In the constantly changing digital age, the FamilyScholars blog has had a relatively long life. Launched in 2003, it hosted a lively discourse until a brief hiatus in 2008, then re-launched in 2010 and has been active ever since. Over the years, dozens of FamilyScholars bloggers have written powerful posts, engaged one another’s ideas, and made friendships or found worthy debating partners in the comments section—in fact, more than a few of our bloggers originally began as commenters at the site. As editor since 2010, I personally have enormously appreciated the variety and depth of relationships I have formed because of this blog.

So it is with some sadness, but also with bright confidence about new possibilities, that I share with you today that the FamilyScholars blog will again go on hiatus. We simply don’t have the staff right now to maintain the blog and the comments section at a high level of excellence. And, more importantly, we want to broaden our outreach on the full range of civil society topics that the Institute engages in the U.S. and the world. (See www.americanvalues.org to learn a lot more.) The new publication, with a new editor, will launch soon. Please do sign up to be alerted about it and share the news with others.

For now, I want to offer gratitude: To all of our FamilyScholars bloggers for the extraordinary, volunteer contributions they have made over the years; to our wonderful Institute for American Values staff who have made this blog technically possible; and, most especially, to our readers who engaged our ideas, kept us sharp, and shared our posts with their friends around the world.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Marquardt

Feeling Betrayed:

Before she died when I was ten, I worshipped my mother. She was a beautiful, straightforward, loving human being and I was proud to be her blood and flesh, her real daughter. But growing up, I always felt something was wrong. I didn’t look like her, I looked Caucasian, too white and freckle to be completely Japanese. Even after she left, I took solace in knowing that I was hers, that someday I might look more like her, that I would attract the attention of many men like she did. She was mine and I was hers in both flesh and heart and I was immensely proud and happy to know that. It was my beacon of light throughout the lonely years of my childhood. I was the luckiest kid in the world to have such a beautiful mom. When I was fourteen though, my father told me that she had loved me very much and to never forget that she was my real mother who bore me, but genetically my REAL mother was an anonymous Korean/German woman. I pretended like it was no big deal, like all it was was explaining my strange eyes and my brown blonde hair. I was so heartbroken. The person I believed to be my own was in fact, not. This distanced me even more from my memories of her and I was so distraught and angry when no one was looking. I wish they hadn’t told me. I really wish they hadn’t. Thinking past that, I do want to meet my biological mother, but I feel like if I expressed these feelings to my father, he wouldn’t understand and tell me that it wasn’t important. But I WANT to know. There are so many questions within me.Do I have siblings? The sister I’d always hoped for? Did they look like me? What did my mother look like? Would she like me? Did she want to know me? Is she alive? I’d like to meet her someday. And if not, I’d like to at least know who she is. A name perhaps.

Single Mother in St.Louis, MO:

I am a birth mother to a beauitful baby girl who is now 5 yrs old. I have always wanted to be a mother and age was against me and the fact that I had never met a Mr.Right . I love my child with all my being and only want to give her the best of everything just as all parents do. When I had the bio clock ticking I asked an ex who I had remained really close to for many years and have known him since I was 15 to help me. He was not into it for a long time it took me the better part of 2 yrs to convince him . When I did he went along with it and charged me for his “DONATION”. At this point in my life I saw what a great father he was to his other 2 kids and I thought he would be the same with this baby. Boy oh boy was I wrong. He is from an all Italian family and he claims they would not accept how she came to be. What a cop out. At any rate I was adjusting to being a only parent to my daughter till she has been asking alot of questions and I dont know how to proceed. My child is very intelligent and will ask me where her daddy is and why he doesnt love her. I tell her he does love her and that he lives very far away and that mommy and daddy just dont get along. The sad thing is he lives a hour from us and he sees his son who is out of state more than he has ever seen his daughter. I want to protect my child and not hurt her in any way so I dont know how to answer her questions she only just turned 5. How do I proceed I want her to know how much I wanted her and would not change a thing. Another thing that bothers me is that we were trying to conceive naturally and it did not happen we had to use a fertility Dr. How can he just walk away and how do I proceed with my child moving forward. Please help if any ideas.

“Your life must be so depressing,” she would suggest, before mentioning all of the pretty things at Banana Republic that a young married mom simply couldn’t afford (or have occasion to wear). Which did at times make my friend, who considered herself to be relatively happy, wonder if she should be depressed.

However, at another time, this same study buddy told my friend, “You are the only person I know who is not on mood enhancing drugs [by which she meant medication for depression].”

In the “Knot Yet” report, one trend emerges most clearly: young adults are delaying marriage, even as many of them are not delaying children.  Indeed, “The Great Crossover,” as the report terms it, is that “for women as a whole, the median age at first birth (25.7) now falls before the median age at first marriage (26.5).”

As a researcher in small-town, working-class Ohio, this is the world I’m in. Many of my new friends and acquaintances are unmarried with children. Take for instance, Stephanie, who my husband and I wrote about here.

But it’s not the world I came from. Like my friend above, many of my friends from high school and college are engaged or married. And many of the married ones are pregnant or have children. And most of them, like me, are around the age of 25. (My husband and I married right out of college at 22 and 21 and we went to a lot of similarly aged friends’ weddings that summer and the following summers. This summer my 22-year-old brother is marrying his high school sweetheart.)

My husband and I certainly didn’t feel pressure to marry. In fact, my dad had reservations, and living in New York City made us feel a bit crazy for marrying so young. And I don’t think that my friends felt pressure to marry either. Thankfully, there is the recognition today that the single life can be deeply meaningful, too.

So why did we?

I think a big part of the answer lies in the fact that most of my friends are part of a strong faith community, which gave us support, confidence, strong social trust, and good marriage models, something which I blogged about here and here. I know that for my husband and me, having a loving community that supports us makes a huge difference in our marriage. We’ve noticed that we have a lot more arguments now that we’ve moved to Ohio and face the task of having to make new friendships and join a new community. When you feel isolated, it is a lot harder to be happy with yourself or your spouse.

So while it’s certainly not my intention to say that everyone should marry young, it’s my anecdotal experience that devout young Evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons make up “counter-communities” that are not really following the larger marriage and family trends.

In my early twenties, I went to more lingerie and bridal and then baby showers than I did night clubs. My alma mater is The King’s College, a small nondenominational Christian college, which was then located in the Empire State Building. The students there are young, smart, hip New York transplants—and yet it’s not uncommon for those who fall in love during college to marry shortly after. (You can see some really beautiful engagement and wedding videos from some 20-something TKC alum, filmed by the uber creative “Finding Muchness films” here.)

Some well intentioned skeptics might ask, “But aren’t couples who get married young at risk of divorce? How will they find themselves and true happiness?

Actually, the facts suggest that my friends stand a much better shot at lifelong love and marital happiness than many people think. Consider the following findings reported in the “Knot Yet” report.

• According to sociologists Norval Glenn and Jeremy Uecker, who examined five data sets, “the greatest indicated likelihood of being in an intact marriage of the highest quality is among those who married at ages 22-25.”
• The “Knot Yet” report finds that among couples who married at 30 or above, only 8 percent divorced within the first ten years of marriage—but a whopping 50 percent of women were “not very happy” in their marriage.
• By contrast, among couples who married between 24-26, only 14 percent divorced, and only 20 percent of women said they were “not very happy” in their marriage.
• Furthermore, couples who got married between 20-23 were more likely to get divorced than couples who got married at 30 or older (34 percent vs. 8 percent), but they were just about as likely to report that they were in a “very happy” marriage (46 percent vs. 42 percent).
• Finally, compared to their unmarried peers, married persons ages 20-28 report higher levels of satisfaction with life, less depression, and less drunkenness.

Furthermore, many of my peers who married young also waited to have children until they married and are deeply religious, both of which greatly lower their chances of divorce, according to the 2012 State of Our Unions report (see the section “Your Chances of Divorce May Be Much Lower than You Think”).

And a 2010 study of 2,035 married couples by Brigham Young University researchers found that people who wait until marriage to have sex—as is the case for many of my friends—reported the happiest sex lives, the best relationship communication, the most relationship satisfaction, and the most relationship stability. These findings were true even when controlling for things like religiosity, education, length of marriage, and number of sexual partners.

The upshot is that it’s time to retire as a general rule that the longer you wait for marriage, the better your chances at a happy marriage. For many couples—particularly young couples with strong social support—the rule is simply arbitrary.

Cross posted at KnotYet.org. 

1. The Affluent Are Fine; Focus on the Poor, The New York Times: Room for Debate

Yet, many of our transfer policies — like housing assistance and food stamps — unintentionally penalize marriage among lower-income couples.

2. The Impact of Divorce, “Maybe I Do”: Modern Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness – Kevin Andrews

In 1990, Jane Mauldon of the University of California at Berkeley found that children of divorce run a 35 percent risk of developing health problems, compared with a 26 percent risk among all children.

3. An Economy That’s Tearing Our Society Apart, The Washington Post

It’s hard to overstate the breakdown of marriage and the rise of single-parent families. Consider out-of-wedlock births. In 1980, about 18 percent of births were to unmarried women; by 2009, the proportion was 41 percent.

4. More Young Couples Commit – To Homeownership Before Marriage, Time: Business & Money

Nearly one-quarter (24%) of polled married couples ages 18 to 34 said that they purchased a home before they were married.

5. Seven Things You Don’t Know About Interfaith Marriage, Fox News

A quarter of couples in same-faith marriages actually started off in different faith ones. This suggests not only that religion in America is remarkably fluid, but also that spouses can have a powerful influence over one’s spiritual choices.

6. Voting for National Fatherhood Initiative’s 2013 Military Fatherhood Award™ Opens on Facebook, PRWeb 

National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) has selected the four finalists for the 2013 Military Fatherhood Award™, and now it is up to the public to choose the awardee on NFI’s Facebook page.

7. I’m So in Love — Or Am I? 10 Experiences That Signal You Are in Love, Huffington Post

• 1. You are operating as a loving adult, not as your ego-wounded self.
• 6. You are committed to working through conflict in loving ways.
• 9. You don’t expect to be on cloud nine all the time.

For more, see here.

He looked at the forlorn little thing in the corner of the parking lot and muttered, “Engine’s not working so she’s only good for parts. She’s worth about $250.”

“Okay,” Stephanie said.

He pulled a large wad of bills out of his back pocket and handed her two wrinkled hundreds and a fifty.

“That can’t be safe! Must have been at least $3000 in his pocket!” Stephanie commented after he was gone.

And then we were off for the afternoon to car shop. Her car budget is no more than $2000 out the door.

Stephanie has some help in the search. Her old friend, Toby, who is a mechanic, tentatively offered to spend his lunch break tomorrow checking out some cars for Stephanie (as long as his girlfriend doesn’t get too mad about him talking to her, that is).

And Stephanie’s dad texted to say that he’d keep his eyes open for something. “Just don’t go buy the first POS you see,” he cautioned.

“He wants me to buy a new car,” Stephanie told me. When she called him to ask if he knew of anything for sale, he said that she should just buy new and pay car payments.

“But I can’t afford the interest, Dad!” she said, exasperated.

“Try Craigslist,” he suggested.

Though Craigslist is cheaper than a dealer, that’s how Stephanie got ripped off on her last car, and so we thought it might be worth it to check with Jim, a Toyota salesman that my dad used to work with and that my family has used for the past fifteen plus years and trusts very much. (Fun fact: his wife also took my wedding photos.) We explained the situation, and Joe was eager to help, although he was at first unsure if there would be anything for $2000 that he would deem reliable enough to sell to Stephanie. He kept stressing that he doesn’t want her to end up at the same place that she has ended up so many times before—out a couple grand with a car that breaks down after mere months of use. But he understands the limited resources and said he’d do his best to find something.

Turns out, given his years in the business and his personal relationship to my family, he can pull strings to do things like knock a 1999 Toyota Camry sticker price of $3974 down to around $2500 out the door.

This is practically miraculous given our other experiences of the day.

When we had gone to the Honda dealership next door and told them the price range Stephanie was looking for, the guy looked us over and then without even looking it up, said, “No. Our cheapest car is around $4000—probably more like $4500 with fees and tax.”

The salesman at the Kia dealership down the road had us test drive a 1995 Buick Regal whose engine gasped and chugged like a train. Its sticker price was almost $3000, and so he suggested that Stephanie find a co-signer or that she take advantage of some alternate financing. He assured her that despite her bad credit she could probably get approved for a special kind of loan (the acronym of which is escaping me now), although he cautioned that the interest rate on that loan could be as high as 24 percent.

The whole experience amazed me. I didn’t realize how knowing Jim, my family’s long-term car salesman, could make such a big difference when car shopping. (Social capital, anyone?)

Stephanie is still looking for something that will work for her. Jim is keeping his eyes peeled for something good, and in the meantime, he’s offered to look at anything she finds through a private seller and give her his opinion, in case she needs to use that option instead of his dealership.

Wish her luck!

I drove to meet her, jumper cables and toolkit in tow. When I pulled in, the rain fell even grayer, even harder. Stephanie was practically sitting in the hood of her car, tinkering around, pulling off hoses, checking for strange sounds.

“I keep mooning everyone!” she exclaimed, pulling up her jeans, which had lost the button but were the only clean ones she could find this morning. “Just to warn you, I’m going to start cussing here in a couple minutes. I hate cars. I seriously want to go to school for mechanics so I know how to fix them. Mine always break down on me.”

Stephanie has been through many cars in her 25 years of life. She never has enough money to get a reliable one, and her credit is shot from unpaid credit card bills and about $10,000 of defaulted student loans. So when she goes to buy a new car, she goes to a “Buy Here, Pay Here” lot, with interest rates sometimes reaching up to 30 percent.

She bought the ’96 Ford Contour that now sat, very wet and very broken down, two months ago with $1400 of her income tax return.  It’s not uncommon for her cars to break down after a couple months of owning them.  Last time it happened was when she was eight months pregnant and the single mother of a four year old. She bought a van, which broke down less than two months later. She took it back to the dealer, who made the remark, “I’m surprised it lasted you that long!” When they sold her the car, they gave no indication that the vehicle was on its last legs. And ever short on cash, she didn’t spend the money to have an outside mechanic check it out.

“Why can’t I ever catch a break?” Stephanie sighed, her black zip up sweatshirt now wet and clingy, its hood hiding most of her short bleach blonde hair.

I stood there, largely unhelpful. I’d hand her a tool when she asked for it, wipe down the battery with a white rag, retrieve a flashlight, turn the ignition to see if anything had changed. But nothing did. Not even after we tried jumping the car.

“I tried calling my Dad,” Stephanie said. “He basically told me that I’m shit out of luck. I don’t talk to my dad.” Her dad owns a gas station not too far away, but she never sees him.

I thought about my dad—who had given me the tools and the jumper cables and the flashlight, along with a million other useful things, all packed with care into a red duffel bag, a kind of home-made emergency preparedness car kit.  If there is one thing I’ve learned from my dad, which he learned from his youth in Boy Scouts, it’s to be prepared. My brother and sister and I all kind of tease him about it, but in times like these, I’m thankful for his foresight.

“I really need your dad to make me one of those kits,” Stephanie said.

We stood for about an hour in the cold rain, until we were soaked through and our fingers were going numb. Cement trucks kept pulling in and out of the parking lot, but no one stopped to help. Cars flew by on the road, no one even slowed down.

“I know I look like a dude right now, but come on people! I bet if I were wearing a short skirt and heels someone would stop,” she joked seriously.

We decided that fixing the car ourselves was a lost cause. We found shelter for a moment inside the smoky cab of the ’96 Contour and decided what to do next. I suggested getting it towed, but Stephanie was resistant to that idea. “I’ve got $100 left in my bank account, and that is supposed to be for gas to get to work, and groceries,” she said. “Oh, and I have to write an $8 check for Colton’s field trip on Friday.

“Do you want me to go pick up Seth and David?” I asked, at a loss as to what to do.

“Nah. They’ve got the kids,” Stephanie said. My husband David was home working (while our eighteen month old watched Elmo—a special diversion reserved for times like these), and Seth is Stephanie’s boyfriend who is stay-at-home dad while Stephanie is at work.

Instead of getting the guys, our plan was to roll Stephanie’s car from the side of the road into the parking lot of the cement plant, and then to find a mechanic who would look at it.

“Go ahead and pull your car into the parking lot so it’s out of the way,” Stephanie directed.

After I parked and was walking back, I saw Stephanie pushing her car…by herself. It was in neutral and she was walking beside it, the driver’s door was open, her right hand reaching inside to steer, her left arm braced the windshield and she leaned her whole body into the frame to help her push the car. I got behind it and started pushing, but when we got to a slight hill, we had to stop.

“Stephanie sat in the driver’s seat, panting. “I’m so out of breath!” she said between gasps.

After getting help from four burly cement truck driver’s we got the car up the hill and into the parking lot.  I drove Stephanie to work, better late than never, and paid for a tow truck to take the car to the mechanic my parents’ have used for the past twenty-some years. Stephanie found out a couple hours later that the car is now junk. She’ll probably get a couple hundred bucks for it.

When she told me, she had almost-tears in her eyes. Just almost. She’s strong. She’s got to be.

For those of us who have social capital, it’s easy to miss how hard life can really be when you don’t have it. Stephanie’s dad is out of the picture. Her mom and stepdad help sometimes, but are struggling financially themselves and get annoyed by Stephanie’s requests. Her sister, who is also a single mom, had her car break down this week, too. (Stephanie was supposed to be her new ride.) She stopped hanging out with most of her friends when they got too involved with drugs and the like. She’s mentioned to me before that she’s not sure who she would call if she didn’t have me when she is broken down on the side of the road.

For as much as individual willpower matters (and it does), there is so much to be said for social support, for neighborliness, for a stronger civil society.

Andy and I discuss the Does the Shape of Families Shape Faith? project, his theological work in general, Bonhoeffer’s laundry letters and even Back to the Future.  It’s a an adventure in philosophy, faith and pop culture.  Enjoy!

Part memoir, part ethnography, part journalistic endeavor, Does Jesus…? is more impressionistic than it is polemical or scholarly. Chu offers a series of portraits, featuring both people (pastors, congregants, ex-Christians, agnostics) and institutions (from the Metropolitan Community Church, overwhelmingly queer in membership, to the Westboro Baptist Church). Across sections titled “Doubting,” “Struggling,” “Reconciling,” and “Hoping,” Chu offers us a tour around America and the religious and sexual-identity spectrum  as well, introducing us to individuals and congregations wrestling with the relationship between faith and queer sexuality.

Chu himself has settled into a life of being gay and Christian, he nevertheless draws empathic (if at times slightly baffled) portraits of LGBT individuals who have forged other paths: queer folks who have been driven from the church or simply drifted away, a gay man who has chosen to remain celibate, a straight woman and gay man in a “mixed orientation” marriage. While he features a few high-profile individuals (Ted Haggard, Fred Phelps, Mary Glasspool), more of the voices in Does Jesus…? are unknowns: the Bible teacher fired from his job for a same-sex affair, the closeted young adult wrestling with if, when, and how to come out to his parents and community, the Christian musician who describes with charming self-deprecation her first gig at a lesbian bar.

I found myself thinking, as I read, a very librarian question: to whom might I recommend this book? One of the pastors Chu interviews offers the following observation: she sees anti-gay Christians and affirming/welcoming Christians trying to have two very different conversations in their discussions around homosexuality. The anti-gay contingent, she maintains, is focused on scriptural authority. The affirming group is focused on stories — on personal testimony. If this is true (though I’m not ready to buy the theory wholesale), then Chu’s book will not have much success in convincing those who believe Christianity demands abstaining from same-sex sexual activity. It is not a work of exegesis, of Biblical interpretation. It is not making a theological argument. Rather, Does Jesus…? is offering us a chance to reconsider our simplistic notions of what “Christian” and “gay,” and the assumption that there is but one type of relationship between the two: a repressive or alienated one.

This is an approach that I think might resonate more strongly with the “personal testimony” contingent. With LGBT folks who are, themselves, wondering, “Does Jesus really love me?” Or with queer activists asking how to engage American believers in the LGBT push for equality and acceptance. Or with unchurched/secular-identified queer folks and allies who see the church as bolstering anti-gay sentiment and are baffled why queer Christians seek to remain in the fold.

For example, as a queer woman who grew up in a conservative Christian community (in a region settled by the Reformed Church in America, Chu’s present denomination!) and attended a college with deep RCA roots, one of the chapters which spoke most directly to my own experience was the chapter about Harding University.  Or, more specifically, Harding University’s student-published Queer Press zine, created and distributed by queer students and alumni primarily to reach out to other (largely closeted) students on the conservative Christian campus. Not only did the creators face a backlash from the administration, they also discovered that their sectarian struggle didn’t always translate very well before a secular audience:

[Secular] bloggers would praise the zine but add, “Why would you go to a school that doesn’t accept you for who you are?” or “Why not just leave?” These questions reflect a different type of thoughtlessness. For one thing, Harding students are just like millions of others who depend financially on Mom and Dad [to attend college]. Then there’s the fact that, again like millions of others everywhere, these students are in a season of fragility and flux. They’re still wrestling with their identities, their faith, and their homosexuality, which may not even be acknowledge before college. As one puts it to me, “It’s not like someone woke up one morning and said, I’m gay but I’m to go there and make my life suck.”

When queer students and allies at my alma mater were making a concerted effort to get the Board of Trustees to revisit their official anti-gay stance, some high-profile queer-friendly blogs got wind of the struggle and there was a lot of puzzlement over why these students had enrolled in, or remained at, such a hostile institution. Setting aside the reality that secular institutions are not always bastions of acceptance themselves, it seems important for non-Christian LGBT activists and allies to remember that “Christian” is often as deeply-held an identity as “lesbian,” “bi,” or “gay.” To ask a queer person raised Christian why they don’t just quit their faith is profoundly lacking in compassion or understanding for the complexity of the human soul.*

Overall, I highly recommend Does Jesus..? to anyone interested in reflecting on the human face of the culture war (for lack of a better term) over sexual diversity in American Christianity. It might also, given its episodic nature, make for really good Sunday School or Church reading group material.

Related: For those unable to put their hands on a copy of the book, Chu was a guest on the Diane Rehm Show back in March, and it was an excellent conversation. You can listen to the audio or read a full transcript of the interview (your support for NPR at work!) courtesy of WAMU.

*On a side note, I know many feminists who’ve encountered similar disbelief that they choose to reconcile their religiosity and their feminism — often, in fact, grounding their feminist values in their faith. It’s fascinating to me that so many people on both sides (the religious side or the queer/feminist side) view these aspects of self as oil-and-water opposites.

And, “The harshest condemnation is reserved for those who marry because of pregnancy. Such marriages, they believe, are almost certain to end in divorce, and thus benefit neither the couple nor the child.”

My wife, Amber, and I are finding the same thing in our research with white, high-school-educated young adults in one small Ohio town. The young adults we interviewed are generally very reluctant to give advice to others about relationships. But on this point they are not shy.

For instance, one mother, Erica, says she felt pressure from her grandma to get married to her high school sweetheart when she got pregnant with her second child, only to separate soon after getting married. She now advises people, “Don’t get married because you have a kid with somebody. I have a new thing: if you have a kid with somebody, don’t just keep trying to make the relationship work out…. Because it’s not healthy for the kid, it’s not healthy for anything.”

After hearing this sentiment repeatedly, Amber and I are beginning to wonder: For an unmarried couple, could the news of pregnancy act as a reason not to get married—even if the couple might be otherwise thinking about marriage?

Even if there is still a social expectation among one’s grandparents and great-aunts that an unmarried couple who gets pregnant should “do the right thing” and get married, might there be a social stigma among young adults—among one’s peers—about getting married because of the kids?

From our interviews, we have reasons to think that this may be true.

For instance, Myron, 23 (whom I wrote about previously at FamilyScholars.org), did get married to his high school sweetheart when he found that she was pregnant. Even though he says he had every intention of breaking off their engagement because of what he describes as her “mean” treatment of him, the news that she was pregnant with his child changed his mind.

“I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna marry her, and it’s my kid. That’s awesome. That’s my kid.’” However, a few months into marriage, she admitted that she was cheating on him, and he filed for divorce.

Looking back, he describes his first journey into marriage as “not the right way to do this.” Instead of marrying her because he loved her, he listened to people like his grandpa, who warned him that “you’ve gotta marry her or she’s gonna get you for child support the rest of your life.”

When I interviewed Myron, he was engaged to Christa, who was pregnant with their child. This time around, Myron was explicit that he was not getting married because they were having a child.

“We don’t wanna rush into anything,” he says. “I don’t want Christa to feel like we’re getting married because we’re having a baby.”

He then took pains to note that although he proposed after they found out they were having a baby, “I had already picked out the ring, had already taken her ring shopping. I already planned on getting married.” In fact, he says that his plan was to wait until after the baby was born to propose. But eventually, “I couldn’t hold it no longer.”

But, he is careful to say, “I want to be married to her, but I want her to have her wedding. I want her to have what she wants on her terms, not because of anything else.”

As the “Knot Yet” report points out, “Marriage has shifted from being the cornerstone to the capstone of adult life.” And the capstone model does not think about marriage and children as a package deal. Marriage is primarily about love between two adults. To the extent that it is about children, it’s the “glue” (as one working class woman whom we interviewed described it) that brings all the children from different parents together into one family.

This shift in the meaning of marriage may help to explain why some young adults are putting off marriage even as they are starting a family—traditionally one of the reasons to get married. If there are more stories like that of Myron, it would mean that some young adults may be delaying marriage—at least for a time—precisely because they want to avoid the appearance of getting married “just because” they are having a child.

Of course, the first time Myron got married, he did not delay marriage precisely because he was having a child. And just as his first failed marriage was a morality tale for him about how not to do things, now that we have had at least a couple generations of “shotgun-wedding-then-quick-divorce,” I wonder if we have reached a turning point where young adults coming of age today are adapting to the failed shotgun marriages they have seen and heard about: marriage is not about children; marriage and children are two completely separate things. And the “right” thing to do, they think, is to get married because you love the person—and for that reason only.

Although the dichotomy that many young adults erect in their minds about marriage between children and love is understandable—particularly because of the loveless shotgun marriages they have witnessed—I think it is unfortunate. Because it is true that one of the most important purposes of marriage is to unite a child to his mother and father. However, young adults are not entirely wrong, I think, in their moral intuition that a marriage must come into being for the sake of love. Without love, a marriage is just a prosaic institution, not a personal relationship. And who wants to live in a prosaic institution?

Building a thriving marriage culture that breaks through class lines will mean inviting young adults to appreciate that marriage is both/and: both about love and children. In fact, because marriage is about love, marriage is also about children: as a couple’s love and trust matures, so does their desire to share themselves completely with each other, to the point that they wish to have a mutual share in a new person, and to found a new family.

Now, there’s a good reason to get married!

Cross-posted at KnotYet.org

I tend to shy away from using the word “stigma” for many of the reasons that have arisen in the conversation here—I find that stigma slips into extreme shunning and shaming too easily.  My thoughts on the use of discipline to maximize the attainment of a perfect state began many years ago as I critiqued the ballet profession from which I came in its use of shunning and shaming for the sake of aesthetic perfection.  Public weekly weigh-ins, receiving production notes of critique publicly, and a profession where your body is both your asset and your liability that is hired and invested in, can lead both to thick-skinned individuals with a strong work ethic and to eating disorders, depression, and acid being thrown in your face as we saw earlier this year with the Bolshoi Ballet drama.  I asked and continue to ask, “Is there a better way?”  For art forms or sports that demand a relinquishing of self to the demands of a coach, does shunning and shaming always play a role?

My Mennonite colleagues helped me greatly in asking these questions (we’ve talked about the book Amish Grace and forgiveness here previously) from the perspective of a faith community.  And they helped me see that stigma historically, and I see shaming and shunning as one method we use to enforce stigma, has been important for groups who must maintain group identity when surrounded by groups with conflicting values that could infiltrate, contaminate, or jeopardize the “chosen” community.  So, for ballet, an art form that is passed down orally and visually through masters to students, maintaining the integrity of the exacting vocabulary of the art form becomes necessary.  Is shaming and shunning worth it?  Where do we draw the line?  I continue to ask these questions.  Because “being married” is not a “chosen community” whose character, lifestyle, religious beliefs, etc. need to be preserved, I wrestle with the use of stigma.

Instead of stigma, I think about the term “best practice” as a better concept to consider than stigma as a motivator for human behavior. (I first played with using this term in the conversation with me and Peter Steinfels) I learned of this term in hospice management and it’s of course a commonly used term in business practice as a way of talking about those companies or organizations that maximize return on investment (ROI) with close cost analysis of their assets and liabilities including market environment, people capital, and organization mission and values.  Now, our CFO would often roll his eyes at me when I would wax philosophical about these terms, but we can!  When we talk about the goods of marriage or the goods of well-paying jobs, etc., we are wrestling with ways of saying that individuals, family systems, and society as a whole is trying to define best practice for all—to find ways to maximize our personal and communal investment in people (financial, educational, medicinal, etc.) in ways that takes into consideration their current level of assets (character, mental ability, emotional maturity, drive, etc.) and liabilities (character, mental ability, emotional maturity, drive, etc.), their market environment (location matters!), their life personnel (family, spouse, ex-spouse, boy/girlfriends, friends…), and their general life mission and values.

Now, I realize that I am being my liberal self in thinking that we need to redefine terms, but I do wonder how the concept of best practice relates to how Mead is thinking of stigma’s role in motivating the attainment of a societal good.