marriage vs. partnership

Mr Sleep · Post by **Mr Sleep** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 9:59 am

@Beldin - I am not (and have not been) married and am currently unattached

EMINEM · Post by **EMINEM** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:04 am

Originally posted by Mr Sleep

So Eminem are you willing to change your terminology, just for the sake of this becoming less of a semantic discussion?

Yeah, sure.

Mr Sleep · Post by **Mr Sleep** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:07 am

Originally posted by EMINEM

Yeah, sure.

Thanks

Yshania · Post by **Yshania** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:10 am

Originally posted by Mr Sleep

So Eminem are you willing to change your terminology, just for the sake of this becoming less of a semantic discussion?

It would also help to define for certain whether our sociological/psychological/physical and cultural degeneration is being argued as a result of sex outside of a committed long term relationship (whether married or not) or sex outside of marriage.

In other words, is it the sex or the commitment we are questioning?

I may be less sarcastic then, though no less angry at some of the comments made.

EMINEM · Post by **EMINEM** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:11 am

Originally posted by Beldin
@yshania: Just collecting data here - are YOU married ? If I remember correctly you stated haveing 2 children - correct ?

@all: Wouldn't it be interesting if all of you stated your "martial status" - just to see from which position you're tackling the subject.

(Besides - I'm just plain curious .)

No worries,

Beldin

To reiterate, I am not married, and presently not even "in love." I'm "in-like" with a few female friends, but these relationships are merely professional at the moment... and besides none of them resemble Aerie or Viconia!

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:20 am

Originally posted by EMINEM
Sorry, fable, but there are significantly more non-married couples who "scream incessantly at one another, abuse their children regularly, and get some on the sly," than couples who are actually married. Similarily, there is a greater likelihood for married couples to live together longer, raise a close-knit, well-adjusted family, than their non-married or common-law counter-parts.

You're misunderstanding me and my context, by again conflating different groups under a single banner of promiscuous, non-married couples with no commitment--which was my initial point. @Eminem, I'm not arguing with you that there aren't many cohabiting couples who haven't the faintest idea of commitment. I was pointing out that your equation of non-married couples with promiscuity was factually inaccurate. None of the statistical samples you mention (some are badly flawed, some are simply opinions of clergy mentioned out of context, and a few are frankly wrong; but that's matter for another thread--did you simply lift this stuff from that "Anti-Cohabiting" website? There are far better places to get information to support your position, especially if you haven't actually read the cited materials) show that promiscuity is identical to forming a monogamous relationship out of wedlock.

If what you say elsewhere is true, then marriages are empty today, divorce is common, and largely because of a decline in morals over the last few decades--correct? Yet you would urge marriage on every couple that is living together. This raises a series a questions: Is a happy, non-married cohabiting relationship something you agree can and does happen? If it does exist, will the simple fact of getting a marriage license make it better? Is staying in a very bad marriage better than divorce? Why recommend a form you don't believe is working any longer within contemporary society? Shouldn't revitalization of that form take precedence over its recommendation?

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:22 am

Originally posted by EMINEM

To reiterate, I am not married, and presently not even "in love." I'm "in-like" with a few female friends, but these relationships are merely professional at the moment... and besides none of them resemble Aerie or Viconia!

WISDOM, as the Eastern Orthodox sing in their congregations. Marry a woman who can cast heal spells, and resurrect the dead. It might wreck havoc with conventional religion, but think of the savings on hospital bills!

Beldin · Post by **Beldin** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:24 am

Originally posted by EMINEM

and besides none of them resemble Aerie or Viconia!

What a shame - I might be tempted by them...

No worries,

Beldin

EMINEM · Post by **EMINEM** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:35 am

Originally posted by fable

WISDOM, as the Eastern Orthodox sing in their congregations. Marry a woman who can cast heal spells, and resurrect the dead. It might wreck havoc with conventional religion, but think of the savings on hospital bills!

You forgot to add "... and who live to see their 500th year without showing any signs of aging!"

"sigh" Sometimes, fantasy IS better than reality. I mean, what man wouldn't want to marry an elven women who looks (and acts?) the same at 300 as she did at 18?

C Elegans · Post by **C Elegans** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 10:51 am

I am married. I checked MM:s links, and briefly glanced through the references. Please note that all links MM posted above, go to the same site, a christian website that is strongly against cohabitation and sex before marriage. This is from the website:

Unapologetically this web page is Christian, biblically-based and follows the teachings of Jesus Christ. Only one reason is really needed not to live together before marriage and that is His teaching. However today, we thankfully have numerous secular research studies demonstrating a host of reasons why these teachings are the most prudent to follow. It is clear from research that cohabitation is harmful. No benefits have ever been documented! It falls far short of what God intended as the ideal for marriage. Trying to artificially replicate marriage robs us all the happiness, joy and strength we can gain from it.

The site offers help to get out of cohabiting, they have a step program to come closer to god and they distribute propaganda material with information against cohabiting. Thus, they appear quite biased.

I do not view this website as a source for reliable, factual information, because:

1. The misquote and distort results from studies published in the peer-reviewed scientific press. For instance, they write that a study "clearly shows that premarital sex leads to behaviour problems" and present statistics, when the original article clearly demonstrates only a correlation. This kind of misinterpretation of data is typical for propaganda.

2. The website quotes various results from various people and only give a name-year reference, just like MM does in his long reply to Fable above. This is not the way you give references in serious writing. When a reference is given like "Smith, 1994, 70", the reader has no simple way of finding the original source since they don't tell either the title of the work, or where it was published. For all we know, such a reference could refer to a fake study, an unscientific study like a poll on the web, a study with too many flaws to be accepted in scientific press, etc. Many groups in society make their own studies, aimed to prove their own opinions, and thus they use specially selected samples or draw unfounded conclusions. Unscientific studies like that can't be published in peer-reviewed scientific press, so some organisations edit their own magazines and books where such studies are published. It is very important to remember that non-peer reviewed press in equal to tabloid press or popular media. There is simply no way of telling if a result is controlled and valid or not. In real research, you have a zillion control processes like anonymous peer review and the fact that you can't publish studies without telling where you got your funds from and showing the study was approved by ethic committes, in compliance with international declarations, etc. A propaganda magazine, or a website like the one MM has linked to, can say whatever they want, there is no outside control.

3. If I have time later, I will check some of the references, but note that so far, I have not been able to localice any Scott 1994 in scientific press. Until I find the original study, "Scott 1994" who MM and the christian website claims have done a study that shows 40% of women in cohabital relationships have experiences sex they did not like, we will not know whether this is a legit finding, a total fake, a lie, or perhaps a legit finding but taken out of contex in a misrepresenting way, ie it might be true, but married women may not have been included in the study so no comparison can be made.

frogus · Post by **frogus** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 11:33 am

Me and Astafas have been going on about this for ages, but MM doesn't seem to be listening.

Eminem, you are arguing for the virtues of commited rellationships, not marriages. Noone in here (except maybe CE

) wants to argue about wether commited relationships are better than non-commited, and you are arguing very well against promiscuity etc. However, (correct me if I'm wrong) EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR (good) ARGUMENTS stands just as well as a defence for commited un-married relationships as it does for marriages.

Please don't ignore this. Please don't ignore this. Please don't ignore this.

Stop thinking that we are saying 'promiscuity is better than monogamy!'. We are not. If you don't mind, I would like you to argue for the case of marriage against the case of non-married commited relationships (marriage vs partnership is the name of the thread), rather than the case of marriage against underage sex, child abuse, promiscuity etc.

Yshania · Post by **Yshania** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 11:48 am

Originally posted by frogus

Me and Astafas have been going on about this for ages, but MM doesn't seem to be listening.

Eminem, you are arguing for the virtues of commited rellationships, not marriages. Noone in here (except maybe CE ) wants to argue about wether commited relationships are better than non-commited, and you are arguing very well against promiscuity etc. However, (correct me if I'm wrong) EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR (good) ARGUMENTS stands just as well as a defence for commited un-married relationships as it does for marriages.

Please don't ignore this. Please don't ignore this. Please don't ignore this.

Stop thinking that we are saying 'promiscuity is better than monogamy!'. We are not. If you don't mind, I would like you to argue for the case of marriage against the case of non-married commited relationships (marriage vs partnership is the name of the thread), rather than the case of marriage against underage sex, child abuse, promiscuity etc.

Most of us have read your arguement and appreciate your point of view. I would say, however, this debate has gone off on so many tangents from partnerships to teenage sex to promiscuity to falling birthrates to unmarried couples being immoral, degenerate and more likely to hurt their children....I would think it unwise to assume who wants to argue what, and unfairly dismissive to roll your eyes at one of the few people on this board who are very willing and capable to provide sound research to back up her arguements.

HighLordDave · Post by **HighLordDave** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 12:15 pm

I have been away for a while and am too lazy (and too afraid of getting caught by my boss) to read through this entire thread, so I will weigh in with my two cents on marriage.

Marriage is two distinctly exclusive things: it is a religious or spiritual commitment to one or more (for polygamous cultures) people, and it is a social contract. We often confuse the two because in some parts of the world, there is no difference.

Marriages based on love is a relavtively new phenomenon. Marriage historically been a device for familial alliances and building personal connections; that is, it was a business relationship, not a personal relationship. Most marriages were arranged, and the idea of loving a spouse was often the exception rather than the rule. In fact, sometimes the bride and groom did not even meet until the wedding ceremony.

So what has changed about marriage? Marriage is easy to get into, and easy to get out of (if terribly expensive). If anything, marriages have become easier to get out of. So why is the divorce rate up? We have new (within the last 30 years) psychologists and sociologists who suggest that dissolving an unhappy or abusive marriage is better than staying together just to avoid becoming a statistic. It is also because women are more empowered today and are not held financial hostages by abusive or adulterous spouses.

Consider this: up until the early part of this century, many women ceased to own property when they married. In the middle and upper classes, women who divorced their husbands either had to return to their families or were destitute because they had no rights, no property and no claim on any accumulated wealth. And I'm not talking about some third world country; this was the United States and western Europe up until the turn of this century or so.

Now that many women have jobs of their own, or at least some sort of vocational training, they are less reliant on their husbands for support, and can file for divorce to leave an unhappy marriage without having to worry about how they are going to feed, clothe and shelter themselves (and often their children).

Also, more marriages are failing because people are living longer and "until death do us part" is a awful long time away. The average life expectancy in modern countries is up by about 25 years from what it was a century ago. Add on to that the fact that 1 in 3 women are no longer dying in childbirth or as a result of birthing complication, and that the incidence of accidental or violent (ie-war) death for men has decreased dramatically in the last century, and people are having to live with the fact that a lifetime commitment is a lot longer today than it was even as recently as the industrial age.

I believe that sometimes people get married who have no business getting married (they are getting married to hack of their parents, the girl got pregnant, etc.) and that those marriages are doomed to failure. I also believe that divorce is often the first option when couples encounter rough times rather than the last. However, I do not believe that divorce is necessarily harmful or undesirable, and that in many cases staying together "for the sake of the children" is often more harmful than divorce.

I also do not suggest that marriage does not have a place in our modern culture. Nor do I think that the 55%+ divorce rate reflects our inability to maintain a commitment. However, I think that we need to evaluate whether or not we have unrealistic expectations towards marriage, such as the "good old days" stereotype of how much happier people were when the nuclear family was the ideal and norm (by the way, the good old days weren't all that good).

EMINEM · Post by **EMINEM** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 12:17 pm

Originally posted by C Elegans
I am married. I checked MM:s links, and briefly glanced through the references. Please note that all links MM posted above, go to the same site, a christian website that is strongly against cohabitation and sex before marriage. This is from the website:

The site offers help to get out of cohabiting, they have a step program to come closer to god and they distribute propaganda material with information against cohabiting. Thus, they appear quite biased.

I do not view this website as a source for reliable, factual information, because:

1. The misquote and distort results from studies published in the peer-reviewed scientific press. For instance, they write that a study "clearly shows that premarital sex leads to behaviour problems" and present statistics, when the original article clearly demonstrates only a correlation. This kind of misinterpretation of data is typical for propaganda.

2. The website quotes various results from various people and only give a name-year reference, just like MM does in his long reply to Fable above. This is not the way you give references in serious writing. When a reference is given like "Smith, 1994, 70", the reader has no simple way of finding the original source since they don't tell either the title of the work, or where it was published. For all we know, such a reference could refer to a fake study, an unscientific study like a poll on the web, a study with too many flaws to be accepted in scientific press, etc. Many groups in society make their own studies, aimed to prove their own opinions, and thus they use specially selected samples or draw unfounded conclusions. Unscientific studies like that can't be published in peer-reviewed scientific press, so some organisations edit their own magazines and books where such studies are published. It is very important to remember that non-peer reviewed press in equal to tabloid press or popular media. There is simply no way of telling if a result is controlled and valid or not. In real research, you have a zillion control processes like anonymous peer review and the fact that you can't publish studies without telling where you got your funds from and showing the study was approved by ethic committes, in compliance with international declarations, etc. A propaganda magazine, or a website like the one MM has linked to, can say whatever they want, there is no outside control.

3. If I have time later, I will check some of the references, but note that so far, I have not been able to localice any Scott 1994 in scientific press. Until I find the original study, "Scott 1994" who MM and the christian website claims have done a study that shows 40% of women in cohabital relationships have experiences sex they did not like, we will not know whether this is a legit finding, a total fake, a lie, or perhaps a legit finding but taken out of contex in a misrepresenting way, ie it might be true, but married women may not have been included in the study so no comparison can be made.

Be careful what you call propoganda, Elegans. Just because a website is run by Christians doesn't automatically mean that it can't distrubute un-biased information. Most of the sources quoted were secular, anyway. In the same way, just because a website is hosted by atheists and agnostics, doesn't mean that the references cited are meant to propagandize an anti-Christian message. I think distortions in self-report data, placebo effects, social desirability and experimenter biases affect ALL groups of people within the ideological spectrum; no matter how many control processes you want to introduce into the equation, some sort of bias is bound to filter through the net. Christian scientists aren't any more vulnerable to them than non-Christians scientists are, and it would be down right bigoted for anyone to suggest otherwise.

Oh yeah, as much as I'd like to post the complete and/or offical abstract references of each study, I cannot do so. I'm not a scientist or psychiatrist, and thus don't have access to medical journals like you do. I must rely, therefore, on secondary and name-year references to back up my arguments. But please don't assume that, because I don't have access to the original source material, that I harbour propogandistic motives. That has never, ever been my intent.

frogus · Post by **frogus** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 3:54 pm

I believe that sometimes people get married who have no business getting married (they are getting married to hack of their parents, the girl got pregnant, etc.) and that those marriages are doomed to failure. I also believe that divorce is often the first option when couples encounter rough times rather than the last. However, I do not believe that divorce is necessarily harmful or undesirable, and that in many cases staying together "for the sake of the children" is often more harmful than divorce.

I agree...The people who are getting married to hack off parents, because they're pregnant etc are making a bad, but common mistake: Marriage has no meaning other than what you put into it. Like words have no meaning other than your intentions in saying them, 'marriage', on it's own, means nothing. In the case of a loving couple, the marriage's meaning is the sum of their love, and in a couple with no love, the marriage is nothing. The girl who gets pregnant and decides that therefore she has to marry her boyfriend mistakenly thinks that marriage has some value independant of her, and that it will be injected into her relationship when she gets married. Which we all know it will not.

this debate has gone off on so many tangents

new rules against spamming serious threads are being hotly debated at the moment in Sleeps PM box, but I just wanted to see the discussion head back to where it started, hopefully having picked something up along the way.

unfairly dismissive to roll your eyes at one of the few people on this board who are very willing and capable to provide sound research to back up her arguements.

It seems that research can only have answers to the question in this debate if they already exist. I don't think however that one can find the right answer to any 'which is better' question by observing what has happened and is happening, but one has to figure out from first principles what should happen, and any influence from the outside social trends is going to get in the way.

sorry that was meant to be a friendly reply but it seems to look really mean cos I put quotes in it...I guess quoting people always seems a bit arrogant..

anyway sorry CE if my eyerolling shenanigans have caused you any offence...

Nippy · Post by **Nippy** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 4:04 pm

Originally posted by EMINEM

Be careful what you call propoganda...

Propaganda, by definition:

propaganda
noun
ESPECIALLY DISAPPROVING
information, ideas, opinions or images, often only giving one part of an argument, which are broadcast, published or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions

So you are telling me that this website, that publicised Christianity, and tends to promote only the advantages of a Christian viewpoint is not propagandist?

A Historical major should know the difference Eminem...

VoodooDali · Post by **VoodooDali** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 4:14 pm

Originally posted by HighLordDave
So what has changed about marriage? Marriage is easy to get into, and easy to get out of (if terribly expensive). If anything, marriages have become easier to get out of. So why is the divorce rate up? We have new (within the last 30 years) psychologists and sociologists who suggest that dissolving an unhappy or abusive marriage is better than staying together just to avoid becoming a statistic. It is also because women are more empowered today and are not held financial hostages by abusive or adulterous spouses.

@HLD: You expressed something I really wanted to add--the conditions of marriage in the past.
19th c. marriage:
Until 1882, women's property became the property of the husband. If a women worked, her earnings belonged to her husband.
Women were not permitted to make contracts, devise wills, take part in other legal transactions, or control any wages they might earn.
Married women were also forbidden to convey (sell, give, or will) any property.
Men could divorce their wives if the wife was adulterous, however women were not permitted to divorce adulterous husbands. For a woman to obtain a divorce, she had to prove both adultery and cruelty.
Once divorced, custody of children was automatically granted to the man.
If a woman was divorced for adultery, all her property went to her ex-husband.
Many men chose to desert their wives rather than go through the courts for divorce, thus divorce statistics appear a lot lower in past centuries than they actually were, esp. since desertion was not accepted as a reason to grant absolute divorce.
Men had the legal right to physically punish their wives, just as they could physically punish their children.
Women had no say in the upbringing of their children: she had no voice in deciding how they shall be nursed; how or where educated; what trade or profession they shall adopt; in what form of religion they shall be instructed.
Women who chose not to marry had no means of earning a living except being a governess, a job with terrible conditions and a miserable salary. Nursing jobs were equally bad until Florence Nightengale organized and improved the profession in 1860.
One of the few legal advantages of marriage for a woman was that her husband was obligated to support her and be responsible for her debts. It is highly doubtful that these latter provisions outweighed the lack of other rights, particularly in the area women faced the most severe restriction, property rights.
***************************************************
Anyway, in looking for some of these statistics, I came across an extremely relevant article for this discussion--The Marriage Hoax. It's long, so I'll quote on the beginning section then give the link:

The marriage hoax

Conservative moralists, alarmed by the divorce rate, want us to return to a Golden Age of Marriage. Too bad it never existed.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Maria Russo

March 19, 2001 | It must be America's most often cited statistic: Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. For many social commentators, including voices from the right such as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead ("The Divorce Culture") and Gertrude Himmelfarb ("One Nation, Two Cultures"), the lesson in this seems like a no-brainer: Our high divorce rate is a sign of widespread moral decline, evidence that we've become a selfish, consumer-oriented society, one in which even the most hallowed of relationships is disposable.

Last fall, two widely discussed books sounded an urgent call of alarm. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's "The Case for Marriage" and Judith Wallerstein's "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce" both argued that our easy-out approach to marriage is getting out of hand; divorce, they feel, should be granted more rarely. But a new round of books published this year -- Nancy Cott's "Public Vows," Hendrick Hartog's "Man and Wife in America" and Marilyn Yalom's "A History of the Wife" -- tells a different, if less mediagenic, story. These books are histories, not polemics, but together they make a clear and compelling argument: The nation hasn't suffered a massive decline in moral fiber since the 1950s, and marriage isn't really any more fragile now than it was in the days of our grandparents and great-grandparents. The truth is that marriage has always been a shaky, contested, unreliable institution, and we're kidding ourselves that it was ever any other way.
The authors of "The Case for Marriage," a sociologist (Waite) and a nationally syndicated conservative columnist (Gallagher), assert that the current state of marriage represents not a particularly wobbly phase in its long history but a crisis that may herald the death of wedlock itself. We're "on the verge of becoming a postmarriage culture," Waite and Gallagher say, and they predict a grave social crisis if we don't change course. They fear that marriage is becoming "optional -- a private taste rather than a matter of urgent shared concern."

Their main evidence, of course, is that 50 percent divorce rate. They'd like people to stop thinking nothing can be done about it; the divorce boom, they say, presents grave problems of "public health" that must be fixed. To that end, their book reads like an infomercial for marriage. In a cheerleading tone that shifts now and then into one of ominous foreboding, they hail the "overwhelming scientific evidence" they've gathered proving that marriage is "good for you." They argue that current no-fault divorce laws should be changed, that unmarried couples who live together should not be given legal rights or even social approval and that government and media should step in to promote "a positive view of marriage," in the manner of current anti-smoking campaigns.

By saying that marriage is good for us, they mean that getting married will improve an unmarried person's health, both mentally and physically. For example, if you're married, their surveys have found, you "not only have sex more often, but ... enjoy it more, both physically and emotionally," than unmarried cohabiting people do: Forty-two percent of wives and 50 percent of husbands say they find sex physically satisfying, as opposed to 39 percent of cohabiting women and 39 percent of cohabiting men. The same 42 percent of wives but 48 percent of husbands say they find sex emotionally satisfying, as opposed to 39 percent of cohabiting women and 37 percent of cohabiting men.

Besides the head scratching this inspires -- they're saying that less than half of all marriages are sexually satisfying, and they consider that good advertising for marriage? -- there's a more fundamental problem with the authors' reasoning, one that becomes apparent when you read the histories of marriage. You can't approach "married," "divorced" and "cohabiting" people as if these were static categories, akin to eye color or ethnic background. It's like trying to lock a rifle's sights on a moving target. Whether two people are married, living together or divorced at any given moment reflects not just the state of their relationship and their degree of commitment to each other but also their personal responses to the legal and social options available at the time.

Next page | The funny numbers of the anti-divorce camp

The Marriage Hoax

Yshania · Post by **Yshania** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 4:30 pm

Great link Voo!

EMINEM · Post by **EMINEM** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 5:09 pm

Originally posted by Nippy

So you are telling me that this website, that publicised Christianity, and tends to promote only the advantages of a Christian viewpoint is not propagandist?

A Historical major should know the difference Eminem...

The website is run by Christians, but most of the studies cited come from secular research. Now if the statistics of one particular study happens to support a "traditional" Christian teaching (ie. abstinance healthwise is better than any form of sex before marriage), it doesn't mean it's propoganda, even though the findings are posted on a Christian website. If the hypothesis is supported by the statistical data, where the conclusions are posted is completely irrelevant.

BTW, I think Elegans made a gross generalization of ALL the studies cited based on what she believes to be the questionability of one or two. There are over one hundred different studies cited in the website that was used to support the argument that abstinance and sex until marriage is preferable to pre-marital sex and non-marriage relationships, and she hasn't demonstrated or proven their conclusions to be invalid, unfounded, or replete with experimenter bias. But until she does (IF she does), don't be so quick to parrot what she hastily labelled as propoganda just because you happen to share the same views as her on this issue.

Yshania · Post by **Yshania** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 5:16 pm

Originally posted by EMINEM

BTW, I think Elegans made a gross generalization of ALL the studies cited based on what she believes to be the questionability of one or two. There are over one hundred different studies cited in the website that was used to support the argument that abstinance and sex until marriage is preferable to pre-marital sex and non-marriage relationships, and she hasn't demonstrated or proven their conclusions to be invalid, unfounded, or replete with experimenter bias. But until she does (IF she does), don't be so quick to parrot what she hastily labelled as propoganda just because you happen to share the same views as her on this issue.

With all due respect, Eminem, your citations have also been generalistic. That and adoptive of a single site that promotes your opinion. I wonder at your accusing anyone here as guilty of bigotry, when you yourself seem reluctant to accept that your way is not necessarily the only way ....