Thursday, April 15, 2004
Whoops I blogged again
Apologies. My butt hasn't even left the seat since the Korean Election effort.
Russell Brown has written a very good post today in Public Address (mainly dealing with family life) which you should check out.
Here he makes reference to cohabitation and the opinion of Bruce Logan, director of the Maxim Institute.
Logan also contended that couples who cohabit before marrying have a higher divorce rate than those who do not. This is true. But the difference disappears after eight years of marriage. But does this suggest that cohabitation damages marriage - as Logan contended - or that people who cohabit don't have the same serious commitment to marriage in the first place? This would seem more plausible than the idea that cohabitation has some innate, and fatally corrupting, impact.
Brown makes a good point about the seriousness of couples living together before they get married. As we all know from seeing friends, family...or ourselves, many of them/us live together simply because they/we don't take the concept of marriage as seriously as others do (great use of the '/' there). They have no real plans or cares to get married and eventually when (or IF) they do there is a reasonable chance they will decide, or find out, that they were better off with their prior arrangement..........or as far apart as possible.
If I decide I don't want to ever get married then does that mean I can't ever have sex or live with a member of the opposite sex?! That's kind of like saying that because I don't like socks I can never wear shoes...or that because Christians don't like homosexuals they can never ask for good fashion advice, or a decent haircut from a bloke (that was the one stupid paragraph I allow myself per serious blog......it's my blog so I make the rules!)
Also there are plenty of people who live together for a few years to see how things work out with a view to getting married later, things don't go so well and then the relationship ends with no divorce needed. I know firsthand how that is. Just as well the two of us didn't get married AND THEN move in together as some social conservatives would have us do. Anecdotal or not, they would have seen a little 'divorce mark' in their side of the column. And no, the committment of marriage wouldn't have made a lick of difference to how things worked out. Living with somebody is indisputedly* going to allow you the opportunity to see things that you could never completely know about before the experience.
A successful marriage coming before or after cohabitation comes down to luck of the draw for most folks. It works for some people and it doesn't for others. To be told that one is a fantastic idea and the other is a disaster waiting to happen is such arrogant bollocks it makes the stomach churn. Sure one of the two is probably going to be throwing out better stats than the other but as I said, one works for one set of people and the other works for the other set of people. Good luck finding what works for you, but perhaps you'd at least like the chance to choose rather than be told what to do.
Personally I recommend everybody go to a bar tonight, pick up a stranger (or hooker if you don't have any luck picking up a strange person), take them back to your place, have a good time, ask them to move in with you, have three kids out of wedlock, quit your job, get married and then get divorced, have a messy custody battle and then agree that you can take the kids to the mall every second weekend.
That's living baby!
* I can't find 'indisputedly' in the dictionary either. But I did find 'indisputably'. Perhaps that's what I meant.
Russell Brown has written a very good post today in Public Address (mainly dealing with family life) which you should check out.
Here he makes reference to cohabitation and the opinion of Bruce Logan, director of the Maxim Institute.
Logan also contended that couples who cohabit before marrying have a higher divorce rate than those who do not. This is true. But the difference disappears after eight years of marriage. But does this suggest that cohabitation damages marriage - as Logan contended - or that people who cohabit don't have the same serious commitment to marriage in the first place? This would seem more plausible than the idea that cohabitation has some innate, and fatally corrupting, impact.
Brown makes a good point about the seriousness of couples living together before they get married. As we all know from seeing friends, family...or ourselves, many of them/us live together simply because they/we don't take the concept of marriage as seriously as others do (great use of the '/' there). They have no real plans or cares to get married and eventually when (or IF) they do there is a reasonable chance they will decide, or find out, that they were better off with their prior arrangement..........or as far apart as possible.
If I decide I don't want to ever get married then does that mean I can't ever have sex or live with a member of the opposite sex?! That's kind of like saying that because I don't like socks I can never wear shoes...or that because Christians don't like homosexuals they can never ask for good fashion advice, or a decent haircut from a bloke (that was the one stupid paragraph I allow myself per serious blog......it's my blog so I make the rules!)
Also there are plenty of people who live together for a few years to see how things work out with a view to getting married later, things don't go so well and then the relationship ends with no divorce needed. I know firsthand how that is. Just as well the two of us didn't get married AND THEN move in together as some social conservatives would have us do. Anecdotal or not, they would have seen a little 'divorce mark' in their side of the column. And no, the committment of marriage wouldn't have made a lick of difference to how things worked out. Living with somebody is indisputedly* going to allow you the opportunity to see things that you could never completely know about before the experience.
A successful marriage coming before or after cohabitation comes down to luck of the draw for most folks. It works for some people and it doesn't for others. To be told that one is a fantastic idea and the other is a disaster waiting to happen is such arrogant bollocks it makes the stomach churn. Sure one of the two is probably going to be throwing out better stats than the other but as I said, one works for one set of people and the other works for the other set of people. Good luck finding what works for you, but perhaps you'd at least like the chance to choose rather than be told what to do.
Personally I recommend everybody go to a bar tonight, pick up a stranger (or hooker if you don't have any luck picking up a strange person), take them back to your place, have a good time, ask them to move in with you, have three kids out of wedlock, quit your job, get married and then get divorced, have a messy custody battle and then agree that you can take the kids to the mall every second weekend.
That's living baby!
* I can't find 'indisputedly' in the dictionary either. But I did find 'indisputably'. Perhaps that's what I meant.
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