I was surprised and intrigued by the title of this post at Psychology Today Why The So-Called “Marriage Gap” Is Good For Your Relationship .  The only “marriage gap”  I was familiar with was this one.

But Douglas LaBier, Ph. D. has some other gap in mind and takes snarky shots at both the National Marriage Project (now headed by Brad Wilcox, Ph.D. at UVA) and the Institute for American Values saying they believe:

…that the best social arrangement is the traditional marriage (heterosexual only, of course) in which the wife is a dutiful subordinate; an unequal partner….

Yes, they believe in marriage, but I dare you to find evidence to support the unequal partner claim.  

He seems to ignore findings (not opinions) about the guys that were the focus of the National Marriage Project’s annual reports in 2002 and 2004  and what doesn’t fit gets ignored in the Institute for American Values’s report Does Divorce Make People Happy?

I do agree with him here though — many couples don’t know how to build a healthy marriage.  So let’s teach ‘em how. That would be good for their relationship even if they, like Pat and I, were married in their early 20s.