Dr. Helen Smith fox news interview on why men are avoiding marriage

[Xantippe]

Estevao said:

“Now instead of attacking the messenger, what we can do is address the concerns of men and look to resolve them. Marriage is a bedrock of any healthy society. If marriage is not restored to the place it once had, we are doomed.”

What if the answer is that low-income women don’t think low-income men have a lot to offer?

 

[Xantippe]

Estevao said:

“I think I know enough about what middle class parenting is about. In my last post I addressed it how thanks to women entering the workforce, it now takes two incomes to raise children in a decent home, and they have to rent out their kids to daycare to people who don’t care about them, and also forgo creating communities of SAHMs and turning neighborhoods into bedroom communities and making latch-key kids.”

As I said, I think you know very little about current middle class and upper middle class family culture.

Read up a bit. Spend time with happy families.

“And how do you know a woman with more children wouldn’t have time to write a book?”

I think she’d be rather less likely to be able to write a book than a mother of one whose daughter is grown.

“How did Pope Benedict get time to write his Jesus of Nazareth Trilogy in his spare time?”
Do you think your typical middle class wife has more stuff on her plate or less energy than Pope Benedict did? It’s because if you want something enough, you’ll make time for it, and not spend it watching America’s Got Talent and chatting on facebook."

I wouldn’t count on Pope Benedict having written every word of those books. It’s typical for major public figures to have ghost writers. Even encyclicals are often written by people other than the pope, and then the pope presumably corrects them.

A typical middle class wife may not have less time or energy than an 80-year-old pontiff, but she does have less staff to delegate tasks to, as well as more purely domestic responsibilities.

 

[Estevao]

Estevao said:

“I think I know enough about what middle class parenting is about. In my last post I addressed it how thanks to women entering the workforce, it now takes two incomes to raise children in a decent home, and they have to rent out their kids to daycare to people who don’t care about them, and also forgo creating communities of SAHMs and turning neighborhoods into bedroom communities and making latch-key kids.”

As I said, I think you know very little about current middle class and upper middle class family culture.

Read up a bit. Spend time with happy families.

“And how do you know a woman with more children wouldn’t have time to write a book?”

I think she’d be rather less likely to be able to write a book than a mother of one whose daughter is grown.

“How did Pope Benedict get time to write his Jesus of Nazareth Trilogy in his spare time?”
Do you think your typical middle class wife has more stuff on her plate or less energy than Pope Benedict did? It’s because if you want something enough, you’ll make time for it, and not spend it watching America’s Got Talent and chatting on facebook."

I wouldn’t count on Pope Benedict having written every word of those books. It’s typical for major public figures to have ghost writers. Even encyclicals are often written by people other than the pope, and then the pope presumably corrects them.

A typical middle class wife may not have less time or energy than an 80-year-old pontiff, but she does have less staff to delegate tasks to, as well as more purely domestic responsibilities.

This post is made up of unsubstantiated claims about my knowledge of middle-class life and the writings of the Holy Father. I think I’m going to ignore it. Goodnight and happy Easter.

 

[Xantippe]

Estevao,

I once had dinner with an elderly Jesuit (a college professor at a major US university) who had drafted an encyclical. It’s quite normal for popes to get help with writing encyclicals. There are a billion Catholics, and literally millions of really smart ones, so it’s not unusual for a pope to get help with a major writing project. Why shouldn’t he?

From the Catholic Encyclopedia (I think this was 100 years ago or so):

“Two officials presiding over separate bureaux still count it among their duties to aid the Holy Father in the drafting of his encyclical letters. These are the “Segretario dei brevi ai Principi” assisted by two minutanti, and the “Segretario delle lettere Latine” also with a minutante. But it was undoubtedly the habit of Leo XIII to write his own encyclicals, and it is plainly within the competence of the sovereign pontiff to dispense with the services of any subordinates.”

newadvent.org/cathen/05413a.htm

And yes, nothing you have written thus far shows a deep knowledge of or familiarity with contemporary middle class or upper middle class family life. You know exactly as much as I would expect a single guy who reads a lot of Men’s Rights stuff to know. It’s not bad that you don’t know more (I wouldn’t expect you to know more than that given your station in life), but it is bad that you don’t know that you don’t know.

 

[Miss_Felicity]

Who cares? The people who avoid marriage are people we probably shouldn’t encourage to marry anyway. It’s a life of selflessness and service to another. It isn’t for everyone and society needs to stop pushing it as though it is.

If a man told me that he was against marriage because of XYZ, I would think that was probably for the best, since in saying that he is showing an inability or unwillingness to discern based on who each woman is as a person-and that’s essential to finding a good and compatible partner.

As long as my husband isn’t avoiding marriage, I’m fine if others want to.

Thank You for putting together two thoughts I have had but never tied together in quite that way. Marriage is very hard work (no doubt joyful work for those called to it) but the pressure to marry in this society is crazy to me. I really think there would be less divorces if society didn’t make it seem that everyone should get married and by a certain age and in a certain way.

 

[Burt_Macklin]

Arggghhh. Woman ah? What are they? Who knows. Can’t live with them, can’t find them sometimes. What’s going on in their little heads? Don’t ask me! I’m not a flipping woman psychiatrist!

 

[Sarcelle]

Arggghhh. Woman ah? What are they? Who knows. Can’t live with them, can’t find them sometimes. What’s going on in their little heads? Don’t ask me! I’m not a flipping woman psychiatrist!

Hah,hah

As Bobby Boucher’s mom once said:

Women are of the devil.

Now before anyone takes offense, this is a joke. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some here in this forum that actually do think that.

 

[Anglewannabe]

youtube.com/watch?v=D33L4zxjpH0

I like that she’s a woman so you can’t call her a sexist and ignore what she’s saying.

Discuss.

I think this is a classic case of the Shakespears the woman protests to much. She strikes me as the type who feels so inferior to men, in order to survive she has to pick at every little thing that is wrong with being a man in order to make herself feels better.

The reason people no longer marry is because pre-marital sex is so accepted. At the end of the day, in a free society governments make laws that will get them re-elected regardless of what is best for society. Anyone who holds the minority opinion will always get the raw end of the deal

So sad that people are opting to choose to trust a government over God

 

[Sarcelle]

I think this is a classic case of the Shakespears the woman protests to much. She strikes me as the type who feels so inferior to men, in order to survive she has to pick at every little thing that is wrong with being a man in order to make herself feels better.

The reason people no longer marry is because pre-marital sex is so accepted. At the end of the day, in a free society governments make laws that will get them re-elected regardless of what is best for society. Anyone who holds the minority opinion will always get the raw end of the deal

So sad that people are opting to choose to trust a government over God

I agree. It is much more easy and straightforward to shack up than to go through all the legal hassles of a divorce. Chances are the marriage if it happens will not last anyway. Better to avoid it than go through all that legal hassle and if men perceive that the judicial system is biased against them, than I don’t blame them one bit for avoiding marriage.

For non-religious people this makes perfect sense.

 

[Groo]

According to Pew research, there is a significant gender gap where more women than men want to marry.

I don’t think the men’s rights movement or even authors like this one are the cause of this. What I see are young men who witness miserable husbands and painful divorces; then decide on their own that marriage isn’t worth the risk.

 

[Xantippe]

Groo said:

“What I see are young men who witness miserable husbands and painful divorces; then decide on their own that marriage isn’t worth the risk.”

…but still have kids out of wedlock.

 

[Groo]

Yep

 

[The_Bucket]

Who are you trying to convince OP? Yourself or everyone else? If you’re not called to marriage, then by all means don’t get married! Be single. Be a member of the religious life. We all have different charisms and we must always be seeking to serve God the way He wants us to serve Him. That’s all good my friend.

But I really don’t get the point of threads like this. Catholics are called to have a radically different vision of marriage than the secular world. As a general rule, marriage in practice has never reflected God’s design. Unless of course one thinks that using marriage as a tool to gain secular power, quell clan/family feuds or simply bringing in a woman to cook and clean and be the servant of a man is what marriage is all about.

Sure, modern men and women generally have a twisted view of marriage. But this isn’t anything new. The only thing that’s changed is the way in which the secular vision of marriage is twisted versus God’s vision. Don’t concern yourself with the world.

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

Au contraire, Bucket, one has to be concerned with the world. Most Catholics do not have the luxury of living in isolated devout-Catholic-only communities.

Catholics may be called to a different version of marriage than in the secular world, but unfortunately Catholic marriage is subject to secular family law just as every other marriage is. No avoiding that at all, no waving of hands by devout Catholics will alter this reality. Hence even devout Catholics must work harder to discern for the suitability of their potential spouses for marriage within the context of today’s society. Both Catholic men and Catholic women have to be able to say “I am not of this world, can I say the same about my potential spouse?” In today’s world, answering that question requires a lot more work and a lot more search costs than it used to and the central part of that discernment is to find the moral force in the other person to remain committed to marriage in the face of a society that celebrates divorce and the “eat, pray, love” culture in our collective faces.

In today’s legal environment, there are many who do not want to put in that work. I agree this is not a Christian attitude, let alone Catholic, but it is a rational response among a signficant number of men to the changes in the incentives. Dalrock’s blog archives are an excellent resource for discussion, just stay away from the comment sections.

That said, there are ways to minimize one’s risk: marry another devout Catholic, marry someone who hasn’t participated in the secular hook up scene (or if they have, they are truly repentant for it), marry someone from a good family, marry someone whose parents are still together, marry someone whose siblings don’t have such a colorful matrimonial history, marry someone who doesn’t have anger management or other psychological issues, and more… Red flags in any of these areas aren’t an automatic disqualifier, but they do need to be discerned further.

The risk will never be close to zero even in the upper middle classes where marriage is strongest. At some point, one does the best they can with their fiance and then honors his/her commitment by choosing love as an action every single day.

 

[The_Bucket]

So overall the point is… marry a good person?

That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t see the reason for these threads. To me, that’s common sense. Marry a good person. Find someone who is “not of this world” and you don’t be of the world either!

Where I disagree is the notion that it is somehow harder to find people these days. It’s easier than ever, in my opinion, to connect with people. To find your niche. The bevy of communicative tools available is mind boggling. Sure, it takes a lot of effort to break through the noise, but people have options today that they just didn’t have centuries or even decades ago. And, specifically, women have more options today. I think that’s a good thing and there’s no white knighting here on my part. Women have more options, which allows more and more of them not to feel “trapped” in a situation.

Can that lead to bad things? Sure. It can definitely lead to abandonment and divorce over trivial and/or selfish issues. But it also can lead to both spouses fully embracing the vocation of marriage, as opposed to simply “making the best” of a situation.

Truthfully I see all the hand-wringing about how the system is “rigged” against men coming from never-married men. And what’s truly boggling is that I’ve seen the system defended by men on this forum who have been abandoned by their ex-wives!

So again I ask, aside from pointing out the obvious in that people need to take discerning marriage seriously, what is the utility of these threads?

 

[Ingeniero]

The reason people no longer marry is because pre-marital sex is so accepted.

Or in other words:

Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?

 

[Xantippe]

Zzyzx Road said:

“In today’s world, answering that question requires a lot more work and a lot more search costs than it used to and the central part of that discernment is to find the moral force in the other person to remain committed to marriage in the face of a society that celebrates divorce and the “eat, pray, love” culture in our collective faces.”

Look at the Old Testament. One gets the feeling that finding a suitable mate could be rather an ordeal. Look at Isaac:

biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+24

Or look at Jacob: 7 years served and he gets the wrong woman and then he serves 7 years for his love.

biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+29&version=ESV

Or look at Proverbs. On the one hand, you have the Proverbs 31 wife (“She is worth far more than rubies”), but on the other hand, you have the adulterous Proverbs 5 wife:

3 For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;
4 but in the end she is bitter as gall,
sharp as a double-edged sword.
5 Her feet go down to death;
her steps lead straight to the grave.

I wouldn’t say that it’s ever been that easy.

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

Yer a funny guy, Bucket. First you say,

Where I disagree is the notion that it is somehow harder to find people these days. It’s easier than ever, in my opinion, to connect with people. To find your niche. The bevy of communicative tools available is mind boggling.

But in the very next sentence, you say

Sure, it takes a lot of effort to break through the noise, but people have options today that they just didn’t have centuries or even decades ago.

As if to cavalierly dismiss the point you just made.

Can that lead to bad things? Sure. It can definitely lead to abandonment and divorce over trivial and/or selfish issues.

And that’s what has to be discerned for. The risk is real. Something you’re dismissing out of hand. That’s the point of these threads.

@Xantippe, I can go Old Testament with ya!

It is better to live in a corner of a roof
Than in a house shared with a contentious woman.
Proverbs 21:9

 

[The_Bucket]

Err… no. I’m saying it takes effort, but that finding the person who may be more ideal is easier given the communicative tools we have. Basically, there are fewer people marrying for convenience, finding that their options are limited, or being put into arranged marriages. This is… bad? Nossir, it is not.

Marriage is a vocation. Discerning a vocation is serious business. I think that should be common sense.

In truth, however, finding a mate is the easy part compared to actually living out the marriage. Anyone who lives out his or her vocation knows that discerning the vocation is the relative cakewalk. It’s delivering the goods day in, day out, either as a married person, single or religious that is the tough part.

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

Err… no. I’m saying it takes effort, but that finding the person who may be more ideal is easier given the communicative tools we have. Basically, there are fewer people marrying for convenience, finding that their options are limited, or being put into arranged marriages. This is… bad? Nossir, it is not.

Marriage is a vocation. Discerning a vocation is serious business. I think that should be common sense.

In truth, however, finding a mate is the easy part compared to actually living out the marriage. Anyone who lives out his or her vocation knows that discerning the vocation is the relative cakewalk. It’s delivering the goods day in, day out, either as a married person, single or religious that is the tough part.

Finding the person who won’t run out on you at the first (or second or third or fourth or …) sign of trouble is not something I would term a relative cakewalk. Picking well is more than half the task of delivering the goods right there. To pick poorly in spite of all the tools out there is still far too common an occurrence. Even you should know that.