I've wanted to write this column for quite some time, but I was afraid of coming off as some sort of spokesman for angry dudes everywhere. I'm not. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of most men, and I think women have every reason not to trust us, especially when it comes to sex. After all, most guys would cut their own [ahem] off to get laid.

So yes, ladies, you're right. When it comes to sexual interactions, men are mostly awful. But now what? You think you'll avoid all the problems that come from interacting with half the human race just because you know we're not to be trusted? Clearly, that's not enough, because everyone knows that, and yet you keep stepping in it. Here are three of the biggest mistakes women make when it comes to men.

Labels: culture, dating, feminism, heterosexual couples, men, premarital sex, sex, women

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At the Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street, divorce is following marriage, just as it does in life.

On Wednesday the Pavilion, which describes itself as one of New York’s premier special events locations, played host to a wedding expo, New York magazine’s “New York Weddings Event.” About 850 people paid $40 a ticket. Couples got in for $60. On hand were wedding planners, cake designers and representatives of bands that couples could hire.

On Friday, a different expo set up displays and booths, a $75-a-person-and-up divorce expo called Start Over Smart. It begins at 9 a.m. Saturday and continues on Sunday.

“We’re putting a positive face on divorce,” said Francine Baras, who organized the divorce expo with her daughter, Nicole Baras-Feuer, “because although it’s difficult and a big transition for most people, there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a post-divorce life.”

Labels: children, culture, dating, divorce, parenting, remarriage

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... And yet, a recent analysis led by the social psychologist Eli Finkel of Northwestern University shows there is little reason to believe that these websites are improving dating outcomes. In fact, they might be making things worse.

The problem is that the typical dating site is founded on two false premises. The first is that successful pairing is merely a matter of matching personalities, finding people with compatible temperaments and attitudes. Chemistry.com, for instance, promises to match people based on their neurochemical profiles, while eHarmony.com attempts to measure applicants on 29 dimensions of personality.

In a 2010 study of 23,000 married couples, however, similarity of personality accounted for just 0.5% of spousal satisfaction. In other words, 99.5% of their success together was explained by factors typically excluded from online dating questionnaires. This finding suggests that most of the vaunted algorithms are no more effective than a chance meeting at a bar.

And this leads to the second false premise of Internet dating: that choosing a mate should be a rational choice, in which people carefully comparison-shop for partners. That's the advantage, after all, of having millions of profiles to choose from. Rather than being misled by our instincts on a first date, we can calmly sort through the alternatives and find the best possible spouse, the would-be soul mate who will maximize our romantic utility.

Alas, the evidence suggests that such a deliberate decision-making process can backfire, leaving people more confused than ever about what they really want in a partner.

Labels: culture, dating, Marriage

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So many singles appear to be enjoying their unencumbered and unmarried state that two-thirds aren't even sure they want to marry, suggests a broad national survey of the dating habits, sexual behaviors and lifestyles of 5,541 single adults across the USA.

Almost 40% of singles 21 and older surveyed were uncertain about wanting to marry; overall, 34.5% say they do want to marry, but 27% don't.

This second annual Singles in America study, conducted online and completed in December by market research firm MarketTools for the Dallas-based dating website Match.com, was developed by the Institute for Evolutionary Studies at Binghamton University, along with biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and sex therapist Laura Berman.

Attitudes about relationships also show decidely mixed views: 21.3% report they don't have time or prefer to stay unattached. Only 12.7% are actively seeking a relationship. Just under half (46.8%) are not actively looking for a relationship but say that if they met the right person they would consider it, and 16.9% are dating someone. Another 2.2% like to play the field.

The nationally representative sample of single adults not in a committed relationship is largely heterosexual (90.5%) and includes 56.5% who have never married, 30.9% divorced, 10.2% widowed and 2.4% separated. ...

Almost a quarter said they typically have sex after one, two or three dates; 25% said “when the other person is ready,” and 19% said “when we agree to an exclusive relationship.” About 13% said “when we are married.”

Among other sex-related findings:

-- 58% of singles have had a one-night stand (65% of men and 51% of women).
-- 44% had not experienced infidelity; of those who had, 36% said a partner had been unfaithful, 8% had personally been unfaithful, and 13% said both were.
-- 60% said a partner having a series of one-night stands was “more unacceptable” than a three-month affair with one person; 40% said a three-month affair was worse.

Labels: committed relationships, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

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Why don’t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 and 90 percent of American teens want to get married someday. And yet we delay, we divorce, and we churn through relationships so quickly that in 2004 only 61 percent of American children were living with both of their biological parents. Why can’t we get and keep what we say we want?

Maybe we lack role models. As we wander around aimlessly, the pejorative term “extended adolescence” has become the euphemism “emerging adulthood.” Kate Bolick’s much discussed Atlantic article, “All the Single Ladies,” seems to offer this explanation for its author’s eventual surrender to singleness.

And yet two recent books argue that a big part of our problem is that we do have role models, conventions, cultural mores, and rules to follow. It’s just that the rules don’t work. Paul Hollander’s Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America and Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker’s Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying take very different approaches to the question of how Americans mate and marry. Extravagant Expectations is a work of pop-philosophy that muses about how modernity and the Romantic movement have influenced personals ads and internet dating. Premarital Sex is a research-based look at the sexual practices and beliefs of young Americans from a broad range of class, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Yet both end up arguing that Americans today are working from fairly well-defined “scripts” about love, dating, marriage—and selfhood. Perhaps, they conclude, our marriage problems ultimately spring from a flawed understanding of what it means to become an adult.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", cohabitation, culture, dating, Eve Tushnet, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

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"Confessions of a 29-year old virgin."

That’s the title of the emotionally revealing blog of four Fraser Valley virgins who are looking for some good men for marriage and “holy” sex.

The Abbotsford women’s online “virgin diaries” have suddenly made them media stars. Their quest for guys led to a video about them appearing Wednesday on the popular show of Ellen DeGeneres, who proceeded to get in some virgin jokes.

The virginal British Columbians, all of whom are 29 or 30 and evangelical Christians, were also to be videotaped Wednesday night for an upcoming appearance on HLN’s Dr. Drew Show.

And this Sunday evening three of the four young B.C. women will be starring on a pilot program called The Virgin Diaries on the TLC network. The program includes video of the young women dating eligible men, all of whom also happen to be virgins.

The extroverted B.C. females, all members of a small church in Abbotsford called The River, began their blog four months ago because they were tired of being stereotyped as defective for being virgins (actually, one confesses to being a “born-again” virgin who wants to start over). They are fighting back against a sex-saturated culture, and looking for guys, in the name of spiritual “purity.” ...

The four young women’s crusade for virginity before marriage goes against the grain of North American culture, where a poll released this week by online polling system Soda-Head suggested 70 per cent of North Americans think cohabitation before marriage is a good thing.

Labels: Canada, Christianity, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, virginity

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Kate Bolick has set the chattering class — not to mention the bar scene — abuzz with her cover story for The Atlantic, “All the Single Ladies.” Because she passed up marriage in her late 20s and has now concluded that at 39 the possibility has passed her by completely, she declares the end of marriage as her generation’s contribution to history. Have all single 30-somethings come to a similar conclusion? Not quite, as you might expect. For further insight, National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez discusses the issue with Jennifer A. Marshall, director of domestic-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation and author of the book Now and Not Yet: Making Sense of Single Life in the 21st Century.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Is this month’s Atlantic story one woman trying to justify why she broke up with a boyfriend of three years for no good reason (as she tells it)?

JENNIFER A. MARSHALL: Not trying “to justify” but perhaps trying to figure out, in retrospect, why she did it. She confesses to having been bewildered by her decision at the time. There were some pretty strong winds at our backs for those of us growing up in the you-go-girl generation (i.e., those born after 1970), propelling us along a seemingly endless path of opportunity. So if “something was missing,” as she says, why not keep looking for it? As in any generation, cultural dynamics shaped our motivations in ways we couldn’t readily articulate, and this article strikes me as an effort to sort those out. ...

MARSHALL: The problem here is taking a fundamentally relational dimension of life — romance — and approaching it individualistically. The more we focus solely on our own goals, our own timelines, the less likely we are to have the other-focused outlook that makes relationships succeed. And as the Atlantic story points out, it’s that relational piece that is so elusive for women of the you-go-girl generation, the satisfaction we struggle to find. These romantic and relational decisions have consequences beyond ourselves, often particularly for children. Part of empowering women today ought to be instilling a greater sense of stewardship for those consequences beyond ourselves.

LOPEZ: Is Kate Bolick a case for arranged marriage? Of course, her feminist mother wouldn’t have been the best candidate for the arranger.

MARSHALL: There’s a lot of room between the situation today — an almost entirely autonomous search for a marriage partner — and arranged marriage. We live in a highly individualistic culture with confused notions of privacy. Sure, there’s a lot of disclosure on Facebook, Twitter, etc., but when it comes to some of the most intimate issues, where mentoring and wise counsel are most needed, they’re often walled off in a zone of individual privacy. It would do us good to take a few steps away from this atomized scenario and restore more family, congregational, and social support for helping young people discern the path to marriage. That takes a willingness to be in a community where we know others and are willing to be known — really known — by them.

Labels: culture, dating, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

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In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

The period that followed was awful. I barely ate for sobbing all the time. (A friend who suffered my company a lot that summer sent me a birthday text this past July: “A decade ago you and I were reuniting, and you were crying a lot.”) I missed Allan desperately—his calm, sure voice; the sweetly fastidious way he folded his shirts. On good days, I felt secure that I’d done the right thing. Learning to be alone would make me a better person, and eventually a better partner. On bad days, I feared I would be alone forever. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life?

Ten years later, I occasionally ask myself the same question. Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

Well, there was a lot I didn’t know 10 years ago. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons (“something was missing”), I see now, is in keeping with a post-Boomer ideology that values emotional fulfillment above all else. And the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother, who had embraced it, in part, I suspect, to correct for her own choices.

I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle, or: A Woman’s Place Is in the House—and the Senate, and bellowing along to Gloria Steinem & Co.’s feminist-minded children’s album, Free to Be … You and Me (released the same year Title IX was passed, also the year of my birth). Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda’s retelling of “Atalanta,” the ancient Greek myth about a fleet-footed princess who longs to travel the world before finding her prince, became the theme song of my life. Once, in high school, driving home from a family vacation, my mother turned to my boyfriend and me cuddling in the backseat and said, “Isn’t it time you two started seeing other people?” She adored Brian—he was invited on family vacations! But my future was to be one of limitless possibilities, where getting married was something I’d do when I was ready, to a man who was in every way my equal, and she didn’t want me to get tied down just yet.

This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place. I spent many a golden afternoon at my small New England liberal-arts college debating with friends the merits of leg-shaving and whether or not we’d take our husband’s surname. (Even then, our concerns struck me as retro; hadn’t the women’s libbers tackled all this stuff already?) We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers’ was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and employees and subordinates—an entire universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing. ...

Of course, between the diminishing external pressure to have children and the common misperception that our biology is ours to control, some of us don’t deal with the matter in a timely fashion. Like me, for instance. Do I want children? My answer is: I don’t know. But somewhere along the way, I decided to not let my biology dictate my romantic life. If I find someone I really like being with, and if he and I decide we want a child together, and it’s too late for me to conceive naturally, I’ll consider whatever technological aid is currently available, or adopt (and if he’s not open to adoption, he’s not the kind of man I want to be with).

Do I realize that this further narrows my pool of prospects? Yes. Just as I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from. But what can I possibly do about that? Sure, my stance here could be read as a feint, or even self-deception. By blithely deeming biology a nonissue, I’m conveniently removing myself from arguably the most significant decision a woman has to make. But that’s only if you regard motherhood as the defining feature of womanhood—and I happen not to. ...

In their 1983 book, Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question, two psychologists developed what has become known as the Guttentag-Secord theory, which holds that members of the gender in shorter supply are less dependent on their partners, because they have a greater number of alternative relationships available to them; that is, they have greater “dyadic power” than members of the sex in oversupply. How this plays out, however, varies drastically between genders.

In societies where men heavily outnumber women—in what’s known as a “high-sex-ratio society”—women are valued and treated with deference and respect and use their high dyadic power to create loving, committed bonds with their partners and raise families. Rates of illegitimacy and divorce are low. Women’s traditional roles as mothers and homemakers are held in high esteem. In such situations, however, men also use the power of their greater numbers to limit women’s economic and political strength, and female literacy and labor-force participation drop.

One might hope that in low-sex-ratio societies—where women outnumber men—women would have the social and sexual advantage. (After all, didn’t the mythical all-female nation of Amazons capture men and keep them as their sex slaves?) But that’s not what happens: instead, when confronted with a surplus of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship.

Labels: age at first marriage, children, culture, dating, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, Marriage, men, motherhood, premarital sex, race, women

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Whilst perusing the fine content on display at our sister blog in New York over the weekend, this editor couldn't help but notice this post, boasting about The City That Never Sleeps' booming population of people who aren't sporting wedding bands....

Labels: cohabitation, culture, dating, DC, Marriage, poverty, unmarried parents

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AT Duke University last fall, members of the Sigma Nu fraternity e-mailed 300 of their female classmates about an off-campus Halloween party. “Hey Ladies,” the invitation leered, complete with a misspelling, “Whether your dressing up as a slutty nurse, a slutty doctor, a slutty schoolgirl or just a total slut, we invite you...”

Yes, there was outrage: in the form of fliers plastered around the Duke campus reprinting the offending e-mail and asking, “Is this why you came to Duke?” And there was official indignation: The recently formed Greek Women’s Initiative will be tackling the subject of gender relations.

But a less-noted fact remains: hundreds of Duke women went to that Halloween party and many dressed as they had been asked.

As parents around the country send their children to campuses for the start of another academic year, what are we to make of the fact that lessons of equality, respect and self-worth have been heard when it comes to the classroom, but lost somewhere on the way to the clubs? Why has the pendulum swung back to a feeling that sexualization of women is fun and funny rather than insulting and uncomfortable? Why are so many women O.K. with that? Odds are that the women dancing at that Duke party had mothers who attended more than one Take Back the Night march in their college days. What has changed? ...

I wasn’t surprised by the progress, though. The male-female ratio is essentially equal now, and the message of female achievement comes from the top: the university’s president is just one of many powerful women on campus.

What stunned me was what was happening outside class, where women seemed not to have budged in decades. In social settings and in relationships, men set the pace, made the rules and acted as they had in the days when women were still “less than.” It might as well have been the 1950s, but with skimpier clothing, fewer inhibitions and better birth control. ...

Whichever way they thought the balance tipped, the students interviewed essentially believed the “he chases, she submits” paradigm was no big deal. Boys will be boys, said Nora Taranto, 20, a history of science major at Princeton, who is particularly interested in neuroscience. “It’s just the way that drunk frat guys act,” she said of the antics of pledges on her campus and others. “Well, besides the naked runs through lectures, which I guess could be offensive to some people but weren’t offensive to me, not really.”

They all get to the generational card eventually, believing that parents are too uptight; being free to flaunt your assets as you do your intellect is a new kind of empowerment, they say. “When I talked about it with my mom, she didn’t understand that there were in-betweens between friends and relationships,” said a female junior at the University of Virginia. “That you could be unofficial. So I think it’s just a generational difference. It really just depends on the girl. Some girls just really like to have sex.”

Labels: culture, dating, heterosexual couples, hooking up, men, premarital sex, sex, universities, women

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I was on a very long flight the other day and, to get me through it, I had two books: the new bestseller “Of Thee I Zing,” by Laura Ingraham, and a book I last read 20 years ago, “The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth. The former is the latest hit from one of America’s most popular talk radio hosts; the latter is an Austrian novel from 1932 by a fellow who drank himself to death just before the Second World War, which, if you’re planning on drinking yourself to death, is a better pretext than most. Don’t worry, I’ll save the Germanic alcoholic guy for a couple of paragraphs, although the two books are oddly related. ...

... She opens with a lurid account of a recent visit to a north Virginia mall – zombie teens texting, a thirtysomething metrosexual having his eyebrows threaded, a fiftysomething cougar spilling out of her tube top, grade-schoolers in the latest “prostitot” fashions – and then embarks on a lively tour of American cultural levers, from schools to social media to churches to Hollywood. If there is a common theme in the various rubble of cultural ruin, it’s the urge to enter adolescence ever earlier and leave it later and later, if at all. So we have skanky ’tweens “dry humping” at middle-school dances, and an ever greater proportion of “men” in their thirties living at home with their parents.

Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents? ...

Laura Ingraham’s book is a rollicking read. But, as I said, I picked it up after a re-immersion in “The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth, a melancholy portrait of the decline of the Habsburg Empire seen through the eyes of three generations of minor nobility and imperial civil servants in the years before the Great War swept away an entire world order and its assumptions of permanence. Roth was a man of the post-war era, yet he could not write his story without an instinctive respect for the lost rituals of a doomed world: The novel takes its title from the great Strauss march that the town band plays in front of the District Commissioner’s home every Sunday. As much as the Habsburgs, we, too, are invested in the illusions of permanence, and perhaps one day it will fall to someone to write a bittersweet novel about the final years of the Republic. But we will not even enjoy the consolations of a Strauss march. It doesn’t have quite the same ring if you call the book “Carry Out” or “F**king You.”

Labels: "emerging adulthood", culture, dating, sex

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Marriage matters, but why?

For more than 20 years, social scientists have consistently found that children do better raised by their mothers and fathers united by marriage.

For most of that time policymakers have focused on the problem of "father absence," and it is a real problem. Very few boys and girls have involved, loving, supportive fathers if the man that made them is not married to their mama.

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers. ...

Many family scholars, consistent with the liberal leanings of the academy, are responding to the accumulating evidence that marriage matters by urging society to make cohabiting and dating relationships as stable as marriages. Good luck with that one.

Here's the bottom line: When mothers' romantic lives churn, babies' and children's lives churn too.

Mothers, marriage matters because it restrains our romantic yearnings and our romantic losses. The restless search for soul mates is not really compatible with making your child feel he or she is the center of your world, infinitely beloved.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, dating, family structure, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, unmarried parents

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I was reading the latest Essence on the plane and realized that their main feature on black dating once again boiled down to black women need to date a white guy. (To be fair, Essence printed a longer version of this article, which we’ve already taken to the mat.) But all the talk of black women increasing their market value by diversifying their holdings made me die a bit on the inside.

It also got me thinking – there are so many missing conversations on race, love, sex, and dating, why do we spend so much time rehashing the same old stories? And since I’ve moderated conversations on all kinds of people’s issues with dating and relationships, I think would be a public service at this point to show that (1) dating and relating isn’t easy for anyone and (2) stereotypes impact how we came to our own ideas about dating, and what is often missed in media or mainstream conversations. In addition, I wanted to throw a bit of a wrench in the gears by including queer discussions of dating in the roundtables – generally, these articles only look at what heterosexual black women should do, and ignore every one else.

So I put out a call to about 75 friends of the blog, long time commenters, and regular contributors. And they responded with their stories that are honest, painful, and beautiful. So without further ado, here’s the roundtable descriptions and schedule.

Labels: beyond marriage, culture, dating, Marriage, men, race, women

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John Evans is in no hurry to get married. ...

“My dating pace is right for me,” Evans says. “I don’t feel stressed.”

That kind of modern nonchalance is what may be worrying LDS President Thomas S. Monson and other Mormon leaders, who addressed the issue head-on at last weekend’s General Conference.

“Brethren, there is a point at which it’s time to think seriously about marriage and to seek a companion with whom you want to spend eternity,” Monson said at Saturday night’s all-male priesthood meeting. “If you choose wisely and if you are committed to the success of your marriage, there is nothing in this life which will bring you greater happiness.” ...

But LDS leaders may be fighting a cultural shift. Traditional dating is almost a quaint custom on college campuses, where more and more young people hang out in groups or “hook up” for casual sex. Students also are investing in education and worrying about their financial stability — no small concern after the Great Recession — then cohabiting in their 30s before tying the knot – if at all.

“People in the country are pairing up,” says Brigham Young University sociologist Marie Cornwall, who teaches a class in family and social change. “They’re just not getting married.”

Labels: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, cohabitation, culture, dating, Marriage, religion

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It wasn't until the second semester of her senior year at Fordham University in New York that Kathleen Adams had a college boyfriend.

"You just don't date at colleges," says Adams, 23, now a Fordham graduate student in urban studies.

But there's no shortage of casual sex on campus, she says — in part because Fordham, like many colleges, has significantly more women than men. Adams says that means guys have the upper hand when it comes to intimacy.

"It's kind of like a competition," she says. "The guys have their choice of whoever they want. So they think, 'Why would I date?' "

The relationship game among college-age adults today is a muddle of seemingly contradictory trends. Recent studies indicate that traditional dating on campuses has taken a back seat to no-strings relationships in which bonds between young men and women are increasingly brief and sexual. (A new website to arrange these encounters that began at the University of Chicago last month now is expanding to other campuses.)

But even as casual sex — often called "hookups" or "friends with benefits" — is a dominant part of campus life, a new report by the National Center for Health Statistics indicates the percentages of men and women 18-24 who say they are virgins also are increasing.

It all reflects an emerging paradigm that is altering the nature of sex and relationships among young adults: fewer men than women on campuses; a more openly sexual society that often takes cues from media, and a declining desire to make relationship commitments early in life.

Labels: culture, dating, heterosexual couples, hooking up, men, pornography, premarital sex, sex, universities, women

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...Over the next few months he occasionally picked up the book, reading a chapter at a time. Author Lindsay Marsh describes her Shaker Heights, Ohio, upbringing in a home where virginity was valued but not explicitly discussed. During high school her sexual interactions with a boyfriend were quickly escalating when she found out he was sleeping with another girl. Dejected, she turned to her faith for solace. In the years that followed, Marsh's virginity became increasingly important to her, eventually inspiring her to write the book and launch an organization, Worth the Wait Revolution, which encourages others to reserve sex for marriage.
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The book "guided me in the right direction," says Warren, who stopped listening to music with hyper-sexualized lyrics and cut ties with a woman whose values didn't match up with what he now believed.

In early February 2009, days after attending a church ceremony with his godson's family, the woman who gave him the book asked if he'd be interested in being set up with a young lady who'd been seated in the row behind them. Her name was Lindsay Marsh.

Labels: abstinence, Christianity, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

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I recently read a paper by one of a group of sociologists on one of the trends in cohabitation. Those researchers are Daniel Lichter, Richard Turner, and Sharon Sassler of Cornell University. That paper is entitled “National Estimates of the Rise in Serial Cohabitation” and it’s in the journal Social Science Research. These sociologists were looking at changes that are occurring in cohabitation in a very large, national data set here in the U. S. Their key focus is on the growing rise in serial cohabitation. Serial cohabitation is living with more than one partner prior to marriage (or, ever, even if one does not marry). Let me summarize the points they make that stood out to me (some points from other research they review and some from their new findings).

• More cohabiting unions now break up than end in marriage. It used to be that most cohabiting unions would end up as marriages. As the authors noted, “Cohabitation is much less tied to marriage than it was in the past – even the recent past.”

• Serial cohabitation is rapidly increasing.

• Serial cohabitation has been, and still is, more common among those at lower income levels, but it is taking off for all groups.

• Serial cohabitation is a form of “intense dating” that will lead to marriage, eventually, for many, but only after living together with a number of partners.

• Serial cohabitation is associated with a much greater risk of divorce than single instance cohabitation.

They summarize what they see in the data this way: “Cohabitation is often viewed as a stepping stone to marriage, but this view is rapidly becoming out of date.”

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, sex

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Colby Brin, 31, and his mother are best friends.

They chat on their cell phones several times a week, debating politics and sports. They catch up over pasta and salad at their favorite Italian joint tucked in New York's Upper East Side. They consider themselves travel enthusiasts and once explored Paris, France, together.

Just like any thoughtful best friend, who can be nosy at times, his mother relentlessly seeks the perfect woman for him. She sets him up on dates. She brags about him to friends who have daughters his age. This month, the 63-year-old launched "Date My Single Kid," an online dating site to expand the scope of potential suitors for her son.

"We aren't trying to start a scientific matchmaker service like eHarmony," says Geri Brin. "We are doing it like a mother would do it. You know what your child wants. I know what Colby wants 100 percent."

Embarrassing? Overbearing? Annoying?

Some critics of matchmaking parents may think so, but Colby Brin lauds his mother's active participation in his dating life. He estimates she set him up on at least 30 dates before her site went live. Some dates went well. Others lacked a spark, like a girl from an art gallery he dated recently.

Labels: culture, dating, parenting

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Supposedly, young adults don't have much of an attention span — except when it comes to love.

That's when it seems this generation of young people is giving new meaning to the words "long-term relationship." Many are "a couple" for years, and some approach a decade of dating. They're just shy of the altar for so long that parents and grandparents are a bit bewildered.

"It's good to get to know your partner before marrying, but one wonders how long you need," says sociologist Andrew Cherlin, 61, of Johns Hopkins University. ...

"There's a certain wisdom in lengthy courtships," says Gary Hoppenstand, professor of American Studies at Michigan State University. "If it lasts three, four, five, six or seven years, they feel like there's something there to support a marriage that will last."

Michael Johnson, emeritus professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University, says the combination of a certain maturity level and the ability to work out problems before committing may help young people avoid the marital mistakes of the Baby Boomer generation.

The world has changed so drastically that experts say today's young adults have a lot to ponder, much more than decades ago. More education has meant delayed financial independence, which is a major reason young adults say they aren't making their relationships official.

Other reasons: Sex before marriage is widespread; two-thirds live together before saying "I do." And there's a whole world of other potential partners yet to meet. Though movies and TV portray perfect romances, these young adults worry about divorce — they know some relationships just don't last.

"There's a lot of fear percolating around marriage," says Hannah Seligson, 27, author of A Little Bit Married, a book about serial long-term relationships and cohabitation released earlier this year. "They want to get it right."

Labels: cohabitation, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex

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The onslaught of megaselling relationship books like Elizabeth Gilbert's "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage," which sits at No. 9 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for the week of Feb 19, and Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," which is at No. 18, might lead you to believe that female commitment-phobes and uberpicky daters are the modern obstacles to relationships and marriage.

Yet a 2007 poll by Meredith, a research and marketing company, found that 73% of women born between 1977 and 1989 place a high priority on marriage. That sounds right to me. It's an attitude that surfaced again and again in the interviews I conducted with young women for a book project on the long-term unmarried relationship. Unlike our boomer and hippie mothers who broke the rules of the '50s, my generation is marriage-minded. But society's messages to young women are so mixed that the path to that goal has been obscured and, at times, blocked. Those of us in our 20s and 30s know that dating—and getting into a relationship that leads to marriage—is at turns ambiguous, arduous, perplexing and often heartbreaking. ...

The more pressing dating issue for young women today is not that they are skeptical about marriage or too choosy, but that their potential spouses are in less of a hurry to tie the knot than they are. A 2005 poll, "Coming of Age in America," which surveyed 18- to 24-year-olds, found that women had the edge on eagerness: 55% said they would like to be married in the next five years, compared with only 42% of men.

Labels: committed relationships, culture, dating, gender differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

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