Divorce

Ross Douthat on Unstable Families and Culture

1950s Dance

FamilyStudies.Org interviews conservative columnist Ross Douthat on the topic of family and culture, and he has some reasonable things to say recognizing the value of modern freedoms while searching for a way to restore some family stability. His first point is about cultural promotion of promiscuity as an almost risk-free phase between youth and married life:

But in the zone in between being sixteen and being a married sitcom dad with kids, pop culture’s vision of the good life is extremely libertine, in the sense that premarital sex is consistently treated as a kind of low-consequence playground—whether in the hot tubs of “Jersey Shore” and “The Real World,” or the haute-bourgeoise sexual carousels on shows like “Friends” and “Sex in the City,” or in the tabloids or the pop music charts or wherever—in which there’s no good reason to put a limit on how often and how casually you couple.

It has always been true that sex is especially powerful and fraught with dangers for the young — with consequences ranging from unwanted pregnancy to STDs and injury to the ego and romantic expectations. This hasn’t changed, but culturally there is a greater expectation that young people will be sexually engaged at an early age, and discussion of the downsides are more of an afterthought in most media. Cultural conservatives tend to look back on some Golden Age where young people were chaste until marriage — an age that never existed — and some of them seem to want to bring back social and political disapproval of sex outside marriage. Absent a sea change in attitudes, that will not happen — but Douthat continues to ask for social conservatives to play a part in bringing back some cultural guidelines encouraging stronger families:

In the past, I’ve made an analogy between the sexual and industrial revolutions, with the point being that it’s possible to mitigate the worst effects of a sweeping period of social change while preserving the good things that came in with it. In the end, for instance, the Gradgrinds and Social Darwinists were wrong: The Western world did not need children working long shifts in factories in order to sustain the benefits of industrialization. And in the same way I don’t think our world needs millions of abortions and out-of-wedlock births and broken homes in order to sustain the very real advancements—in female opportunity and professional and political dignity, especially—that we’ve seen since the 1970s. But proving that point is the work of generations, and a better synthesis, if one exists, still lies well ahead of us.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

For more on this topic:

Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Life Is Unfair! The Militant Red Pill Movement
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
Madmen, Red Pill, and Social Justice Wars
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Stable is Boring? “Psychology Today” Article on Bad Boyfriends
Ross Douthat on Unstable Families and Culture
Ev Psych: Parental Preferences in Partners
Purge: the Feminist Grievance Bubble
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Modern Feminism: Victim-Based Special Pleading
Stereotype Inaccuracy: False Dichotomies
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Red Pill Women — Female MRAs
Why Did Black Crime Syndicates Fail to Go Legit?
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
Feminism’s Heritage: Freedom vs. Special Protections
Evolve or Die: Survival Value of the Feminine Imperative
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)
Gaming and Science Fiction: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Culture Wars: Peace Through Limited Government

“The New ‘I Do'”

I haven’t been able to read it yet, but the forthcoming book The New “I Do”” looks like it will be a useful exploration of reform ideas for marriage. As I’ve pointed out here and here, the one-size-fits-all, state-legislature-designed marriage laws are not suitable for most of the couples getting married today, and the emotion surrounding the topic makes it hard to address some of those problems with prenups, which most people can’t afford to draft anyway. But if you thought it was expensive to hire two lawyers to work out your prenup, you will find it far more expensive to hire two lawyers for your divorce who may successfully make it an adversarial proceeding.

Co-authors Susan Pease Gadoua and Vicki Larson have a web site for the new book which links to some thoughtful material. From their site:

What [author Susan Pease Gadoua] found so striking was the amount of shame people felt if they did not fit the marital mold. Virtually everyone whose marriage ended said he or she felt like a failure or described the dissolution as a “failed marriage.” But admitting something isn’t working does not equal failure. In fact, it often takes more courage to go separate ways than it does to stay and pretend to the world that everything is fine.

Sadly, too many still think that way. If a marriage ends in divorce, people are all too eager to start pointing fingers at what went wrong — either the couple didn’t understand what commitment means, or they didn’t work hard enough on their marriage, or they were too focused on their own happiness, or they were too selfish or lazy.

It’s still all about blame, shame, and personal failure, instead of looking at the institution of marriage itself and asking, why isn’t it working well for about half of those who enter into it? Actually, it isn’t working well for more people than that; many couples remain married in name only because the wife or husband needs the health benefits, or they own a business and it would lead to financial ruin, or they can’t afford to sell the house, or they live separate lives but decide to stick it out, unhappily, “for the kids.”

… Couples are tweaking the institution to make it work for them even if it looks pretty much like a “traditional” marriage from the outside. Serial monogamy, open marriages, covenant marriages, commuter marriages — these variations-on-a-theme arrangements are already happening. What hasn’t happened, however, is the end of the blaming, shaming, and sense of failure many feel, as well as the need to keep their marital choices in the closet lest they be judged.

Our book hopes to change that. We hope to normalize what is already happening. And, just as important, we want to offer those who may want to marry one day — perhaps even you — or those who would like to transform their marriage new marital road maps that will set them up for success.

The New I Do will get you to think consciously about the kind of marriage you want, not the marriage your parents, relatives, friends and — heaven forbid — celebrities have. If you have seen marriages around you end in separation and divorce, or remain intact — unhappy, sexless and perhaps loveless — and you are questioning whether marriage is still worth it, then this book is for you.

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

Marriages Happening Late, Are Good for You
Monogamy and Relationship Failure; “Love Illuminated”
“Millionaire Matchmaker”
More reasons to find a good partner: lower heart disease!
“Princeton Mom” Susan Patton: “Marry Smart” not so smart
“Blue Valentine”
“All the Taken Men are Best” – why women poach married men….
“Marriage Rate Lowest in a Century”
Making Divorce Hard to Strengthen Marriages?
Student Loan Debt: Problems in Divorce
“The Upside of ‘Marrying Down’”
The High Cost of Divorce
Separate Beds Save Marriages?
Marital Discord Linked to Depression
Marriage Contracts: Give People More Legal Options
Older Couples Avoiding Marriage For Financial Reasons
Divorced Men 8 Times as Likely to Commit Suicide as Divorced Women
Vox Charts Millennial Marriage Depression
What’s the Matter with Marriage?
Life Is Unfair! The Great Chain of Dysfunction Ends With You.
Leftover Women: The Chinese Scene
Constant Arguing Can Be Deadly…
“If a fraught relationship significantly shortens your life, are you better off alone?
“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”
View Marriage as a Private Contract?
“It’s up there with ‘Men Are From Mars’ and ‘The Road Less Travelled’”
Free Love, eHarmony, Matchmaking Pseudoscience
Love Songs of the Secure Attachment Type
“The New ‘I Do’”
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Mark Manson’s “Six Healthy Relationship Habits”
“The Science of Happily Ever After” – Couples Communications
Free Dating Sites: Which Have Attachment Type Screening?
Dating Pool Danger: Harder to Find Good Partners After 30
Mate-Seeking: The Science of Finding Your Best Partner
Perfect Soulmates or Fellow Travelers: Being Happy Depends on Perspective
No Marriage, Please: Cohabiting Taking Over
“Marriage Markets” – Marriage Beyond Our Means?
Rules for Relationships: Realism and Empathy
Limerence vs. Love
The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive
When to Break Up or Divorce? The Economic View
“Why Are Great Husbands Being Abandoned?”
Divorce and Alimony: State-By-State Reform, Massachusetts Edition
“Sliding” Into Marriage, Small Weddings Associated with Poor Outcomes
Subconscious Positivity Predicts Marriage Success…
Why We Are Attracted to Bad Partners (Who Resemble a Parent)

View Marriage as a Private Contract?

Dog Wedding – Shutterstock

Marriages happened long before government took notice and wrote laws about them, then set up family courts to deal with them specially. Now the special status of the married is embedded in thousands of well-meaning laws covering taxation, benefits, inheritance, and child custody. Starting 20 years ago, same-sex couples quite reasonably demanded to be included, since most of the trappings of marriage had little to do with procreation (and same-sex couples now head many families with children.) We’ve just seen the public flip to majority support for this fairness position, and not surprisingly legislatures and courts are following.

Reason’s Scott Shackford has a story about this which is worth a read, ending with this thoughtful question:

Well, there’s this: Every time a ruling like this happens, there’s a dozen comments or so about getting the government out of marriage entirely. While I think that’s a great goal for creating an equal playing field in areas like government entitlements and taxation, I still have deep fears our court system won’t know how to deal with legal family conflicts.

When a federal judge in Oklahoma struck down the state’s ban on gay marriage recognition, a conservative state legislator named Mike Turner said he was going to craft a bill eliminating government marriage in Oklahoma entirely. After the quick rush of initial, extremely superficial stories, I attempted to get in touch with him to delve deeper into the proposal to see if he had researched or thought about all the things the state would need to change if it were to end official marriage licensing. Unfortunately, he declined to speak further on the matter, leaving some coverage to characterize his actions as some sort of “cut off his nose to spite his face” act of retribution.

Who knows—they may be right about Turner, but that doesn’t mean other efforts to divorce marriage from the government are about denying people the right to freely associate. From the libertarian perspective, it’s the opposite. The government is the barrier, not the liberator. So a thought exercise: Presume that we can’t just eliminate marriage licenses entirely, as much as we might want to. The good news in these gay marriage rulings is that judges are pointing out that the state doesn’t really have an actual stake in using marriage incentives to further breeding (and isn’t handing marriage licenses out based on the concept anyway). What actually can or should be done next to further reduce government involvement in our family composition choices?

Let’s suppose (as I proposed here) the states opened up marriage as a private contract and truly respected the couple’s intentions on entrance into marriage. The states might retain family courts but allow marriage contracts to invoke binding arbitration (which would be far cheaper and faster, because like all services run by government, cost, speed, and innovation are not valued by court systems, so they are unmanageably slow and expensive for settling small matters.) The state’s family court would be invoked only when the parties had failed to make proper preparations (as is true of Probate Courts, now often circumvented by efficient trusts.) The state could outline the minimum requirements for a contract to qualify as “marriage” for legal purposes (to prevent abusive or sham marriage contracts) and set out several model contracts (which would make adjudicating disputes under them simpler by providing the most common options which would then have a large body of previous decisions to examine.) Many people would thus be able to avoid the costly and expensive lawyers now required in adversarial disputes over custody and property.

This reform would be fairer to everyone and reduce the enormous damage divorce causes, as it is now practiced. Be sure that any state that tried to move toward such a reform would find a large number of entrenched interests (lawyers, politicians) trying to block it.

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”

divorce cake

Blogger Susan Walsh has a story examining who is asking for divorce (2/3 of the time, the wife) and why (male and female reasons differ substantially, with the wife’s complaints centering on abuse or disappointment with her husband.) Since these are self-reported, we have to be skeptical of the reasons, especially when “abuse” is now considered a great excuse even where it doesn’t exist, and assists in custody battles. Some studies show significant abuse by wives of husbands, but apparently men are ashamed to cite it as a reason.

Read the whole thing.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

For more on family law and politics:

More on Divorce, Marriage, and Mateseeking

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

Divorce

Ross Douthat on Unstable Families and Culture

Like this:

“The New ‘I Do'”

Like this:

View Marriage as a Private Contract?

Like this:

“Divorce in America: Who Really Wants Out and Why”

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: