (though we never plan to). We also are vehemently anti-religious and wou…

> We also are vehemently anti-religious and would never support an institution like marriage for that reason either.

Just curious, do civil unions not exist where you are? I kind of assumed in my mind they were a pretty normal thing at this point.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#53

Post by remarkEon »

gorkonsine wrote: post #5

Wow, this article isn't scientific at all, in the least. >As mentioned in the previous essay, single parenthood correlates with a number of social maladies. >The best environment for these children is a home with their biological mother and father. Marriage is statistically the best way to ensure these environments for children. Healthy marriages create stable families. Stable families create strong and safe communit…

>Citations needed. There's no proof of any of this, it's just the social norm we've had for centuries.

More like millennia. You should ask yourself why/how the concept emerged independently across many cultures and civilizations what that signals for its usefulness in building social structures that are able to respond to negative external stimuli (war, disease, environmental catastrophe etc).

>Personally, I think it'd be better if people joined into polyamorous groupings; it's better for kids, and provides a more stable home life than only having 2 parents. Don't ask me for citations; you'll just have to take my word for it, just as the author of this article did.

Okay, now I'm pretty sure you're being sarcastic, since the opposite is true.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#54

Post by gorkonsine »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #10
gorkonsine wrote: post #5

Wow, this article isn't scientific at all, in the least. >As mentioned in the previous essay, single parenthood correlates with a number of social maladies. >The best environment for these children is a home with their biological mother and father. Marriage is statistically the best way to ensure these environments for children. Healthy marriages create stable families. Stable families create strong and safe communit…

I'm almost certain widespread polyamory will degenerate into polygamy approximately instantaneously.

Most modern polyamorous relations end up with the women having more partners than the men. Women have a far easier time finding sex partners than men do, on average.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#55

Post by washadjeffmad »

cmahler7 wrote: post #42
dr_ wrote: post #29

"As mentioned in the previous essay, single parenthood correlates with a number of social maladies." This may be true historically, but does it have to be that way going forward? My thoughts, not based on studies but based on people I know, is that the general interest in marriage has declined as there is a preference for greater autonomy amongst both men and women, not to mention economic independence. Marriage was…

Your method would destroy society. Women would make the choice for who the father would be and would choose only top tier traits, leaving out a vast majority of males. Men would either have no reason to be productive members of society or would become violent. Marriage came to be as a way to essentially harness productivity by eliminating most conflict over mates. I'm agnostic but I still think religion as an institu…

You're conflating your personal experience with modern courtship and kinship rituals in a particular society with some sort of universality of human nature. That's a nice way of saying you're wrong.

You and all other humans exist because of what you say you believe would "destroy society".

Sex wasn't even associated with pregnancy, let alone progeny until fairly recent history. There are existing kinship models where the "husband" is the father of all of his wives' children, even if he's 80 years old and has ED. Native American courtship rituals placed women in control of their relationships with multiple partners. There's more than one way, and humans have done them all for millennia.

The fact that US vernacular doesn't have common terms to distinguish between the people who raise you (your parents) and the people whose genes you posses (your genitor/genetrix) speaks volumes about it's dimness in the face of modern understanding.

Just because you don't think you or the other products of your society could handle it doesn't mean an entire species is de facto incapable.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#56

Post by gorkonsine »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #38
gorkonsine wrote: post #5

Wow, this article isn't scientific at all, in the least. >As mentioned in the previous essay, single parenthood correlates with a number of social maladies. >The best environment for these children is a home with their biological mother and father. Marriage is statistically the best way to ensure these environments for children. Healthy marriages create stable families. Stable families create strong and safe communit…

> Personally, I think it'd be better if people joined into polyamorous groupings; it's better for kids, and provides a more stable home life than only having 2 parents. As an introvert, this is my idea of hell. I have one wife, one child, and two cats - and that's about the maximum I can currently handle, emotionally and... attentively? Adding more significant relationships in my life would be really, really, really…

It's simple: with a polyamorous relationship, your wife would have another boyfriend/husband to spend her time with, and also to help take care of the kid, leaving you alone more of the time with the cats.

There's no requirement in polyamory for everyone involved to have multiple partners.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#57

Post by rukittenme »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #43
Danihan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many agnostic / atheist people do you know that have four or more kids? Atheists don't genuinely seem to believe in natural selection, it's ironic.

I believe this video properly elaborates on why https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXSz0bA9CiE

It does not. Marriage and fertility rates are dropping across all income groups. And, in the past, it was the wealthy and educated who had more children than the poor and uneducated.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#58

Post by ef4 »

remarkEon wrote: post #47
ef4 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fundamental flaw hiding under arguments like yours: the "civilization" you're circumscribing is an imaginary and arbitrary boundary. An ahistorical retcon. It's as unsupported as discredited racial theories that all humans fit into three tidy buckets ("caucasoid", "mongoloid", "negroid"). For example, maybe you're talking about "Christendom". But then it's not actually in decline -- hispanics are part of Ch…

>Our civilization -- the actual web of relationships and institutions that keep the lights on -- is clearly doing fine. Given even a passing look at just the last 2 decades, and the serious prospects for massive social unrest going forward both in the States and in Europe, which often get discussed here, how in the world can you say that. "The World" (since you apparently are one of those who think the term "Western…

> Given even a passing look at just the last 2 decades

In the last two decades, the share of humans living in extreme poverty fell from 30% to 10%. And child deaths under age five were cut in half.

So where's your data?

I will add that I don't think "western civilization" is racist, even though the term gets coopted often by racists. I happen to be proud to be part of a scientific civilization and want to see it flourish. But I recognize that has nothing to do with which people are allowed to live and work on which side of imaginary lines.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#59

Post by maxerickson »

Danihan wrote: post #40
api wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence brings up something I've been thinking about for a long time, namely that secular philosophy seems completely blind to children or to the needs of family and child rearing. It's a fairly massive shortcoming. Philosophy must address all of human life, not just the aspects that apply to early 20s single people and that subset of society that doesn't have kids. Some secular communities actively seem t…

How many agnostic / atheist people do you know that have four or more kids? Atheists don't genuinely seem to believe in natural selection, it's ironic.

What are you implying that a belief in natural selection requires?

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#60

Post by gorkonsine »

mercutio2 wrote: post #9
gorkonsine wrote: post #5

Wow, this article isn't scientific at all, in the least. >As mentioned in the previous essay, single parenthood correlates with a number of social maladies. >The best environment for these children is a home with their biological mother and father. Marriage is statistically the best way to ensure these environments for children. Healthy marriages create stable families. Stable families create strong and safe communit…

I’m with you on almost everything, I happen to agree communal and/or polyamorous parenting is great (no sarcasm, kids raised this way are great); but when do you think universal female suffrage happened in the U.S.? The 19th amendment was ratified in 1920. Are you implying there was some kind of poll tax or equivalent suppression of the female vote until the 60s?

Women couldn't hold most jobs until the 1960s or later; they could only be nurses, teachers, secretaries, etc. Suffrage was earlier, but just like black people (men) who got freedom and suffrage way back in the mid-1800s, they still weren't full members of society until significantly later.
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