Posted on 10/12/2015 8:32:47 AM PDT by Salvation
A 2012 report on men and marriage by the Pew Research Center shows statistically what many of us have noticed anecdotally: men are finding marriage less desirable than in the past and are now marrying later, if at all.
In today’s post I want to present some excerpts from a hard-hitting article that appeared at Lifesite News in 2013, commenting on the Pew study. The full article can be read here: Men Giving Up on Marriage.
As usual, I present the text from the original article in bold, black italics, while my own poor commentary is in plain red text.
Fewer young men in the US want to get married than ever. … The number of young adult men saying that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things dropped from 35 percent to 29 percent [since 1997].
The latest census data showed “barely half” of all adults in the United States are currently married, a “record low.” Since 1960, the number of married adults has decreased from 72 percent to 51 [percent] today and the number of new marriages in the U.S. declined by five percent between 2009 and 2010.
Moreover, the median age at first marriage continues to rise, with women getting married the first time at 26.5 years and men at 28.7 [years]. The declines in marriage are “most dramatic” among young adults. Just 20 percent of those aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59 percent in 1960.
In my mere 26 years of priesthood, I have seen the number of weddings I perform each year decrease from 35 to 5, and the average age of engaged couples increase from 24 to 31. These are startling changes, and they largely match those experienced by other priests with whom I have discussed the matter.
29 percent of young adult men desiring marriage is an amazingly low figure. The article notes that the things that once motivated men to marry in the past are largely in eclipse now. Men once enjoyed the esteem they garnered by marrying, and were motivated by the challenge of being breadwinners. Getting married was once a proper and approved way of attaining status, and legitimately enjoying sexual intimacy. It was part of the passage to manhood.
But today, many (if not most) women don’t need (or don’t think they need) men to provide for them economically. It’s goodbye to any notion of the esteem of being a provider.
Further, in an age of promiscuity, most men don’t need marriage to open the door to sexual encounters. Only a few “old-fashioned” Catholic priests and traditionalist Catholics raise any eyebrows at men’s “playing the field.” And women as a group (with certain notable exceptions) seem less insistent on expecting men to connect sexual intimacy and marriage.
Add to this the financial bondage introduced by the racket that college education has become. Many young people graduate from college with six-figure debt. And when undergraduate degrees no longer open doors, advanced degrees became necessary, bringing on even more debt.
And finally, add one more thing: pornography. It is more available than ever before. And though it is theoretically more privately accessible than previously, I would point out that there is nothing private about the Internet; Internet service providers know every site you have ever visited.
Sadly, many young men honestly admit that they prefer pornography to real women. Pornography doesn’t talk back or have preferences or moods. Real relationships are complex and require navigation and negotiation. Pornography, it would seem, is a narcissistic paradise. Click through to your current preference; it’s all about you and what you want. And at the end, the object of your fantasy disappears and does not have issues or attitudes with which you must deal.
The overall image is of a cauldron, filled with a witch’s brew or a satanic stew. That men and women marry at all today is increasingly miraculous. I always make a point of congratulating and thanking engaged couples that get to my rectory door for beating the odds and having the gumption to swim upstream.
Pew’s findings have caught the attention of one US writer who maintains that feminism, deeply entrenched in every segment of the culture, has created an environment in which young men find it more beneficial to simply opt out of [marriage] entirely
Suzanne Venker [in her] article, “The War on Men,” … points out that for the first time in U.S. history, the number of women in the workforce has surpassed the number of men, while more women than men are acquiring university degrees. …
With feminism pushing them out of their traditional role of breadwinner, protector, and provider—and divorce laws increasingly creating a dangerously precarious financial prospect for the men cut loose from marriage—men are simply no longer finding any benefit in it. …
“When I ask [men] why, the answer is always the same: women aren’t women anymore.” Feminism, which teaches women to think of men as the enemy, has made women “angry” and “defensive, though often unknowingly.”
“Men are tired,” Venker wrote. “Tired of being told there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Tired of being told that if women aren’t happy, it’s men’s fault.”
Most men I know perceive that they are often considered by the wider culture as deficient, even depraved. The “men are stupid” commercials and sitcoms abound. Men are often presented as buffoons, who need women and children to “set them straight” on the simplest of things.
Schools, dominated by feminist ideology, have made a pathology of the normal behavior of boys, which includes competition and roughhousing. They seek to feminize boys, going even so far as to encourage medication for them. Most of these boys merely have the spit and vinegar that was once considered normal, needing to be curbed somewhat rather than suppressed with drugs.
It is little wonder that fewer young men make it to college and are falling behind young women in almost every category. Being told (even indirectly) on a regular basis that you are fundamentally flawed has a significant effect over time.
The article says that feminism has emboldened many women to direct suspicious anger toward men and generally presume that they have bad or evil motives. But it has also caused a lot of men to draw back from the healthy confidence that once bolstered them to go out and seek a wife and to take a leadership role in the community, the Church, and the family.
A feminist culture in effect shames these desires as being “patriarchal.”
This is a situation that should not be celebrated by feminists, Venker says. “It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex … The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals … in order to live the balanced life they seek.”
Yes, in the end it’s usually the biology that kicks in. Truth be told, men and women are meant to be complementary not competitive. Our very body bespeaks a difference that requires the opposite sex to complement it. The design of women’s bodies speaks to bearing children and nurturing them.
A woman who wants to have and raise children well needs time and flexibility. The 9-to-5 career world does not facilitate that. Thus her husband complements her need by taking up the linear and less-flexible career world, leaving her freer to nurture the children.
This used to be obvious to us. But ideology is often disinterested in the obvious. It may be true that we were once too restrictive, limiting certain jobs and careers to men. But for most women, the freedom to work has become the duty to work, even in the childbearing years. It’s a raw deal for everyone: women, men, and especially children.
The bottom line is, it’s never good for anyone, or for civilization as a whole, when huge numbers opt out of or find no access to our most fundamental building block: the traditional family. We must save traditional marriage if we stand any chance of saving our dying civilization.
For further reading, consider Men and Marriage by George Guilder and Eggs are Expensive, Sperm is Cheap by Greg Krehbiel.
Hopefully those 2 are not having a gay old time....
I get you on about #4-6, but not the “whores”, infidelity, or bi-sexual/lesbian thing.
I dare say a greater percentage of men visit prostitutes than women are prostitutes. Infidelity is still higher among men than women. And also more men are gay, including closeted gay, than women are lesbian or closeted lesbian.
Oh, and you’re right about electronic devices, I think—particularly with boys playing video games into adulthood.
Stats don’t bear that out.
Women typically have more sexual partners than men, and men are more likely to be virgins then women.
“The bottom line is, it’s never good for anyone, or for civilization as a whole, when huge numbers opt out of or find no access to our most fundamental building block: the traditional family. We must save traditional marriage if we stand any chance of saving our dying civilization.”
While this is generally true, it is not true in the end times as individual soul growth is so accelerated that every human being is our brother and sister. We have only one Father and He is within us.
This is why Paul mentioned that it is better to remain single. As growth accelerates when we are not utilizing another soul to create our own wholeness.
That’s just not true. Never has been either.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/37853719/ns/health-sexual_health/t/surprising-sex-statistics/#.VhvlHvlVhBc
http://www.livescience.com/13072-sex-stats-virgins-rise.html
There is no upside for them to, given the conditioning of most females from schools, media, shows, and advertising.
you can fire men a lot easier, and also women are more likely to go along with crap in the workplace than men.
You address only on very narrow element of the broader issue. Men didn’t just abandon their roles, popular culture mocks those men who even desire to fulfill their traditional roles.
its like volunteering for work release for 18 years, at least.
Maybe it tells you how genuinely awful the state of real reltionships with the real women around them actually are. Maybe that is the headline right there.
“I dare say a greater percentage of men visit prostitutes than women are prostitutes.”
I think you’re reading “whore” a bit too literally. When a woman will have sex with a man on the second date, and most women nowadays will, then they are harlots, floozies, women of low repute, etc...
They may not be professional prostitutes, but they are not women you consider marrying and taking home to meet your mother.
Exactly right. Whoever heard of a church charging a member to get married there? A church seeing a wedding as a chance to get paid is on the wrong path.
In real life a few cents of electricity is the only real “cost”. Families and friends clean up after and lock the door. That’s what a group of Christians should do.
The courts and lawyers have never done better’since no-fault divorce and convenience culture, plus the i’m perfect it must be you, mentalities took over.
In the protestant churches they aren’t missing anything spiritual by not marrying in a church house. In Catholics possibly so?
But just as worship can be done on the hood of a jeep, a wedding can be anywhere that people gather in his name.
One of the most amazing easter services I ever attended was in Moab Utah, in the back country, with friends standing around a few jeeps. Nobody even passed the plate and put the bite on us.
women complaining about being treated like a man, still have no idea what being treated like a man really is, they still get special treatment. even though they think they don’t. still harder to be let go. still can cry and have it work on much more people. still can have thousands more support groups just for them. still have more government programs just for them. still are a protected class. still have lawsuits by them be effective because they are a protected class. “family” courts totally biased their way.
or’fix things. or do heavy lifting.
Definitely not.
I was checking to see if someone had already posted that before I did.
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