"We are so deluded by the mass communications glorifying love and marriage and parenthood that we believe solutions to our problems will be found in the institutions rather than in ourselves."

In the Netherlands, sex is universally held to be a normal, wonderful part of everyday life for people of all ages, and it is accepted that adolescents are going to explore their sexuality, with some becoming fully sexually active at a young age. All forms of contraception are widely and easily available to everyone - especially teens - and sex education begins much earlier than in the U.S. Also, the Dutch have very progressive laws about sex and minors, and seem to have found a balance between protecting children from predators and at the same time, respecting the rights of adolescents to select their own sexual partners.

But are permissive sex ed programs really the reason for the disparity in teen pregnancy rates? A new report by Dutch sociologist Joost van Loon argues that the conventional wisdom is false. In "Deconstructing the Dutch Utopia," van Loon explains that there is no single "Dutch model," that the Dutch programs are not more permissive than British programs, and that sex ed has only a minor influence on actual behavior. The report states:

If we want to understand the gap between British and Dutch teenage pregnancy rates, we need to look at those factors which are known to influence the likelihood of young people becoming sexually active.

Most important among these is family structure.

It is well known that young people from single-parent and non-traditional family structures are more likely to be sexually active. It is in this area that we find a great difference between the two countries. British children are five times more likely to live in a family headed by a lone parent than their Dutch counterparts.

"The idea of kids choosing which mate is best for their single mom just seemed like a fun, natural extension of 'Meet My Folks,"' NBC executive Jeff Gaspin said in a statement Thursday.

NBC to Offer Single Moms Up for Marriage

BURBANK, Calif. (Reuters) - NBC, already hot on the trail for talented kids and senior citizens, is now looking for a few good moms to marry off.

The network on Thursday said it will launch a new reality series, "Who Wants to Marry My Mom?," in a five-episode installment this spring.

The show, NBC said, is a spinoff of its dating show "Meet My Folks," and will feature the adult children of single mothers choosing among several candidates to decide who gets to go with their mom on a fantasy vacation.

"Most of the couples were dating about two years and had reached a stable level of intimacy," she explained. "So basically, positive responses couldn't raise their intimacy any more but negative behaviors could lower it." Previous research also has suggested that couples in established relationships tend to be more affected by negative than positive behaviors, according to Witcher.

Also, for those who sometimes complain about bias at the NY Times (this includes me), it's worth noting that they are they only paper to cover this story (at least so far).

Monash University will offer $15,000 research grants to scientists who agree to return to the laboratory after maternity leave. Under the scheme, "Populate and Publish", new mothers will be entitled to the grant, plus the university's standard 12 weeks' paid maternity leave and up to a year's leave without pay.

Previous reality TV such as Survivor, Dog Eat Dog, The Weakest Link spoke to our collective anxieties about the new workplace culture of "no long term"; surviving despite the continual threat of expulsion, rejection and humiliation in the globalising economy. The latest reality TV deals with another kind of "no long term" - where people fear getting "pink slips" in relationships. Over the past few decades, there has been nothing less than a social revolution in dating and mating. Marriage and other partnerships are being radically delayed. In the prolonged adolescence that results, men and women face a new laissez-faire sexual economy - a free market of bodies - in which only the fittest will survive. Here, too, the fascination on TV is with rejection, expulsion, and humiliation.

"Dating just seems really stagnant now, instead of marriage seeming stagnant," said Rick Marin, author of Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor, who�s marrying lifestyle consultant Ilene Rosensweig. "If you�re getting married, then it means you found true love," said Ms. Rosenswieg, "and that�s a new status thing."

The monthlong "Romancing Singapore" campaign, run by government agencies and private businesses, is timed to coincide with Valentine's Day celebrations. It features dances, concerts, drive-in movies and other activities aimed at putting people "in the right mood for love."

The government, well known for its efforts at social engineering, has been playing matchmaker since 1984, when growing numbers of single professionals and increasingly smaller families prompted the establishment of a dating agency called the Social Development Unit.
...
Singles who prefer conventional face-to-face dates can turn to an eight-page dating guide, "When Boy Meets Girl! The Chemistry Guide," produced by the government last year.

"Smiling is a great way to break the ice, but don't grin like a Cheshire cat the whole time," it says. "A date is very similar to a job interview. You have to sell yourself. People are drawn to good listeners. But don't just sit there passively; engage whomever you are with."

"We have this idea that conflict stops at divorce. What we are finding is it doesn't." Researchers have analysed the attitudes of children to their divorced parents and the effects of the divorce on the children's psyches. They interviewed more than 500 children from more than 300 families, divorced and intact.They found that even though the marriage may have ended, the disharmony continued.

Where I come from, there is something called culture: respect, old traditions (you may call it primitive), and most of all self-preservation. I move here to Minnesota, USA, and find a terrible culture shock. People here are very fat, very materialistic and shallow. The weather is terribly cold. No culture (please don't call media hip-hop or Hollywood a culture), too many sins like freedom of sex, and other unmentionables.

� I have successfully dumped five dates in the last three-month period. I dumped them because of an annoying three-letter word that seems to be an obstacle in my dating life. SEX! All these men demanded sex from me when we barely began to know each other. I am not that kind of girl. I can't randomly oblige a bull in heat just because his hormones are biologically in disposition. I understand if American women find that agreeable, but not me. Where I come from, there is a long-lasting courting period, a kiss on the cheek, then there is the soft kiss on the lips rendered after five months of anticipation, then there is the mutual discussion on when to actually do the deed.

I want the date to mean something grander than just some spontaneous act of violent mating. �

You must understand that America is sick about people from Africa, especially women from Africa. Early in our national history, whites here actually thought that people from Africa weren't human. I tell you, my dear, we are sick, sick, sick, and just beginning these days to climb out of our madness. It was not so very long ago that our courts decided that people from Africa are indeed human.

"To test the theory, Gunturkun secretly observed 124 kisses of couples in international airports in the United States, Germany and Turkey. He found a ratio of about 2-1 turned their heads to the right. Gunturkun said the results of the study, which were reported in the science journal Nature, indicate adults have a head-turning bias toward the right side, just like embryos and newborns. "The preference to turn the head to their right � prevails through their whole life, so it could be the key agent to induce all other asymmetries our brain has," he said."

[She writes] I have a great job in a creative field with wonderful colleagues and more freedom and flexibility than most corporate jobs offer. But I'm just doing it for the money now, and I realize I'd rather be a housewife and full-time mother and do the things I pay a very nice preschool to do. The problem is that, as a single mother, I have only so much control over the future. If I don't get married to someone who can help with support, I will have to go on working full time, being solely responsible for our financial well-being. (Joey's dad is a musician and contributes to a college savings fund.)

I feel guilty that I didn't order my life differently -- I was always discouraged from marrying or even really getting very involved with boys and men. My mother stressed independence, which is good -- I'm glad I can care for myself and my child -- but I'm about to turn 41 and am very anxious and sad to think of having no more children.

I can share some general knowledge about day care, quality time, divorce and single parenting. Remember all of this is filtered through my biases and the biases of the society. For instance, I am not neutral about parents staying together or breaking up. I think, if at all possible -- except in cases involving physical abuse, extreme emotional abuse or substance abuse -- parents should stay together for the sake of the children. All children prefer that their parents remain together if possible. (emphasis added)

One thing a lot of the �we need to return to the old culture of dating� types miss is that there really is no going back, for several reasons:

1. It is very difficult for young men and women who don�t believe in premarital sex to find potential dates who feel the same way.

2. In a college setting, the best place to meet people who share similar beliefs is through church.

3. College churches tend to encourage close friendship, rather than �casual dating.�

However, this is not a bad thing, for all the �hanging out and hooking up� crowd may complain. If you �hang out� unromantically with people, you get to know them as human beings rather than objects. When dating finally does happen, it may move quickly into the �going steady� stage, but only because you�ve already gotten to know the person well through years of preceding friendship. And, IMHO, close friendships teach a skill set more applicable to married life than dating does.

(Of course, this whole theory is based on my experiences, and those of friends who also married in their early 20�s or who are about to marry � Of course, if someone had interviewed us mid-college, we too would have bemoaned the lack of a �dating � culture � it�s only in hindsight that we�ve realized how little a �dating� culture would have improved our chances at marriage. However, I think an interesting side note to all the current studies out there would be to figure out how the people who DO get married managed to find their spouses.)

Q: You've been married a few times. Do you want to marry again?

A: I don't plan on it. I'm definitely gun-shy. I won't ever say never, but I read somewhere in one of the celebrity magazines - instead of saying congratulations to so and so, it said married for the fourth time. And I went, 'Oh geez.' Automatically everybody thinks you're such a tramp and a loser. I'll have to work through that. That's what counselors are for.

Many other students find emotional, social and financial advantages to tying the knot while still in college.

"They want to be more anchored," said sociology professor Laurie Wermuth.

Students get married because of the quality of the relationship, Wermuth said. They experience an intense closeness, emotionally and sexually. She said they take the leap because there is more support in a marriage "especially amidst the culture of the singles' life."

Government policy must help women combine work and family if the fertility rate is to rise, a prominent British social scientist will tell a conference today. Catherine Hakim, whose views have influenced Prime Minister John Howard, is expected to argue that most family policies are too heavily slanted towards working women at the expense of homemakers. But the women who benefit from most from these policies, such as paid maternity leave and subsidised childcare, are those with the lowest fertility. "Governments that are serious about raising fertility rates . . . should focus instead on policies to support home-centred women who have the highest fertility rates and can most easily be persuaded to increase their family size," she argues in her paper. "In practice the focus of social and family policy has swung so far towards the working mother that there is now a systematic policy bias against non-working mothers in most modern societies."

Once a divorced welfare mom, now married to a man with oil money, Sayles hit the big time on the seminar circuit, preaching the gospel of snagging seven-figure spouses. With the money she earned, she even established The Ginie Sayles Scholarship for Single Parents. Sayles' motto: "The Rich will marry someone. Why not you?"

Therapist Audrey B. Chapman...said several of her clients have turned to adoption because they doubt they'll get married.

In the Washington area, African American women tend to be better educated and more affluent than men in their age range, making it difficult to find a mate, she said. According to the 2000 Census, 25 percent more black women than men in the District and Prince George's, Montgomery and Fairfax counties had postsecondary and graduate degrees. Nationally, the gap is closer to 30 percent, census numbers show.

At the same time, black women ages 30 to 49 outnumbered black men in the Washington area by more than 35,000, the census found.
...
Harris is trying to figure out how to explain to Danielle why she doesn't have a father. She recently contacted her adoption agency to ask for advice.

"Danielle's little cousins and friends are already asking where her father is," Harris said. "As a single mother, I knew that [question] would come, but I didn't think it would come this quickly."

But at least there was a pattern there, and everyone knew what it was. It is the chaotic situation today, where intimacy is tied to no stage and can disappear as quickly as it strikes, that is responsible for this uninformed nostalgia. The reformers who tore down the rules of dating wanted outlets that would allow for the development of friendships, which might or might not proceed to courtship. They wanted both sexes to be able to orchestrate occasions from which a romance could develop, not to eliminate invitations and hosting. The idea was to add a stage for the growth of romance, not to do away with courtship.
So if there are any reformers thinking about improving the current social patterns, Miss Manners hopes they will figure out how to combine the orderliness of the past with the easiness and egalitarianism that is supposed to characterize the present.

"The child's parents -- whom she has always perceived as one whole unit of strength, her armor against all the dangers of the outside world -- are no longer together. The armor has cracked. This is frightening for her. In the best of situations, both parents will assure her that she still is loved by each of them. In time, she will become convinced that she is still protected by them, but she will continue to feel the repercussions of that cracked armor. She still will harbor some fears about her parents specifically (Could they stop loving me, too? Could they move away?), and the world in general (What else could happen to hurt me? Who else can't I trust?)."

"Nobody figures it will happen to them," says William Doherty, another highly acclaimed therapist in the field. Having come across his latest book, "Take Back Your Marriage: Sticking Together in a World That Pulls Us Apart," I call him as well. Doherty, director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota, tries to disarm the feeling of isolation that usually accompanies couples who have drifted into the grind of managing the household and neglecting their marriage. "It's the common cold of marriage, and people should actually be surprised if it doesn't happen to them," he says. There's usually a bit of a honeymoon in the relationship after a newborn arrives, according to Doherty, but as the responsibilities stack up and leisure time dissipates it's only natural to begin feeling less connected to your spouse on a daily basis. "When you're falling in love, you go on dates," he says. "Once you have kids it's not as easy to put time aside for each other, but you have to."

Teenagers today believe that marriage is the best relationship in which to bring up children and nearly six out of 10 expect to one day exchange rings.

The research revealed that the number one reason they expected to marry was to have children.

These results suggest teenagers - many of whom will have experienced divorce - are more conservative than their parents and older siblings.

According to the National Centre for Social research, only 27% of people admit to thinking married couples make better parents than unmarried ones. However, only 9% of 18 to 24-year-olds dismissed marriage as "just a piece of paper".

In America, people usually find love and marriage in the traditional way. You meet, fall in love and tie the knot. But the failure rate is pretty high. What if there's a better way?