So today I'm going to live up to my name and give you some good news.

[jlh]

There's this whole thing going 'round about people trying to post more often. I realize that since sometime in March I've been posting about nothing but television, but hey, this is the public journal and my RL hasn't been that exciting anyway. I read a lot of books, and then I wrote some papers. That's about it. So now that my shows are off for the summer (right, like I'm going to post about So You Think You Can Dance) I was wondering what I should talk about.

And then Newsweek took it back.

You know, that stupid statistic that they put on their cover 20 years ago, that single women over 40 were more likely to be kidnapped by a terrorist than marry? Newsweek put it on the cover and wrote an article that followed a group of single women over 30 in 1986. And then, as famously said by Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, someone wrote practically a whole book about how that was wrong; Faludi said the article had more to do with politics than statistics, and indeed the study was pushed hard by the conservative Reagan administration.

(The original Harvard-Yale demographic study assumed that women would continue to choose husbands who were older, taller, and made more money than they did. So as unmarried women got older and made more money, they were competing for the six or seven single CEO's, basically, putting the odds of marriage for women over 40 at 5%. The study couldn't have predicted the growing status parity within marriage.)

Well, Newsweek tracked down 11 of the 14 women they'd talked to in 1986 and all but two of them have since married. Oh, and get this: None of them divorced. Turns out that the more highly educated and older you are when you marry, the less likely you are to get a divorce. (As my friend S said, you're just skipping that starter marriage.) Unfortunately it also reflects a steep decline in marriage among low income men and women (there was a great article in the New York Times magazine a while back about this trend and how it seemed to reflect both a hyper-idealization of marriage and the separation of marriage from parenthood).

Check the article and the sidebars that go with it. For good reason we tend to focus on the ways in which modern marriage still isn't equal, but this is one of those "look how far we've come" moments and really, we should savor it. Fuel to move us forward!

Comments

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

"Unfortunately it also reflects a steep decline in marriage among low income men and women (there was a great article in the New York Times magazine a while back about this trend and how it seemed to reflect both a hyper-idealization of marriage and the separation of marriage from parenthood)."

Will you explain this bit more?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

First, the Newsweek article—I didn't want to just restate it, but one of the points that they made is that while more educated, higher income women's rate of marriage is increasing, low income marriage rates are decreasing, and the writer commented that marriage is becoming one of those things that only the middle and upper class do.

And that reminded me of an article in the 22 August 2004 NYT Magazine, which you can get for free if you go through the CUNY portal, called "Raising Kevion." It was about a young black father in inner city Milwaukee. I think the article started to be about the increase of young men being involved single dads (because they didn't want to repeat their father's mistakes, it seemed), but one of the trends they were surprised by was how separate this culture thought of having children and getting married, and therefore how idealized marriage was for them. They wanted to find the exactly right circumstances, right person, right everything, be more stable, making money and things, before they got married. But kids they could have any time with anyone; you didn't get married and then have kids.

At the moment this seems to back the whole break up of the family thing, but like the original article I'm sure there is more to it than that. I have no doubt that government services play a role in this; one reason old folks tend not to get married is that they'll get less social security and pension benefits if they do. So if you're juggling welfare and public housing and whatever child support you can get from your baby daddies, I'm not sure why you'd get married anyway.

Also, and this wasn't mentioned directly in the article but is in the chat that the writer later had online, these stats probably don't hold true for black women. The gap between the education of black men and black women is greater, to begin with. I can say just anecdotally that I don't know any well-educated black or mixed women who are married to black men, but that's a severely limited sample.

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

that anon comment was me. I got logged out somehow.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I reckoned! I'll reply here so you get the email.

I think it's unfortunate that the raising of children has become completely seperated from the romantic lives of their parents. On the one hand this might make more rational sense, but on the other hand it makes having children seem really cavalier. It seemed from the Times article that their lives have become completely destabilized, which in turn makes marriage not something that you see all around you in its real life variety but something in a movie. Never good.

I also would rather that the whole "if you have a higher education you're more likely to marry" was from higher marriage rates among the highly educated, and not lower marriage rates among the less educated. But that's my bias.

It never changes, the ways in which the government makes it difficult for the lower classes to actually follow middle class morals if they wanted to, and then punishes them for that. The rhetoric, it goes on and on and on.

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

Legit! Thanks for explaining.

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

one of the trends they were surprised by was how separate this culture thought of having children and getting married, and therefore how idealized marriage was for them.

You know, that's a really interesting point....I'm sure many would add "horrifying" and "depressing" to the list of adjectives, but personally I'm not so sure. On one hand, it can make for a complicated life for single moms with children from multiple fathers...on the other, I wish that more people took marriage that seriously. Like so many people I know, my parents divorced when I was young, and while I suppose I managed myself all right I think my mom never completely recovered from it. She's always cautioned me to take marriage seriously because she wouldn't want me to have to go through the same thing.

*ponder*

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It's serious, definitely, but it's still something that you'd want to do and that you've seen in action. LIke, you know it isn't all sunshine and flowers and roses and meeting someone who is so amazingly perfect and you'll never fight and all of that.

Anyway, it seemed to me less that people were taking marriage with the seriousness that it deserved—they seemed a bit TOO afraid of it IMO—and more that they weren't taking childbearing with the seriousness that IT deserved. Like, you want to be making more money before getting married but not before having 5 kids? What is that about? And again, I think that goes back to what you see around you, that everyone has kids and no one is married so what of it, really.

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

"Newsweek tracked down 11 of the 14 women they'd talked to in 1986 and all but two of them have since married."

BUT HOW MANY OF THEM HAD BEEN KIDNAPPED BY TERRORISTS?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Well, PERHAPS THE MISSING THREE!

Or, like, none of them because I'm sure someone has a list of Americans kidnapped by terrorists. Though, I say that, and it's probably not true because then Homeland Security would have to talk to State and why would they do that?

[eibbil-libbie.livejournal.com]

As my friend S said, you're just skipping that starter marriage.

..this depresses me as that means I've been in my starter marriage for 14 years ;)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

As has S and my other college roommate, who got married about two years after we graduated to her college boyfriend. So you know, you guys are the exceptions that prove the rule!

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

What a fantastic article! Thanks so much for linking to it! It's nice to see something positive and optimistic about marriage in the mainstream media, and the "oops, we goofed" aspect of the article was refreshing. And the quotes they included from the women they interviewed were well-chosen, I think.... *grins* Moving forward, indeed! ^_-

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

What a great article! It makes me feel really good about the way marriage is going--and scared for people I've run into who seem bound and determined to make it the way it used to be, all about the woman submitting to the man for no reason other than they like it that way.

Thanks also for that clarification on the difference in low income people.

[ziggy1278.livejournal.com]

Marriage freaks me out. Big time. There are alot of bodies under that car...

But, again, I say buy this shirt (http://www.glarkware.com/securestore/c188252p16715729.2.html).

Yeah... I edited this for grammar... it was LATE.