Manly Thor's Day Special

Let's get married
A number of studies recently have confirmed that most young people still hope to get married.

I was surprised to find that the authors of one recent study were surprised at this:

"What was so striking about what the young people said is that no one really described rejecting marriage," said lead author Maria Kefalas, a sociology professor at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "I had a category all written - marriage rejector - and we couldn't find any. There was no one who said, 'Marriage is meaningless and I don't want to get married.'"

Marriage is one of the very best moves you can make in life so I don't know why anyone would be surprised.

But there is an important caveat. People who are married are much happier than people who are not but people who never marry are considerably less miserable than people who divorce. The price for failure is high.

And that probably explains the next thing that comes out in the study.

Young adults in small towns and rural areas - whom they dubbed "marriage naturalists" - generally have a 1950s' view toward marriage, seeing it as the inevitable "next step" in a long-term relationship.

In contrast, urban young adults - dubbed "marriage planners" - had high standards for potential marriage partners and a strong sense that marriage was something they had to be "ready for."

The authors distinguish the two groups this way:

Marriage naturalists basically believe that you get to be an adult after you marry, while marriage planners think becoming a full-fledged adult is a prerequisite to wearing a wedding ring, she said.

 I wonder who is more successful in their marriages?

The problem, of course, is that an increasing number of marriage planners never get married.

I'm not an advocate of returning to the 1950s but I think we need to take the wisdom implicit in the 1950s approach seriously. You couldn't possibly know or plan for what it takes to make a marriage work ahead of time. It's a life choice where on-the-job training is unavoidable.

But how do you deal with this as a man? I think the answer is that there are some ways to make the thing more likely to succeed. and there is one ting you can do that will more or less guarantee failure.

That one thing is to keep treating everything as an experiment.

One of the odd things about most failed marriages I have seen in friends and relations is that they were never married in the first place. These couples plunged right into deep, deep love but when it came time to get married they treated the, 'til death do us part' and 'forsaking all others' stuff as provisional. Yeah, that's what we'll do so long as it keeps working. There will innevitably be times in marriages when it stops working.

But if you're already thinking, "f this doesn't work, I'm out of here," you've already failed.