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.
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.