A while ago, we had a medium-sized crisis involving one of our kids. One of the first thoughts that raced across my mind was “Just when I finally thought I had my act together — now this!!” Then I immediately caught myself. Would I rather it happen while I’m drowning in three other crises? Or when I feel like I’m in a position to let everything else slide for a bit while I focus on my child’s problem?
Meanwhile, my husband jumped up to the plate as well, and we both found solace and emotional replenishment in each other’s arms while dealing with the problem.
This incident came to mind when I read the following comment:
Excuses like the kids would want me to be happy that adults use to justify their divorce (news flash your kids dont give a damn if youre happy. Kind of like how you dont give a damn what they think about the divorce. Funny how that works).
Sure, most kids (being, by definition, immature) don’t consciously care much about other people’s happiness. But having the emotional and physical energy to deal with crises (as well as with day-to-day parenting) is not something you can fake or simply conjure up by force of will. It’s the parents’ responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment for their kids, and it’s the adults’ responsibility to figure out what they need to do to create that environment. It is the couple that knows whether their marriage is a source of comfort and solace or whether it is a source of additional stress, hindering the parents’ efforts to focus on their kids’ needs.
When people say that no-fault divorce is destroying the family, I take issue with that personally — because if it weren’t for no-fault divorce, I probably wouldn’t have the happy family that I have today. I remember thinking that if the point of restricting divorce is for the sake of the kids, I shouldn’t have even had the six-month waiting period for my no-fault divorce. If a childless couple has already decided to call it quits, the last thing you want to do is insist on giving them another opportunity to bring a child into this picture. Of course, even for couples with kids, if they’ve decided to split amicably, it’s not necessarily in the kids’ interest to insist on turning it into a fight.
Now, I know that the defenders of traditional marriage will say that the point is that if they create more obstacles to divorce, maybe the couple will choose not to divorce. Because that’s what a stress family needs: more obstacles. (Aside: A historian studying Victorian-era illegitimacy told me that there was a high rate of cohabitation and illegitimacy due to one or both partners being unable to obtain a divorce from an earlier union.)
Studies on kids’ “outcomes” have shown that kids whose parents stayed married do better than kids whose parents are divorced. But if these studies are used to tell people that they need to stay together “for the kids” (and they are used for that, consistently), then the fact that some of families in the “married” category actually didn’t even want to split up is a major factor that should not be glossed over. The only relevant studies are the ones that specifically compare outcomes of families where the parents wanted a divorce (but decided to stay together for the kids) to the outcomes of families where the parents divorced and cooperated in child rearing. And, to be credible, such studies should be free of major funding conflicts of interest.
Sometimes I get the impression that people who want to “defend” (heterosexual-only) marriage don’t really think very highly of marriage, even straight marriage (see this recent critique of straight marriages where the spouses are in love with each other). Personally, I think marriage is a commitment rather than a prison, and — even though it represents some amount of work — on balance it is a comfort and joy rather than a punishment.
At this point in my life, I am not a huge fan of marriage of any sort, gay or straight. Qualifying this, I have watched the hoops that people have to jump through to dissolve legal relationships-gone-wrong as a way of holding one or both of the partners hostage to the bad relationship. The adults often stay in relationships not for the children’s sakes, but because of other stigmatic factors and lack of emotional or financial support for single parents. When this happens, the fall-out for the kids has been horrific, since the custodial parent must deal with the break up of their relationship AND to try to mop up the mess of what his/her child is dealing with. I take care of a child who was created out of an affair that occurred because his father could not (would not) leave his marriage.
Chanson, you are right that children often seem so wrapped up in their own needs to see that a split is the very thing that will reduce the strain of adults cohabiting in a rubbish situation and those who support the institution of marriage (not necessarily the ideals of a committed and healthy relationship) use children’s egotism and inexperience to argue that the children will be irreversibly damaged by mummy and daddy’s divorce. What proponents of marriage fail to see is that children also fail when exposed to a loveless or antagonistic marriage.
As for those who argue that the destruction of the marriage is caused by no-fault divorces (it was gay marriage last week, remember?), divorce and marriage as should be equally easy or difficult to obtain, especially where there are only assets to divide not children to make arrangements for. A painful and difficult divorce guarantees that children will continue to suffer beyond the physical break between their parents.
BTW, I hope the crisis with your child has been sorted, chanson…
@1 — I totally agree, except that I am actively in favor of marriage**, especially with a happy, healthy marriage as an ideal.
@2 Thanks. I really don’t want to discuss it in detail on the Internet, but it is essentially sorted out.
** for people who want to get married, that is — not as something that people should be pressured into doing out of some misguided sense of duty.
chanson,
I suppose that people who want to get married do so for a variety of reasons. I think my parents said that they couldn’t wait to get married so that they could have sex. An honest answer, but probably not the best one for entering into a legal contract from which children would have most likely been produced after ejaculation number one!
BTW, what does ‘happy and healthy, as an ideal’ look like…does it even exist?
This article by Stephanie Coontz on no-fault divorce, although two years old, is worth revisiting: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opinion/17coontz.html?_r=1&th&emc=th IN particular, this paragraph is worth noting:
I remember reading another article in a British newspaper a couple of years or so before that documenting the fact that children whose parents are in active conflict do MUCH better after the parents split. They go from having behavioral and health problems to being quite stable and happy within a matter of months, as long as the home provided by a single parent is settled and secure. Unfortunately I didn’t save the link, and I can’t find it by googling it, but it makes sense.
@ Holly:
Perhaps it is this one:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/11/divorce-should-parents-stay-together
Nope, it’s this: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/dont-stay-together-for-the-kids-rowing-parents-told-1879980.html
A relevant paragraph:
Great post, and very true. You can’t fake a happy marriage, which makes it even more important to put off or not marry until you’re ready (or because you’re having “too much fun.”) Also to consider the commitment carefully before having children. I’m glad your crisis has passed.
OK, that piece doesn’t comment on the behavioral and health problems, but in some discussion I followed that was raised as well. anyway, the larger point is, I think, that Your Mileage May Vary.
It sucks to have surgery because A) it hurts and B) it’s always risky and C) anesthesia and the trauma are just plain bad for you, and having abdominal surgery can shave a few years off your life, it’s still better to have your gut cut open and a diseased appendix cut out than to die of appendicitis. In the same way, sometimes divorce, painful as it is, is still the best way for people to achieve genuine and lasting health.
Sorry to hear about your crisis and glad to hear everything is getting resolved. Anecdotally, I can say that growing up with parents that don’t seem to love each other is very stressful. And so, in certain circumstances, I do think divorce is the better option.
There is some research that shows that women and children do worse in economic terms after divorce. This is usually because a family takes a significant economic (standard of living) hit by maintaining two households instead of one. I don’t think that should be a factor in not allowing divorce, but rather figuring out a way to make the laws better and more equitable. But it is complicated. Sometimes divorces happen because in a bad relationship, parents also disagree about child-rearing. So one parent wants to remain home (if that was the prior agreement) and the other parent doesn’t want to support that standard of living. A good example that I’m familiar with is a family friend whose mom was so determined that they not sell the family home, they kept the home and could barely put food on the table with property taxes, upkeep. So no fault divorce won’t really stop some people from making bad decisions, or decisions with unintended consequences.
For all the angst, I agree that no fault divorce can really be the best solution. And it’s become so normalized, there’s not the same stigma for the kids (a good thing). Schools, communities, everything is now more open to accomodating blended and non traditional families (separate parent addresses, etc.) I think that the worse outcomes happen when one or both parents use kids as pawns in the divorce. Amicable divorce happens and is more common (and has more support from the community).
Finally, I like to tell the story about our ancestors who remained married but disliked one another so much, they wouldn’t eat together. Why did they remain married anyway? Life is short. And as their great great granddaughter, I’m not sure my life is affected either way.
Ideally, people commit to marriage if and when they want to make that commitment and they’re ready to make it (as opposed to choosing to marry out of social pressure or a sense of obligation).
Once married even though every relationship requires some amount of work on balance the relationship is more of a comfort and joy (to both parties) than a punishment.
does it even exist?
Not necessarily. That’s what I mean by calling it an ideal.
Naturally. I don’t aspire to prevent all bad decisions — far from it. I just want to avoid encouraging people to make bad decisions.
Or, once it becomes obvious that a mistake has been made, compounding the problem by refusing to let them cut their losses, do their best to rectify/ cope with the damage they’ve already done to their own lives and the lives of others, and try to make a better life by seeking out a situation that seems more likely to provide happiness at best, or at least not perpetuate the misery.
p.s. I don’t mean it’s an ideal in the sense of claiming that everyone should aspire to be married. My ideal is closer to “every marriage a happy marriage”. The belief that everyone ideally needs to be married is counter-productive — it encourages ill-advised marriages.
p.p.s. Great article links, thanks!!
@14 Exactly.
@ aerin: I think you are so right to note that women and children suffer most, financially, when divorce occurs and I think that’s what keeps a lot of women feeling ‘stuck’ in marriages that they do not want to be in or are toxic for them. Women tend to be (not always, but mostly) the caregiver who gains custody and who also continue to sacrifice the majority of money and time resources for the child(ren). This is not a tirade against men, but my beef is with the institution of marriage that sets out to create an inequality between men and women. That’s why I’m not really in favour of marriage, or at least the model that seems to be the most accepted and encouraged – which is borne out of archaic property law.
chanson, I think everyone would agree that, bottom line, a happy marriage is the ideal. However, there is a lot of explaining to do if the marriage you have doesn’t (in some shape or form) fit the model that is most recognised or encouraged. I guess that was why I asked about happiness and what does an ideal look like? Part of being happy is the well-being you feel from fitting in with a community and if the community approves of your family because they fit a mould, that’s cool and you win. If you do not reflect a community’s values, you do not fit and face a lot of pressure to conform, so there is a HUGE pressure to ‘fake it til you make it’, I think. I know LOADS of people who have had children and got married to make it easier for their children to navigate socially, at school. My boy’s mother and I have had far more input into his life than his father, but he loves to hear himself say the words ‘Mummy and Daddy’ because those are the words coming out of his friends’ mouths. It hurts, but I cannot fight against convention, even though our setup is far less toxic than some of his friends’ parents who still live together. I guess that’s primarily the reason that I don’t agree with marriage, straight or gay. I’d sure respect people’s right to get married but it seems to me too high a price to pay for what needs to be carefully thought out. As I said before, my parents got married (whirlwind engagement) so that they could have sex at 18. It wasn’t a bad decision but they got lucky and they worked hard on the marriage. Lucky for me, eh?
BTW, have you all heard of the hotels set up in Holland that allow for couples to check-in married and spend the weekend getting divorced?
http://www.divorcehotel.com/en/
@17 I’m just saying that this sort of commitment can be a very positive and rewarding thing for those people who want to make it.
The fact that the marriage is recognized as a family relationship by the community is indeed a component of marriage. However, if this is the cornerstone of your marriage, then your marriage doesn’t fit my definition of ideal.
Any time you do something that is outside of expected norms, you end up having to explain it to people. Yes, it’s annoying. But the phenomenon is not limited to marital-type situations. This is an argument for broadening people’s horizons and expectations, it’s not an argument for saying that people shouldn’t make a public commitment to each other.
Good, then I would advise you not to get married. See my comments above about how marriage shouldn’t be held up as the ideal for everyone.
Right, as I said, I don’t think people should be encouraged/pressured to jump into this kind of commitment when they’re not ready. Some couples get lucky, but I wouldn’t bet my future on it. I totally agree with your initial comment that it should be as hard to get into as it is to get out of.
Well, divorces tend to destroy families, but it’s not necessarily the case that they’re destroying the family, or that a given family can’t recover from a divorce and emerge in a new, better form. I speak from experience when I say that divorces that occur in mid-childhood are very difficult on the psyches of children because they’re used to the presence of an adult who is now not going to be in the home. In a best case scenario, children receive an additional home, but often this is not the case merely for geographical reasons. Also, depending on how many children there are, siblings might have to be split from each other (which was unfortunately the case in my childhood). Personally, I was affected pretty negatively by my parents’ divorce, but I’m sure I would’ve been affected negatively by their staying together, too.
As a gay person, I kinda separate the concept of “marriage” from the concept of “family-building,” since for gay people the two have not historically been linked. Basically, marriage historically has been a state contract (in 19th century Alabama, if you wanted a divorce, the state legislature would have to approve it by a 2/3 vote!). With no-fault divorce, marriage is now merely a demographic category with certain financial benefits afforded by the state. All the responsibilities of a relationship and child-rearing never actually required the state to begin with. In fact, I would say that marriage as an institution has a Machiavellian feeling to it; I find it a tad disconcerting that gay people are so eager to have their relationships “sanctioned” by the state. I disapprove of marriage on those big-brother terms, but of course I approve of it in terms of gay people forming homes, families, and yes, marriages.
Now that I’m approaching 30, I think I can safely say that a person doesn’t really begin adulthood until around age 30. The fact that people are waiting until later when they know themselves to marry and have kids is a good thing. In the world of Mormonism, I’m bothered by the continued push to have people marry young, but also by the new phenomenon of mixed-orientation marriages starting later in life. Like their heterosexual counterparts, gay folks are waiting until their 30s to marry an opposite-sex spouse when they know themselves better. Hopefully, before that becomes the official therapeutic standard for gay folks in the Church (“get married later in life”), there’ll be enough agitation to accept gay relationships.
I grew up a child in one of those marriages that stayed together “for the kids”. I don’t doubt for a minute that that was genuinely my parents’ motivation but I’m baffled why they thought an environment of constant hostility and recurring late night fights when they thought we were asleep (as though anyone could sleep through WWIII…) could benefit anyone.
The result was two miserable adults and 3 kids with, effectively, PTSD. Speaking for myself, I have virtually no self-esteem, I led a life as a chronic under achiever resentful of meaningless jobs and too scared to try for anything fulfilling and I had a distrust of marriage such that it took my husband-then-boyfriend TEN YEARS to convince me that we had a chance at some happiness.
I know a statistical group of 1 is laughable but my vote is for the dignified congenial divorce before lives are scarred.
@18
“Any time you do something that is outside of expected norms, you end up having to explain it to people. Yes, its annoying. But the phenomenon is not limited to marital-type situations. This is an argument for broadening peoples horizons and expectations, its not an argument for saying that people shouldnt make a public commitment to each other.”
By eliminating marriage (yes, this is a pipe dream…I know, I know) the explanation of having a committed relationship becomes the norm, not the conventional setup of one man, one woman, two point five children.
I agree with you that marriage could follow the same path as the motto, “Against Abortion? Don’t Have One”. However, it’s not as easy as that for some and marriage isn’t always about making the wrong decision about who you want to be with, for sex’s sake or convention’s sake and the necessity of getting out of it easily. Some people have to make the marriage commitment (for many years, and at the expense of other peripheral rights) in order to appease other elements. You might think that I’d, therefore, argue for expanding the umbrella of marriage rather than throwing out the concept of marriage but there are many other issues (usually for women, but some for men, too!) that surround the institution of marriage. I see your point about celebrating publicly the love that you have with your partner and having that socially and legally validated. It is a good thing for you and your children. I still don’t know that I agree with you about how important marriage would be if it was abolished…maybe humans would always find ways of binding people together.
As for ‘Don’t Believe in Marriage? Don’t Have One,’ well…I’ll just have to let it stand that it doesn’t always work that way for some folk.
Really? Like who? I realize that’s part of the whole plot of Tweilight, but does it really apply to that many enfranchised adults in the west today?
I’d really like a more concrete explanation of what you’re getting at.
@22: Sorry, I can’t…
@23 Now my curiosity is piqued. For a green card? To retain the right to a throne?
I certainly know people who married for a green card. But it didn’t seem to involve the expense of many other peripheral rights. I only know of someone who married to retain the right to a throne, but that also didn’t seem to come at the expense of many peripheral rights that weren’t already compromised by the situation overall.
Whatever benefits divorce may be having at the individual household level, it’s hard for me to see it as a positive development for our society at the macro level. I think this 2005 article is well worth considering on the subject:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR2005110402304.html?referrer=facebook
On the historical blurb about Victorian co-habitation.
These arrangements didn’t really count as “co-habitation” in the minds of those who did it. Most of them probably considered themselves married.
There was no centralized government regulation of marriages in those days. When a woman was ill treated by her husband, often she’d leave and seek refuge with family in some other town or state. And if she met a man who wanted to marry her, they’d just head to the local public officials (judge, mayor, pastor, etc) and get married. They didn’t much care about the old marriage because – as far as they were concerned, it was over – writ of divorce or no writ of divorce. Didn’t even occur to most people that you’d need to get government sanction of the divorce from the previous husband. And they didn’t.
But I doubt a lot of them considered themselves to be “shacking-up.” That’s what some of us would call it, not what they would call it. They self-identified as married.
By the way, this is exactly what happened between one of Parley P. Pratt’s plural wives – Elenor Mclean – and himself. She fled an abusive husband and wound up marrying Parley. The abusive husband eventually tracked Pratt down and shot and stabbed him to death. Pratt sometimes gets accused of marrying an already married woman – but she didn’t view her relationship with Hector that way. As far as she was concerned, she was rid of the old spouse for good.
A gay marriage advocate I was arguing with on another blog post pointed out to me that marriage has always been a rather changing institution and the idea of marriage being equated with these “marriage licenses” is a rather recent phenomenon. I quibbled about the details at the time he made the argument, but I think he’s probably right in some respects.
“Traditional marriage” and “traditional family” may very well be artificial constructs to a great degree, and terms that mask a much greater historical diversity in human relationships than we give credit for.
This is one of those times when it might be good to ask at the beginning what you think terms mean.
What does “Victorian” mean to you, Seth? What dates and regions does it generally apply to?
Because based on the generally accepted way of invoking and applying the term “Victorian” in terms of history (England, 1837-1901, England being the land of Victoria’s reign and 1837-1901), which is what the comment you seize on from the OP referred to, you’re wrong.
If that’s not what you’re referring to, you should provide another term, so that you aren’t just plain old wrong.
Until you explain yourself, I won’t worry about the other elements of your comment, except this:
Well, good. Then we know that gay people who consider themselves married are indeed pretty much married.
And of course this applies to gay people as well: if they identified as married, well, that’s what matters. No matter how vigorously people like you assert the basic inferiority of the union, no matter how opponents of gay marriage insult gay unions, if they self-identify as married, well, they’re as good as married.
Indeed! Some of us have even studied the topic and read books and articles about it. In any case, it’s so nice of you to drop by and admit that you have failed to give credit to ideas that others of us have taken quite seriously for quite some time.
Oh. That should be “1837-1901 its duration.”
I don’t think any of my comment needs further explanation. And if you choose to ignore it Holly, I daresay I’ll survive the loss.
I am confident, Seth, that you actually breathe a long sigh of relief when people choose to ignore most of your comments, given how often they are grounded in error and poorly argued. Yes, finding your comments ignored must be a heavy “loss” for you indeed.
Regarding the historian I mentioned above: It’s been nearly three years since the conversation I had with her so my memory may be faulty, but it was my understanding that she was indeed studying illegitimacy rates in Victorian England.
Interestingly, one of the points I recall from that conversation was that there had to be an innocent, injured party in order to qualify for a divorce. If each party accused the other (of, say, adultery), then they couldn’t get divorced because neither one deserved to be free of the other. This same point was mentioned in the article Holly linked @6:
(A different time and place, but similar laws produced similar results.)
Regarding Seth’s article, linked @25:
It would be nice if the author provided more details about this research, what journals it was published in, etc. She seems to indicate that she did the research herself. Here’s her end of article bio:
Both articles note that divorce is declining:
I think you can explain the falling divorce rate largely by self-selection. People just aren’t getting married anymore. And perhaps the demographic most likely to divorce is instead just not marrying.
I’d be interested in knowing where the “Victorian” study sample of divorces was coming from. Out in frontier America, I can’t imagine that the legal system was even established enough for formal divorce to even be necessary.
Unless there was a need to divide property through a divorce proceeding….
Then I can see it being necessary. Are you sure the divorces in the selection weren’t predominantly over property disputes?
Also, were these women who wanted to stay in the same town that their troubled marriage was in? That would make a difference too.
Which would make sense. in Victorian England, bigamy was both a crime and such a preoccupation that it produced a genre known as the bigamy novel. The period is notable for a great many novels about people trying, with various degrees of success, to escape a spouse who brought them misery and ruin, as well as the difficulties of someone unlucky enough to fall in love with such a person. In fact, Jane Eyre, one of the most beloved British novels of all time, is about just that subject. Charlotte Bronte’s sister Anne also wrote a novel about someone unable to marry because of a spouse they can’t escape, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
And of course a very popular and successful novelist of the era was Mary Evans, aka George Eliot, who endured all sorts of social opprobrium because she was known to cohabitate–for over 20 years–with a man who couldn’t get a divorce.
John Stuart Mill, an important philosopher and politician of the era, argued in On the Subjection of Women written with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, that marriage was akin to slavery for women. Plenty of people thought the entire institution needed reforming, and plenty of people were keenly aware of just how all but impossible it was to escape a bad marriage and how devastating it was to be stuck in a bad marriage.
It is a fairly recent development in English law that a husband’s adultery was grounds for divorce. Women could be divorced and their dowries retained if they committed adultery. But even if a husband had a slew of mistresses and flaunted them before his wife, that was not grounds for divorce for most of British history.
the fact that you can now imagine that there’s a difference between Victorian England and frontier America is at least a start. Hopefully someday you’ll imagine a way to research these questions you’re curious about.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=19th+century+american+divorce+law
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=marriage+and+divorce+in+the+american+frontier
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=divorce+in+victorian+england
Actually, there are over 2.3 million marriages in the US each year, or over 6,200 every single day.
I know you’re an advocate of taking things of faith, Seth, and very dismissive of evidence, but seriously, you can look this stuff up, and you CAN’T expect anyone else to respect or take on faith such a ludicrous assertion.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+many+marriages+occur+each+year+in+the+us
OK, I perhaps misunderstood/extrapolated that part. I had one conversation with a historian at a dinner party when I was at the Institute for Advanced Study a few years ago, and now I’m a little vague on the details. The part that I really thought was interesting was when she explained that if your spouse accuses you of something that is grounds for divorce, you might be tempted to turn around and accuse your spouse right back. But if you do that, you ruin your chances of getting a divorce since then neither party deserves it.
The other thing that was interesting was that she said that cohabitation (without marriage) was fairly widespread because of the the difficulty of obtaining a divorce from a failed marriage, and that many children who were born into stable unions were nonetheless considered bastards because of it.
Thanks for the added detail — it’s a very interesting topic!
And bastard was a real legal status, and people who were bastards would, if the authorities had their way, have “bastard” stamped prominently on their birth certificates. In “Marriage: A History,” Stephanie Coontz discusses all the legal rights bastards did not enjoy in the US well into the 20th century. The most egregious I remember was that if their mothers were killed through someone else’s negligence, the damages they were allowed to sue for and entitled to receive in any wrongful death suit were drastically reduced.
Of course, bastards could make no financial claim whatsoever on their fathers. A bastard was entirely a mother’s shame and a mother’s responsibility.
Holly’s point of the stigma attached to being a bastard is one of my main reasons for feeling the way I do about the whole institution of marriage. Usually people who ‘want’ to be in power are people who care about the rules. Most rules will usually discriminate against someone, somewhere who will suffer for those rules being in place. The idea that justice should be blind and, therefore, punish the exceptional cases who may have had NO OTHER WAY of having a family or being with the ones they truly loved or escaping from a bad marriage is enough of a reason for me to be against an institution. That’s the reason I left the church – it’s a cookie cutter mechanism for religious belief and if you don’t do it the ‘right’ way there are consequences. If you do not get married in the traditional sense, there are consequences and, okay, maybe people should be willing to confront ignorance daily to explain when they fall into ‘exceptional’ categories, but Jayzus, it gets old. And tedious. And you really do just want to flip the bird after a while. Or you want to join convention so you don’t have to fight any more.
@38 Your logic appears to be that people shouldn’t do thinks that are typical or popular because then people who don’t do the typical or popular thing have to explain themselves, and that gets old. Like the very existence of a typical case oppresses atypical cases.
For myself, sure, I’m married — I’m even right-handed! And yet, I fall outside of a lot of popular social norms. I have the same “it gets old” experience when a standard topic of polite small talk is something I don’t want to have to discuss with every random stranger, see here.
But in general I’m glad not to always fit the mold. I’m not going to insist that everyone be different in the same ways that I’m different.
Actually, let me quote you the relevant part:
Then a comment:
My response:
Now, how does your argument not equally apply to the proposition that people shouldn’t settle in the country they were born and raised in, because that turns the foreigners — some of whom had no choice but to leave their home country — into an exceptional case, always having to confront ignorance about their status, etc….?
@38: I can appreciate I don’t always follow a logical path when arriving at my feelings about things! : ) I don’t want to make people (most certainly not yourself, who has brought up an interesting topic and one that has, at this point in time, hit a bit of a nerve with me…) who have made the choice to get married feel rotten just because my situation is an atypical case. I can see the good in relationships that are stable, for the consenting adults in the relationships and for any dependents in the family. The ‘powers-that-be’ (sorry Holly, I know that sounds a bit ‘Twilight-esque’) who set up marriage brought some really horrible conditions that discriminate against exceptional cases and, to be fair, I’m not sure whether a typical case even exists in society…there’s just an ideal to strive toward and a feeling of failure when the ideal isn’t met. I truly don’t think that’s enough to throw out all of the infrastructure of marriage, since that would be like me wanting to ruin a party just because I wasn’t invited. I believe in things like the legal rights that dependents have to their parents’ attention and resources within a relationship, but also to their rights to have that attention and those resources outside a relationship. Marriage conveys those rights to the children and that’s why a lot of people I know ended up getting married after their children were born, not because they wanted to be husband and wife (or hh or ww, whatever the case may be) to one another. Maybe marriage needs to be redefined to be more inclusive, but maybe the whole feeling of entitlement that accompanies married couples just needs to be shot down, too. I don’t know.
Chanson, I know that you don’t fit the mould/mold and wouldn’t insist that everyone be different in the ways you are different. I doubt that anyone posting on this forum fits a mold/mould, even the TBMs who often seem to trot out the party line. I think there is a case to be made that there are enough victims of the institution of marriage that ‘it’ really doesn’t deserve the protected status that it has had for generations. That I haven’t really made my case isn’t surprising. I’m not that brilliant at arguing a point, but hey that’s cool. Thanks for letting me weigh in anyway!
When something is not working, the question becomes Is it worth fixing, or do we throw it out? Some things deserve to get thrown out, and certainly, ‘the institution of marriage’ has left a lot of victims in its wake (especially when combined with political/economic disenfranchisement for women). OTOH, the institution has made some major progress in the last few generations, and IMHO has enough positive qualities to be worth fixing rather than tossing.
chanson,
While weighing those things, it’s also worth considering how well alternatives to marriage have fared in society as well. I would submit that other methods of living together have had their own set of social problems as well. Some of them have had even more problems than marriage has.
If we just myopically narrow the focus down to marriage alone, and ignore the rest of the ways people have tried to live together, we run the risk of inflating marriage’s negative points and not realizing how good or bad the alternatives are.
Just what are these alternatives, Seth? Historically and across cultures, what are “other methods of living together”? You already stressed above that many people previously who did what some of us would call shacking up “self-identified as married.”
No one here wants to “ignore the rest of the ways people have tried to live together,” but before anyone can consider the ways in which “Some of them have had even more problems than marriage has,” you need to explain what these “other methods of living together” are. And since you want us to consider their myriad problems, you should probably list those as well.
As someone who was married lonnngg before she was legally married, I couldn’t help noticing that the government privileges some relationships and undermines others.
I don’t think government is going away any time soon and they will continue to collect taxes and give out benefits. So I think the best we can do, is try to be as fair as possible, whatever that means.
For instance, I worked at a job for years that provided health benefits for their co-workers and their families. Well, not mine. My legal strangers undermined the very foundations of civilization.
Here’s the thing, my family didn’t count when it came to health insurance. Yet I was legally responsible for their medical bills.
People want and need protection for their little bastards.
I don’t need the government to tell me who I love and are committed to. But I need government to stop punishing that commitment.
Some have been pushing for the implementation of a comprehensive civil union code across the board to provide needed protection for a variety of relationships – not all of them romantic. For example, two elderly sisters who live together and take care of each other.
Certainly people in many cultures and many times have continued to live throughout their lives with members of their family of origin, which was typically the product of a marriage. But I don’t see how mentioning one instance of something that has yet to happen–we have not yet “[implemented] a comprehensive civil union code across the board to provide needed protection for a variety of relationships”–constitutes “considering how well alternatives to marriage have fared in society as well,” which is what you call for.
They’re obviously two separate issues.
OK, I’ll bite. What’s the difference?
I think for Mormons, even singleness would be considered “an alternative to marriage.” Other examples: a parent and a child household, cohabitation, polyamory, other relationships that have historically not been accepted by the state as ‘marriages,’ whether or not the participants call them that.
Suzanne @ 45:
Even though there’s a good chance Washington State will soon have same-sex marriage, it’s just really not something my partner and I are even considering. Not because we’re not committed to each other, but I guess no one ingrained in us as children that the central romantic relationship of our lives will be a “marriage.” We had to come to our own terms that the relationships we form are not wayward altogether. The only reason I’d consider a marriage is because of benefits provided by the state, but that just makes me annoyed that I have to “register” my romantic relationship with the state. I’m not sure that legal same-sex marriage is a correction to the institution when the brokenness is the institutionalization of marriage.
And I’d like to know what Seth thinks the problems of these relationships he refers to are. Certainly I’ve read enough by Jane Austen and about her novels to know a fair bit about the difficulties faced by women who either chose not to or failed to marry at a time when it was all but required for women, but I am not at all sure those are the problems Seth wants us to consider.
I would also still like a clear explanation of what “other methods of living together” are. The context suggested that Seth was referring to some sort of sexual or intimate coupling, rather than two elderly sisters, either spinsters or widows, taking care of each other because no one else wants to and they’re too poor or frail to live alone. If by “living together” Seth means something as broad as “everything that falls between conventional marriage at one end of the continuum and being a self-sufficient hermit who has entirely abandoned society at the other,” I think that’s casting the net a bit wide, since it means we also have to consider the problems of celibacy, childlessness, spinsterhood, and bachelorhood, and those are not usually things people associate with “living together” when “living together” is opposed to having an official and conventional marriage. Instead, concern is generally more along the lines of worrying about the status of children produced by such unions–as Suzanne pointed out, “People want and need protection for their little bastards.”
Exactly.
I cringe to think that same-sex marriage is going to be accepted in this society only because some gay people are raising kids and need the state to not punish their families.
The US state today provides kids healthcare and education (I’m not sure about daycare or respite care, though) regardless of parentage. Of course children whose parents are a husband and wife with citizenship are in the best position in the current setup for benefits beyond the basics. For everyone else, there are institutional hurdles unless incomes can offset those hurdles.
Given that there exists safety nets for “the children,” I’m not sure that marriage today is necessarily about “the children.” I think it’s important to bring things like “celibacy, childlessness, spinsterhood, and bachelorhood” into the equation when considering what it is we’re doing when we “marry” and when we support the state institution of marriage.
Absolutely. I’m quite happy to talk about “celibacy, childlessness, spinsterhood, and bachelorhood–after all, I’m the person who mentioned them explicitly, I think they don’t get enough respect, and I know a fair bit about them.
But my discussion of those things would likely differ from any discussion Seth would offer. The comment in the OP about
is from Seth, and I think it misses the mark in many ways–I don’t know too many parents who “don’t give a damn what [their kids] think about the divorce.” He consistently inveighs against alternatives to marriage, and in @43 here he writes
I have asked him a few times to explain what he’s talking about there, and he has resisted. the bolded section suggests to me that he’s NOT referring to things like celibacy, childlessness, spinsterhood, and bachelorhood,” and if he’s not, I want to know what he IS referring to.
And if he is referring to “celibacy, childlessness, spinsterhood, and bachelorhood,” I’d like to know if he has ideas for how to force people to marry, have sex, and have children, even if they don’t want to. It seems to me that no matter how much marriage and couple pairing is a good, no matter how great sex is for binding couples together, they really shouldn’t be compulsory. that’s totally gross.
Well, it’s one thing to say that protections are needed for human relationships – I think that’s something lots of people can agree on. But talking about which relationships ought to be promoted by government or society and encouraged is another matter. It’s also important to consider how things should be promoted as well.
I would also point out that encouraging stable situations for children doesn’t need to be the same thing as making children (or sex, or whatever) “compulsory” for people.
For instance, the US government offers a “Lifetime Learning” tax credit for adults going to school. But no one suggests that this tax incentive is making it “compulsory” for people to be going back to school late in adulthood.
Alan, I don’t think same-sex marriage is going to be accepted in society through government force – regardless of whether there’s an argument for kids or not.
But I also think the government’s legitimate interest in our love lives is pretty limited. I don’t think the government has any more legitimate interest in promoting homosexual romance than heterosexual romance. Aside from protecting people from abuse, and making sure that people have free access to their own chosen social support networks (I’m thinking hospital visits as an example, and of course deciding what to do with the property of those who die – what interest does government really have in me and my wife’s relationship?
Not much actually.
But if you bring kids into the picture, the government interest jumps up quite a bit. Which is why I think government is within expectations to provide different treatment those relationships that are most likely to result in children that will catch the interest of government’s protective mandates.
I would also say that if all marriage ever was, was the love between two people – we would hardly even need marriage for it.
In fact, prominent liberal social advocates have long been suggesting that marriage is an extraneous, unneeded, and outmoded vehicle for love between adults, and have been advocating that it be done away with entirely.
If you accept their premise that the whole point is adult mutual romance, then I have to say – they have a pretty good point.
Absolutely. And if you would just clarify what you were talking about above, there’d be no need for speculation like that.
I do wonder why you won’t clarify what you meant.
why?
Why?
Well, because they are vulnerable parties that the government has an interest in providing protective or supporting services for. They represent the future continuation of the society that government is supposed to be supporting. If nothing else, they represent the future funding of the entire tax-supported welfare state (I don’t use that term in the pejorative sense that you hear it on Fox 13).
Unless perhaps you don’t feel the continuation of society is a matter of sufficient government interest, of course.
Are you saying reproduction needs to be protected by the government because otherwise it will be in jeopardy? Um…I’m pretty sure this planet is almost at capacity.
If it’s a question of childrearing, then you and I simply disagree on the fundamentals.
Here’s a good book to check out:
Basically, we’ve evolved to be social creatures; it is good for our development to be raised by multiple members of our species. Luckily, most children do grow up in environments where they interact with multiple others, but we have a long way to go to get away from the awful notion that only “one man” plus “one woman” in a “marriage” where they can make babies is what constitutes a true “family.” The Church has a very limited/damaging sense of kinship.
Alan, have whatever opinions you want on planet overpopulation. I think the sheer economics rule against the modern welfare states of North America and Europe surviving for long with dwindling population pyramids.
Did you check out the link I posted? What do you think about the author’s hypothesis — that the nuclear family is actually not in our best interests? I’d rather talk about that than a presumed death of welfare states.
I did read it. I found it interesting, but applying the findings to modern society is going to be problematic.
The problem with evolutionary models is that any given evolutionary track is never a forgone and inevitable, or even best solution. There’s more than one way to skin a cat in evolutionary strategies for success. And sometimes a logical and necessary evolutionary advantage can actually lead a species into a dead end – due to outside factors (perhaps climate change, an invasive new species, or even just ivory poachers).
This makes it very difficult to make normative prescriptions for modern society from past evolutionary models. They might be the right move. But they could also be the completely wrong move. Like the male drive for as many sex partners as he can get his hands on. As I’ve said before – science merely describes things, it never proscribes.
That said, I want to make it clear that I’m not a defender of the nuclear family. The idea of an isolated mom, dad, two kids and a dog as some sort of ideal doesn’t seem right to me.
But the nuclear family is not the only way to do heterosexual marriage either.
Any economy that is dependent on permanent exponential population growth is going to have trouble surviving long. The more quickly societies re-orient towards facing that reality, the better off they’ll be.
I went to a lecture the author gave on her research — it’s really fascinating stuff.
Despite being in favor of marriage, I agree with both of you that “family” = “nuclear family” is not a helpful equation. I think people (especially children) benefit greatly from strong ties with their extended family and with their local community. It’s tricky to figure out how to encourage that in our world of modern mobility, but probably not impossible.
Just a theory I have, but I think the idea of “nuclear family” may have actually been a concerted push by major corporations to promote a family setup that would provide them with the sort of salarymen they wanted working for them. By cutting off the nuclear family from the rest of what we used to call “family”, they made their workers more mobile, and with less interests to compete with devoting their lives to their work.
Just a half-baked theory of course. But I do remember watching some old 1950s propaganda videos about the ideal salaryman that I recall being rather disturbed by.
I do think that it’s in society’s interest to invest in the continuation of society.
But I also think that if children create such a responsibility for society, then society can reasonably claim more control over the creation of children. People who are too young to care for them responsibly should be discouraged in every way possible from doing so. There should be measures to discourage any one couple from having too many children. For instance, once a couple has that third child, taxes should become regressive. People can still have as many children as they want–provided they can pay for them.
I still find it striking that you won’t explain or defend several of your previous comments. You seem to be ignoring the fact that you ever made them and hoping others will ignore that fact too.
that should be “People who are too young to care for them responsibly should be discouraged in every way possible from having them.”
Other things we should if we’re really so concerned with society’s responsibilities to children and the people who raise them:
make temporary birth control for both sexes more reliable, accessible, and affordable; provide a free tubal ligation or vasectomy for anyone who wants one; give tax breaks to couples (including gay couples) who adopt a child who already exists instead of conceiving one of their own, and make the tax breaks larger as the child ages; give exactly the same financial and legal privileges to couples with children regardless of their marital status, since, if Seth is right that “kids dont give a damn if youre happy” when it comes to divorce, kids also don’t care if a relationship is formally recognized by the state or a commitment unrecognized by the powers that be–what kids care about is that their parents can take care of them.
I’m rather conflicted on the whole debate over methods of lessening the consequences of sex. On the one hand, I don’t like how sex has become so casual and thoughtless in our society – something some people seem to put no more thought into than renting a movie for the night.
But on the other hand, the problems Holly was mentioning of teen pregnancy, unwanted births, and all that are quite real. I heard a doctor relate a story about an irate mother who came in with her teen daughter who’d gotten pregnant demanding that the pregnancy be carried to term and that the daughter be given no pain relief during labor to “teach her a lesson.” The doctor was not amused, to say the least, and ordered the mom out of the room to discuss things with the pregnant teen in private (think he threatened to call Child Protective Services on her if she didn’t get out of his patient room). I’m just as outraged by that behavior as my doctor acquaintance was. I also don’t like the thinking behind it – I’ve never thought shock-value-deterrence was effective in curbing bad social behavior.
I don’t want birth control restricted – because I see the social costs as being too high.
But I’m also really dismayed at how sex is being sterilized, degraded and commodified by our culture. Not sure how to oppose that trend most effectively.
Holly, if you’re talking about the whole “what does Victorian mean” line of interrogation that you were on about earlier, I already told you wasn’t going to offer further clarification. I considered your objections to be quibbling over details that didn’t matter much to the point I was making, and I saw no reason to explore that angle. I still don’t.
@67 — I agree, those would be fantastic ways of putting children’s welfare first.
There is cross-cultural evidence that alloparenting (that is, when raising kids isn’t just the responsibility of the bio-parents, but also siblings, grandparents, neighbors, etc) actually reduces the rate of teenage pregnancy and obviously helps those teenagers who do have kids be better parents.
We say that teenagers are not emotionally mature enough to be parents, but that would mean that the majority of human history consisted of immature parenting. Perhaps that’s true, but I think a lot of the problem comes from a messed-up division of labor with regards to parenting, not just between men and women, but this idea that a child is the sole responsibility of its parents. Rather, a child is the responsibility of its family, which as noted above needs an expanded definition (in middle-class American culture, at least).
In some Native American cultures, at least, the mother and father were typically too busy working (hunting, weaving, gathering, skinning, crafting tools) to do all the raising of the children. So it usually fell to the grandparents and other elders of the tribe to raise and educate the children.
I assume that worked for them.
Some of the most sterilized, degraded and commodified sex I’ve heard of happens in LDS marriages. In a recent (but still pre-Josh Weed) thread of FMH about MOMs, there was concern about the qualify of the sex. The crappy sex in a couple marriages in question was defended with the assertion that “Most of my straight married Mormon friends have really bad sex lives.” That’s only one example. So many conversations about Mormon sex make it sound like a joyless obligation or a contentious bargaining chip.
Oh, heavens, Seth. I don’t care a fig about the “Victorian” thing–you clearly had no idea what you were talking about there and weren’t willing to google anything yourself, which is why I did it for you. But now that it’s settled that you were completely off base, there’s no point in dwelling on it.
No. The comment you’re ignoring and seem to be hoping everyone else will ignore is this, @43:
If I could find the answer to this by googling it, I would. But somehow, when I type in “What does Seth mean by ‘alternatives to marriage’ and how they have fared,” I don’t get very useful hits, especially because plenty of them stress that historically, there really WEREN’T many alternatives to marriage, especially for women, and it has been a difficult struggle to create more.
So I have repeatedly asked you to explain what comment @43 means, as in @44, when I wrote:
The best you could offer was this, @46:
But as I wrote in @47
As you acknowledged in @48:
Other people have speculated about what these alternatives you mention might, but you have yet to clarify or explain.
You say you want people to consider the flaws in these “other ways of living together” but thus far have entirely failed to explain what these “other ways of living together” are or to say anything about their flaws.
If you truly believe that “how well alternatives to marriage have fared” is worth considering, surely you’ll feel that those alternatives are worth naming and explaining, and surely you’ll provide information about how they have fared for us to consider.
Otherwise, how can anyone engage in this activity you say is so worthwhile?
So Holly…
You’re the sort that takes a random unsupported assertion on a blog about LDS sex lives as sufficient evidence that they’re degraded and sterile in higher proportion than the rest of the population.
I guess I was expecting that.
Oh, and the most obvious alternative to marriage is living together without being married. That arrangement was already in question, so I don’t see why it was that much of a mental stretch to apply my comment to it. You don’t need a long history to make these comparisons. A few recent decades will do just fine.
One other thing to keep in mind about the DAMU, the bloggernacle, and all of those sorts of self-selecting little demographics.
They aren’t representative.
They tend to self-select for people with public gripes to make. That’s a small and rather distorted segment of the population. Like, for example, people who want to gripe about their sex lives and project their own issues onto everyone around them.
Which makes it foolish to rely on forums like this being representative of what the larger demographic actually looks like.
Well, Seth, as I pointed out, that’s “Thats only one example.” I’ve listened to plenty of conversations about sex–and in my estimation, in my subjective opinion, a lot of married Mormon sex sounds more awful than the sex being had all throughout their relationships by couples who slept together before getting married, with each other and with other partners as well.
but here’s the thing: that’s a subjective statement. All I’m asking you to believe is that that’s my opinion. If you want to believe, say, that Mormon sex is uniformly ultra orgasmic and super tender, well, be my guest.
Whereas a list of “alternatives to marriage” and “other methods of living together” should be a factual compilations of MORE THAN ONE ALTERNATIVE TO MARRIAGE THAT IS ALSO A WAY OF LIVING TOGETHER. It should be verifiable, documented information.
I’ll forgo asking you to support any subjective estimation about the relative awfulness of the flaws of these alternatives. I just want you to explain what the alternatives actually are.
Instead, all I get from you is this:
This is indeed true. I’m glad your grasp of the obvious has not failed you there. But you wrote
This implies that you know A) about multiple methods of living together and B) what their problems are and C) that SOME OF THEM (not just one of them, but SOME) have had even more problems than marriage.
As I wrote above, I’ve given up requesting C–no need for your subjective estimation of how problems are or are not worse than in marriage.
But I think the conversation would really benefit from your careful laying out of A and B.
Then you won’t find it difficult to compile a list, will you–unless you don’t actually have any facts and were just making things up.
So go for it. Share this factual information that you implied you have. If it’s as valuable as you claim, it might well have a powerful influence on others’ opinions and ideas, and I would think that you would like to influence people in just such a way.
Just to clarify–the person who asserted that all the straight people she knew had crappy sex lives was herself a straight TBM defending MOMs. She wasn’t griping. Instead, she argued that few Mormons expected to have good sex lives and instead made the best of marriages where other things worked out OK but the sax was pretty dreadful.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like that. I’ve heard it enough that I’ve started to believe it.
But thanks for reminding me that there are “people with public gripes to make” who “project their own issues onto everyone around them.” It’s something I’ll keep in mind as I consider this statement from you: “I dont like how sex has become so casual and thoughtless in our society something some people seem to put no more thought into than renting a movie for the night.”
Yes Holly, you’ve hung out in certain places long enough, that you’ve started to get the same narrative. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re on to something representative. I had my own phase participating in the bloggernacle where I liked to air gripes about Mormon culture. After doing that for a few years I got it out of my system and realized I was just being overly negative and viewing others through that lens.
As for alternatives being worse than marriage, I think cohabitation takes the prize:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21838575/ns/health-childrens_health/t/children-higher-risk-nontraditional-homes/#.T-_i8fXhe7I
fyi: some of the places I’ve heard this narrative is the living room of TBM family and friends who have never heard of the bloggernacle.
Oh. Well. I’m glad that you’ve conquered at least a small part of your pathology. Good for you.
That’s not the question, though, is it. The question is, CAN YOU LIST MORE THAN ONE ALTERNATIVE TO MARRIAGE THAT IS ALSO A WAY OF LIVING TOGETHER, or were you lying when you implied that you knew A) about multiple methods of living together and B) what their problems are and C) that SOME OF THEM (not just one of them, but SOME) have had even more problems than marriage.
Come on, Seth. What are the OTHER alternatives BESIDES cohabitation that you were referring to?
Or were you just making it all up?
It is ridiculously easy to get married. And suddenly you’re legally obligated to things documented nowhere. marriages should be contracts. Up for renewal contacts. And divorce shouldn’t be 100 times more difficult and expensive than getting a marriage license.
@81 So true! People complain that people don’t take their marriage commitments seriously enough. Naturally part of the solution is to make sure people understand what they’re getting into and encourage them to be sure they’re really ready before jumping into such a commitment.
The most important thing we can do if we truly love our children has NOTHING to marriage or divorce.
Instead, it’s all about climate change: http://youtu.be/A7ktYbVwr90
@83 True, good point. But worrying about other people’s marriages is so much easier than convincing people to do something real about climate change…
What’s the point of merely continuing human society (climate change), if that society sucks (relationships)?
I also kind of doubt that our society is so simple-minded that it can’t multi-task and deal with both problems at once.
In any event, the “climate-change is more important” argument is nothing more than an attempt to dismiss social issues you don’t like. Because others can flip it around and use it equally against you.
“Climate change is hugely important – therefore let’s just shelve the idea of gay marriage, leave things the way they are, and just focus on global warming.”
Or how about:
“Climate change is so important that we shouldn’t be wasting our time on blogs like this debating the actions of the LDS Church – we should be debating alternative fuels.”
Sound like a winner to you Holly?
@83 — Excellent video; I’m listening to it right now. Part of doing something about it is helping people understand the problem with clear, simple messages like this one.
@85 — Holly didn’t say that it’s a waste of time to be discussing marriage. I’m the one who implied that the reason we’re talking about marriage is because it’s a lighter and easier topic to deal with than the disaster we’ve set up for our children in the form of climate change.
Hey, Seth! Glad you’re still reading and showed back up.
The reason we have words like “priority” and “prioritize” is because we recognize that in a group of important considerations, concerns and demands, there still might be one or two that are most important–particularly in view of a stated goal or good we say we embrace.
This is why doctors say things like, “The most important thing you can do to protect your health is to stop smoking if you are a smoker and to never take it up if you don’t already smoke.”
But not everyone cares about their health, or at least, not everyone has health as a primary goal.
Excellent point, Seth! Given that you admit that human beings can deal with more than one issue at once, how about answering the questions I asked in @80?
But perhaps railing about how stupid people are to care about rendering the planet uninhabitable is easier than either defending your integrity (provided you have both integrity and the means to defend it) on the one hand, or, on the other, admitting that you don’t have any facts or information to support your assertions and just make stuff up, if not more important.
Ugh. So annoying when you post a comment and realize your syntax sucks. I should have made that, “But perhaps railing about how stupid people are to care about rendering the planet uninhabitable is easier if not more important than” etc
fyi, Seth: some activists–even gay activists–do argue that global warming is more important than a slew of gay-related issues. See this post, almost two years old, from Troy Williams, on full spectrum social justice: http://troydwilliams.com/2010/07/29/full-spectrum-social-justice/
the overall argument:
the most specifically relevant passage for this discussion:
So there you go, Seth. People who argue that climate change is more important than other issues, even ones that can benefit them personally, do pretty much argue that climate change is more important than other issue.
Oh, and about this:
The church, with its emphasis on big families and leaders who have preached from the pulpit that global warming is a hoax, is not just an impediment to saving the planet but an active force in its destruction. Criticizing the actions of the LDS church on this topic is, I think, pretty important, and I was already mulling over a longer post about the topic for this blog. And it’s why, among my other activism, I worked quite hard to reactivate an LDS environmental group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/21141126751/
but perhaps you’ll take this as an opportunity to evaluate whether coming over to MSP and making assertions you can’t support, asking questions you could answer yourself if you’d just avail yourself of google, and making statements you acknowledge are “misleading,” is really the best way of defending marriage and proving that you value children in general and your own in particular.
OK, Holly.
If all of that is true and we are in agreement, I guess we can also be in agreement that there was really little point in you raising the global warming tangent on this discussion in the first place.
As for #80, I don’t really see much that needs to be expanded on there. I made the point initially that various family relationships have their own unique problems – which I don’t think is a particularly controversial suggestion – with or without support. Secondly, I stated that some of them have even more problems than monogamy, and when asked to provide an example, I provided co-habitation as the clear winner. As far as I’m concerned, that topic is dealt with unless you want to bring up anything new. If you insist on nit-picking over this, I’ll just name FLDS-style polygamy and consider my duty on this topic more than discharged. But I don’t think that’s necessary.
I think the purpose in making the original comment is fulfilled (adding context to the things being considered), and I don’t really see any need to play semantic games with you on it.
OK, I’ll disagree on this point, because this issue is important enough that it should be raised even in conversations where it seems tangential — and here it’s not entirely tangential — in case people aren’t aware of how serious the problem is, hence won’t go out of their way to research it.
OK, can I hijack this conversation with a discussion of the practice of enslaving illegal immigrants on Thai fishing boats in the South China Sea?
How about Sudan?
@92 Sure, if you have something interesting to say on the subject. It seems like around @81 we summed up this whole marriage question anyway…
Hmm… you have a point.
What do you mean, “expanded on,” when you never even answered the real question to begin with?
That’s not at all close to the point you made initially. If that’s the point you were intending to make, you failed. As for the point you did make, it’s quoted below – and above, more than once.
I didn’t ask for examples of the problems; I asked for a list of the alternatives to marriage.
Are you really unable to understand the difference between “provide a list of the alternatives to marriage” and “Provide a list of the problems”?
but FLDS-style polygamy is still marriage, isn’t it? You stressed that people who consider themselves married are essentially married. And you didn’t mention alternative forms of marriage, but alternatives to marriage.
I do accept that you are unable to provide truly adequate context or support for your statement. But it would be nice if in the future, you would work to say what you really mean early on. Next time, for instance, if you want to suggest that “various family relationships have their own unique problems,” please say something like that, instead of something confusing, unsupported, and inaccurate like “its also worth considering how well alternatives to marriage [ NOTE: alternatives TO marriage] have fared in society as well. I would submit that other methods of living together have had their own set of social problems as well. Some of them have had even more problems than marriage has.”
I do love those moments when for all your bluster and bombast, you have to admit that i am right. Thanks!
I must underscore the point that when you’re sitting in a burning building talking about issues in marriage with a bunch of people who seem oblivious to the fire, your first item of business really should be to point out to them that Hey! The building’s on fire!
if they insisting on staying in the building and arguing about marriage as it burns down around them and kills them, well, that’s their business. You’ve done your duty.
But I plan to find a call attention to climate change in many of the conversations I have, so if you don’t like it, Seth, well, I’m sure you can some up with some possible methods to manage your upset.
Oh, I see. You wanted to take the discussion in a different direction than I did.
Well, I don’t. Sorry.
Did you have anything else to add?
I’ll point out that precisely what it is you “don’t” is unclear in your previous comment, but given how much trouble is involved in getting ANY sort of clarification out of you, I won’t ask for clarification now.
Further,I don’t remember asking for either your permission or your approval when I introduced another topic. I feel no obligation or interest in acquiring your permission or approval for anything at all, so no need to apologize on that count, though I do admit that you have ample reason to be sorry in other ways. I just hope, as I mentioned, that you’ll try to do better next time.
Of course you know, Seth, that if and when I do, I’ll add it without consulting you first. But it is quite amusing to see you trying to assert control over the conversation now, so thanks for the question.
Oh, I’m the one trying to assert dominance and control over the conversation Holly?
That’s about the most ironic thing I’ve read all afternoon.
Seth, sweetheart, I have managed to direct the conversation in the ways I desire.
You, however, have failed. That’s my point: not that I didn’t try, but that we both tried, and I succeeded and you failed.
You said on another thread that one of your reasons for posting is “to point out that the believing position is not ridiculous and unfounded.”
You fail at that a lot. For all your effort, your position still looks ridiculous and unfounded as often as not.
It’s clear that you’re angry and upset. You have good reason to be: you’ve failed to express your ideas successfully, and you dislike people pointing that out. It’s clear that one way you’re dealing with that frustration is to act like you’re somehow in charge of the conversation, and entitled to ask things like “Did you have anything else to add?”
As I said, it’s amusing. So if you don’t want to stop, I’m willing to continue pointing out when you say something ridiculous or unfounded.
Yes Holly, between the two of us, it’s certainly clear that I’m the angry one.
If that sounded patronizing, I’m sure it was just your imagination.
Thanks! That’s the sort of amusing attempt I was looking for.
I guess we are all waiting. Holly is waiting for Seth to name alternatives to marriage, and I’m waiting for Seth to give me the same kind of insights into Dan Petersen that he has for John Dehlin, and Seth is waiting for Dehlin to provide “names and proof” that he spoke to a general authority, otherwise he refuses to believe that he did (#7, Two Interesting . . .). Well, it isn’t exactly the same as Waiting for Godot, but I have an idea that Godot will show up before Holly and I get answers. And D.P. is still fired regardless of whether or not Seth gets the proof he wants.
Actually, Parker, I’ve given up waiting, at least in this round. Christ will come through before Seth does.
Though that’s a good point about Seth’s relationship to evidence. According to Seth on the Maxwell institute thread, we don’t really need evidence that the Book of Mormon is indeed an ancient history engraven on gold plates in order to accept that it is and to completely reorder our lives because of that acceptance.
but to believe that John Dehlin, who has all sorts of contacts all over the church, might have talked to a GA? Even though there are GA’s who actively seek dialogue with people on the fringes of the church for the insight that provides? WE MUST HAVE NAMES AND WE MUST HAVE PROOF OR NO ONE WITH ANY RESPECT FOR EVIDENCE AND TRUTH WILL PLACE ANY CONFIDENCE IN THIS OUTLANDISH CLAIM!
http://mainstreetplaza.com/2012/06/22/two-interesting-news-items-mormons-secret-and-maxwell-institute-shake-up/
I already expressed problems I had with Daniel Peterson Parker. Not sure what else you want.
Incidentally, Jack posted this summary:
http://www.clobberblog.com/?p=4481
I happen to know Jack pretty well and trust that she wouldn’t make the assertion that the Dehlin paper had GA involvement without more information on the subject than I have. So my position on this has changed since a few days ago. We still have no indication that anyone above Bradford was involved in Peterson’s demotion (he wasn’t technically fired – he was demoted).
Jack has posted a conclusion sort of post as well:
http://www.clobberblog.com/?p=4532
An interesting article discussing cohabitation as a reality we have to learn to deal with (partly because it’s not as detrimental as some people say) and the misplaced belief in marriage as a cure of a variety of social ills: http://www.alternet.org/story/156162/5_states_where_%22living_in_sin%22_is_illegal_america's_irrational_love_affair_with_the_institution_of_marriage_?page=entire
Actually the article just says that more Americans are doing cohabitation, and less Americans disapprove of it, and that there’s legal problems cohabitating couples face that need to be overcome. I could have told you that already.
The article briefly promised at actually tackling the question of whether cohabitation is inferior to marriage with it’s mention of the New York Times article. But the interviewee simply hemmed and hawed, and ultimately didn’t say much about it. It basically boiled down to “we need more data.”
Well, OK….
Guess I’ll wait for that then.
Actually it states
Yes, Seth. There are many things you could have told people already, but for some strange reason, you often refuse to provide information you claim to have.
Why? Just take it on faith, the way you do with the Book of Mormon and the rest of Mormonism’s claims. After all the stakes are much lower, and “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” as you yourself said, and you don’t want to be guilty of “demanding a degree of evidence that is not reasonable or warranted for the subject.”
If you can believe that a 14-year-old boy saw an angel in his bedroom and dug up a box with gold plates in it near his home and translated an ancient text by peering into the darkness of his hat at a stone he’d dropped into the bottom of it and was visited by God and Jesus and told that he was their favorite latter-day special prophet, all just because the guy said so, then surely you can believe that cohabitation isn’t really all that bad.
Unless, of course, it boils down to the fact that you want to believe the claims of Mormonism and don’t want to believe that cohabitation might not be as ruinously evil as you like to assert.
Uh huh.
Is “change the subject” a standard operating procedure you have taped to your computer monitor or something Holly? Last I checked, we weren’t talking about faith claims at all.
I’m interested in the larger context, Seth. You wrote @85:
I can remember multiple strands of various conversations, all at once. You have espoused a particular approach to evidence and belief, and I want to see if you apply it consistently.
So, no, I don’t have “change the subject” taped my monitor as an instruction. To me, I’m not changing the subject; I’m just aware of the larger subject, which is how things relate back to Mormonism and its effects on those who discuss it.
That wouldn’t be such a strange or difficult thing to pay attention to, would it?
But it does seem at times that “Dodge the question!” might be a command you have taped to your monitor. Certainly you seem to find some questions extremely discomfiting, and work very hard to avoid answering them. As I mentioned, I find it interesting and amusing.
No Holly, I just consider a lot of what you write to be not worth bothering with. Especially since so much of it is merely a transparent attempt at heckling.
Back to the topic though – the area of whether cohabitation is or is not a good thing seems to have a lot of different camps throwing contested data back and forth at each other. Some say it leads to more divorces, others less. Numbers get thrown around without context and you can dig up your favorite decontextualized data blurb and act like it’s relevant.
But it really boils down to this:
Cohabitation basically says “I want to have sex with you, but I don’t want to care about you enough to commit long term.”
That’s pretty-much jerk territory – no matter how you slice it.
As nice as people who cohabitate may or may not be in all other respects.
And as nice or bad as people who marry may be in all other respects.
and yet, here you are, typing away, bothering.
Unless it says, “I consider myself married to you in every important way and don’t need someone else to validate it,” a position you yourself defended @26 in this very conversation.
Yeah. I can TOTALLY see why you wouldn’t find someone pointing that out worth responding to.
Because attacking and defending the very same position in the same conversation is “pretty-much jerk territory no matter how you slice it.”
Unless you are viewing marriage as a synonym for certain social commitments. In that instance, cohabitation indicates a desire not to enter into those same commitments. This isn’t really a difficult point – there is a reason people cohabitate instead of getting married, and it involves not wanting to be bound by those social commitments.
Incidentally, this is also a reason for not extending the same legal benefits (or extending different legal benefits) to cohabitating couples as opposed to married ones.
Those who cohabitate have made a social decision to forego the same level of legal commitment. So it only makes sense that the government can treat their relationship differently than a couple who has made that level of legal commitment.
perhaps. But it does not necessarily that not wanting to make certain commitments to all of society involves an unwillingness to make a long-term commitment to one’s partner in the relationship.
Certainly that’s the thinking in many European countries, where marriage is entirely a legal arrangement, religion doesn’t enter into it, and gay couples can marry.
Here, the concern seems to be more about protecting the abstract concept of “marriage” than the people who enter into it.
I don’t think those two things in your last sentence have to be separate concerns.
For instance, when’s the last time you heard someone say the concern is more about protecting democracy than protecting the people in them?
(OK, maybe I did hear something like that back in some of my undergrad Political Science classes, but it’s not a distinction people always make in regards to every social institution)
Seth, you’re doing a lot of mind reading with this one. The decision to share a household with someone is a complex one; the decision of when/whether to marry also. People approaching their own life choices with a different set of assumptions than yours aren’t necessarily thinking the same things that you project onto them.
It reminds me two sentences that came before the comment I cited in the O.P.:
So, in a nutshell, you’re in everyone’s head, and you know why they choose to marry (or not) when they do; why people used to have kids in the past, why they do today, etc.
Have I mentioned before that people who disapprove of something tend to ascribe frivolous motivations to people who do it?
Yeah. That.
Marriage is an abstract concept. It exists because we say it does. If we declared marriage illegal or impossible as of today, there would still be people who would decide to spend their lives together, or simply find themselves doing it because they like being together.
Yeah. I was thinking about how easy it is to vilify the reasons people get married. There’s always that very Mormon reason:
“I want to have sex, but I’m too afraid and immature to do it until someone from my church tells me it’s OK, so let’s get married right away.”
or
“I really want to have a great big party and get lots of presents from my friends. In fact, that’s more important to me than simply sharing my life with you. I won’t feel like I’m really committed to you until that happens.”
or
“I like you, but what matters most to me in how we structure our relationship are the financial and social benefits I’ll get from making a public commitment to you.”
All of that is “pretty much jerk territory no matter how you slice it.”
Which was YOUR reason for getting married, Seth? It has to be one of those three.
Because in the same way you claim to know why people cohabitate, I claim to know why people marry. The reasons I’ve listed are the reasons why people do it–end of story. I know the primary reason people marry is not love. If it were, they’d just declare their love for each other and be done with it. No, because marriage is about some kind of official religious and legal status, people’s reasons for marrying are NOT about the other person in the marriage but about the institution–what they’ll get from it.
Yeah. That really is “pretty-much jerk territory no matter how you slice it.”
Chanson, if I’m wrong, then why do I have such a hard time finding any societal discussion of children that isn’t couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms, with adult fulfillment as the primary overriding concern? The very language that adults use to defend their own lifestyle choices speaks quite a lot about the assumptions they hold and what they prioritize. I see a lot of talk of adults getting what they are entitled to. I don’t see a lot of concern for anything beyond the sphere of the individual.
You’re kidding. You seriously can’t find any societal discussion of children that isnt couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms, with adult fulfillment as the primary overriding concern? Is the scroller on your browser broken, preventing you from scrolling up and reading the OP?
If so, let me re-quote:
Well, gee, Seth. Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place. After all, as you yourself said, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
If YOUR inability to find these statements that undermine your position is going to count as ANY sort of evidence that there is ANY validity in your position, then the fact that no one is able to find DNA evidence to support the claims of the Book of Mormon–that in fact the DNA evidence contradicts the claims of the Book of Mormon–is evidence that the Book of Mormon is a load of bunk.
You can’t claim in one conversation the absence of evidence is an utterly trivial criticism that in no way undermines your position and then claim in another conversation that the absence of evidence is a damning point that entirely supports your position.
First off, I wasn’t talking about your original post when I made that observation Chanson. Secondly, you’ve shifted the topic to “children.”
Of course when people are talking about CHILDREN, they tend to talk about children.
I was talking about discussion of marriage primarily and other adult unions. When people talk about marriage – yes the discussion does tend to go adult-centered rather rapidly.
Well, gee. Since marriage is a commitment between TWO ADULTS, it makes sense that discussions of it would be adult-centered.
Everyone paying attention will notice that that contradicts
So which is it, Seth? Is it true that “Of course when people are talking about CHILDREN, they tend to talk about children” or is it true that you “have such a hard time finding any societal discussion of children that isnt couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms”?
Everyone paying attention will notice that that contradicts
So which is it, Seth? Is it true that Of course when people are talking about CHILDREN, they tend to talk about children or is it true that you have such a hard time finding any societal discussion of children that isnt couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms?
+
= ?
Oh, I see. You mean other than in discussions (like this one) where people talk about adult unions in terms of their effects on children, people never seem to talk about adult unions in terms of their effects on children.
Holly, you’re defining marriage as a commitment between two adults. It’s actually more than that. And the fact you’re reducing it to that kind of supports my point here.
Actually Holly, good point about the wording contradictions.
Couple things.
First off, marriage is being redefined in our society as merely a matter of adult-to-adult commitment, with little to no regard for any societal obligation or obligation to anyone outside the romantic couple. That’s one trend I’m very much seeing here.
Secondly however, children are largely viewed in terms of adult fulfillment in our modern society. Having children is largely couched in terms of personal rights. “I have a right to have a child.” And personal aspirations of self-fulfillment are put at the center of discussions of whether to have children or not. Discussions of the number of children, or whether to have children are all primarily couched in terms of adult well-being.
Both of these are trends that I see in our national discussion. Of course you can still find articles, studies, and blog conversations that talk about child well-being (though even those can jump the rails and start obsessively moping about whether the ADULT is a good parent – making it, once again, all about the adult). But that doesn’t necessarily negate the trend I’m seeing.
By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that adult selfishness is a new invention only discovered in the last 30 years.
But I do think our modern social context gives adult selfishness freer reign to express itself and get itself written into the legal and social code.
I’m defining marriage as a commitment between two adults because that’s how our society defines it. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=definition+of+marriage
This is not a new thing, Seth, despite your assertion to the contrary.
Really? Since when? And what does that even mean? So when 25-year-olds “get married,” they’re not REALLY married….
until they have kids?
until Seth R says they are?
until what?
And yet, when someone else brings up a trend, you write things like
so which is it, Seth? Is the larger tend you’re seeing something valid, or is it just the product of a self-selected, small, and rather distorted segment of the population who “project their own issues onto everyone around them”?
it’s not an issue of mere “wording.” Your entire position is incoherent, your approach to argument utterly inconsistent.
I love the way you’re ignoring Chanson’s comment, btw.
as for this
and this
Well, it’s not surprising, given the divine model we are supposedly encouraged to follow.
Let’s look at “Heavenly Father.”
If there was ever a parent who views his children in terms of his own fulfillment, it’s him. It’s his “work and his glory.”
He deprives his kids of their mother. She’s quite absent from the whole business. He makes and executes plans for his children’s growth with their big brother. When he has business so important that he has to visit them, as when he initiated the “Restoration” with Joseph Smith, he takes Big Brother along, not Mom. (The theological and psychological implications of Jesus as Big Brother are indeed rich.)
When his kids disappoint them, he figures the best way to deal with the problem is to kill all but a handful of them and start over, as in the whole Noah’s ark thing.
Finally, if you look at this success rate, he SUCKS at his work and his glory. He starts off by banishing a third of his children from his presence forever, and they become his mortal enemies, committed to destroying their siblings.
What would we think of a human father who achieved that outcome?
As for the kids he likes well enough to let them acquire a body and an education, most of them won’t measure up to the requirements necessary to go back and live with or even visit him again. And he doesn’t let them know much of anything about their mother–perhaps because she got so fed up with his crap that she left him? Went off to care for the third of the children he deprived of a home and a source of nurturing?
I remember being in the MTC, looking at a pie chart of world religions by number of adherents. I stared at the tiny sliver of Mormonness, and I thought, explicitly, “For someone who’s perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient, god sure isn’t doing very well at this work and his glory.”
At that point my concern was whether the church was really so important to spiritual salvation. I figured if it was crucial, it was pretty crappy of a loving God to take so long to restore it. I thought it seemed more likely that the LDS church wasn’t the only available means to salvation.
And I think that’s even truer now. But I also think that God’s an exceptionally lousy parent.
Mormon theology is not really child-centric. Instead, as Mormon scripture stresses, it’s about GOD’s WORK and GOD’s GLORY. It’s all about how having children makes God feel special and important. The focus is not on whether his children are well-adjusted and productive, but on whether they are obedient and humble, because he thinks their obedience and humility makes him look better. And requisite in the whole affair is the torture and execution of that Favorite Son/Big Brother who’s so important to him, the one other being he loves most (WAY more than he loves Mom).
Given that the parent-child relationship we enshrine in LDS theology and label “perfect” is entirely about one parent’s fulfillment, has no need of mothering except as a logical and biological necessity (Truth is reason, truth eternal Tells me I’ve a mother there), and results, for most of Daddy’s children, in an eternal and irreparable divide between parent and child that Daddy insists on, it hardly seems surprising that Mormonism in particular would create dysfunctional marriages and families and really skewed ideas about why we have children and how they should be nurtured.
As I wrote in a facebook discussion,
So if you dislike this trend of parenting being all about the parents and not so much about the kids, maybe you should reconsider the theology you embrace, since it takes this thing you claim to hate and enshrines it as divine.
Holly, I would simply note that you conveniently left out WHAT it is that is “God’s glory.”
@133: doesn’t change the facts that A) the whole proposition is still not child-centric and B) God sucks at his work and his glory.
And I do still love the way you’re still ignoring Chanson’s comment. Classy.
It’s the same logic as the criticism you make here http://irresistibledisgrace.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/marriage-is-dead-and-we-have-killed-it/#comment-8808
namely
God’s work and glory is not a sign of parental concern for the kids, but rather a sign of parental obsession with his own self-image.
And even still, he sucks at it.
Hold up a moment Holly…
You’re saying God is a helicopter parent?
That would be a bit inconsistent with how you’ve usually described him.
@136
Hang on there, tiger! Don’t get too excited just yet.
I’m saying that like helicopter parents, God’s parenting reveals a “parental obsession with their own self-image” instead of “parental concern for the kids,” even though God’s parenting style is anything but helicopter-ish. instead, it’s violent, abusive, and distant.
I still love how you’re still ignoring Chanson’s comment.
Well, you’re getting so excited yourself, I thought I’d join in on the fun.
But you still haven’t really recited for me WHAT God’s work and glory is.
Namely – the well-being of this children. So it’s not so much that God is obsessed with his own image – it’s that he has made his purpose synonymous with the ultimate well being of others.
Which is ideally what a parent or a lover of any kind should do – to reform their own desires, purpose, and self-image in conformity with devotion to another. Some of us are better at it than others, but it doesn’t have a lot to do primarily with rights and whether I’m getting as much of the approval pie as Harry and Sally down the street.
Sorry
“well-being of HIS children”
Sorry for the typo.
Oh. OK: “To bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of MAN.”
If that argument works for god, it works for helicopter parents as well, who at least don’t require their children to worship them, and don’t insist that one of their kids get murdered in order for the others to have the privilege of hanging out with Dad.
if that’s true, why do you trash helicopter parents for trying to do that?
Still ignoring Chanson? Can’t you also admit to her that she caught you up on your “wording”?
Because I already responded to Chanson’s remark.
And your attempt to make this a debate about the theodicy (every angry atheist’s favorite pet issue) is nothing more than subject-changing and heckling.
I can almost accept that you believe that. You used some of the same words she used and wrote a comment after she commented, so I guess in your book, that could count as a response.
It’s a discussion of parenting. If families are forever, then it’s worth examining the one “forever family” we are told about, which is that of God and his children.
But if this is your tacit admission that God’s way of parenting is so alien that there’s really nothing meaningful we can learn from it and should not use it as the basis for anything we do in this life, I can live with that. Certainly that’s one of my critiques of Mormonism, so it’s nice to have you back that up.
And if you’re also admitting that Mormon theology is so morally repugnant that a believer can’t help but find a discussion of it “heckling,” I can live with that too.
Admit it Holly, you’re just trying to derail this into a discussion about why God allows suffering.
Even if it has some tangential reference to the topic at hand, it’s pretty obvious an inflammatory topic like that is just going to hijack the entire thread.
Wow, Seth. You do fancy yourself as quite the mindreader, don’t you?
anyway, you’re wrong. I’m content to show that God is a bad parent and that his example as a bad parent creates a lot of dysfunction in LDS families and results in incoherent and inconsistent ideas about relationships precisely like the ones you are expressing, so thanks for helping to prove my point.
If you want to return to earlier subjects–if, for instance, you want to deal with @131 or @127, no one is stopping you.
Yes and the topic of “is God a bad parent” is inevitably going to wind up being a debate about why suffering is allowed. I’ve been on enough atheist message boards to know that 9 times out of 10, if an atheist brings this topic up, it’s going to derail the conversation completely – and about 7 times out of 10 – that was deliberate on the part of the atheist who brought it up.
More amazing displays of mind-reading! And yet, not quote amazing enough to mind-read (or recall) that Holly doesn’t identify as atheist.
Well, if that does happen, it won’t be because of me. I find theodicy really boring and beside the point. It’s an unanswerable question I don’t really care to discuss.
Sorry, Seth, but those telepathic powers you are always trying to advertise have really failed you on this one.
However, analyzing the fictitious character “God” and figuring out how his small-mindedness interacts with his egomania and his violence and his astonishing lack of self-awareness–that I find interesting. Why, of all the creatures we could have invented to worship, did so much of humanity decide to latch onto that nasty bastard? What does it say about humanity as a whole that we’re so stupid that we think someone who traffics so blatantly in violence and cruelty is the epitome of unconditional love? How are our notions of family, love, and forgiveness necessarily poisoned when our ideal of a loving father is that mean-spirited, egomaniacal crank?
I also like the impressive deployment of made-up statistics.
To show you, Seth, that I’m happy to discuss human relationships rather than divine malfeasance, I invite you again, Seth, to address @127 or @131.
p.s. For the record, Seth, Chanson is right. Though I know most people who consider themselves christian would consider me an atheist, I don’t really consider myself one. I have a concept of god, but it’s very idiosyncratic, so I don’t bring it up much.
@148 Well, y’know, 9 times out of 10 stats are just made up.
“However, analyzing the fictitious character God and figuring out how his small-mindedness interacts with his egomania and his violence and his astonishing lack of self-awarenessthat I find interesting.”
Right – exactly. You wanted to talk about the theodicy.
Because there is nowhere else that line of argument is going.
Chanson, I remember one of my friends who was taking some college statistics classes report his professor stating that “statistics is the art of taking the numbers and making them say what you want them to say.”
Now we just need a fun quote about “rhetoric.”
What I want to talk about is not theodicy, Seth.
I seriously can’t believe how many times I get to do this in conversations with you, Seth: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+theodicy
In case you’re too lazy to click on the link, as you were in another conversation, I’ll spell it out for you. Theodicy is “a vindication of the divine attributes, particularly holiness and justice, in establishing or allowing the existence of physical and moral evil.”
I’m really not interested.
YOU might think that my framing of the topic is a response to someone else’s theodicy, but that’s your error and your problem, borne of your ignorance. I’m not approaching god from the POV of metaphysics but of literary criticism. God is a character; I want to understand the character. I don’t think examining him will tell me something true or real about the universe.
there are plenty of other places that area of exploration can and does go. I manage to talk about it a lot without ever getting to the question of “If God is good and all-powerful, why does He allow evil?”
Frankly, Seth, I really CAN’T end up there, since I don’t begin with the premise that God is good or all-powerful.
Remarkable dynamic going on here: You keep insisting that it’s nasty atheists who want to “derail the conversation completely” by talking about theodicy, the question of why a perfect god would allow evil, blah blah blah. Nasty atheists, focusing on theodicy, derailing conversations that should really be about something else!
I say that it’s not really a particularly compelling topic for me–in fact I find it silly–and have offered a couple of times to direct the conversation back to earlier topics. But you are stuck on the topic of the derailed conversations. If your garments are all in a twist because the conversation has been derailed, by all means, de-derail it. Since supposedly the third time is a charm, I’ll state again: Seth, I would love to have you respond to @127 and @131. If you want the subject changed away from theodicy, prove it by changing the subject.
Though we would hope that those numbers were at least numbers that could be documented and verified, instead of numbers fabricated from thin air, like your meaningless figures @145.
I know full well what theodicy is Holly.
You’re just incapable of seeing the logical connections in your own arguments.
You want to talk about what a jerk the Christian God is.
Well, why is he a jerk?
Because he either does evil stuff, or allows evil stuff to happen while supposedly being all powerful. And why would he do that?
Bang!
You’ve got a theodicy discussion.
I think you’re being purposely obtuse here. The connection is is pretty obvious.
And whether you personally Holly, believe that God is all powerful or not is irrelevant. You’re attacking the Christian concept of God (or whatever it is you think is my concept of God) – which means you’re going to be talking about a theoretically all-powerful being.
Which means you’ve got the theodicy.
I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT WHY HE WOULD DO THAT. it’s a dumb and unanswerable question, and a waste of my time to contemplate.
And if I don’t worry about WHY, then I’m not in the realm of theodicy.
Though trying to explain this to you gets involves reaching into the realm of theoidiocy.
“theoidiocy: trying to talk about religion to a dense true believer who insists that every conversation about god be framed in the terms of his belief.”
Oh! I’m attacking it! Oh! No wonder you seem so wounded.
I figure I might as well repeat this from @151:
Yes, you don’t care. That’s why you used such flowery and inflammatory language about it. To show us how much you don’t care.
Right.
Liberal use of expletives and insult is always the mark of someone who is dispassionately disinterested in a subject.
I mean… take this little gem:
“Why, of all the creatures we could have invented to worship, did so much of humanity decide to latch onto that nasty bastard? What does it say about humanity as a whole that were so stupid that we think someone who traffics so blatantly in violence and cruelty is the epitome of unconditional love? How are our notions of family, love, and forgiveness necessarily poisoned when our ideal of a loving father is that mean-spirited, egomaniacal crank?”
Yes, this is obviously a subject Holly couldn’t care less about.
It’s a good thing she reassured us earlier that she wasn’t angry in this conversation, or I might have almost been foolishly persuaded otherwise just now.
Seth: wondering why human beings worship an evil god is not the same as wondering why a particular god does evil things.
I am very interested in the former and not at all interested in the latter.
The distinction appears to be beyond your comprehension, which is unfortunate for both of us, but there it is.
Oh, I get the distinction.
I just see it as trivial and basically irrelevant.
Like much of the quibbling you’ve been throwing out as a distraction throughout this thread.
If I cared about your assessment of much of anything, that might be a problem.
but as it is, it matters not, and it’s just one more reason we can all be grateful that you do not actually have much influence over the world or its way of conversing.
My turn then Holly.
If you don’t care, why are you still responding to me?
Because it’s fun to watch you contradict yourself, fail to realize that there are links to information you want, and fail so spectacularly at your goal of demonstrating “that the believing position is not ridiculous and unfounded.”
I can also tell that, given how you obsess about marriage and stuff, your own marriage is on the rocks and you need something to distract you from how crappy your home life is, so keeping you busy at the computer is actually compassionate service.
So, let’s read some more about how you don’t want to see the conversation get stuck on a discussion of theodicy.
(p.s. I don’t really know that Seth’s homelife sucks. I rather suspect it, but I don’t know it for certain–I don’t have a testimony of it. Still, I figured I might as well try that “I can read people’s minds” thingy he likes to do.)
Yes, you certainly sound like you’re having fun – amid the insults and expletives.
Whereas you seem pretty miserable, amid the pomposity and incoherence.
Things must really suck in the rest of the house if you’ll stay so close to the computer for this.
Well Chanson, you think there’s much point continuing this discussion any further?
@164 — When believers come here and tell us we must be angry and bitter to be sitting here discussing Mormonism on the Internet, I don’t think it contributes to any kind of reasonable discussion. So perhaps we should refrain from speculating as to why Seth likes to debate people whose beliefs differ from his own.
@167 Yes, you’re right. But given how emphatically Seth insisted that he knew my motives, I figured at least once instance of turn about was fair play. And at least @162 I pointed out that that’s what I was doing. I doubt this alone with break him of his nasty habit, but if he has any empathy at all or the slightest ability to learn from his mistakes, he might think twice before he does it next time.
Empathy for who?
For you?
Or for the people who have to live with the consequences of your decisions?
People who actually care about empathy don’t think there’s a difference.
That was one point of the OP. You can have empathy for children and empathy for adults. It’s not an either/or. It shouldn’t be an either/or.
That’s part of your vast and nasty problem. You think you have to and get to choose whom you have empathy for, and you withhold it, with a lot of sneering and self-righteous cruelty, from anyone you disapprove of.
It’s what makes you repugnant and unchristlike.
In Shot in the Heart, Mikal Gilmore’s amazing memoir about what led his brother Gary to do what he did, Mikal mentions his young Mormon cousins in Provo and adds, “They were prissy and mean in the way only well-bred Mormon children can be.”
I read than in my 30s and I got it. I was raised to be prissy and mean. Those characteristics were inculcated in me as righteousness and missionary work and standing up for the gospel, but really, they’re just prissiness and meanness. I could empathize with both the prissy, mean cousins and the people who suffered when they met them.
I’ll leave it to you to figure out how that applies to you.
Here’s the problem with speaking on moral issues. It’s impossible to have opinions on stuff like divorce and cohabitation without stepping on big personal landmines for people you know. I deal with cohabitating couples all the time filing bankruptcies. And they’re pretty normal folks. Nice in most respects – they’ve got their own sets of problems and I’ve got mine. They have their own strong points too. Some are nice, some are stupid, some are admirable, some are downright annoying.
It’s just your normal slice of society. So when I oppose cohabitation in writing, I actually do have human faces in mind whom I know would not like what I’m saying. I feel bad about that.
But what then?
Are we supposed to drop any moral position we know would upset someone we know? Are we supposed to simply stop opposing divorce because we all know divorcees?
The problems with cohabitation are structurally inherent in the living arrangement itself. Lack of commitment, lack of trust, and focus on personal insecurities are built into the core DNA of the living arrangement. Those are not things to be celebrated.
Likewise, I’m not about to celebrate the fact that the large majority of divorces in the United States don’t even experience “high level conflict” between spouses, let alone what professionals would call “abuse.” People are just dropping their spouses and subjecting their kids to the low level hell of visitation just because they “don’t feel like it.” And I’m supposed to think this is a positive development for our society just because I know divorced people in my own ward?
A huge amount of our romantic relationships in our society are being entered into, engaged in, and consumated with failure as the underlying premise. We call ourselves “saavy shoppers” and “cautious consumers” when describing LOVE. How is this healthy? How is this anything other than mentally messed up?
Never mind the underlying financial instability that comes with the territory of cohabitation and the utter financial collapse that accompanies most divorces. As a bankruptcy attorney – I’ve never seen a divorce that was anything other than a financial disaster for the people who did it.
This is a problem – and not just for the people doing it. For the society that has to absorb the slow erosion of the trust needed to maintain the social contract. For the lovers hamstringing or denying their relationship from square one. For the government that has to foot the bill for benefits for people who’ve financially imploded along with their relationship implosion. And worst of all, for the kids who get to have suspicion, lack of trust, and manipulation built into their life paradigm.
Those are problems that deserve harsh language. But harsh language is most certainly, well… harsh. And it’s going to steamroll over a whole bunch on nuanced differences between people in the population it’s targeting. I don’t know how you can avoid that – other than just not having convictions that matter at all.
I guess if you have an authority figure who tells you something is wrong, you can find all types of reasons to support that assertion.
Yeah, that’s why my comment above was full of Thomas S. Monson quotes Parker.
Huh. It’s actually sort of nice to finally read an explanation for why you’re an aggressively cruel, unchristlike, nasty, hateful jerk.
I realize that’s a bit harsh, but hey, as you yourself said, some problems “deserve harsh language.”
Your aggressive, sanctimonious, unchristlike cruelty is one of the things eroding social trust. It’s pretty hard to trust someone who feels they have the right to condemn most of society. It’s pretty hard to trust someone who states, explicitly, that they take satisfaction in trying to shame large portions of society. it’s pretty hard to trust someone who feels the he and people like him–and only he and people like him–are entitled to a great many rights and privileges.
YOU are the PROBLEM, Seth. Not the solution.
I pity your children. Lord, how I pity your children. What a nightmare it must be to share a house with you.
I hope your wife realizes that whatever the financial cost of leaving you, it is inconsequential to the emotional cost to your children of being exposed, every day, to a dad like you. It’s going to poison them.
Of course you won’t object to my saying such things, because there’s a “problem with speaking on moral issues” and there “are problems that deserve harsh language.” My world view and my convictions justify entirely my saying such things to you and about you. I have nothing to retract, nothing to apologize for. In fact, you should thank me for explaining your problems to you. Actually, I’d be doing the world a favor if I’d go to blogs where you’re a permablogger and start condemning you there.
** Removed by admin by request/agreement of discussion participants **
No, the problem is that if you invent motivations and project them onto people, they just might tell you you’re wrong. I think that was amply demonstrated on this thread.
+ @174 : WTF? I thought this was supposed to be a civil exchange of ideas. Can you make your point in a civil and constructive manner?
** Removed by admin by request/agreement of discussion participants **
** Removed by admin by request/agreement of discussion participants **
Wow, Seth, if that’s you holding back, can’t wait to see you let go.
And it’s pretty interesting that your definition of “civility” grants you the right to inform others that they’re a cancer destroying civilization, but there’s almost no criticism of you that isn’t uncivil.
I admit that find it satisfying to point out when your statements are contradictory, dishonest, irresponsible, lazy, and hypocritical. It happens often.
Oh, and is this really just “a blog debate”? I thought we were talking about “the slow erosion of the trust needed to maintain the social contract,” something that threatens the very foundation of civilization.
If there are types of discourse that are inappropriate for “a blog debate,” even about a really important topic, then you should examine very carefully the ways in which you have been guilty of them. You might start with recognizing that assuming that you know the motivations of every single person whose behavior you disapprove of, and that those motives are uniformly despicable, is pretty darn inappropriate for “a blog debate.”
I’ll withdraw @174, Seth, and apologize for any upset it might have caused you.
I’ll only add, that if a hypothetical professional felt that his/her career would suffer if his/her clients were to learn about the types of things s/he says about them in a public form, s/he might reconsider those statements, and perhaps stop making them.
Holly, you comment on this blog anonymously.
If you were having your comments on this debate published publicly for your boss and co-workers and neighbors, how would you feel? Would that tone down what you have said here?
Chanson, if Holly is withdrawing any comments and anything is removed, feel free to also remove my response in comments #176 and #177.
If the participants in the discussion mutually agree that they would like to have comments deleted, I’ll delete them. Holly, by withdrawing @174, does that mean you would like it deleted?
Seth, I try to avoid saying things about my co-workers, boss, neighbors, and family on blogs. I might not be thrilled if they came across this discussion, but I wouldn’t worry that it could cause me much harm.
If you feel otherwise, you might think about that.
@180 That wasn’t really what I meant, since I thought MSP didn’t delete comments unless they were superfluous–something along the lines of “Oh, sorry my italics are messed up–can an administrator fix that for me.” But sure, if deleting it and Seth’s comments will make things better, go for it.
Are any of those people faithful Mormons Holly? You don’t have to answer that. I just want you to think about that. You’ve said incredibly hurtful things about what Mormons hold dear. You can say that you’re only attacking Mormon religious belief and not the Mormons personally. Likewise, I could reply that I’m only attacking the concept of divorce and cohabitation and reserving judgment on individuals who actually do it.
And everyone can think a little bit about how persuasive those distinctions between people and their intensely personal ideals are.
Ideally, I don’t like to delete anything. But if all participants in a discussion want some comments deleted, I won’t refuse.
Seth, is that what you meant @179?
** Removed by admin by request/agreement of discussion participants **
Seth, thanks ever so much for giving me the option to ignore one of your questions, but I’m perfectly happy to answer you here. As an answer, let me give you a link to something I published UNDER MY FULL NAME AND WON A MORMON AWARD FOR AND LIST ON MY CV. https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/divine-malfeasance/
I have family members who are really devout Mormons and also read SUNSTONE. One of them, someone who’s very important to me, read the issue I edited, including the conclusion, which is pretty critical of the church. He told me that it was excellent and that he was proud of me.
Yes, and I intend to say more, often, in many different forums. I hope to get paid for it from time to time, as I have done in the past.
Come on, Seth. This is an ex- and post-Mormon forum. This is a place where people come to talk about the ways Mormonism is damaging and damaged.
Your woundedness might be justified if I hung out in the bloggernacle and said there some of the things I say here. BUT I DON’T DO THAT. I don’t knock on someone’s door and say, “Hi! Will you invite me in so I can tell you why you’re a bad person and should be more like me?”
Nor do I assume that I know the motives of everyone who is Mormon or devoutly religious. They might do things I find damaging and hurtful, but I’m not so arrogant as to imagine that I know every motive for every act that I dislike, nor so self-righteous and judgmental as to assume that those motives are invariably culpably immoral
But you do, as you’ve shown here, and as in this gem of a comment on Andrew’s blog:
Not only is that comment unbelievably judgmental, but it’s also amazingly self-obsessed. Other people want to get married just to piss you off?! The whole thing is an intentional affront designed to insult and hurt you, and rub your face in some sort of defeat?!
Come ON. Seriously! Take some time to consider the possibility that other people’s lives ARE NOT ABOUT YOU, that you’re not even important enough for others to waste much time worrying about what will constitute “flipping you the bird.”
So you can write here
but it wouldn’t be very convincing, because you don’t talk merely about negative effects of divorce or cohabitation on society. No. You intentionally denigrate the emotions and motives of people who cohabitate or divorce.
That’s what it says to YOU, so YOU probably shouldn’t cohabitate. But it’s not necessarily what it says to people who cohabitate. But you can’t consider even the possibility that YOU’RE WRONG.
As for this
I think you should think about it A LOT.
And I think you should talk to someone you trust about the amount of time you spend here, purposely subjecting yourself to things that you know will upset you, making statements that could damage your relationships if others were to find out about them. It’s not really in keeping with the image you seem to want to project elsewhere.
here’s the link to the comment from Seth in the comment above–forgot to include it.
https://irresistibledisgrace.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/marriage-is-dead-and-we-have-killed-it/#comment-8810
Holly, I said you’ve posted hurtful things and justified it. I never said how I personally was taking those things you’ve said.
Anyway, you haven’t really said anything about why it’s OK separate the Mormon from the Mormonism in your mind, but not OK to separate the divorcee from the divorce, or homosexual from homosexuality, or whatever else. Why is it OK to attack the issues on one subject without regard for the people behind it, but not OK on another?
Oh, OK: you find them hurtful, but you’re not hurt by them. That makes sense.
No, I haven’t done that. I haven’t really even tried to do that. What I’ve tried to do is
A) show that YOU, Seth R, bankruptcy lawyer, don’t even attempt to separate the “homosexual from homosexuality, or whatever else.” I’ve tried to show that in fact you make the divorcee synonymous with divorce AND THEN INSIST THAT YOU KNOW WHAT MOTIVES DIVORCEES HAVE FOR THE DECISIONS THEY MAKE AND THOSE MOTIVES ARE SUPER, SUPER BAD AND WORTHY OF CONTEMPT AND CALUMNY. I’ve tried to show that this is uncivil and unchristlike.
and B) suggest that there’s something different about showing up at sacrament meeting and saying, “Hey, y’all are dumb and evil!” and convening another space way from Mormons for saying, “You know, as a Mormon myself, that Mormon shit really seems to be, you know, shit.”
Though, now that you want an explanation of “why its OK separate the Mormon from the Mormonism, but not OK to separate the divorcee from the divorce, or homosexual from homosexuality, or whatever else,” I have a few things to say.
1. I OWN MORMONNESS JUST AS MUCH AS ANYBODY ELSE. I grew up Mormon, of pioneer and polygamist stock, graduated from seminary and institute, won prizes for my knowledge of scripture, went on a mission. I’m still a member of record. I GET TO SAY WHATEVER I WANT ABOUT MORMONISM BECAUSE I OWN MY MORMON EXPERIENCE. I CAN SEPARATE MORMONISM FROM MORMONS BECAUSE MORMONISM IS PART OF ME IN WAYS THAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE NOT A PART OF ME.
I will grant you the same right to criticize divorce and homosexuality just as freely when you own up to being gay and divorced.
2. Homosexuality is not a set of concepts divorced (heh) from real human beings. Unlike Mormonism, It is not and never was a set of verbal texts that can be read on their own, without reference to specific human behavior. “Homosexuality” exists as a concept because it describes actions and emotions and sensations that real human beings feel.
Whether or not we have always had the concept of “homosexuality,” the world has always included gay behavior. It is as old as humanity. It has been punished and vilified and accepted and promoted and winked at and ignored. Many societies have prospered despite an embrace of “homosexuality.” It’s not going to go away.
But Mormonism could go away. Religions have died out in the past and may yet die out again.
Similarly, divorce exists because it’s a practical necessity–because sometimes people make foolish decisions, and our society has decided that it’s better to give them various options for correcting those mistakes.
Mormonism is not a practical necessity. It’s not the answer to a mistake. MORMONISM IS AN INVENTION OF JOSEPH SMITH. It did not exist before 1830. it is separate from human beings in ways that homosexuality and divorce never were.
There is not an official gay organization that all gays donate 10% of their income to. There is not a monolithic Church of Divorce that people join once they become divorced. Divorcees don’t listen to talks every six months by decrepit old gits who tell them why they should look down on others who aren’t divorced, and how they need to go out and convince other people to get divorced too, and how divorce is going to save the world from really terrible evils.
The organization of the church is separate from the members, in the same way that the US government is separate from the collective citizenship of the US.
In the same way that you can criticize the US government without indicting everyone who has ever been and ever will be American, you can criticize the actions of the LDS church without indicting everyone who has ever been and ever will be Mormon, no matter how much they want to whine and insist that any discussion of immoral or misguided church policy is an attack on all Mormons.
In the same way that you can critique and call attention to weaknesses and flaws in the ideology guiding the US without condemning and damning everyone who has ever been and ever will be American, you can critique Mormon doctrine (which is pretty fluid anyway) without condemning and damning everyone who has ever been and ever will be Mormon, no matter who much they want to whine and insist that any discussion of silly Mormon beliefs is an attack on all Mormons.
This is especially true given that Mormons themselves sometimes criticize the actions of the “the church” as something separate from themselves and are bugged by doctrines they find troubling and do not internal. GIVEN THAT MORMONS RESPOND TO AND TREAT AND DISCUSS THE CHURCH AS SOMETHING SEPARATE FROM THEMSELVES ON MANY OCCASIONS AND IN MANY WAYS, I GET TO DO THE VERY SAME THING, BECAUSE HEY! AS I ALREADY POINTED OUT, I AM MORMON!
So there you go, Seth. On all sorts of grounds, I am justified in saying that MORMONISM SUCKS in ways you will NEVER be justified in saying that divorce and gayness suck.
On top of which, I’m willing to critique and criticize Mormonism under my own name, on the record, and take the consequences.
So you go publish an op-ed in your local paper about the evils of divorce and homosexuality, and provide a link to it here. Stand up in Sacrament meeting and tell the divorced people in your ward what you really think of them and their choices. If these things are such evils, go public with the reasons why you oppose them. Demonstrate that you have not just convictions but the courage to support them.
Then come back here and lecture me some more “separating the Mormon from the Mormonness.”
Oh, and one other thing. No one here is saying that society is wrong to let anyone become Mormon. No one is saying that society would be a better place if it did not grant Mormons so many rights. No one is arguing that other people’s Mormonness hurts THEM. No one is saying, “Wow, Seth, your decision to become a Mormon is SUPER BAD FOR SOCIETY. We’re all going to hell in a handbasket because WE MADE IT TOO EASY FOR YOU TO BECOME A MORMON.”
But you are saying that other people’s gayness and their divorces hurt YOU. You are personalizing their choices as something that is a threat and a danger to YOU.
YOU ARE PERSONALIZING THE WHOLE BUSINESS IN WAYS THAT MAKE YOU LOOK BOTH WEAK (Really? You’re so easily threatened by what other people do?) AND CRUEL
Just a side-note, it might be interesting to go through the posts on this thread and count how many times Holly has insulted me vs. how many times I’ve insulted her.
I’ll get to the substance here later.
Just wondering if I get divorced, how much more will I cause the destruction of the social fabric, than when I got married. I must be a Clothes Moth larvae.
I would say I spent hours plotting the downfall of civilization with my destructive appetite, but us moth larvae have such little brains. We blindly chow through the closet of civilization.
And does it make a difference whether it the number of clothes I ruin or the quality?
Is eating 10,000 Kmart specials better or worse than a Versace?
Holly, I don’t know that you owning your past Mormon experiences (and I say “past” because your language here makes it pretty clear you’ve made a firm break) makes one jot of difference to my point.
You think that you are able to segment away the nasty Mormonism with it’s “self-centered bastard God” and his prissy and mean in the way only well-bred Mormon children can be kind of followers from the actual people who might be hurt to hear things that are important to them spoken of that way.
I’ve been exposed to people like you a little too much for this kind of unhinged anger to really personally offend me. I’m just noting that you’ve been self-righteously grandstanding here for dozens of comments now about “insensitivity” and “jerks” and how hurtful it is to ascribe motives to people – but you don’t seem to mind doing it much when the shoe is on the other foot. You don’t mind labeling practicing Mormons as “prissy and mean”, but you object to it being pointed out that divorce over low level conflict is rather unconcerned with all the other important family ties that are broken up by it.
There’s no mind-reading in saying that Holly. If your family connections mattered to you as much as I think they should, it would take more than constant low level disagreement to undo it all. And there’s no mind-reading going on on the co-habitation front either. Co-habitating is done for a reason in our society. It’s done because people don’t want to be tied down to the choice of their lover, and want to be able to separate with minimal fuss if it doesn’t work out. You don’t have to be a mind-reader to note that that is the same thing as entering a romance with your exit-strategy firmly in mind. And not wanting to be entangled, or tied down? The very definition of human relationships involves being entangled and tied down. The only free people are those who are completely alone in the world. So of course I see co-habitation as a refutation of what love is actually all about.
Because it is – by-design, structurally, down to it’s very DNA. That’s what cohabitation is. A refusal to commit.
Now people who divorce, or people who cohabitate may manage to be nice people in many other areas. They may be outstanding individuals in a variety of areas of their lives. But that doesn’t magically render them not mistaken in this area of their lives. There is no self-superiority in me saying this. I’ve got my own problems – and I’ve never once claimed that my problems are not as big a deal as yours or anyone else’s. I don’t consider my set of virtues superior to that of others. Nor do I consider my set of defects to be less of a personal liability than others.
You chose to read arrogance and contempt into my statements. But that’s simply because you view your own world through a lens of arrogance and contempt. So you automatically assume everyone else is using the same lens you are. There’s no mind-reading in this either Holly. One has only to read through this thread to get a more than ample perspective on how you approach the world.
You have your own words to thank for how you are perceived.
Quite predictably, I’m sure you’re going to try the teenage trick of “I know you are, but what am I?” and say I have my own words to thank for how I am perceived as well.
But I can accept that. I’d much rather own my own comments on this thread than own yours. No question.
Anyway, whether you choose to see the hypocrisy of your own complaints about behavior that is – objectively – far less egregious than your own behavior on this thread won’t prevent others from seeing it and drawing their own conclusions.
True. I was thinking Holly was ahead until this remark:
A lot of interesting points in this discussion — I wonder if it’s even possible to make them without armchair-psychoanalyzing each other…?
I disagree, and I don’t think that’s how it’s perceived by the people doing it (or by most of the community). I think there’s a spectrum of commitment, and cohabitation is perceived as one of the rungs on the commitment ladder. It’s more committed than simply being boyfriend/girlfriend, for example.
You see it as nothing more than a refusal to commit because you project onto people that they’re making a choice between cohabitation and marriage. But that’s not always the choice they’re making. As someone who has cohabitated, I can tell you that it was more a choice between living in the same apartment (and pooling money and responsibilities) vs. living in our own separate apartments — hence represented an increase in commitment level, not the inverse.
Actually, my own life provides kind of an interesting case study for the discussion on this thread:
I came from a culture that teaches girls that their success in life depends on landing a man. Despite having rejected much of that culture, I arrived at graduate school with the idea in my head: I’m surrounded by marriage prospects, so now it’s time to pick one and settle down!
My first date with my first husband was on my 21st birthday. He was a nice guy and a great boyfriend, but I shouldn’t have married him. I wasn’t ready for marriage, and he wasn’t a person that I ultimately wanted to spend my life with. If I’d been encouraged to take decision to marry more seriously, I would have made a better choice and would have avoided costly legal entanglements.
After I had separated from my first husband, I started a relationship with my current (only true) husband. I lived with him for approximately two years before we married.
Part of the reason for the length of this cohabitation was because of the length of time it took to get divorced. Between the waiting period and the inevitable difficulty of communicating with an ex over paperwork, I was legally “married” to someone else almost the whole time I was engaged to (and living with) my current (only true) husband.
However, even without the legal entanglement, I would still have waited before getting married! I learned my lesson the first time. I refuse to jump into a marriage before I’m sure it’s the right one because I take the marriage commitment very seriously. Getting married to someone you’ve never lived with is a way of saying that you aren’t taking this commitment as seriously as it should be taken.
Encouraging young people in their early 20’s (with little relationship experience) to marry people they’ve known for perhaps a few months shows profound lack of respect for what a serious commitment marriage is.
Jumping into marriage also disrespects the other person. It says “I care more about what my parents or my ward or my God(s) think than I care about being sure this is the right choice before locking you into a commitment that will affect your entire life.”
Seth:
Show me one instance in this thread where I ascribe motives to a single human but you. One. I suppose you could quote this, from @120, where I was imitating you:
Aside from that, which I did to call attention to what you do and the weaknesses in it, I am NOT ascribing motives people. I am not doing the thing I object to you doing.
That’s not what I’m objecting to. I don’t think divorce is something that should be cavalierly done.
there you go again, projecting how I or anyone else should value something.
That’s not a judgment you get to make. What you think I should value is entirely immaterial to this or any other conversation.
Never offer an argument or critique based on any such assumption again, because it doesn’t matter.
Whereas you assume that everyone SHOULD use the same lens that you use.
That’s arrogant.
“Objectively,” huh?
Back at you.
Can’t help noticing that you don’t actually respond to a single point I raise in this:
You say you want an actual defense of a position, but when you get it, you ignore it.
All you really respond to are psychoanalyzing and insults. They’re all you offer as well.
that comment demonstrates pretty amply one of my criticisms of you: you come to a forum created by and for people you feel contempt for. You express your contempt openly. YOU ARE THE OUTSIDER HERE. And as the outsider, you tell people that they are wrong to discuss the flaws and weaknesses they see in a community they have been a part of.
I don’t care what you think of me or anyone else here. I just think it’s awfully rude of you to advertise it so openly, and very hypocritical of you to object to our statements HERE about Mormons when we ourselves have been Mormons. It’s one thing to say “I hate that lousy so-&-so” in your own home, to your own friends. It’s another to say it to that so-&-so, in his or her home.
I think this exchange is instructive:
That’s it. That’s really all the response he had. It’s a matter of WORDING, not of what the words convey. He didn’t deal at all with how this contradiction undermines his entire position, or how it shows a poor memory for what he himself has written, which suggests a lack of respect and concern for the people he’s conversing with. There’s no real attempt to craft a coherent position. It’s not just that he fails to craft a coherent position. It’s that he doesn’t even try.
@196: Yep.
I must point out that Seth relies on a classic perpetrator script in this thread. It’s the sort of offensive (as opposed to defensive) tactic someone who sexually abused their child would resort to when the child begins discussing the abuse. It goes
No one did anything to you, and anyway
Anything that was done to you wasn’t that bad, and anyway
No matter what was done to you, it’s in the past, and anyway
You shouldn’t talk about it because it’s in the past and because anyway
It would hurt people if you talked about it now, plus
If you really loved your family the way you should, you wouldn’t even WANT to talk about it, ever, on top of which,
You’re unhinged, so no one needs to pay any attention to you anyway.
It’s a well established script with a well established set of pathologies, employed not just by perpetrators but by those who want to enable and protect perpetrators. Its goal is to silence and invalidate victims not just as individuals but as a class. *
Seth performs a pretty classic example of it here, and resorts to it at least in part in most if not virtually all of the conversations he has at MSP.
*There, Seth! I FINALLY make a blanket statement about the motives behind a widespread human action.
Seth @ 193
If a marriage goes sour beyond repair and you want to get away, no one wants to be stuck with the paperwork or associated costs, sure. But people don’t go into marriages or cohabitive relationships with the expectation of them souring. If they knew they’d sour, they never would’ve entered the relationship. I take that back — some people do enter such relationships, and think that marrying rather than cohabitating will somehow fix things out of a false sense of security, because of this idea that marriage is somehow better than cohabitation. Personally, my partner and I have been cohabitating for 5 years, and marriage is still not on the table. Sure, when our state legislature passed same-sex marriage earlier this year, there was some discussion, but my partner basically said: “Get married? To you?” =p
Really, I think that when it comes down to it, the reason most religions are against cohabitation is because of the sex. In Mormonism, you have the whole “eternal marriage” theology, but that aspect is cerebral since we’re on Earth. Sex represents the carnality of the matter, and once people start having sex outside of marriages (and are happy and enjoying life), the rest of theology quickly falls apart. This is not to say that being pro-sex means you have to be anti-marriage, but there’s no reason that being pro-marriage means that all sex must occur in marriage, unless there’s a bunch of other baggage you want to maintain (like gender roles, and required family structures, etc).
@199 Holly:
It’s interesting that Seth says things like
When the “classic perpetrator script” you describe, that he’s using, is intended to create unhinged anger.
It’s designed to reduce people with legitimate pain and grievances to raving lunatics, by dismissing their concerns, stonewalling their arguments, and using such bizarre un-logic that it drives one mad trying to comprehend it. And when you stay lucid enough to unravel the unlogic — like Feathertail did on Seth R’s post on MSP about his mission, or like you did in the post you quoted @197, he simply ignores it and moves on.
The reason he uses this script is because in Mormon culture, and to a lesser extent in places influenced by it like MSP, the tone argument is considered a valid reason to dismiss someone. Abuse victims (and institutional abuse victims) have triggers Seth R doesn’t have, so he can say things that set them off without coming across to nonvictims as anything other than dense.
It’s like he crushes your foot under his chair leg at a dinner party, and everyone else sees you scream and swear all of a sudden while he just tipped his chair back for a second. Then he feigns ignorance as to why he’s always surrounded by crazy, screaming people.
It may be going to far to suggest that he does this on purpose, but I think it’s pretty convenient how the way things are set up right now lets him dismiss and marginalize his and his church’s victims. I also think it’s an extremely terrible idea to let him comment on MSP at all, because at best he’s “contributing” apologetic non-arguments for LDS church positions and at worst he’s making it an unsafe place for survivors of LDS church-directed or -enabled ecclesiastical abuse.
Which, you’d think the exmormon community would be more concerned with helping them recover than in giving a clueless TBM another platform from which to condemn everyone different from him.
WRT the main discussion, the driver of one of the town buses once yelled at me and my significant other for fifteen minutes straight about Jesus, and Hell, and salvation, because when she told me earlier that day that we’d go to Hell if we didn’t get married I told her I didn’t care.
I wonder if it would’ve affected her rant if she’d known that we weren’t having sex, because my significant other is asexual.
Taryn @202–thanks. I’m glad someone else can see this stuff too.
Been thinking about this. I tried to make a similar point, but this makes it more effectively.
The classic Mormon approach to children also seems to show a lack of regard for children and their welfare.
Considering how many statements have been made over the pulpit that couples should not delay having children, considering the sermons that used to be delivered about the necessity of having large families because spirits need physical bodies, considering that a large family still seems to be a mark of righteousness and a small family is viewed as sinful selfishness, to the point that 25-year-olds who have been married for two years will be hounded by relatives about when they’ll finally start having kids and couples with two kids will be asked when they’re having another (as if that’s anyone’s business), it’s not surprising that Mormons still reproduce early and often.
Utah County has one of the highest rates if not the single highest rate in the country of babies paid for with Medicaid. The irony of people whose political views condemn those who rely on “government handouts” themselves relying on government handouts to pay for the births of their children is pretty rich. It seems selfish not to wait until the parents can A) afford prenatal medical care more easily and B) provide for the child more fully.
I know plenty of Mormons–including family members and friends–who had more children than they really wanted or could comfortably raise because they felt pressured to do so. The concern was not for the child; the concern was fitting into the world and the overall culture. Doesn’t seem too child-centric to me.
I was a teenager when I first heard the term “babylust.” It was used to describe a woman who kept having child after child, because she liked babies but not children. One of my friends confided matter-of-factly to me that that was a real problem in his Mormon marriage. “My wife only really likes our kids when they’re babies,” he said. “Once they turn about four, she’s not really interested. Whereas I like them a lot more now that I can interact with them in more ways.”
I have another friend who rarely sees his six children because he has to work such long hours to support them. He never wanted that many children, but his wife insisted. And now she admits that it probably would have been better not have so many, that six really is too many for them. But she was from a family of six and had said her whole life that she wanted six kids and was not going to settle for less.
How selfish is that? How disrespectful to the basic idea of what it means to be a parent?
So if Seth really has “such a hard time finding any societal discussion of children that isnt couched entirely in adult-centered paradigms, with adult fulfillment as the primary overriding concern,” maybe it’s because he’s spending too much time listening to Mormons talk about families, where a genuine if not universal concern is having a large family soon enough after marriage that you appear as righteous as you ought to be.
I agree. Neither cohabitation or even just plain dating are primarily about having a built-in exit strategy–or if they do, that exit strategy is still pretty problematic. Even after things go sour, it can be really hard to admit it and to decide to do anything about it, regardless of how many official external commitments have or have not been made. After all, “breaking up is hard to do,” as more than one pop song has informed us.
There are different kinds of commitment, and the commitment of loving and investing in some one and seeing them every day is genuine and profound, regardless of what sort of official commitment you have or haven’t made or how finances are involved. Even when you know you’ve got to break up because things just aren’t working, IT’S HARD AND PEOPLE DON’T LIKE TO DO IT. Breakups have a pretty high recidivism rate–people getting back together to give it one more try.
So the claim that cohabitation is always or even primarily entered into because it makes an exit easy errs not only on the motive but on the reality of what people experience when they do break up.
I thought the linked conversation with Feathertail went just fine for me. So your example is a bit lost. As for who is purposefully winding up whom in this discussion – I think that’s a matter of debate.
Alan, maybe the carnality angle plays well for some Mormons, but it doesn’t play well for me. I long ago decided I thought the “Boyd K. Packer” approach to the Law of Chastity was unhelpful and obscured more than it illuminated about human sexuality. For me, I view sex as something that’s simply too potent to enter into casually. It messes with people emotionally to such an extent that you simply can’t do it with someone without a huge level of existing commitment (which marriage was ideally supposed to be providing).
Chanson, thanks for sharing your perspective on this. I have a couple responses.
I would dispute that cohabitation is just another gradual step or rung on the ladder of commitment that people ought to take before getting married. At a certain point, it’s time to take the plunge or not and there aren’t really degrees between that plunge. I see sex as far too emotionally intrusive to be undertaken by people who are not committed to each other. With sex, there is no “try before you buy.”
I’m also not clear on whether you view co-habitation as acceptable because it preps for marriage, or if you consider co-habitation acceptable as a destination situation in its own right.
One thing I would ask however, is – what exactly are couples supposed to learn about each other by co-habitating that they couldn’t learn about each other through simply dating that is going to help them have a more successful marriage? I’m not asking you to provide personal examples if you don’t want to. But I don’t really see what sort of useful data the co-habitation period is actually going to provide.
Also, as a general response, I consider it a fallacy to try and justify co-habitation by appeal to bad marriage practices. Even if there is no shortage of bad marriage practices, that still doesn’t constitute a valid argument for cohabitation.
Your final point about people marrying too young is valid, but it’s valid for different reasons than I think you have in mind.
The only reason that age 20 is currently too young to get married is because we, as a society, are disempowering and infantallizing our young people. We are turning our teenagers into ten year olds, and we are turning our twenty-somethings into teenagers, and our thirty-somethings into twenty-somethings (“failure to launch” anyone?). 20 year olds have always been capable of taking on full adult responsibility and marrying competently. It’s just that our society doesn’t allow them to and encourages them to prolong their adolescence into the college years.
Which brings up another big modern social problem – but that’s probably best saved for another debate.
Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. This piece I wrote on Mormon marriage for Religion Dispatches a couple of years back is pretty relevant. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/3388/from_here_to_eternity%3A_of_mormons_and_celestial_marriage/
And yet, it does appear to be useful indeed. As I already mentioned @109:
So if your real goal is minimizing divorce instead of, say, policing sex, as Alan suggests, it might be a good idea for you to start advocating cohabitation at least after engagement and before the actual ceremony.
Statistics which I noted appear to be hotly disputed.
For what it’s worth, my wife and I lived together for a few years before tying the knot and we’re currently in the longest-running relationship in my immediate family. We both value our marriage as a component of how we present ourselves as parents to our kids, but we’d all (both us and our brood) find it laughable to suggest that mom and dad’s many premarital relationships/flings/disasters have much relevance to anything other than being a part of our personal journeys.
I remember offending the first girl I ever had sex with (after my mission) by laughing during the deed. I laughed because I couldn’t believe that our rutting had somehow been built up in my mind as a stargate to celestial wonders. It’s sex, for crying out loud. The birds and the bees do it but it takes a hominid with an oversized brain to suggest it’s too dangerous to try outside the bounds of the tribal mating regulatory framework du jour. Come to think of it, the only time I ever got in trouble with sex is when it was bought. Word to the wise, if a beautiful Danish girl ever tells you she needs a place to stay, don’t kid yourself that she also likes you for your sparkling wit.
chino, I do love the way you show up and just drop a nice concentrated dose of realistic common sense into the mix.
I fear that sounds sarcastic but it’s completely sincere. that was the perfect comment at this point. thanks.
Just sounded like solving the problem by trivializing something special to me.
“It’s just sex.”
Three words that sum up what’s screwed up about our modern society.
Hotly disputed–by you.
anyway, even if the stats aren’t yet conclusive, if your real goal is indeed reducing divorce, you should at the very least keep an open mind about engagement cohabitation, and seriously consider the possibility that it might indeed have a strengthening, stabilizing effect, even if you can’t see it yet.
If your real goal is indeed reducing divorce and not, say, policing sex.
Holly
Since Mind Reading is in vogue, there are lots of people (and if this thread goes on much longer, those people will be like the sands of the sea) who can see this stuff too.
But it’s not worth the bother to play Seth’s game.
However I’ve been highly entertained, at how you can take Seth’s game with his rules and way outplay him.
Bravo.
But I’m unhinged, so what do I know?
@211
“Its just sex.
Three words that don’t actually appear in Chino’s comment, so you can lose the quotation marks, Seth.
@208 Seth R
They’re disputed for the same reason global climate change is disputed, and that you’re arguing your viewpoint at all: People having their identities invested in one side of a discussion being correct.
It’s extremely disingenious to claim to care about statistics or facts at all, when the reason you hold and advocate your viewpoint — if you’re like most Mormons — doesn’t have anything to do with them. When any statistics or facts you discover that contradict your viewpoint are “disputed” simply because they do. Why not just jump straight to the real reason, which is that you don’t believe cohabitation is a good idea for anyone regardless of their lived experiences because an old man you revere as a prophet said so?
Whereas on the other hand, people are choosing to cohabitate with people they love for perfectly rational reasons to them, and if they thought that it’d be better for them and their soulmates to get married they would have done so. But this isn’t an acceptable train of thought to you, so you have to impugn their motives and talk about what people would do if they “really” loved each other. Or say stuff like “I don’t really see” why they don’t do things your way, when they’re saying why they don’t do that and it’s their decision to make.
This sort of crap goes over well with the TBM crowd, but not so much when you’re talking to the people whose motives and intelligence you’re questioning.
You do and say stuff like that, and basically put down everyone who chooses to live their lives different from you just because they do so, and then you act all surprised when people explode in anger at you. It’s like they just came out of a church where their whole lives people with the power to hurt them or constrain their actions told them shit like that as an excuse for not caring about what they’re going through, or something! And when someone from that church does it to them again it brings back all the helpless rage and frustration they felt back then.
I’m not saying this for your benefit, because frankly, Seth, you’re a dick. I’m saying this to explain why it’s a really bad idea to let you get within shouting distance of any exmormon community. We already know Mormons think we’re bad people, who don’t love each other and aren’t committed to each other and only do things for selfish reasons. Some of us nearly killed ourselves when we came to believe those lies about ourselves. We don’t need to hear them again, especially from someone so dense and self-centered that he doesn’t care that he and his church have that effect.
@211, “It’s just sex”
That’s what you Mormons say about same-gender relationships. “It’s just about the sex.” Or what my Institute teacher said about gay marriage: “It’s all about the money.”
Keep lying to yourselves and telling yourselves it’s about anything other than love. You have to, because if you ever stop you’ll realize what horrible monsters you are.
Chino’s comment was also about uncommitted sex, specifically an experience with same which he considered a bad idea in hindsight, but for goddess’ sake you had to tear down cohabiting couples and impugn their love and respect and commitment. Because no one is allowed to love except Mormons.
And I mean that literally, because of your church’s political actions.
@213–
thanks, Suzanne. I’ve received quite a few PM, cheering me on and commiserating about… certain unfortunate traits exhibited by someone I’ve been conversing with.
I don’t know if I agree with Audre Lorde that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I think they probably will dismantle his house. they just might not help us build another we really want to live in.
But until we get to the dismantling stage, it can be rewarding to take the master’s tools and whack him, good and hard, on the head with them.
it’s not difficult to out argue Seth because he is so lazy about paying attention to what he’s already written and so reliant on mindreading and feeble psychoanalysis.
It gets old eventually, but I do think it’s worthwhile to reveal what he’s really about.
Holly, I don’t really care about your own personal echo chamber any more than I imagine you care about anyone else’s.
Oh, and Chino’s quote:
“Its sex, for crying out loud.”
Which is saying exactly the same thing as “it’s just sex.”
Oh heavens, Taryn. You should have seen him trivialize evidence and so forth on this thread:
http://mainstreetplaza.com/2012/06/22/two-interesting-news-items-mormons-secret-and-maxwell-institute-shake-up/
This exchange was classic:
When it comes to the Book of Mormon, he says things like “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” (Same thread, @81.) This is one of the things I’ve tried to point out in this thread–see, for instance, @109. And he offers a dodge like this:
Like I said, @198:
It’s nice to have someone make this move on him, and ascribe to him what, the more you consider things, really does seem to be his actual motive. it’s particularly nice given that he wrote
So, admit it, Seth: Taryn’s completely right that you dont believe cohabitation is a good idea for anyone regardless of their lived experiences because an old man you revere as a prophet said so.
Admit it.
but here’s the thing, Seth: I don’t go to someone else’s echo chamber and start shrieking. I demonstrate my indifference to those echo chambers by ignoring them unless they somehow impinge on my life in some way that makes them impossible to ignore.
But here you are, spending a good chunk of your Sunday, when you could be with your wife and kids like a righteous Mormon patriarch, screaming into someone else’s echo chamber, showing just how much you DO care.
I’m hanging out with people I like in a forum pretty much designed for people like me. You’re hanging out with people you go out of your way to demonstrate your disrespect for.
And you’re hanging out with them, on a SUNDAY, instead of the Mormon family you claim to value so much.
Just sayin’.
@219 Seth:
No. Flat no.
You don’t get to accuse anyone else of living in an echo chamber. Not as a Mormon. Not when your church excommunicates people for publishing books that reveal unflattering parts of its history, and then its apologists turn around and act like “of course everyone knows about the Book of Abraham issues, it’s only weak-minded saints who don’t”.
Not when you make “faith” into a reason to believe in archaeological claims in the absense of archaeological evidence, and then turn around and cite studies to prove the social science claims that you accept on faith.
Not when you think only one kind of loving relationship is okay, and attack everyone else’s just because they aren’t the right kind.
Those insults you throw out? Stop hitting yourself.
@222
thanks.
Taryn, Holly claims to still be a member of record as well.
So I guess your critique applies to her as well, correct?
@224 Seth
Way to rub it in about belonging to a church culture which forces people to remain “in the closet” about their doubts, and prevents them from voicing concerns to the people around them because they’ll be ostracized for disbelief or even heterodoxy.
Is this your way of confirming that your presence here is just a thinly-veiled pretense for pushing “emotionally damaged” people’s buttons? Or is change the subject a standard operating procedure you have taped to your computer monitor or something, Seth?
You’re a bully and a coward, and one of the many reasons your church isn’t true.
A few things.
do I accuse anyone of living in an echo chamber?
I don’t. You use the term, and I repeat it because you use it. But I don’t accuse anyone of living in one.
If I don’t accuse anyone of living in an echo chamber, how can her criticism apply to me?
And ever so conveniently, I don’t have to feel indicted by her criticism of the church because, as I explained @189 and repeated @197
As for this, from Taryn’s comment
In this conversation, it applies to you and you alone.
btw–how’s the family, Seth?
Taryn, my point is you really don’t know what kind of Mormon I am. I’ve done my best this entire conversation to keep my remarks about general concepts of divorce, cohabitation, and things like that. With a couple of exceptions, I think I’ve managed to do that – in spite of relentless and extreme provocation from Holly. I haven’t asked Holly how her family is doing. I haven’t threatened her career. I haven’t said her husband should divorce her and that her children would be better off without her. I haven’t said anything about you personally either (though you richly deserve it with some of the things you’ve said recently).
I’ve tried to keep this on the issues. It’s Holly who has insisted repeatedly on making this a personal confrontation. There hasn’t been a single comment she has made in this thread that hasn’t been taunting and obviously designed to provoke an angry personal response. I suppose the two of you are hoping I’ll slip up and get myself banned here or just get tired of the barrage of insults and leave.
I don’t think I’ll give either of you the satisfaction. Here’s to many more blog threads.
@227 Seth
As Holly established @199, your comments are alternating between indirect emotional abuse, victim-blaming, and prying and prodding for weakness on the one hand, and feigning niceness and rationality on the other. The object is not to conduct an actual discussion, which is why you change the subject whenever your bullshit’s called out. It’s to victimize others, and make sure that you seem more reasonable than your victims so that they will suffer social consequences and you won’t.
It’s sort of like how the LDS church goes out to ban others’ families and then clutches their pearls when a few meetinghouse windows get broken the day after the vote. We’re supposed to be horrified that people are mad at you for being a civil asshole. Because aggression is totes okay so long as it’s passive-aggressive and doesn’t use swear words.
I tried that pearl-clutching thing on a queer-friendly messageboard back in my TBM days, after the Prop 8 vote. Didn’t get me too far.
@227 Seth
Incidentally, I’m not trying to make you “slip up” so that you’ll get banned. But considering how pretty much everything else you’ve said about others’ motives has been projection so far, I think it’s really telling that you accused me of that, even though it makes zero sense.
Taryn, weren’t you the one who told Andrew over at Irresistible Disgrace to “go die in a fire” just because he lets me comment over there?
Weren’t you the one in another recent thread here on MSP condemning the moderators for allowing me here?
No, *thank you*, Ms. Welker. Seth’s schtick cracks me up but it wouldn’t be possible without a volunteer from the audience willing to play along. It’s a hoot, for crying out loud.
Back in the day, my wife used to get worried about me wasting time tilting at Mo Defense League trollsters, but as one half of a committed couple that’s been having the same sex for nearly twenty years, she came to understand that this is our fight, too.
S. N. 213 reflects my thoughts as well. Earlier today as I was checking some sources for something I am writing I came across this statement by the psychologist Leon Festinger. “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your source. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” Guess who I thought about when I read that.
The thing I notice over a number of different threads for the last couple of years is that you really can’t have a discussion with Seth. Instead, you end up discussing him–just as I am doing now. And his response is to act absolutely amazed and puzzled that anyone would say such a thing, since he has been on topic all along with convincing compelling arguments supporting his position, and it is you that has been rude, off-topic, and muddled headed.
Parker, would you do any better on a blog hostile to your opinion where you are being constantly barraged with insults and not sure what to respond to first?
Oh, absolutely. That’s why @193 was crappy psychoanalysis of me instead of a response to an answer you said you wanted @188.
Really? check out @6, @8, @10, @14, @22, @24, @34, @35, @37, @44 (that one is even directed to you), @47 (also directed to you), –and that’s just the first page! There are more on the second, third, fourth, and fifth page–too many to list!
No. But you suggested that you had no need or obligation to have empathy for me or for anyone you disapprove of. You said that I didn’t love my family in the way you think I should. You wrote stuff like this, @145
You accused me of highjacking the thread, and then refused to talk about anything else but this highjack. You know, ’cause I’m the angry atheist who wants to derail things and you’re the calm believer who has “tried to keep this on the issues.”
You justify YOUR insults and glibness and contempt by writing
And, as I’ve pointed out, you make all of this a personal confrontation because you make other people’s sex lives about YOU.
Gotta admire someone who’s so committed to interacting with people he thinks are “unhinged” that he sticks around just to deny them “satisfaction.” Yeah. That’s indicative of a healthy psyche.
Seth @233
An honest and straight-forward suggestion: keep it on the issues.
It would be really nice if you could “keep it on the issues” you yourself have raised. For instance, I would still like a response to this, @189
I would like an answer to that particularly since YOU ASKED FOR IT @188:
So ignore any and all taunts, and try to do what you say you’ve tried to do, which is “keep it on the issues.”
Yes. It’s really nuts the way one bit of profanity and actually expressing unhappiness or disagreement seem so intolerable in Mormon culture.
Elouise Bell has a great essay on the toxicity and dishonesty of Mormon passive-aggression masquerading as niceness. Can’t find it on line, or I would link to it.
Your 189 didn’t introduce any distinctions that mattered Holly. That’s why I ignored it in favor of other discussion. It doesn’t matter if Mormonism was invented or not. Divorce was also invented at some point. But even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter.
We’re talking about deeply held ideals that people hold close as a part of their core identity. Mormon belief qualifies as that much.
You still haven’t really explained why it’s OK to attack someone’s deeply-held ideals and maintain that you’re not attacking the person themselves in the case of attacks on Mormonism, but not OK on other things that are important to people. Why can I not make the same distinction between the people and the issues that you do?
And let me get this straight – are you saying that if I had been divorced, you would be A-OK with me saying the exact same things I’ve said in this thread?
Does that mean you’re OK with other testimonials from people who have been a part of a controversial issue and are now speaking out against it? Or do you simply dismiss them as being “blinded” or “in denial?”
Oh, and this, from Seth, @227
You’re the kind of Mormon who thinks sex is too “special” to be had anywhere but in a monogamous officially sanctioned marriage.
You’re the kind of Mormon who thinks divorce is wrong and people who get divorces are selfish and worthy of your judgment.
You’re the kind of Mormon who completely ignores Christ’s command not to judge.
You’re the kind of Mormon who objects to gay marriage.
You’re the kind of Mormon who thinks that there “are problems that deserve harsh language” and your cruelty to others is justified by your “convictions. ”
You’re the kind of Mormon who insists that “faith is all the reason you need. For all sorts of things” and “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” to defend his own positions but demands and discounts evidence for any position that contradicts his.
You’re the kind of Mormon who claims he has “tried to keep it on the issues” when he actually works pretty hard to derail every conversation he takes part in.
You’re the kind of Mormon who writes @193 “I have my own words to thank for how I am perceived” and then writes @227, “you really dont know what kind of Mormon I am.”
I think we have a pretty good idea what kind of Mormon you are, Seth.
Oh, OK. So that’s how it works.
Here I was thinking that “keeping it on the issues” involved responding to what people actually say.
Glad to know I was wrong.
Well, Seth R, you haven’t said anything that I think matters, so I’ll just ignore what you have said in favor of other discussion as well.
And I hope others will take the same approach with you as well.
Chino @231 You’re welcome. Glad to be of service.
Parker @232 this Leon Festinger sounds interesting. Does he say anything else relevant to this conversation?
Oh, you’re done venting then?
@241 Hmm…. have to think about that, Mr. Rogers. I’ll get back to you on it.
“It doesnt matter if Mormonism was invented or not… Were talking about deeply held ideals that people hold close as a part of their core identity. Mormon belief qualifies as that much.”
For what it’s worth, I’ve watched Tommy Davis (Anne Archer’s son) make this exact same argument in defense of Scientology before walking out of an interview because he was offended at the mention of Xenu.
And for the record, if Mormonism was invented, it matters a lot. Or should I tell my folks it’s OK to start sending Monopoly money to SLC because, hey, somebody invented it, so it must count for something?
Anyway, carry on with the veni, vidi, flevit routine. It’s precious.
Yeah. It does. It matters a lot.
Had to google that. Pretty great.
@239 continued
You’re the kind of Mormon who wants others to take his faith really seriously and says that he’s here “posting to point out that the believing position is not ridiculous and unfounded” and then actually has the audacity to insist “It doesnt matter if Mormonism was invented or not,” a ridiculous assertion if there ever was one.
http://mainstreetplaza.com/2012/06/22/two-interesting-news-items-mormons-secret-and-maxwell-institute-shake-up/comment-page-3/#comment-104049
You’re the kind of Mormon who raises the issue of whether his beliefs are ridiculous, then gets indignant and offended and hurt when the people he’s raised the issue with say, “Yeah, actually, that does seem pretty ridiculous.”
You’re the kind of Mormon who insists that “deeply held ideals that people hold close as a part of their core identity” deserve the utmost respect if those beliefs are Mormon but that “deeply held ideals that people hold close as a part of their core identity” deserve nothing but ridicule if those beliefs involve some sort of painful rupture with religion and you dismiss them with statements like “there really wasnt any point talking with them until theyd gotten over their emotional exit story enough to actually engage in rational thought again.”
http://mainstreetplaza.com/2012/06/22/two-interesting-news-items-mormons-secret-and-maxwell-institute-shake-up/comment-page-1/#comment-103933
You’re the kind of Mormon that people think Mitt Romney is.
I’m glad you got a chuckle. Mostly, I just wanted to give you gals a heads up about how the “I came, I saw, I cried” routine works with us Mormon men. It’s usually our next-to-last defense before this one: When cornered, we’ll make an awful admission (like, say — just for example — admitting the possibility that everything we’ve spent our lives defending is just a steaming pile of bunkum). Once we’ve made that admission, we figure it’ll force y’all to stop pressing the point and start worrying about how to soothe our male anxiety.
For some reason, y’all aren’t doing that and it’s perturbing.
Hmmm…. Maybe like this, from Seth @193?
Yeah… funny, how that wasn’t very convincing. Funny how not one single sentence seemed sincere. Maybe that’s why no one has felt compelled to let up.
Because normally, I do drop EVERYTHING to assuage male anxiety.
After all, that whole helpmeet thing is what we girls were put on this earth to do.
Hi folks — I’m now blogging at y’all from sunny Minneapolis!!
I’m about to go jump in a lake with my kids, but I just wanted to say sorry that — right after telling people to knock it off with the attempted mind-reading — I decided to get into the game myself @196. Then I hopped onto a plane so I couldn’t follow up…
I have a few points I’d like to respond to, but since I’m a little rushed, let me start by quickly responding to one (I’ll come back later):
The important thing to keep in mind is that the people in question are not having sex with you.
I found this interview with Michael Cobb, author of Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, interesting:
http://www.alternet.org/story/156241/the_power_of_being_single
That is an interesting point. I remember from way back a song where he sang, “She belongs to me.” And another that went “He’s mind–he’s really mine.” (At least those are traces of lyrics that bounce around in my head.) I wonder what the effects are of this “ownership” position. And the Church seems to have adopted it in particularl as a sexual exclusivity as though that is the natural order of things. It may be the civilized order of things, or a particular society’s order of things, but it isn’t inherently and obviously natural (as in fact the Church argued at one point in their pre-1890 history). I’m not advocating a free sexual license, but I am thinking that this sexual proprietorship, as though it is a moral position, advocated by the Church has to put kinks and strains in a relationship based upon it–not to mention individual behavior as well.
Let me start by admitting that I did not read all 250 comments. So, maybe someone had already addressed this.
I divorced my first husband for my kids. They needed to know how to be men that love and respect their spouses, and women who demand respect and equality in their marriage.
I followed my mother’s example, first in marrying a man for whom unrighteous dominion came much more naturally than partnership. I oftentimes wonder if she had married my step-father early enough that I could see a healthy marriage, before I got married, if I might have made a better decision. It is knowing how difficult it was for me and my siblings that I didn’t stay in a bad marriage.
I don’t think divorce is inevitable for all couples, but I worry that too much of the focus in the church is on not having sex and discussing what should happen before marriage, and not nearly enough time, energy and instruction about the realities of marriage, how to choose a partner that shares the same views and goals, and emphasizing all of the ways a marriage can be strengthened, including sex, but not exclusively sexual.
I wish someone had given me more practical advice on marriage, without rose colored glasses, and that we had skipped some of the sewing projects.
I can agree with that need for a different focus of instruction Julia.
@251
Hi Julia–
No one has made quite the point you’ve made, and it’s an important one, so thanks for making it. But people have pointed out some of the problems in the LDS approach to marriage, as in this comment. @196:
Holly,
I think marrying young can be part of the problem, although I see this patern I’m a lot of my friends who married later in life too. For me, I think that we all want to believe our parents are good people and doing the right things. Someone can tell us it isn’t right, but if we don’t see the wrong thing stopped, and changed to something better, I think we end up being more likely to repeat that mistake. I think the WORST thing parents can do is stay married “for the kids” just long enough to teach the kids that they should be miserable and married for as long as they have kids. I just don’t see how that helps break family patterns of abuse and unhealthy relationships.
I don’t think any marriage is doomed to fail. Both of my grandmothers married at sixteen, since their sweethearts were going off to war, and one has always been happy, and one tolerated my grandfather until she died. I think my mom was able to make a healthy second marriage because she had a good example for it. I doubt my father wi ever have a healthy relationship with anyone after the example that his father, and his grandfather, set about what a relationship should or could be.
I don’t know that I would say I was a divorce advocate, but I think that if you are going to base your choice to stay married or not on what is best for your kids, that the default should not be staying unhappy but together.
I was going to wait for Chanson to add her additional thoughts, but she seems to be having fun on vacation, so I’ll wish her well and not wait.
I don’t think the age of marriage is so much the problem as the societal context we’ve built up around age. There’s no question in my mind that a lot of 20 year olds are not ready for marriage. But I don’t see that as being due to their age. I see it being the fault of our society that disempowers young people and doesn’t allow them to have significant responsibility until much, much later in life. Our 20 year olds SHOULD be ready for serious adult responsibilities, like higher education, employment and marriage. They SHOULD be ready for this. But they aren’t.
And that is a defect in our culture.
Back in the 1800s, a 13 year old male could run a small dairy farm by himself. He knew how to milk the cows, save a pregnant cow’s life by turning the calf, ride a horse, round up strays, shoot a rifle at coyotes, repair a saddle and any other number of tasks that needed doing. And no one had to tell him to do it. He just did it because it was needed. Plenty of 13 year old boys back then were frankly, more mature than the majority of University of Utah’s freshman class last year.
This is because we tend to look down on and coddle our youths these days. We don’t teach them to be responsible with their lives, we don’t teach them the things about marriage and relationships Julie was calling for.
And as a result, the age at which people can be entrusted with adult responsibility has been on steady decline for the last 50 years.
It’s not an age problem. It’s a cultural problem.
Now on the cohabitation problem.
We’ve focused the discussion down on the personal level. Meaning that we’ve been talking about personal anecdotes, such as Chanson sharing her story of why cohabitation and divorce were the correct decisions for her and stories like that.
However, the discussion also needs to look at the broader picture of what cohabitation means for society. By and large, the people on this blog represent a narrow demographic of people. profxm is a college professor, Holly has a PhD (I think – I can’t find the bio page anymore), and I’m sure others here have similar achievements.
Point being – the participants here all come from the higher end of the education bracket. That’s not a majority of society though.
The problem with these “what’s the harm?” debates is that they are always conducted using the lives of the highly educated as test cases. So the pair of PhDs are used as the model couple for how cohabitation worked out just fine and felt like the right choice and all that. When no-fault divorce was being debated likewise the discussion was from educated people imaging how people like them might benefit from easier divorce. Yes, there was intense discussion of abuse (which crosses economic lines). But the potential drawbacks were all seen from a perspective of how intelligent people would cope with them. And I see the same thing happening with discussion of cohabitation.
The problem is – the worst effects of no-fault divorce were not felt among the educated upper class and upper middle class. They were seen in the poor lower class and the lower middle class – where the divorce rate, the single parent household rate, and the fatherless rate absolutely went through the roof. Poorer neighborhoods were turned into literal family wastelands.
And in the lower to lower middle class, the effects of cohabitation have been EXTREMELY bad. One can find only slight variations in rates of happiness between educated couples – regardless of divorce, cohabitation, or marital status. But among the lower-educated the well-being factors differ greatly based on marital status.
I was reading a study worth considering:
http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/WMM_summary.pdf
A few of the key findings (I’ll just cut and paste some quotes):
1. “On many social, educational, and psychological outcomes, children in cohabiting house- holds do significantly worse than children in intact, married families, and about as poorly as children living in single-parent families. And when it comes to abuse, recent federal data indicate that children in cohabiting households are markedly more likely to be physically, sexually, and emotionally abused than children in both intact, married families and single-parent families (see figure 3). Only in the economic domain do children in cohabiting households fare consistently better than children in single-parent families.”
2. “the impact that transitions into and out of marriage, cohabitation, and single parenthood have upon children. This report shows that such transitions, especially multiple transitions, are linked to higher reports of school failure, behavioral problems, drug use, and loneliness, among other outcomes.”
3. “Cohabiting couples who have a child together are more than twice as likely to break up before their child turns twelve, compared to couples who are married to one another (see figure 5).”
4. “For instance, one indicator of this growing complexity is multiple-partner fertility, where parents have children with more than one romantic partner. Children who come from these relationships are more likely to report poor relationships with their parents, to have behavioral and health problems, and to fail in school, even after controlling for factors such as education, income, and race.”
5. “the United States is devolving into a separate-and-unequal family regime, where the highly educated and the affluent enjoy strong and stable [families] and everyone else is consigned to increasingly unstable, unhappy, and unworkable ones.”
6. “While cohabitation is associated with increased risks of psychological and social problems for children, this does not mean that every child who is exposed to cohabitation is damaged. For example, one nationally representative study of six- to eleven-year-olds found that only 16 percent of children in cohabiting families experienced serious emotional problems. Still, this rate was much higher than the rate for children in families headed by married biological or adoptive parents, which was 4 percent”
7. “While marriage is a social good, not all marriages are equal. Research does not generally support the idea that remarriage is better for children than living with a single mother.9 Marriages that are unhappy do not have the same benefits as the average marriage.10 Divorce or separation provides an important escape hatch for children and adults in violent or high-conflict marriages. Families, communities, and policy makers interested in distributing the benefits of marriage more equally must do more than merely discourage legal divorce.”
And I already remarked on the disturbingly higher rate of child abuse from live-in boyfriends as opposed to biological fathers.
So whatever the motives and merits of individual cases of cohabitation, the debate cannot ignore the bigger social problems the arrangement is causing.
Seth, thanks for writing the last post do I didn’t have to go find the links. I lived with my second husband for about 13 months before we got married. It was fine for me, but it wasn’t for my kids. I thought they were fine, but working with their counselor made me aware of how insecure they felt.
If I hadn’t had kids, and the only consequences were mine, then I might do it again. But my kids were involved, and the damage to them was only exaggerated when my second husband decided he didn’t want a “second family” about three years after we married. I think if we had waited to live together until after we got married, we both might have been more aware of the needs of my kids. At the time, being with me was so much healthier than being with their father, that I didn’t take a very hard look at how my choices were impacting my kids.
I remarried (yes sometimes I still blush when I admit that I failed twice before) I made sure that they met my husband as one of my friends, that we did things as a group with other adults and kids, and when we started getting serious, he took my kids out to dinner and asked THIER permission toasty me and become their step- father. While they have all bonded well, the kids continue to have trust issues with all of the men in their lives.
I have to take most of the responsibility. I married the man who is their biological father, and had children with him because we thought it would help save our crumbling marriage. I found out I was pregnant with my oldest a few weeks before I was going to file divorce papers. Looking back, I should have filed them anyway.
I already talked about what I did wrong the second time, and how we tried to do better this last time. It isn’t ideal, but my kids have friends who have have ten or more “dads/uncles” live with them and who have no real sense of what a stable family or parents as a unit. In my experience, the lower the income and education levels of a person, the more likely they are to choose cohabitation, with no set time for how long or how stable the relationship is.
Julie, you missed all the fighting in the 250 previous comments.
But I did want to just say thanks for the nice response, and state that my previous remark was targeted at broader social trends, and that I realize there can be deviation and counterexamples at the individual level. I’m glad you feel things worked out for you, I don’t really question your conclusions about your own life. I don’t think people who divorce are automatically inferior to people who stay married even if I don’t really agree with divorce as a general matter. Nor do I consider marriage a panacea of some sort that equally fixes everyone’s life.
And it’s unfortunate that I did such a lousy job of conveying the same sentiments in the previous “250 comments”. If you get around to reading them, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. 😛
Bleh, that emoticon didn’t turn out right at all…
Julia:
This was a common sentiment throughout the comments.
Seth:
No one here wanted to “ignore the bigger social problems,” but your flipflopping on many points, your insistence that people cohabitated because they were “jerks”, and your steadfast claim that you knew why people made choices you disapproved of and that their motives were bad made it pretty difficult to get at the bigger social problems.
The stuff you discuss in your comments, Seth, show the need for economic fairness. Cohabitation does often work just fine if people have secure financial lives.
But making divorce more expensive, inconvenient, and difficult for people who already have limited resources and options doesn’t seem particularly wise.
It also raises the question of how often people live together for economic rather than romantic reasons.
So the real issue might be raising people out of poverty, not dictating their morals.
There are about as many people with PhDs in the US as there are active Mormons–about 1% of the population in both cases.
And it’s not like none of us have ever have friends or relatives or neighbors on the lower end of the economic scale.
Really? then why did you write stuff like
Also:
yeah, it really is. Thanks for owning up to that here, Seth, because you sure seemed to be working pretty hard to convey the exact opposite of what you now claim you wanted to convey.
Great. And what do we do until someone figures out how to make that happen?
Maybe we ask people to consider the usefulness of positions like this:
http://byzantium.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/postmormon-sexual-ethics/
Not sure what you are getting at.
Well, it’s a good point.
Saying that we’ll solve the family once we solve poverty is just another way of saying “I don’t want to deal with the issue – let’s talk about something else.”
Solving poverty would probably also solve a lot of crime, but that doesn’t mean we abandon law enforcement in the meantime.
There’s a lot of problems that afflict the poor. But we don’t just tell them to suck it up until we can figure out how to make them “not-poor” anymore.
Furthermore, the mere fact that better-educated folks cope with cohabitation better doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with the idea. Healthy 20 something people can cope with the flu much better than the elderly or infants (for whom it can be deadly). But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with the flu. It just means that some people show the stresses it puts on them more readily.
Back to the mindreader routine, eh, Seth? How’d that work out for you last time?
And what on earth does it mean to “solve the family”? Who here has said that we’ll “solve the family”?
There are plenty of policies that help people be more financially secure. They helped create a large middle class and reduce poverty in the US.
Poverty rates are very low in Sweden, which also has fairly rates of things like cohabitation, unwed mothers (though not teen mothers) and divorce.
it has low rates of crimes and very low rates of violent crimes, particularly when it comes to children, as in “Every year, eight to ten, sometimes as many as twelve children die in Sweden due to violence. This has been true for several years.”
Imagine how we’d rejoice if ONLY eight to ten or twelve children died in the US due to violence.
If we want to protect children, there are societies who do it better than we do. If we’re not imitating them, it seems logical to deduce that as a whole, there is something we value more than protecting children.
Sweden is a racially homogenous, quiet, and undisturbed country that doesn’t have half as much on its plate as the United States, so I don’t consider them a great comparison in all respects.
I’m not mind-reading Holly. It’s just what you plainly stated.
Oh, and Sweden has it’s own problems. It isn’t an unqualified family paradise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUAlFuUnsLY&feature=share
I look forward to learning the ways in which you do consider them a great comparison.
Well, at least I understand why you resort to mindreading, Seth, bad as you are at it: you’re bad at plain old reading too. Because “So the real issue might be raising people out of poverty, not dictating their morals” doesn’t equal “solving the family,” let alone I dont want to deal with the issue lets talk about something else.
Come on now; don’t be obtuse. We’re saying “solve the family” as a shorthand for addressing the social fallout from no-fault divorce and widespread cohabitation raised in Seth’s post at 256.
thanks for clarifying that.
Not everyone thinks that the fallout from no-fault divorces and widespread cohabitation is worse than the fallout from restricted divorces and coercive marriages.
But if you do think that “solving the family” is important, I assume you’ve thought about how to do that?
Given that you raise the issue, it would be helpful if you would offer your assessment first.
I’m just saying you can’t dismiss Seth’s points about the fallout from no-fault divorces and widespread cohabitation with a handwave and a nod to “raising people out of poverty,” especially since you and I both know full well that’s much easier said than done, all things considered.
So, the advantages that no-fault divorce and widespread cohabitation create for weathy white women outweigh the disadvantages that no-fault divorce and widespread cohabitation create for poor minority women?
@272: Oh, OK. It’s good to know what you’re just saying.
I don’t think that no-fault divorce creates more disadvantages for poor women than having no way out of bad marriages. As the passage Seth quotes @256 points out,
Somehow I don’t think it’s an either or situation Holly.
I have a hard time believing you have to embrace a widespread culture of encouragement for and acceptance of divorce just to save women from abusive marriages. By the way, I’m not advocating abolishing no-fault divorce, since I think that could have a lot of unintended consequences I’m still wary of.
But lets keep the cohabitation question separate from divorce.
Is it worth culturally celebrating cohabitation so that the privileged can “test out” their relationships at the expense of ruining many more families in lower income brackets?
I’m not saying that’s the price you have to pay for one or the other. But we do have to keep in mind that “it’s not all about me.” What I do, the example I set, and the social arrangements I advocate for have a much broader impact on the people who share society with me. And I cannot simply say they aren’t my problem and I’m entitled to my rights – even if it messes up their lives.
Another finding I found in my research was that a great many low conflict marriages where the unhappiness with the marriage was enough for the spouses to want divorce, but the spouses decided to stick it out – the conflict resolved itself in 5 years and couples reported a return to healthy marital satisfaction levels.
I’ll have to dig up the source again for exact percentages…
Also, another thing to keep in mind is that the abusive marriage can often be a red herring in discussions of the general availability of divorce. According to this article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR2005110402304.html?referrer=facebook
Two thirds of divorces today end “low conflict” marriages where there is no abuse, violence, or even serious fighting. Little real outward indication that mom and dad don’t really like each other anymore. Which tends to come as a shock to the kids – who never saw it coming.
Well, I know far more limited english speakers than I do Phds. And in my limited acquaintanceship with my non-white low wage female coworkers, I’d say plenty (what a nice qualitative term,) are choosing cohabitation.
It seems that poor, minority women favor the advantages of no fault divorce and cohabitation for themselves as well.
Hallelujah!
This is a point many of us were trying to make, comment after comment.
Glad you finally came around.
Who is celebrating it, Seth?
The fact that a bunch of people here acknowledge that
1) cohabitation is an option many people choose for a variety of reasons, and that
2) cohabitation before marriage is actually shown by plenty of evidence to inhibit divorce; and then ask
what, given that, we can do to make life better for children and adults
does not mean that we celebrate cohabitation. (Particularly since plenty of people here are pro-marriage in all sorts of ways.)
It means we’re trying to deal with reality.
That’s awesome. that’s reason for people to weigh their options carefully. That’s reason for people to go to counseling, be honest about what they want and what they can do to get it and to give it to someone else.
it’s not necessarily a reason to tell them they’re bad people for deciding that what they’re experiencing isn’t “low” conflict, or that even if it is, they just don’t have the resources to deal with it. It’s not a reason to assume that neither party in the marriage has their children’s best interest at heart or doesn’t value the institution of marriage.
Thank christ, you’re finally learning.
Holly, I was never trying to say who was and wasn’t “bad” in the first place.
I was saying that co-habitation had a selfish element inherently stuck inside of it. You chose to interpret that as me saying “you cohabit – which means you suck – and I feel like I’m better than you.” If you’d spent half as much time reading carefully and not jumping to conclusions as you did feeling pissed-off and attacked, you might have caught that.
Suzanne, your anecdotes actually support the research I was reading.
Low income women cohabitate at a much higher rate than higher income women. That data is fairly well supported.
But you’d be mistaken to conclude from that – “well, I guess it must be working out well for them – because that’s what they are doing.”
Do you think selfishness is “good”?
I admit that in light of comments like this one
I and a great many others perceived you as denigrating the choices of others and expressing a lot of moral superiority. I imagine this is not a surprise to you, given that acknowledged that
It would be helpful to understanding what your position actually is if you would confront the way your comments were received here and to do more to address the “lousy job” you did of conveying what your sentiments really were or are.
You’d also be mistaken not to seriously entertain the possibility that however poorly cohabitation works out for these women, they still see it as superior to marriage.
And if that’s the case, you need to address some of the factors that lead them to conclude that.
Yes, and it was exactly that quote which should have put you on notice that I was drawing a distinction between the problem of cohabitation and the people who actually do it (whose individual circumstances, I do not hold myself judge over).
I feel like cohabitation has an element of selfishness inherent in it. But that doesn’t mean I think that Chanson – for example – is a “selfish person” just because she did it for a while. People cannot be reduced in character to one of their life choices. Nor can they be defined simply by one aspect of their social relations.
That quote you picked was trying to make clear the distinction and indicate I was troubled by it and wrestling with it.
That is a far less emphatic, absolute statement that you made previously. That acknowledges that the statement is your opinion, and suggests that selfishness is not the only element in cohabitation. It gives people more room to respond with their own ideas, without needing to first counter yours.
It’s much easier to have a conversation when those are the types of statements being made. thanks for doing it.
And yet, a primary thing it conveyed was your willingness to condemn friends and associates for making choices you disapprove of.
I’ll remind you of another statement you made:
Seth R.
I don’t presume that co-habitation must be working well, only noting what they are choosing.
And sometimes what may look like co-habitation may not be. Poor female workers may see advantages in having a male roommate, benefits not included. Whether this is selfish, I do not know.
No, it conveyed a willingness to condemn cohabitation – but an acknowledgment that it is hard to do that without making people feel like you are condemning them even when that is not your desire.
I don’t know – I’ve heard parts of the DAMU condemn the whole concept of “love the sinner, but hate the sin” that gets said a lot in church before. I have no idea where you stand on that concept.
Either way, I don’t generally find it useful to rank other people’s hangups (real or perceived) as higher or lower than my own. I find that a rather useless exercise in most cases.
Here’s how it works: the audience, not the speaker, determines what a statement conveyed.
Your summary might be what you WANTED to convey.
What people here have worked to make you see is what you ACTUALLY conveyed.
And since they are the ones who received and interpreted the message, they are the only ones who can say that accurately. You cannot tell people what they thought about your message–unless you’re a mindreader.
I’ll take your word for it, but add that it’s a bit hard to believe, given much of what you’ve said here, including
In return, I’d like you to believe me in the future when I write something like
instead of insisting that I’m lying and writing things like
and
Seriously: the mindreader routine needs to go.
Back in the day, when marriage was supposedly more stable, it was because one person had ownership / economic power over the other person. The existence of no-fault divorce / cohabitation in our society now is basically a reflection of how neither person has ownership over the other as far as the state is concerned.
Conservatives have a tendency to latch onto certain topics — “marriage,” “abortion,” “homosexuality,” etc — and use reverse logic to make their points at the expense of critically thinking about class, gender…history even. The points above about no-fault divorce being bad for low-income folks should be a conversation about poverty and gender dynamics before about marriage. Marriage is an institution whereas class, race, and gender are more fundamental aspects from which to analyze. We don’t have to “fix” poverty first before we talk abut marriage, but it’s a little silly to latch onto marriage as a fix-all when so many marriages are unstable and so many cohabitating relationships are stable.
Seth, the study you cited above is put out by the Institute for American Values, one of whose sole goals is to “strengthen marriage” and whose founder David Blankenhorn recently decided to support gay marriage in part because he believes there’s more consensus now about its stability. Heh, maybe if enough cohabitating couples talk about their stability, he’ll get off their backs, too — but then, what would the IAV be fighting for?
Who knows Alan, maybe he will.
Until someone actually has a response to the studies and the data they present, I don’t really care where they came from. I did a bit of digging to see if I could find some criticisms of the organization and read a few of them. I didn’t find them significant, so I felt comfortable citing the studies for the time being.
Sometimes people don’t respond to data because the bias behind it is so obvious that responding to it is a waste of time — and plays into the hands of those who are biased. Of course you would grab data from an organization whose sole reason for existence is to support the institution of marriage, and not see how this bias drives their methodology. -_-
What if I showed you data about how interracial marriages are more unstable, leading to more divorce? Would you conclude that this is bad for children and that therefore interracial marriages are, on whole, “lesser” than monoracial ones? Would you insist that your position of them being lesser is based on the “fact” of their statistical instability, and that you’re not actually condemning individuals who make the choice to enter them?
Alan, I think all the quotes I selected were a bit more nuanced than simply saying “cohabitation is always bad.” In fact, the study found little deviation in satisfaction levels at higher income and education levels.
That’s not exactly something a Focus on the Family staffer would be willing to admit, you know?
Hi guys, sorry to wander off — we had the most amazing, enormous, all-ages party all afternoon and evening!
There are a few different dynamics going on here:
First, there’s the point that Parker mentioned in the higer education thread, namely that higher education is being artificially lengthened (and trade school de-emphasized), partially as a trend for the “haves” to give their kids a leg up on the “have-nots”. Yes, this causes people to start the adult phase of their lives earlier.
But the second (and more important) point that has been ignored is the longer lifespan enjoyed by modern people. People in the modern developed world live literally twice as long as people in the ancient world (and earlier) did. The lifespan in the 1800’s in the US was between the ancient and modern.
If you can reasonably expect to live 35 years, then, yes, you’d damn well better have kids when you’re seventeen if you want to successfully reproduce at all. But if you’re going to live for 70 years, and if you can expect all your kids to live to adulthood (so you only need to raise two in the first place to have two adult descendants, see fertility, mortality), then it’s totally reasonable to lengthen the span of time that you spend investing in your education and preparing yourself for adult responsibilities.
Personally, I could have had kids when I was a teen or in my 20’s (instead of my 30’s), but why? How would that have benefitted anyone in any way? I can expect to be healthy and active well into my 60’s, and so my family and I benefit from the added maturity and life experience that I can bring. Yes, previous generations didn’t have the same luxury, but that doesn’t mean that it’s useful for me to make life decisions as though I were in their shoes.
That isn’t the point I was planning to add the other day though. I wanted to go back to Holly’s comment @204, reagarding people who have more kids than they can handle (either for status or out of a sense of duty) without taking their kids’ welfare into consideration.
I know some people have big families because they’re really capable of giving that many kids the love and attention they need — and do a fantastic job. But I have seen too many cases of large families where some of the kids essentially get lost in the crowd, and wind up with major problems because of it. As Seth put it:
That is the most rotten part of Mormon culture, IMHO. That is why I went ballistic when they preached at General Conference that women should view their kids as their fashion accessories, as their jewelry. Children aren’t jewels or other accessories, and they don’t deserve to be used as symbols of their parents’ righteousness.
WOW! I didn’t think keeping up with a single blog post would be this much work. 😉
You go visit a friend, take a nap, have dinner, watch tv snuggled up to your husband, text with a girlfriend, and then check your email and find 137 of them. Now not all of them were from this discussion, but at least half were. I admit, I dealt with the ones from my own website and friends before I went to bed and then started reading these this morning when I woke up.
Most of the comments really seem to just be going back and forth on what one person said and then changed how they said it, and then more discussion of whether something should be said or what studies to trust. It was interesting, and some of it may link in to some public policy debates, but there were four things that really struck me. ( I still have not gone back to read the first 250 comments, I don’t get the feeling that they are much different than those that came after.)
1) There are wildly differing views about who is hurt most by divorce and cohabitation laws, and whether they are a good idea. Since everyone has those choices, as far as I know, it seems that this is more of a freedom of choice issue. Having been poor, but still gotten divorced, I don’t think that when a relationship is bad that someone will stay in it just because you have to get creative about how to get the resources.
2) Kids are impacted by divorce, cohabitation, single parents, parents that stay together, happy or not, and that while statistics give part of the picture, it is really difficult to say which choice is right for the parents or the children.
3) There are parts of Mormon culture that inform opinions, concerns and justifications on almost every part of courtship, marriage, child rearing, divorce, family size, remarriage and morality. Some people are very rigid in agreeing or disagreeing with Mormon cultures answers to these questions, while others find that their personal experiences, in some way or another allow for more flexibility in how they think about and judge the actions of others.
4) This debate ends up being very cyclical. The same points can be said in slightly different words, over and over again, but when a viewpoint that is unique enters the discussion it isn’t talked about for long, since the most prolific commenters go back to their favorite issues after a few comments. (I am not saying any one person or view is wrong, just that the pattern seems to be pretty repetative.)
So, there are several OPs that came after this one, which have gotten very few comments. Have you read them? Is there a reason they don’t inspire almost 300 comments? Is it maybe time to take a look at some of them and see if they might lead to intersting discussions if more people commented, and/or asked questions?
Just wondering.
Julie, mainly because a personal fight usually inspires a lot of comments.
Chanson, I don’t really see that attitude too much among large families to be honest. I know several and my wife is the middle kid of nine in a family that didn’t have the finances to have that many kids. I’m the oldest of 6 kids in a family that did have the financial ability to support that many. In both cases, yes – there is a lot of pride in the kids (I think it’s justified for any parent to be proud of their kids). My dad would sometimes quote the Old Testament verse of “children are an heritage of the Lord – blessed is the man who has his quiver full….” I forget the exact wording.
(keep in mind he said this with a healthy sense of self-mocking)
But I didn’t get the sense that the kids were a vanity project. They simply drained too much from the parents for any sense of fashion to build up. You can’t send 6 kids to the best pre-schools, the best extracurricular activities, the best soccer leagues, and ballet lessons. You can’t drive 60 miles to take your 10 year old to a soccer game (happens here in kid league soccer all the time). You can’t obsess over and helicopter parent 6 kids. You can’t spoil them as easily. And you can’t really doll them up much. It just takes too much money and energy to do this.
Helicopter parenting is impossible for large families. Yes, they have their own problems – sometimes severe problems. But I always felt it was more an expression of obligation and duty than personal fulfillment. You don’t approach the prospect of six kids the same way you approach the prospect of writing a book, or taking a rock climbing clinic in Boulder, or planning a trek across Nepal. And you can forget about the massive baby-showers, birthday parties, weddings, and other ways that Americans like to show off for other Americans.
But yes Chanson – I think it would be foolish to deny that ego and fierce pride of identity doesn’t factor into the decision to have a lot of kids. I think it’s not so much a matter of one group having more pride than the other, or one group being exempt from pride. But both groups doing it differently.
Just wanted to let you know that MSP is included in this Sunday’s edition of “My New Favorite Blogs.” http://poetrysansonions.blogspot.com/2012/07/my-new-favorite-blogs-sunday-july-15th.html
I specifically linked to this thread, as an example of how hard it can be to come into a OP that has so many comments that unless you started with the conversation, or have extremelly passionate views about the OP, getting through the comments can take MUCH longer than the OP itself deserves.
I am glad that MSP exists, and I don’t mind long chains of comments, but in introducing my readers to new blogs, I like to give them a heads up if different posts get different patterns of attention!
Thanks for letting me be part of the fray!!
@294 & @296 — Thanks for the summary and the link!!
This discussion is very far from being representative of what this site is normally like. We don’t usually have long discussions like this, and this thread has got to be one of our longest ever! It’s probably because Seth is back after a fairly long absence. He keeps the discussion lively, and there were some points that he had made on an entirely differen blog that I wanted to respond to here.
@295 There is no doubt that parenting styles have changed dramatically in the space of a couple of generations. I think the biggest factor driving the changes has been the lengthening of our lifespans and the dramatic drop in infant and child mortality. People stop at two or three kids these days because they can. Period.
As I discussed in my “Fertility, Mortality” post linked above, the fact that instead of raising and loving six kids — and watching four of them die — we can have two to begin with, and focus all of our love and attention on those two. “Helicopter parenting” is a pejorative term for the pathological extreme, but the fact that modern parents have more time and attention/energy for each kid is simple math.
If you look at cultural trends in terms of the environment that drives them, you can see that not all of the things that are different are bad. Some are bad — the American consumer culture you mention, for example, plus this thing of only going out to drive from an air-conditioned house to an air-conditioned mall, spending all social time on TV and screens like this one — causing a real breakdown in IRL communities. But I’m having some major culture shock being back to the US after all these years, so don’t get me started on my “what’s wrong with America” lecture series — I don’t want to be the cranky expat. 😉 But a lot of cultural trends are simply a reflection of the fact that we have a different set of options than people did in the past, and our options that work for us today might not existed then, or might not have been adaptive.
Another interesting report on a study and some criticisms of it:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=125950&page=1#.UALGgvXhe6J
I know this is an old conversation that should probably just be left alone, but this article I found was just a bit too relevant to the cohabitation debate to not link to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/the-downside-of-cohabiting-before-marriage.html?_r=4&hp=&pagewanted=all
This author isn’t for or against cohabitation before marriage. But gives a very useful warning against viewing cohabitation as a convenient “test run” to see if you want to get married. It’s not without exit costs, it’s not easier to get out of than marriage, and it can even pull people into the trap of settling into a comfort zone of living together for years with people they otherwise would have broken up with in a few months if they hadn’t been living with them.
That is a good article. Too bad you hadn’t read it prior to this thread. =p
@299: Yes, Seth, this is pretty much what many of us have been saying, in the face of your insistence that cohabitation is a way of trying to make sure you have an easy exit strategy and is not really much of a commitment. Several people here have worked very hard to make the point that cohabitating is a very real commitment and that anyone who thinks that “it’s without exit costs” is ignoring all sorts of evidence.
Exactly! Whereas jumping into marriage can mean that YOU END UP HAVING CHILDREN AND LIVING FOR DECADES AND DYING WITH SOMEONE YOU WOULD HAVE BROKEN UP WITH IN A FEW MONTHS IF YOU HADN’T MARRIED THEM.
Which is why so many people here advocate caution toward that sort of thing.
There are many things in this thread I don’t have time to respond to right now, but I have been collecting links, and I might as well post a few now.
First, children are simply becoming too expensive for some poorer couples: http://www.alternet.org/story/156260/what_happens_when_you_can%E2%80%99t_afford_your_children?page=entire
Divorce makes women less like to commit suicide: http://jezebel.com/5920503/divorce-makes-women-want-to-kill-themselves-slightly-less?tag=itheedread
the role of fathers in ruining families: http://jezebel.com/5926318/why-arent-we-talking-more-about-deadbeat-dads?tag=itheedread
poor people have high expectations for marriage: http://jezebel.com/5926539/study-finds-that-poor-people-have-really-high-hopes-for-marriage?tag=itheedread
One reason people have married (or not divorced) is for health insurance, which Obamacare takes care of: http://jezebel.com/5922206/obamacare-one-less-reason-to-get-married?tag=itheedread
Yes, all of those links are from Jezebel. Their “I Thee Dread” section has all sorts of interesting bits of info about marriage and relationships.
Speaking of universal healthcare, it’s not really that scary, and it leads to things like fewer abortions: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/07/12/how-i-lost-my-fear-universal-health-care
That story, and the story of what has happened in Portugal since it decriminalized all drugs a year ago and began donating a lot of funding and research to ending addiction, support something I’ve been thinking for a while:
If you want people to make superior choices, educate them and then provide them with more options, because educated people with more options tend to choose better ones.
@300 No kidding.
forgot to include a link on Portugal, though you can find all sorts of stuff if you google it: http://www.alternet.org/drugs/151635/ten_years_ago_portugal_legalized_all_drugs_–_what_happened_next
Alan, I think that article raises just as many concerns about cohabitation as others have raised about Mormon culture of early marriage.
The author remains neutral on the subject. But I came away with a rather negative view of the arrangement. On balance, cohabitation seems to foster even more negative behavior patterns and holds even more traps for those engaged in it than insisting on marriage does.
I’d also be interested in some actual data on how many people “jump into marriage” rather than mere assertion and personal anecdotes.
Holly, you didn’t mention that the divorce = less female suicide were only findings in India and China – which raises more questions about the study than it answers. What other social factors unique to those societies were in play in that study?
The article about kids being expensive was more an indictment of our society that is hostile to child-rearing and families than it was an indictment of having children.
The deadbeat dad article emphasized the need for more male responsibility and involvement. To which I respond – then stop giving them more ways of copping out of their responsibilities – like cohabitation (no one has really talked about the ways in which cohabitation tends to harm the female more than the male – since she’s the one inevitably stuck with the kids).
The article about poor attitudes toward marriage was just confusing. I’m still not sure what point it was making – and it internally contradicted itself. And I’m also not sure what point the link to the health insurance article was making. Certainly the health care article wasn’t talking about “giving people more options.”
On the contrary, the point of the health care article seemed to be that by narrowing people’s options (i.e. by only offering certain health care benefits to the married), you encourage certain behavior. Which seems to contradict your point.
I saw no connection whatsoever with the Portugal drug situation and what we are discussing here.
That would indeed be interesting. I look forward to your report on it when you’ve taken the time to google it and do some research and so forth.
it’s true, I didn’t mention that. I figured people would notice it for themselves when they read the article.
Again, I look forward to your analysis.
the point is, stigmatizing and punishing “bad” behavior is less effective at ending said “bad” behavior than is doing away with sanctions against it and giving people the resources they need to cultivate “good” behavior.
I think there’s a principle there worth considering and exploring.
I suppose. But we weren’t really talking about stigmatizing here at any point as far as I’m aware.
OK, replace “stigmatizing” with “opposing” or even “opposing with harsh language.”
I’m sure there are folks in Portugal opposing drug use with harsh language.
But no one is talking about making cohabitation illegal.
Incidentally, I don’t know why I need to do research on points you were trying to make. It would be a much more effective division of labor if I were to research my own points and you could research yours.
That way we both could get more done.
There probably are. And the point is: it’s pointless at best and harmful at worst. It just makes people feel bad, both those who want help overcoming their drug use and those who don’t.
I LOVE those moments when you can grasp the obvious.
But it has been illegal in the past, and it’s still considered illicit within certain segments of society. People within those segments sometimes work to make those who cohabitate feel bad about their choices.
That’s an effective strategy if your goal is to make people feel bad about cohabitating. But there’s no reason to assume that making people feel bad about cohabitating necessarily propels them into strong marriages, any more than making people feel bad about being gay seems to make them straight or making people feel bad about having a propensity for depression seems to make them happy.
So if your goal is to encourage strong, stable marriages, you need to focus on the strategies that will meet that goal.
And there’s a good chance that it won’t involve a lot of attention to opposing cohabitation–or divorce, for that matter.
Because I get to follow your lead @237 and ignore as I see fit any statement you make–including requests for information–in favor of other discussion.
Duh.
Anyway, the data from Portugal does not show that stopping people from speaking negatively about a social ill helps the situation.
The data from Portugal shows that removing the criminal penalty on illicit drug use brought the practice out in the open where it could be dealt with. No one in Portugal was suggesting coddling drug users and telling them what they were doing wasn’t harmful to their health and socially damaging. So yes, all the mean ole nasty disapproval is still going on uninterrupted in Portugal.
This was an article about criminalization – no social disapproval. There’s a big difference between the two. And using an article about government oversight – and how it works better in a framework were regulation can be effectively brought to bear – and trying to make it a call for people to “quit judging me” is just a ridiculous reach. The argument is obviously not there.
News flash – Cocaine still screws up your life, damages your health and ruins just about everything it touches.
And I’m not going lie to you and pat you on the head and tell you it’s just fine and lovely – like indulging in chocolate every once in a while – just so you can feel better about yourself. There’s nothing self-esteem building about having everyone around you run away from reality.
Also a clarification Holly –
Is this your way of admitting that cohabitation is – on the balance – a socially damaging practice – like illicit drug use?
My statements were about “making people feel bad” by TELLING THEM YOU DISAPPROVE OF THEM, not about “judging them.” There’s a difference.
Judge people all you want. You obviously already do, and I don’t figure anything is going to stop that except maybe a personality transplant or your kids really disappointing you.
Just don’t think that voicing your disapproval of them is going to result in much of anything but their concluding that you’re a jerk they’d just as soon steer clear of. Unless you’re their parent or something, it almost certainly won’t change their behavior. It will just make them avoid and distrust you.
who’s asking you to?
What about minding your own business?
If no one asks you for your opinion of their choices, you have no reason to lie OR to tell them the truth, do you?
OOooh! It’s the return of Seth’s mindreading act! I guess I’m pleased that you ASKED if your assumption was right instead of insisting that it was.
Anyway, nope. It’s an attempt to put cohabitation in a context that might actually speak to you, since I imagined that comparing cohabitation to, say, eating chocolate wouldn’t really do the trick.
eta: the real point of comparison to the Portugal situation is this:
are you more interested in condemning something negative, or do you want to promote something positive?
Condemning cohabitation, however much it does or does not deserve that condemnation, does not do much at all to strengthen marriage.
So, Seth, I ask: what is your real goal here?
If it’s to strengthen marriage, many of your comments are misplaced.
if it’s to trash cohabitation regardless of what that accomplishes, well, I guess we can all look forward to more of the same.
It is absolutely my business.
My daughters have to grow up in a world where men will demand they sleep with them before commitment thanks to attitudes like yours. A world where they will be expected to pay for affection with sex, only to be cast off when it turns out the guy wasn’t committed to them in the first place.
It impacts me terribly. It impacts my children terribly.
We have to live in the crappy world you are advocating for Holly.
And it doesn’t take mind-reading to predict your next response Holly.
You’re going to lash out angrily about the “crappy world” the LDS Church and “people like me” create for other people with our judgmental attitudes.
You are, of course, free to argue that.
But unlike you – I’m not claiming that my publicly stated beliefs are none of your business. I’m not trying to exempt myself from critique the way you are right now.
Why?
I read a comment by you recently about one of your kids inquiring into your sex life. She has to live in the world you create by having sex. So why shouldn’t she know what you are dong? If other people’s choices are your business, are your choices our business? Surely, given that your choices impact everyone else, we have a right to know what you’re doing and what your plans are.
Are you done having kids? If not, how many more will you have? When will you have them? How will you pay for them all to go to school, if that’s a value for you?
I’m advocating a world where people make careful choices about their commitments and honor them as well as they can. However, if it turns out (as it sometimes does) that those commitments can’t be honored, people are allowed to withdraw from them as quickly and gracefully as possible, in ways that minimize the damage they do to others. You really think that would be so bad?
I refer you to the edit I added above, and ask again: what is your goal with regards to all of this?
Oops! i posted my comment before I read this one from you, so I wasn’t able to deliver what you ordered.
Seriously, Seth: If only you knew how much we just plain LAUGH at you.
Well, good. Then I look forward to reading the details of your plans for your family, since they demonstrate how you implement your “publicly stated beliefs,” which are very much my business.
since you seem to have missed it, and to make things easier on you, I’ll repost this from 315:
the real point of comparison to the Portugal situation is this:
are you more interested in condemning something negative, or do you want to promote something positive?
Condemning cohabitation, however much it does or does not deserve that condemnation, does not do much at all to strengthen marriage.
So, Seth, I ask: what is your real goal here?
If its to strengthen marriage, many of your comments are misplaced.
if its to trash cohabitation regardless of what that accomplishes, well, I guess we can all look forward to more of the same.
Holly, the notion of graceful withdrawal sounds nice in theory.
But then again, the idea of early marriage between two outstanding young people who are completely and responsibly committed to each other also sounds nice in theory.
However, you have said that this notion has unintended side effects of unprepared kids rushing into marriage to have sex and causing pain for themselves and others.
Well, cohabitation has it’s own entourage of unintended consequences as well – which the article illustrated quite well.
Namely that the “soft-option” of cohabitation encourages people to not be as careful in selecting who they decide to move in with – and yet allows them to gradually build up just as many ties to each other as married people have – but without the real compatibility that traditional courtship and marriage are supposed to provide. A guy shacks up with a girl because “she seems fun and attractive” and isn’t too concerned about any underlying compatibilities he might have with her – because he can always just “move out” later on down the line – right?
Then a dog, furniture, 3 years of shared rent, shared utility bills, and shared friends and life later – suddenly that “move out” option doesn’t seem so simple anymore. They find it just as difficult to be rid of each other as it would have been had they been husband and wife.
That’s because there’s a hard rule about human romance that has been ignored here.
When it comes to love, sex and romance – there is no such thing as non-commitment. There is no such thing as no-strings-attached. You’re either in, or you’re out.
And the solution is not to go through endless social contortions to find ways for people to have sex without commitment. It’s not going to work that way – ever.
I think it”s pretty awesome in practice too. I know some middle-aged and elderly people who were once “outstanding young people who are completely and responsibly committed to each other.” They have really sweet marriages that I admire. More power to them. I wish more people were that lucky.
My concern is not the “outstanding young people who are completely and responsibly committed to each other” but the average young people who mostly just want to have sex and figure they better get married before they try it so they won’t get in trouble with their church; or the average young people who start looking around for ANYONE to marry before they graduate because they always figured they’d be married by then; or for the average young people who don’t really like the guy who proposed to them but marry the guy anyway because they really, really want a baby; or the average young people who figure they might as well get married because all their friends are setting dates and buying rings; etc.
Seth, NO ONE HERE HAS IGNORED THAT BUT YOU. People have tried repeatedly to get you to see that falling in love involves a commitment. Living with someone and having sex with them involves a commitment. People have told you this, repeatedly. And you’ve told us we’re wrong. YOU are the one who has insisted that cohabitation shows a lack of commitment. “Well,” we say, “not necessarily.”
So what’s it going to be? Do love, sex and romance always necessarily involve a commitment? Or is cohabitation not REALLY a commitment?
Like Alan said, it really would have been nice if you would have read that article before you started commenting here.
Fine by me, since that is not and has never been part of my agenda.
Then why aren’t they getting married Holly?
Why are they cohabitating instead?
There is only one apparent reason for the majority of cohabitations out there – and that is an exit strategy.
Sure there are exceptions, like Chanson’s story. But really – you have to ask what the fundamental reason for cohabitation is.
Seth, I said @ 300 that the article was “good” in the sense that it opened you to the possibility that cohabitation was nothing like what you’ve been saying it is. That shouldn’t be an invitation for you to become reductionist again like @321.
Read this response to the article, which doubts that the “cohabitation effect” is even sociologically present in the 2010s like it was in the 1980s. The thing is that, at any given time, people form relationships differently due to factors outside just the couple — that is, cohabitating can take on different meanings for people, so that, say, in the year 2025 cohabitation might be basically what your saying marriage is.
Also, the first article specifically was referring to folks who cohabitate in their 20s. The reason Chanson’s story plays out differently, I imagine, is because she was older after a failed marriage in her 20s. In sum, the different ways cohabitation manifests culturally, through time, and within a particular lifespan cannot be boxed around so easily.
No, you don’t. It would be better to resist this impulse.
I liked the article because it touched on things like how young low-income folks cohabitate, often out of necessity, to share expenses. I see a great humanity in people “shacking up” to make ends meet regardless of how things turn out in the end for the relationship. Is the goal necessarily for everyone to “get married and live happily ever after in the eternities” or might for some of us it be “to make it happily and comfortably to old age”?
Why don’t you ASK THEM, Seth?
I’ve talked to people about stuff like that, and they’ve given me answers–a range of them–that I’ve tried to think about carefully. I could tell you a pretty interesting story about my friend Jay, who lived with someone, broke her heart; married someone else, divorced her; and has cohabitated with a woman who considers marriage a repressive tool of patriarchy. They’ve been together for almost 15 years, have reproduced, and own a house.
You could ASK PEOPLE why they cohabitate. You might actually learn something that way, about both people and cohabitation.
Or you could just continue to assume that you know their motives and can’t possibly be wrong in your assumptions, in which case you won’t learn anything–about cohabitation, other people, or even yourself.
Alan, I found the Slate article vague and frustratingly unhelpful. It gave no rationale for what it was claiming.
There’s a quote from one researcher that the “cohabitation effect” just can’t be found anymore. And then there is some vague talk about cohabitation becoming the “norm” and then a bare assertion about the divorce rate going down.
But there is zero explanation beyond that. After making these vague data points, the author then pulls the “what’s the big deal” card and asks why we are even bothering with this.
It was a very unhelpful article that gave little explanation or rationale for its assertions – there was no advocacy there to weigh or decide on.
Right, as I said earlier, cohabitation is not the absence of commitment, it is a type of commitment.
I agree with Holly and Alan that you don’t really have to — you might consider the MYOB option. However, if you’re genuinely curious, then (as Holly said) you should listen to people who have information on the subject.
You’re not going to learn anything by simply asking yourself what other people’s motivations might be, and then doggedly insisting:
even after you’ve already discovered that:
Holly’s conclusion @301 really nails it:
Also, the article she linked about universal health care demonstrates the point quite well:
If you really want people to make good choices, making sure that they have good options works better than railing against the choices you don’t like.
The problem is the mixture of “inevitable commitment” that goes with sex and romance, and the idea of “exit strategy” or “hedging” that goes along with cohabitation. No one is claiming that people don’t bring their own unique virtues and vices to the relationships they find themselves in. No one is claiming that a person can’t be so otherwise outstanding that they do cohabitation in an admirable way. The argument was never about whether it was possible to have an admirable household with cohabitation in the mix.
The question was about what cohabitation TRENDS towards for the population as a whole. If you are looking at the big societal picture then yes – absolutely – you need to know what cohabitation is fundamentally about and what its core premise is. Because that will reveal (partially) where the practice is pushing the larger surrounding society.
Chanson, you have every right to tell me to mind my own business when it comes to judging your household, your past, and your decisions. I don’t know how good or bad you and your partner were, whether you made it work or messed it up. Nor should that matter to the argument I’m making. Nor should Alan’s virtues (or vices) in his own relationship matter to a discussion of where homosexual relationships are taking our society.
UNLESS…
Your relationship or his relationship demonstrates fundamental attributes about cohabitation or homosexuality that shed light on how the broader social movement will act, and impact our society.
The anecdotes are not “my business.” But the broader social trends certainly are. I have to live in the society that these trends are pushing us toward as much as anyone. So does my family.
There’s also a difference between promoting education, fighting poverty, and providing people with “options” as you put it, and deciding whether cohabitation is something we want to applaud and encourage as a concept in our society.
I feel like we’ve been talking about two different subjects this entire debate, while thinking we were talking about the same thing.
if that’s what you want to know, then, as Chanson said
Well, more than once, YOU have taken multiple positions with regards to the very same issue and then insisted there’s no contradiction between your statements until and sometimes even after this has been brought to your attention. So much of the blame for that problem lies with you.
We don’t have to applaud or encourage cohabitation. We also don’t have to shame and condemn it, because that doesn’t lead to better relationships or more stable marriages. Instead, we can invest in things that tend to lead to marriage and to to inhibit divorce.
Did you not read the stuff, Seth, about how people with more education and better finances tend to marry more and divorce less?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=people+with+more+education+and+money+marry+more+and+divorce+less
The bottom line is this: you aren’t going to be able to make people do what you want. By that I don’t mean that “one is not able to make people do what one wants.” I mean that Seth R is not going to be able to make people take his opinions and beliefs about how they should live their lives into account when making decisions.
Given that railing against the evils of cohabitation doesn’t get people to make the choices Seth wants, what can he do instead that will help people have more stable, committed relationships that better nurture and protect children?
He seems unwilling to even think about anything pragmatic and practical, and has difficulty seeing how anything not specifically labeled “cohabitation and marriage” relates to the issue.
So I don’t see much hope for poor Seth to be anything but disappointed and angry about the awful choices other people are making.
But then, the mindreader in me thinks that that’s probably what he really wants. He doesn’t want to give people more options; he wants them to work with the options they’ve already got and make the same choices he did. And when they don’t, he wants to condemn them for it.
To follow the template Seth himself established:
But really you have to ask what the fundamental reason is for someone to be so opposed to cohabtation and divorce and not want to talk more about what, besides his opprobrium, will discourage both.
There is only one apparent reason for the majority of Seth’s statements, and that is that he just wants to be spread his disapproval around.
And thus we get back to Parker’s point @232 that it’s easier to talk about Seth than to talk to him. Let’s see if the statements there about how Seth reacts hold true here as well.
No, I would reject your premise Holly that economics are the only or major factor leading to family breakdown.
And as both Kullervo and I pointed out – you’re not going to solve the economy any time soon. So saying “let a better economy solve the problem” is really just the same thing as saying – let’s not solve this problem any time in the next century.
“There is only one apparent reason for the majority of Seths statements, and that is that he just wants to be spread his disapproval around.”
And you cry about me mind-reading Holly?
Nothing like the smell of unaware hypocrisy in the morning.
Uh, Seth, precisely where do I say this? Precisely where do I say or even suggest that “economics are the only or major factor leading to family breakdown”?
I don’t think they are. I am smart enough to realize that “more education and money tend to promote marriage and inhibit divorce” does not mean that “economics are the only or major factor leading to family breakdown.”
Identifying a partial solution to a problem does not necessarily mean you can therefore clearly identify its root cause, does it?
Oh, so we’re only allowed to discuss solutions that will be effective “any time soon”? We don’t get to take the long view and work for an overall transformation of society? Who said so? Where is that written?
Well, I’ve got news for you, Mr. Rogers: You’re not going to end cohabitation any time soon. So by your logic own, your incessant complaining about how bad it is “is really just the same thing as saying lets not solve this problem any time in the next century.”
As you yourself wrote @331, “Nothing like the smell of unaware hypocrisy in the morning.”
Speaking of @331: Are you too angry to read an entire comment before you pound out your indignant response? Sad when that happens.
For the record: I was very aware of what I was doing @329, and I make that clear in the comment. I call attention to the fact that I’m mindreading and using a template you establish. How did you miss all that?
I suppose you were too busy being angry and plotting ways to make this thread about me rather than the subject, to really pay attention to the substantive issues we were discussing. But if you had been, you would have noticed that I already discussed economics on several occasions in this thread that had nothing to do with this particular sub-argument. So it clearly was not the case that I didn’t want to talk about economic solutions to the problem.
The only issue I had was your attempt to suggest that I ought to concede my argument in favor of economic solutions. Basically, you were saying that “economics is the real big problem here – so Seth is just barking up the wrong tree and ought to shut up already.”
That was a clearly dishonest attempt to shut down the debate by an appeal to eradicating poverty. Neither me, nor Kullervo ever said we didn’t think poverty was important, or worth talking about. It’s just that both of us recognized that you were hand-waving to try and avoid talking about an issue you didn’t want to talk about.
So bring up poverty Holly. By all means – feel free to discuss it.
But don’t expect me to accept it as a reason not to talk about why cohabitation is a problematic social construct. This kind of dodge and evade may play well with your own little band of groupies, but it isn’t fooling anyone else.
Now, to address your… can I even call it a point… about “railing.”
You would like to dismiss what I’m doing here as “railing”, “ranting”, or whatever else (though I think it’s clear to an objective reader which of the two of us has been “the angry one”). But these labels miss the key issue being debated in this thread.
Is cohabitation, as a social trend, good for society or harmful to it?
That’s what I’ve been discussing. And the answer to that question is in dispute. I think it’s a, on the balance (at the macro level), harmful trend. Others disagree with me.
Given that situation – how does it possibly make sense for Holly to complain that my aim here has been to express disapproval for the social trend of cohabitation? Of course that’s what I’m doing. I’m on one side of a debate about whether cohabitation is a good thing or not for society. What else would be expected?
This is basically a Captain Obvious moment for Holly.
Oh my gosh – it’s like his whole purpose in this debate is to express disapproval of cohabitation!
Gee, well-spotted Holly. I hope it didn’t take all these weeks for you to deduce that. But given that whether cohabitation is a good or bad thing has been the subject for 333 comments and running (despite a lot of wasted comments were people tried to make it about how mean I am), I have to say – you’re a little late to the party.
@328
I don’t even know what this means. Can one say the same thing about marriage? That it has one premise, or can’t it also be about a bunch of other things? This whole time I see Seth as comparing something he believes as ideal to something he believes is less than ideal, so that the equation is already sorted out.
1 > (less than 1).
I also don’t understand this. Homosexual relationships have always existed in society. They’re just now more public, because it’s not fair for people to have to stay hidden (like they’re quasimodos, or something). So the only place public homosexual relationships are taking society is to a place less homophobic.
Seth’s framing here (and certainly plenty of his previous comments) demonstrate that he’s already of the opinion that homosexual relationships are lesser than hetero ones — so he’ll do the same thing he does with cohabitation — search for what’s “fundamentally wrong” first and then try to be “open” to the pros to see if they outweigh the cons.
So, Seth, as much as you’re attempting to play objective observer, you don’t really have my trust that you can sustain it.
Right. Because my writing
and
isn’t an acknowledgment that you’re unlikely to give up this bone you’re gnawing.
But I am at least glad to know what “the only issue you had was.”
Oh. OK. Both YOU AND KILLERVO are expert mindreaders. YOU KNOW that he knows what I intended.
Truly, Seth, your skill grows daily. Very impressive!
Don’t worry, Seth: I don’t expect you to be swayed from your favorite tirade by much of anything.
Um, Chanson, Alan, Parker, Suzanne, Taryn, Chino and anyone else who has been involved: Is this conversation “a debate about whether cohabitation is a good thing or not for society”?
It’s not what the OP was about, so if you think that’s all the conversation can and should be about now, Seth, who made you threadjacker in chief?
Anyway, I guess that explains a lot if that’s all you think it is. You think that your angry rantings (yes, your angry rantings) are actually going to prove anything and settle the question. Other people say, “Well, engagement cohabitation seems to be good for marriage. Other kinds of cohabitation, not so much. But regardless of whether it’s good or bad, cohabitation is a reality. So given this reality, what can we do to make things better for people?”
You’re flat-out wrong, Seth. This thread has had a great many twists and turns, and not all of them have had to do with cohabitation.
Again I ask: Chanson, Alan, Parker, Suzanne, Taryn, Chino and anyone else who has been involved: is that the key issue being debated here?
Yes, that’s it. That’s all you’ve got to offer. Nothing but disapproval. No solutions, nothing constructive. Just a nasty nay-sayer who rants and rails.
I’ll just point out something else. I gave you this advice: “You could ASK PEOPLE why they cohabitate. You might actually learn something that way, about both people and cohabitation.”
You seem unwilling to take it.
I have recognized all along that you have nothing to offer but ranting and railing. I’ve asked why you don’t offer more. To repeat:
I’ve repeatedly ask you to explain what your goal is in condemning cohabitation (and divorce, but you don’t seem to want to talk about that anymore–you have erased that topic, though it was the focus of the OP).
You have no answer. None.
Having asked you repeatedly for an answer, I now feel entitled to speculate as to why you won’t provide one. Most likely answers: A) you don’t actually have an answer. B) the answers are unflattering to you: you just like to complain; you’re too lazy to do anything but point out problems and find it too much bother to solve them.
So keep foaming at the mouth and the keyboard, Seth. We’ve all figured out that you have nothing to offer but condemnation of a situation you refuse to ask questions about. It would be pointless to continue were it not true, as Chino pointed out, that it’s fun to watch your whole ridiculous routine.
So take a look at Seth @333 & @334, and then read this from Parker, @232:
http://mainstreetplaza.com/2012/06/27/put-on-your-own-oxygen-mask-first/comment-page-5/#comment-104364
so whether we have a truly skilled mindreader here, it seems we have a prophet.
Holly, you are absolutely right on one thing.
YOU can’t have a discussion with me.
That is abundantly obvious.
My goal was to discuss cohabitation and debate whether it’s a good thing or not. I think that should have been rather obvious, which is why I haven’t bothered with this frivolous question until now.
All societal solutions start with recognizing what your values are. Before you can talk about solutions, you have to identify the problems. If we don’t recognize cohabitation as a problem in the first place – then there is no point talking about solutions for it. Since the debate over whether it is a good thing or not continues apace, I don’t see why the fact that I’m still advocating a side is a big news flash for anyone.
Now, are there any more obvious things you would like pointed out to you Holly?
Well, Seth, if you ever change your mind and decide to be someone with whom people can have a discussion, I would still really like answer to the questions @336 and earlier.
Well, I see that my comment @340 was premature. It’s not abundantly clear after all that I can’t have a discussion with you!
@339: In other words, I was right in my suspicion that your one and only goal is to trash cohabitation regardless of what that accomplishes, so we can all look forward to more of the same.
It’s true that this was obvious to me, but I wanted YOU to admit that you are not and have never been interested in talking here about how to strengthen marriage.
So, thanks.
Sure, Seth: is someone who spends a huge portion of his time arguing a position he is never going to persuade his interlocutors to accept suffering from some sort of pathology?
Oh, “people” can and do have conversations with me all the time Holly.
It’s just that YOU can’t.
But that’s more your own personal hangup than mine.
OK, apparently you do need more of the obvious pointed out to you. I feel like I’m running a thought-charity here.
Obviously the reason that cohabitation would be bad (or good) would be intimately tied up in the question of whether marriages are strengthened or weakened. Cohabitation is seen as an alternative to marriage in the first place. So of course increased cohabitation is going to impact marriage.
Furthermore, the question of “is marriage good” is implicitly tied up in the question of whether it’s OK to forgo it in favor of cohabitation.
So, by discussing whether cohabitation is good or bad, we are already automatically discussing the health of marriage. I would have thought it was obvious the two subjects were interconnected and implicit in the discussion, but always happy to point out the obvious for you Holly.
and Parker, and Taryn…. It seems difficult for most people here.
A “personal hangup” is the last thing I or anyone whose opinion I care about would call my refusal to play your little games on your terms.
But it sure is fun to get you to play it on mine.
@343: Poor Seth. Can’t quite seem to understand that “is marriage unhealthy?” a question with a yes/no answer, is not the same question as “how do we strengthen marriage, regardless of its health?” a question that requires actual thought and some suggestions on how to solve a problem.
but hey, Seth, if you want to continue to give away your utterly worthless thoughts and call it charity, well, I suppose you might as well.
similarly, the question of “does cohabitation suck?” is not the same question as “how do we discourage cohabitation and encourage marriage?”
As I pointed out, clear up there at the top of this portion of the thread, saying “Cohabitation is bad” doesn’t reduce it.
So what will?
I’m actually interested in that, and have pointed out things to think about in answering that question. You don’t see the connection to the debate you think, all alone in your head, you’re having here with others.
But you have no answer for that question, Seth, and you don’t want to come up with one. You think that you’re doing a service by repeating yourself, and I guess you are: it’s one more episode of Seth’s Schtick at MSP, and you already know how that entertains us.
So yeah, if providing a spectacle that amuses others is the best use of your time, by all means, continue.
Do you want to post your address, so people know where to send the tips?
Is this thread still going? Count me as one who finds it difficult to have a conversation with Seth.
I think marriage can be strengthened by people freely choosing to commit to one another. People should be empowered with the tools and information to make choices that are most beneficial.
Sometimes there aren’t any oxygen masks.
But who am I to talk, I only got married to piss Seth off. And I’ve never even met him.
For the sake on my cranky brain, my spinal surgery recuperation, my hips well at me when i use them, and the reduced brain power that spasms is a syncopated rhythm combinations every time a new comment that says the same thing as at least 20+ posts that said the same thing, albeit with more or less words in different posts.
Please everyone who still cares passionately about this thread, if I send you a ream of paper, envelopes and stamps, could you use them and talk about it that way?
Trust me, any thing that hasn’t been said by the 200th, isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. Besides, think how many trees you could kill to underscore have passionate. You are about disliking the debate, disliking how the debate was framed, personally disliking the personality and persons of those who don’t agree with you. Besides, then you use the mail service to send messages you can contribute having your argument be completely irrelevant to answering the last comment, you blame it on the “damn postman.”
So, go to my blog, laugh at the juvenile people actually poetry about shopping list must be insane. Leave a comment with your email and a will send you a letter writing kit.
Poetrysansonions.blogspot.com
This has been a public service announcement brought to you by the forest products industry.
Alright Julie.
I’m done. This blog has other threads I’m sure merit discussion.
Thanks for the engaging mega-thread everyone. It’s been fun to come back and back and back over the past few weeks.
Seth R., (in my unbiased opinion) I am an objective reader of this blog. While I am convinced of the sincerity of your arguments and perspective, I am not convinced that what you keep claiming to be obvious is obvious. In reading your posts, and reading what other people say about your posts, I’m frankly just perplexed. I see people sincerely looking to engage with you and your ideas, but it’s like you don’t understand what they are trying to say. And they repeat what they are trying to say in a different way, and you still don’t understand, so they start getting frustrated. I don’t see that frustration aimed at you as a person, but aimed at the barrier to communication that seems to exist between you and other posters.
I find this quote so thought provoking. A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your source. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. My first question when reading that is: am I that man with conviction? I’ve read all the posts in this thread, and I don’t see you engage in any sort of self-reflection Seth R.. Even if it’s objectively true that you don’t rail or rant, or that you are a fair and level-headed debater, or that you harbor no anger, or whatever else, if someone criticizes you, do you ever just step back and think, “Is there some possible kernal of truth in that criticism? For what reasons would a reasonable person say such things?”
Because I don’t see any self-reflection in your comments, nor I see any of your comments that might be informed by self-reflection. You made a jab at the “Christian war on science” in another thread. Do you think there is any sort of discussion, facts, or logic that is going to change those people’s minds? Without self-reflection, there is no way a person to find their way out of a false conviction.
I guess my point is that I think demonstrating a little bit of self-relfection would gain you a lot of mileage with your discussant partners and with observers. Up to this point, everytime you have invoked the view-of-the-unbiased-observer I have disagreed with that view, and I think a lot of that disagreement comes from me not seeing self-reflection in your comments.
I already told Julie I would stop responding.
But I’ll break that promise (sorry) just long enough to say thank you to muucavwon for your sincere advice. I will think it over and try to self-reflect on how this thread went and what I should have done better.
Other than that, I’m done this time. Seriously.
Julia, If there are people who still want to participate in this conversation, it’s not your place to tell them to stop, just because you don’t like what that does to your inbox. If it troubles you to follow this post, do your “cranky brain” and everyone else a favor, and UNSUBSCRIBE FROM IT.
I just came across a personal history blog entry that I’d like to add to this discussion:
[…]
I’d like to quote you the entire post, but I’m trying to limit this to fair-use teasers to get you to read the whole thing.
OK, one more — apologies if I’ve quoted too much:
This was the whole point of the OP. Yes, it would be great if nobody ever needed to divorce. But when it happens, it’s not about choosing the parents’ happiness over the kids’ happiness. It’s that some marriages are more of a hindrance than a help to raising children well.
Thanks for the link, Chanson. The comments on the post are worth reading too.
I am currently watching two divorces unfold; one couple is LDS and one is not. It’s shocking how wrenching the decisions were to arrive at, how much difficulty is involved at every step. On top of all the other issues involved, the LDS couple has 1) over twice as many children as the other couple, 2) a smaller income base to support those kids with, and 3) all this shame and heartache about the failure of a temple marriage that was supposed to last for all eternity and bring the people involved in it joy and perfection along the way.
It’s the height of cruelty to set people up for such spectacular failure and misery, and then inform them disapprovingly, when they fail so devastatingly and their misery is more than they can bear, that the ultimate problem is their “selfishness.”
I found this article completely fascinating. It’s on the interrelationship of sleep, health, marriage, sex, happiness, and sharing a bed. A bit long, but worth the read. http://www.salon.com/2012/08/14/separate_beds_are_liberating/
Very interesting idea.
I imagine it depends a lot on the particular sleeping patterns of the individuals involved. When I was just visiting my parents in MN for a month, they put us in a room with separate beds — and it was one of those things where it might have been an epiphany of sleeping well, but it wasn’t really. I wasn’t happy with it. I was happy to return to our one common bed in Switzerland.
But I can understand how that would work better for some people, in the same way I believe my friends who’ve recounted that putting their baby in a room down the hall worked better for them (even though I felt more relaxed having my baby in my bed with me, way back when I had babies). Sleeping patterns (and your mileage) may vary. 😉
Yes, one of the things I found most interesting was the anxiety around what others will think of what works best for you, whether it was worrying that sharing a bed would give kids the idea that their parents had sex, or deciding that you wanted separate rooms would suggest that your marriage is about to end.
found this recent story relevant to the larger discussion here: http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/10/opinion/coontz-poverty-marriage/index.html?hpt=op_t1
In other words, a way to increase marriage and strengthen it when it happens is to increase the social safety net.
It took me a while to realize that I had as much right to be happy as my former wife and our child. She initiated the separation and I initiated the divorce. I don’t think there is a good way to do either, but in retrospect we handled both decisions well. We fell out of love but still had respect for each other. That has served our son and ourselves well. Thank you for a very well reasoned post.
@360 Divorce is difficult, but sometimes it really is the best option — for everyone in the family.
My wife is still struggling with some mental trauma from her first marriage/divorce. I really wish that I had met her first, but… It took about a year worth of therapy just to get to the point where she was capable of a serious relationship, let alone marriage. She is still waiting for something bad to happen which will make me leave her like her ex did.
I think that her divorcing him was the best thing she could have done. The guy was (and still is) a compulsive lier, manipulative, and abusive. The only thing that they had in common was that they were drinking buddies. He tricked her into having sex without protection, by claiming that he had taken a shot (much like women can get) which made his body stop producing sperm, which resulted in her first pregnancy. The pregnancy resulted in basically a shotgun wedding. Then, he was shocked that when her son was born, she withdrew from her college party girl lifestyle, and went back to being a good Mormon girl. That was the beginning of 8 years of lies, deception, and pain, before he left.
I believe that getting the divorce was the best thing that she could have done. Not just because she ended up being my wife, but I don’t believe that environment is good for anyone (and I’m a big proponent of marriage).
I truly believe that everyone that is involved is better off. Although the ex is still trying to make her life miserable.
@362 Exactly. I’m a big proponent of marriage too because I see it as a source not only of joy, but of comfort, strength, solace, and rejuvenation. If you treat marriage like “you’ve made your bed, now you’ve got to lie in it” — eg. as a punishment, if you chose wrong — then you are doing it wrong and have no business giving other people marriage advice.
There are times when divorce is the best option for all involved, including the children, if any. Not always, but in a non-trivial number of cases. And in such cases, divorce isn’t the “selfish” choice, it’s the responsible choice.
Thanks to facebook friends, recently came across this essay from a couple months back about the benefits of sex before marriage, for both individuals and society: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/24/moral-case-for-sex-before-marriage
Very cool article — thanks!
Here’s another testimonial of the point I was making in the OP:
“The conflict and struggle inherent in denying such an integral part of one’s self can’t not affect his ability to be a kind and loving father and husband. You’ve seen evidence of that when “R.J.†takes over. R.J. isn’t his gay side—it’s his conflicted, self-denying side; it’s a symptom of the emotional scarring that such conflict and self-denial causes.”
Also, here’s a post I wrote related to Holly’s point @34 about Jane Eyre.
Just noticed, in looking up my comment @34, that all previous formatting for blockquoting is gone. Can we somehow get that back? It renders this conversation (and a great many others) basically unintelligible.
OK, this has been on my to-do list for a while — figure out what happened to the blockquotes.
As far as I can tell, the stylesheet says that blockquotes in comments should be formatted just like the blockquotes in the main post. Yet the formatting in the comments is not working for some reason. Does anyone here know something about WordPress styles and themes, and have an idea of what the problem might be…?
OK, it’s a bit of a hack, but I think I fixed it. I also added a new tag <superquote/> which is the same as blockquote except that the background will be
Now I just have to fix all of those stupid quotation marks that don’t display correctly…
Yeah, those are super annoying, but at least you can still make sense of a thread even with the weird little symbol that has replaced the quotes.
Anyway, thanks for addressing the blockquote problem!
And I look forward to finding a use for the
It would have been ideal for certain comments on this thread. 🙂
Any possibility that “superquote” could have the Superman logo superimposed over the red strip? You’ll work on that? Super!
@374 That would be fun — and it might actually even be possible…
I would like to save one more article reference on this thread:
and