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Notes -
Aella Twitter poll: If you ended up in a romantic relationship just like that of your parents, would you be happy?
Yes - 31.2%
No - 68.8%
The decline in marriage makes a lot more sense with this datapoint. Does anyone have any idea what is going on here?
I'd happily pick yes. My parents care for each other and have been married for four decades.
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I'd vote "no" because my parents' marriage was fine (they had a rocky patch when I was very young but got over it) but I don't want a marriage or romantic relationship, knew my mind on that since I was nine, and had I been forced by family and social pressure into marrying someone I would have been very miserable (and so would they). There were a couple of mild hints, in my late 20s/early 30s, about "hey, here's a distant cousin with all this land, someone ought to marry him" but that all bounced off me.
So 'yes, my parents' marriage was fine, no, I would not be happy'.
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Probably an adversely selected sample given Aella's audience, and going by my past talent for ruining millennial "complain about your family" sessions by talking about actual bad stuff I'm among the "adversely selected", but as a millennial with Gen X parents, uh... The two of them were married four times (Mom twice, Dad thrice) and of those four, my father's third marriage is the only one that I would call successful (and even then, I have no idea why my second stepmom puts up with my father's shit). Of the six aunts and uncles on both sides, none are married to their original spouses, save for one who is merely separated (They'll likely never divorce, just live in separate trailers in the same park; they had dinner together during Easter.).
My parents' marriage and divorce were insane disasters that only could've gotten worse if my father had given up and walked away, someone actually got murdered, or mom had been clever enough to accuse him of "abusing" my sister and I in court instead of just painting him as an irresponsible alcoholic and lecturing us about her victimhood in their episodes of domestic violence (Yeah, she lost some fights, but she won some too, and after their divorce mom kept having problems with domestic violence while dad did not. She hit my sister and I, not him.). They split for good when I was six and their post-divorce war dragged on for 15 years after that.
If we're swapping anecdotes about domestic violence and old-fashioned marriage, my mother used to tell me about a cousin of hers (who had a brother who was a priest, so VERY RESPECTABLE FAMILY) and how he helped solve a problem of that kind.
Another relative was married to a guy (again, outwardly respectable) who used to beat her. The family strongly hinted that this was not acceptable. Guy didn't stop. So Cousin warned him off by beating him up so badly he had to spend a week in bed (and his wife made excuses to work for him) and told him if he ever laid a hand on his wife again, Cousin would kill him.
That stopped it.
I never understood why she stayed with the guy, but think about it: this would have been in the 50s or 60s. No divorce in Ireland. Marital separation considered very scandalous and disgraceful. Women were supposed to put up with it. Economically dependent on husband. So really the option of leaving him was not there.
This is also why "let's go back to making women economically dependent on men so they have to get married and have kids" is never going to fly again.
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Well statistically, wouldn’t “just like that of your parents” mean “divorced” for about half of them?
That’s still insane. The Protestant Reformation and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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“Selected for Aellea’s social network” makes any kind of social commentary or inference from the results completely meaningless.
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Total guess: A majority of marriages from the boomer generation are actually at least somewhat unhappy. Marriages lead to children pretty reliably though. Given lack of social pressure to marry, people choose not to marry, believing it will lead to greater happiness.
Used to, until one child/no children marriages became acceptable. We've redefined marriage as solely a romantic relationship between two individuals for the purpose of self-fulfilment, nothing more (see gay marriage, where having kids is wiped out of the picture completely as one of the aims of marriage; remember all the arguments about "so if a heterosexual couple are infertile, does that mean they can't get married?") and if either or both parties gets bored or falls out of love, they can get out of the marriage because it is cruel and mean to keep them trapped where they're not happy. Marriage is about being happy, forget all that old-fashioned stuff that came before.
Also, having a baby in order to patch up a failing marriage doesn't really work, and may indeed precipitate the breakup.
I view having the baby to save the marriage as a high-risk, high reward hail mary gambit. It has a good chance of working on the right type of guy, the guy who will support his offspring and offspring's mother, if only because motherless children have poor outcomes.
It will definitely not work on a deadbeat dad.
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Watch out for reverse causation there; a bun in the oven is frequently a trigger for people to actually tie the knot.
Oh, yeah that's true. Even happened to a friend of mine about a decade ago. Probably more true for the boomer generation than younger generations.
Still, where there used to exist general social pressure to marry (without a bun in the oven) it no longer exists outside of some foreign cultures, religions, and insulated subgroups.
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The divorce rate for American parents with children is somewhere between 40-50%. Aella's Twitter followers might select for kids of divorced parents so the result may reflect straight forward thinking that they'd much rather be in happy marriages.
Yeah, it also gets complicated when your same-sex parent has been married multiple times, as the implicit terms are "with nothing else for the rest of your life" even if your same-sex parent did in fact have other romances at other points in his life.
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