Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Laura's Abstract
The divorce rate is now one in two, and one in eight Americans opt never to marry. I am studying the attitudes of Americans towards dating and marriage and how they have changed in recent years because I am trying to find out why the divorce rate is so high to help my reader better understand the nature of the modern marriage. In my paper, I would like to argue that the modern attitudes about dating and hooking up have led to the deterioration of marriage in our society. Because we live in a “hook up” society, and people often have pre-marital sex, people are more likely to have affairs once they are married. In addition, couples are now more likely to live together before they are married. When people don’t reserve this bond for marriage, they are likely to not value marriage as much. They seem to say, “let’s give this a test run.” Therefore this attitude is carried over to marriage, and couples don’t take their commitment as seriously. In addition, when people live together and then break up, the emotional effects can be as devastating as an actual divorce. As a generation, who lived through many more divorces than any other in American history, many of us are choosing to opt out.
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1 comment:
Is it possible that instead of it being as simple as a changing attitude in modern times, it could be more about the price of freedom and equal rights? The idea that women were somehow "happier" in earlier times when they often remained married to their abusive, or cheating, or emotionally assaulting husbands seems a bit distorted.
In earlier times, a family that went through divorce was scorned by society so brutally that couples would remain together more for appearance sake than anything else. A divorced woman was often viewed as second class citizen, so there were times when women would accept some of the worst abuses--even cases of ignoring incest--just so they could maintain the image of having a model family. Women didn't really have a reasonable "choice" to leave their husbands, no matter what he did.
So yes, marriages may have lasted longer, but to make the argument you are making, it ignores data that explains why.
In fact, if you could send modern women in America back to that repressive environment, their marriages would last longer too. When you don't have a choice, you act in ways you wouldn't normally act if you had more freedom. That's why your argument is misleading. It doesn't examine all the evidence and data.
I believe that if they had the same freedoms women have today, the couples from past generations would have divorced more too. They were not more "happier" than couples are today, they were just less able to act on their "unhappiness" without social repercussions.
Just food for thought I guess.
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