Marriage Media
Week of January 30, 2011
Courtesy of Bill Coffin
1. Many Singles Looking for Love, But Not Marriage, USA Today
So many singles appear to be enjoying their unencumbered and unmarried state that two-thirds aren’te ven sure they want to marry, suggests a broad national survey of the dating habits, sexual behaviors and lifestyles of 5,541 single adults across the USA. Almost 40% of singles 21 and older surveyed were uncertain about wanting to marry; overall, 34.5% say they do want to marry, but 27% don’t.
2. Here is What Real Commitment to your Marriage Means, Science Codex
“This,” Bradbury said, “is the other kind of commitment: the difference between ‘I like this relationship and I’m committed to it’ and ‘I’m committed to doing what it takes to make this relationship work.’ When you and your partner are struggling a bit, are you going to do what’s difficult when you don’t want to? At 2 a.m., are you going to feed the baby?”
The couples that were willing to make sacrifices within their relationships were more effective in solving their problems, the psychologists found. “It’s a robust finding,” Bradbury said. “The second kind of commitment predicted lower divorce rates and slower rates of deterioration in the relationship.”
3. The Secret to an Enduring Sex Life, Belfast Telegraph
Marshall is also keen to bust the myths about sex which hold couples back: that it has to be spontaneous and that both partners have to be equally turned on at the same time. “That puts people under extreme pressure,” he says. “What’s needed is a bit of give and take and accepting that sometimes one person is in the spotlight, sometimes the other. If you wait until you both feel in the mood you’d probably only have sex once a year, on holiday. That’s not to say you can’t have spontaneous sex, just that you can’t rely on it. The rest of the time you need to plan.”
4. Research and Public Opinion: Monogamy ‘Safer’ Than Polygamy, Coffin Corner
Prof Joseph Henrich said: “Our goal was to understand why monogamous marriage has become standard in most developed nations in recent centuries, when most recorded cultures have practiced polygamy. The emergence of monogamous marriage is also puzzling for some as the very people who most benefit from polygamy – wealthy, powerful men – were best positioned to reject it.
“Our findings suggest that that institutionalised monogamous marriage provides greater net benefits for society at large by reducing social problems that are inherent in polygamous societies.”
5. Values Inequality, Wall Street Journal
So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.
6. Divorce Hurts Health More at Earlier Ages, Michigan State University
Divorce at a younger age hurts people’s health more than divorce later in life, according to a new study by a Michigan State University sociologist. Hui Liu said the findings, which appear in the research journal Social Science & Medicine, suggest older people have more coping skills to deal with the stress of divorce.
“It’s clear to me that we need more social and family support for the younger divorced groups,” said Liu, assistant professor of sociology. “This could include divorce counseling to help people handle the stress, or offering marital therapy or prevention programs to maintain marital satisfaction.”
7. Black Family Breakdown, The Portland State Vanguard
The film “goes all the way back through slavery, coming over to the U.S., what a traditional family looks like and the different barriers that have been in place” for black families, Schwoeffermann said. “He calls it the breakdown of the black family.”
“I think it’s important for social workers to have a historical context about different communities they are engaging with, to inform their work to make it more culturally relevant and inform their practice,” Schwoeffermann said. “The part I was excited about was just having that conversation about families and how families work, and the unique differences between different families in the U.S.”
Similarly for the black community, see VIDEO: Our Music Video for Fatherhood Goes to BET!
For more, see this site.
