Maggie's Farm

Probably your demographic, and that of those your children associate with. The culture hasn't sufficiently degraded what / where you come from.

I was thinking about marriage lately (in the abstract!). Of all the people I've known well over the years that have gotten married and had kids, starting in college and up until the present, a high proportion have stuck together (with a couple of spectacular flame-outs). My acquaintances are beating national divorce statistics, easily.

Funny thing is, some of these people were or are very liberal, right up to and inching beyond pink-eyed leftist category. Their baseline attitude towards "marriage" is wary/hostile. They would never agree that marriage is some sort of necessary institution that ought to favored by society or social policy, or that it is by and large a better mechanism for raising children than - anything, really.

In fact, in the several families I'm thinking of, the parents aren't actually married at all. They refused to tie the knot on one or another principal - one couple for one or another feminist objection, another refusing to do so until gays can marry, etc. Did I mention that these folks are all, one or another way, involved in academics?

And, delightfully, of the families I know they are some of the most conventional and stable. Everything about how they have conducted their lives and families is pretty much humdrum straight down the middle: parents devoted to each other and their children; two or three kids, stay at home mom (mostly), kids playing sports, pursuing hobbies as per usual, modicum of (deracinated, Episcopalian) churchgoing, and a remarkable lack of squishy child discipline. They've all had their issues but they are making it work. The kids are great.

Nonetheless they would never presume to suggest that say, poor black people living in urban ghettos would benefit from an arrangement that works so well for them, or that the way they live together and raise their children might be a better way than single motherhood.