Feet first into marriage

What can we learn from couples who don't live together before tripping down the aisle, asks John Naish

by John Naish

'Why didn't we live together before we got married?" I asked my wife. "It was your idea," she replied. "And a particularly daft one." Nevertheless, I should be feeling smug after a recent burst of headlines forecasting marital misery and early divorce for couples who cohabit before getting wed. We're the only marrieds we know who lived separately before the big day.

More than three-quarters of UK couples now live together before marriage. If you subtract strictly religious spouses from the non-cohabiting cohort, there's only a small minority left. But perhaps something helpful can be learned from the oddball few who decide to plunge straight in. Not that they are nicer, more upstanding, virginal types, but that their actions could betray a higher level of commitment to the actual idea of being married.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/22/feet-first-marriage

a gross cohabiting couple

This is a prime example of why cohabiting is dangerous for children.
Headline:
3 children found starved in hotel bathroom
Officials say kids were so emaciated they threw up when first fed

If you've got the stomach for it:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32091786/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts
This is a prime example of why cohabiting is dangerous for children.

I Hate to Say I Told You So, But, I told you so....

I've been saying for some time that the path of marriage law is to reduce marriage to a series of 5 year renewable term contracts. Most recently, I said it in my Witherspoon article, here.

Now, someone is actually proposing it, in Germany. See here:

OK, so I was off by 2 years.They're proposing 7 year contract. Please notice, the proposal is serious; the FOX hosts and their guest are taking it seriously.
A bit of data:
it takes about 20 years for 50% of marriages to end in divorce.
Cohabiting couples are more likely to break up, than married couples. When cohabiting couples do get married, they have a higher divorce rate than couples who didn't live together. So, the advice given in this clip is grotesquely irresponsible.
Treating marriage as a contract will make you miserable. My first book, Love and Economics explains why.

Idaho college reverses co-ed dorm decision

Thank goodness for this!

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 1/31/2009
The University of Idaho has scrapped its plans to turn some of its dorm suites into co-ed apartments.

Bryan Fischer of Idaho Values Alliance (IVA) says the idea was short-lived because it would have required students of the opposite sex to share the same bathroom (see earlier story). After word surfaced about the school's plan, Fischer sounded the alarm and residents began contacting their state lawmakers.

Continue...

Arkansas ban on unmarried foster parents

The Arkansas voters banned unmarried couples from becoming foster parents. Although it was aimed at same sex couples, my opinion is that the impact on opposite sex unmarried couples is more significant. We already know that children do better with married couples than with cohabiting couples. The state should absolutely take this fact into account in choosing foster parents. "Opponents argued it would make it harder for the state to find the foster parents it needs to take care of children." I don't consider that a very strong argument. The states should recruit more married couples and make foster care an appealing proposition for them, rather than lowering their standards.
As a personal note, I have seen some unmarried cohabiting opposite sex couples do adoptions and foster care. It doesn't work very well. The problem is attachment. Many, many adopted and foster children have difficulty attaching to loving adults. Their ability to attach has been compromised by the trauma they've already been through. They need the most stable possible people to connect with. The unmarried couple implicitly says, "I do not entrust myself to my partner. My partner does not entrust himself to you. But we want you, the wounded child, to entrust yourself to me and to him." States should not be using cohabiting couples.

Benedict XVI on Marriage

When Benedict spoke to the US Bishops, he stressed the importance of marriage.

To some young Catholics, the sacramental bond of marriage seems scarcely distinguishable from a civil bond, or even a purely informal and open-ended arrangement to live with another person. Hence we have an alarming decrease in the number of Catholic marriages in the United States together with an increase in cohabitation, in which the Christ-like mutual self-giving of spouses, sealed by a public promise to live out the demands of an indissoluble lifelong commitment, is simply absent. In such circumstances, children are denied the secure environment that they need in order truly to flourish as human beings, and society is denied the stable building blocks which it requires if the cohesion and moral focus of the community are to be maintained.

This is the beauty of Catholic teaching. People often believe Catholic teaching is nothing but a set of prohibitions. But, here, Benedict stresses what the Church is positively in favor of: Marriage is more than a civil union, more than a contract. Marriage is the lifelong commitment of mutual self-giving. You can't have that in cohabitation or in a union that is understood to be temporary.

The Boyfriend Problem, Update

Evidently, the link to the AP story on what I called the Boyfriend Problem, is no longer active. Here is an msnbc link to the same story.

The Boyfriend Problem

Even the mainstream media is starting to connect the dots between cohabiting boyfriends and child abuse. This AP story reported on yahoo.com includes horrific incidents, as well as interviews with experts like my friend Prof. Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia sociology department.
The bottom line: the most dangerous person in a child's life, the person most likely to abuse a child, is his mother's cohabiting boyfriend. Not the biological father. The feminists and their political allies have driven biological married fathers out of the home. Feminists have convinced women that marriage is dangerous to them. The opponents of marriage never seem to take responsibility for the fact that the main alternative to marriage, cohabitation, is much more dangerous to women and their children.
Notice this paragraph from the very bottom of the AP story:

Oscar Jimenez Jr., the San Jose, Calif., boy found buried under cement and fertilizer, did have a biological father who was devoted to him. But the father, Oscar Sr., separated from Oscar Jr.'s mother in 2002 and was prevented from seeing his son in the weeks before the boy's death in February, allegedly from a beating by live-in boyfriend and ex-convict Samuel Corona.

I'd be interested to know who prevented the father from seeing his child, and how they prevented him.

Ask Dr J: Campus Sleepovers

Dear Dr J

You have discussed cohabitation in your writings, but not "sleepovers". In our college culture, it is common for dating couples to routinely spend the night at each other's house. In our campus ministry community, I have several friends that say that while they do share a bed they do not have sex.

I want to believe them, however, even without having sex, I do not think that this makes for a healthy relationship. It is also difficult as I live with several girls from my campus ministry that routinely sleepover with their significant other. I am torn between how I should respond to this; I do not feel like it is right but I realize we all have different moral compasses. I was wondering what your take was on this overlooked issue.
Katie in Kentucky

Dear Katie,
Thanks for your question. I have never heard this particular question. I think your instincts are sound. It is hard to believe that they aren't "having sex" when they are sharing a bed routinely. (In the Catholic tradition, we call this putting oneself in the near occasion of sin. We are responsible to keep ourselves out of occasions of sin!) Also, the evidence about the hormonal bonding suggests that sleeping together, even touching, can trigger some of the hormonal response. That means that your friends are bonding with each other and getting some of the "involuntary chemical commitment" that can cloud a person's judgment about whether the relationship is really right for them.
All in all, I suspect your friends are kidding themselves if they have convinced themselves that this is ok. It would be a better use of their time to spend time "doing stuff" that is not sexual, and that would allow them to get a realistic picture of whether this person is really right for them. If this is the right person for them, then, think about getting married. For most people, getting married right out of college is not too young. If you've really got a good match, you might as well get on with the business of building a life together.
Dr J

Get the Government Out of Sex Ed

My latest Town hall article is HERE. The contraceptive failure rates commonly reported are very misleading. I cited a couple of articles from Family Planning Perspectives, published by the Allan Guttmacher Institute, which is the research arm of Planned Parenthood. Those articles show that contraceptive failure rates depend not only on the method of contraception used. The probability of failure also depends on the demographic characteristics of the user.
Some of my critics in the blogsphere seem to think I made these numbers up, just for meaness. These are Planned Parenthood's numbers. The question is: what do we make up them? What do they mean? There are 3 demographically relevant factors: age, poverty and marital status. I think there are probably several big issues behind these demographics: fertility, maturity, commitment and amount of sexual activity.
First, age is a proxy for both maturity and fertility. For any contraceptive method, young women are more likely to get pregnant than older women. This is a function of the fact that fertility naturally declines with age. Think about people you know: among the middle-aged, middle-class married women, you probably know some who are more worried about infertility than contraception. That is what the data are picking up when they show an overall failure rate of 15.2% for women aged 20-24 and 9% for women over 30. (table 4 of Ranjit et. al.)
Maturity matters because some of the younger, and possibly less stable individuals are probably not using their contraception consistently or correctly.
Commitment is very interesting: cohabiting women have twice the contraceptive failure rate of married women overall: 21% versus 10%. And even looking at comparable age groups and poverty status, cohabiting women have much greater failure rates than married women. See Tale 2 of Fu et. al. Cohabiting teenaged poor women have a 70% failure rate for condoms, compared with only a 23% failure rate for married poor teenagers. What does this mean? I suspect that the married couples have less difficulty negotiating consistent condom use. They have a shared future, which the cohabiting couples may not.
Finally, cohabiting couples have sex frequently than single people. This may account for the relative success of singles vs. cohabiting women of comparable age and income. Again, see Table 2 of Fu et. al.: the failure rate for the PILL is 48% for cohabiting poor teens, but only 13% for single poor teens.
Of course both these rates are higher than the officially published statistics of 8% for the pill, and 15% for the condom, which was my point.
Sex ed programs should be focusing on the failure rates that are relevant to the target demographic group, not the general population. If a middle-class, middle-aged married woman has a contraceptive failure, that is a private problem for her and her family. It has no social significance whatsoever, and is frankly none of the government's business one way or the other. Contraception failure among the poor and the young and the unmarried has become a public problem because the public is likely to end up supporting their offspring. That is why the government has taken it upon itself to teach sex ed in the first place. If the government is going to get involved, it should focus on demographically relevant contraceptive failure rates, not on some failure rates, theoretically obtainable in a world of perfect use. The point of the tables in these studies is exactly to show that perfect use is not the same as theoretically perfect use.
By the way, I am certainly prepared to believe that improved education can improve the consistency of contraceptive use. I'm not prepared to believe that there is any education program that will make a 13 year old behave like a 30 year old.
By the way, the shouting and screaming in the blogsophere, complete with commentary about my likely sex life, confirms what I believe is our new social norm about sex: Sex is a essentially a private recreational activity, with no moral or social consequences. We believe sex is essentially a sterile activity, and babies are an after-thought, an optional consumer life-style extra, if you happen to like that sort of thing. Many of the discussants at Pandagon seem to feel themselves cheated if they don't obtain the results that perfectly functioning contraception would create. I'm just the messenger: contraception doesn't always work. Shoot the messenger if you must, but that doesn't negate the message.

Kiddie Porn at Work

Pornography is big business, and internet child porn is a big subset of that business. Here is a story from an Insurance industry publication in which an employer is found liable for the internet porn viewing habits of employees. The employee cruised kiddie porn sites at work. The employer told him to stop, but didn't report him to anybody.

In 2000, there were reports that the employee was acting “strange” in shielding his computer screen. Suspicions that he was visiting illicit sites were confirmed in 2001 by the IT director and by senior managers who found child pornography. They discovered the employee had been posting images of his 10-year-old stepdaughter to a child pornography site. Authorities arrested him and seized the computer, finding thousands of pornographic images, including child pornography.

The minor's mother sued XYC, alleging it had breached its duty to report the employee to authorities for his child pornography computer activity. The mother claimed the company's failure enabled him to continue secretly photographing the stepdaughter and molesting her.

Interesting detail not highlighted in this story, which is after all, an insurance publication: the man did not photograph his daughter. He photographed his stepdaughter. Research shows that children are in far more danger from unrelated men in the household than they are from their own fathers. And, children are in more danger from their mothers' boyfriend, than from their mothers' husband.

Response to the University of Kentucky Kernel

Last month, I visited the University of Kentucky and gave a speech entitled, "A skeptical Look at Domestic Partner Benefits." That speech was well-received by many in the community, and may have even played some role in the ensuing debate in the state legislature.
However, the article in the student newspaper was not very well-informed. I have my doubts as to whether the author even attended the lecture, since she did not seem to know what time of day it was held. So I wrote a reply to the editor of the Kentucky Kernel (no, I'm not making this up: that is the name of the student newspaper.) But they have not published it as far as I know. So, to set the record straight, I am publishing the letter here.

To the editor,

I write in response to the February 15, 2007 article entitled, "Legislators, speaker 'skeptical' of benefits.” As the “speaker,” I consider myself qualified to know what I said and didn’t say. For benefit of anyone who was unable to attend the lecture, I have posted the entire talk, complete with footnotes, on my website:

http://www.jennifer-roback-morse.com/articles/domestic_partner.pdf

People can decide for themselves whether I “just talked about what I felt” or whether my factual claims have empirical support.

As for the questions from the audience, several students seemed to want to minimize the importance of the research on cohabitation. So let me reiterate: years of research on cohabitation among opposite sex couples has shown convincingly that cohabitation is not equivalent to marriage and is in fact, inferior to marriage. Domestic violence, including child abuse, is more common, and relationship satisfaction is lower among cohabitors than among married couples. In response to one question, I agreed that these effects are stronger among people with lower levels of education and earnings, but the independent effect of cohabitation persists even after taking account of income and education.

Perhaps the law students in the audience believe that as educated people of relatively high income, the impact of cohabitation will be negligible in their own experience. Maybe you think you’ll be able to dodge the statistical bullet. But the University’s plan would subsidize not only cohabiting couples among the faculty, but among the clerks and cooks and custodians of the University.

There is nothing “progressive” or “tolerant” about a policy that provides ideological gratification to the rich while harming the poor. Encouraging opposite sex cohabitation, a lifestyle known to be destructive, is bad public policy. The taxpayers of Kentucky should decline to pay for the University’s domestic partners proposal.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Roback Morse

Memo to Jessica Lynch: Get Married Already!

Jessica Lynch, celebrated POW, gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She named the baby Dakota Ann Robinson, after a fallen comrade, Army Spc. Lori Piestewa of Tuba City, Ariz., who was the first woman to be killed in combat in Iraq. Piestewa's middle name was Ann, and Dakota means friendship or ally.
Congratulations on a healthy birth and a touching commemoration of your friend. But do your child a favor: marry her daddy! "Lynch and her boyfriend, Wes Robinson, named Dakota in honor of Lynch's friend." Children of married parents do FAR better than the children of cohabiting parents. See my fact sheet: Why NOT Take her for a Test Drive, for details.
Jessica, don't be afraid: get married. Mr. Robinson, be a man: marry your baby's mother.

More on the NYT

The outrage continues over the NYT marriage distortions. Here Mike McManus, founder of Marriage Savers, makes the connection between No-Fault Divorce and the decline of marriage. He proposes as an alternative, Mutual Consent Divorce, which is what many people believe No-Fault is. When you explain that No-Fault means Unilateral divorce, and that many people are divorced against their wills, people are usually shocked.

There has been an alarming increase of never-married people. In 1970 there were
21 million never-married men and women aged 18 or older. By 2005, the number was 52 million. That is a 148 percent hike, more than triple the growth of population. Of those aged 30-44, the percentage of never-married men and women has also tripled since 1970.

What is not widely recognized is that these trends feed upon each other. The tripling of divorces makes young people fearful of marriage, particularly the 35 million since 1970 who saw their parents divorce. That experience fueled the number of cohabiting couples10-fold from 523,000 in 1970 to 5.2 million in 2005. In choosing a "trial marriage" they have unwittingly chosen a "trial divorce." Eight of ten will either break up before the wedding or after. The divorce rate for those who live together first is 50 percent higher than couples who remain apart until the wedding.