Commitment, anyone?
Looks like further evidence of the results of the current trends to deconstruct marriage.
by Carolyn Moynihan
Further to an earlier post on delayed adulthood, USA Today recently ran a report headed “Dating for a decade?” on how young adults put off the commitment of marriage for years, even though they have “paired off” and typically live together. Nobody seems very upset about it.
European royals set a poor example: England’s Prince William and Kate Middleton are in their ninth year together; Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria, 32, has just married her beau of eight years.
For a complete contrast, the paper cites the whirlwind courtship of Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird, who met in August 1934. He proposed to her on their first date, they were engaged in October and married in November — and stayed married.
Prolonged education, job hunting and the desire to start marriage from a financially strong position partly explain the delay, but the general acceptance of uncommitted sex explains a lot more. Fear of commitment — and of divorce — plays a part, as also romantic ideas about finding the perfect match, a soul-mate. Dating is open-ended, options are kept open.
Many, of course, cohabit more than once while others break up and come together again up to several times. Maybe they hope they will get their divorces over before marrying.
The pattern is unlikely to change, says sociologist Andrew Cherlin, unless Americans (or Europeans or Australians) want more children than they are having.
“If all you want is one or two kids, you can wait until your 30s to get married,” he says. “We may in the future look more like France and the Scandinavian countries, where many couples live together a long time before marrying. And a lot of them have kids.”
Those countries also have very burdensome social welfare systems.
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The trend to watch is where cohabitating couples are increasingly having children outside of marriage.
Things in Scandinavia, in particular, have moved from “first marriage then children” to “first longterm cohabitation then children and then, with the arrival of the first child, marriage”; and things have moved further to “cohabitation, then, children (a second or third perhaps), but no marriage”; and more and more — “no cohabitation (living apart but in a longstanding sexual relationship), no children, no marriage”.
In Holland, in particular, this trend has only recently increased sharply. The Dutch are about 20-30 years behind the leading Swedes; Norwegians and the Danes are about 15 and 10 years, respectively, behind the Swedes and ahead of the Dutch. Holland was unusual in that it had a very liberal governmental view of nonmarriage but a very traditional cultural view (and practice) of marriage and childbearing. That came undone as the campaign to merge SSM with marriage pushed forward and the deconstruction of marriage has continued apace — in terms of unwed childbearing in particular.
Meanwhile, the marriage rate across Europe has dropped about 25% since the mid 1980s. The Dutch are catching-up now.
LOL @ the “those countries also have very burdensome social welfare systems” part.
Yeah, the crushing burden of not going bankrupt just because you got sick. Terrible.
Lefty, the social welfare systems in those countries would be burdensome even without the safety nets for medical services.
In any case, the implication is that a population that does not reproduce itself (and which is top-heavy with older citizens) will find such systems more and more difficult to carry.