Why Get Married? (part 1)

    A recent Cincinnati Enquirer article reported that there were fewer couples applying for marriage licenses in 2009 in the three Ohio counties making up the Cincinnati metropolitan area than in any year since the 1950’s.  They also reported that this trend is very much in line with the national trend.  The article then stated that the trend seemed to be for individuals choosing to either remain single or to live with their mate without being married.

    I believe there are several reasons people are choosing not to get married.  First of all, I believe that culturally this trend away from traditional marriage is different from and potentially more dangerous than the experiment of the “free love” generation of the 1970’s. They wanted to live as they pleased without any “establishment” telling them what to do. This trend I think reflects a more fundamental paradigm shift primarily among men regarding relationships.  Worldly men are thinking less and less of intimate relationships as a committed, long term, family building, offspring producing, legacy leaving venture and more as a temporary, fantasy embracing, almost completely selfish opportunity for sexual gratification.  Men in our culture are more sex focused and sex addicted than ever in recent memory and women are complicit thinking that occasional, unsatisfying relationships are better than none at all. 

     Entire segments of our young adult culture are beginning to look similar to certain Caribbean cultures and to low income, inner city and impoverished rural communities.  In these cultures it is common for men to seldom enter into committed relationships and when they do, they seldom stay committed long.  They take little to no responsibility for the children they produce.  Childcare is often the responsibility of the mothers and grandparents (mostly grandmother) while the men go from one illicit relationship to another. This relational paradigm is springing up from impoverished communities right into middle-class America.  From college campuses to dating websites to singles clubs this “hooking up” (a phrase often used to describe a primarily sexual relationship with little to no commitment) phenomenon threatens the concept of marriage and family to the core.  

      Even more than our current divorce epidemic this relational paradigm seems poised to force children to grow up in homes where there is no father figure dooming them to almost certainly repeat that cycle when they move into their teen/young adult years.  More about this in Why Get Married? (part 2)