MEDIA ALERT: Charmaine with Glenn Beck on CNN Headline News: More Cohabitation?
Charmaine giving a lecture
at Princeton Nothing good comes out of a “shack job” as Dr. Laura often says.
Charmaine will be on Glenn Beck tonight to debate recent trends in co-habitation.
More view cohabitation as acceptable choice, By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
An analysis of cohabitation, marriage and divorce data from 13 countries, including the USA, shows that living together has become so mainstream that growing numbers of Americans view it as an alternative to marriage.
The National Marriage Project study of a sampling of Western European and Scandinavian nations, Australia, Canada and New Zealand found that cohabitation elsewhere is far more common and indeed viewed as an option to matrimony.
The study found that anywhere from 15% to 30% of all couples identified themselves as living together, compared with about 10% right now in the USA.
The guys get the sex, the girls get the heart-break, the kids get Prozac and few couples stay together for long.
“Just like marriage,” some would say. “After all, half of all marriages fail.”
Wrong.
This is my favorite wrong statistic. Half of all marriages do not fail.
The 50% failure rate goes like this: In any one year there are about 2 million marriages and about 1 million divorces.
So: half of all marriages fail, right?
Nope.
The caveat needed to be emphasized is: “In any one year.”
To get the numbers right, the stats should evaluate couples ever married. Not those marriages/divorces in a single year. One person can have multiple, multiple marriages.
This is the media run a-muck attempting to screw-up the culture.
For example, only marriages are counted, not the people in them. Charmaine and I have one marriage, Elizabeth Taylor has eight of them and she finally gave up, I think. Her last relationship with a Jason Winters was merely a shack job. Hollywood.
Not good for the couple. Not good for any children. Sharon Jayson continues,
Glenn Beck on CNN
The National Marriage Project report also cites findings from earlier studies showing that children of cohabiting couples are more likely to experience emotional problems, alcoholism and drug abuse.
But Raley says the research leaves unanswered questions.
“Many cohabiting couples use cohabitation to weather economic uncertainty or uncertainty about a relationship,” she says. “We can’t tell if the negative outcome for the child is due to the cohabitation or to the economic uncertainty or maybe the relationship uncertainty. That’s a limitation of the data.”
Guys: go get married. Make an honest woman out of her. For the children. For your health.
Hit time is 7 and 9 pm on CNN’s Headline News. Email and let us know what you think.
Thank you (foot)notes:
The Baptists get it right, of course: More view cohabitation as acceptable choice.
See the Legal Theory Blog with Leckey on Cohabitation. Read how a professor can use the higher educational word “discursive” not once, not twice, but three — THREE times in a single paragraph. “Diachronic” is used but once (in that same paragraph.) No network is going to ask that Ph.D. to debate on air, thank goodness…
Charmaine makes it look easy.
Your Business Blogger(R) also blogs at Management Training of DC, LLC.
In regards to the number of “failed” marriages I always explain it by showing, over a ten year period, how many people are still married. In this case that would be 10,000,000. Versus of course the figure of 1,000,000 getting divorced each year.
Pat, you are right: we need a better benchmark for measuring and predicting the success of marriages.
For example, Larry Burkett suggests that no couple should build a house until they’ve been married ten years.
The late Erma Bombeck said that no couple should get married until they’ve hung wall paper together.
Best,
Jack