Straight Men Vote With Their Feet on Marriage
This article explains why women are having such difficulty finding men to marry them. HINT: You made your bed, ladies, now you have to sleep in it. Alone.
In 1973, the Supreme Court granted women the sole legal right to abort an unborn child. In 1990 President Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act which allowed women to evict their partners solely on account of being “fearful” of an attack. And in 1996 draconian child support enforcement measures were enacted.
Men generally don’t like to complain. A man will endure ridicule and abuse, and then move on with his life. But abuse him once too often, and he will vote with his feet.
And one day, men woke up to the fact that marriage was a losing proposition. The math was hard to refute: Half of all marriages wind up in divorce. In 85% of cases, mothers gained custody of the children. And sometimes, bitter ex-wives would try to turn the children against their father, what psychologists call Parental Alienation Syndrome.
In the face of such dismal odds, men decided to go on a Marriage Strike. By the millions, men opted to remain single. In 1990 the U.S. marriage rate was 9.8 [per 1000]. By 1998 it had plummeted to 7.4. That’s a huge drop in eight short years. And women became desperate.
I could say a lot about this article but for now I’ll just let my readers judge it on its own.
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March 31st, 2004 at 11:21 am
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? There’s hardly any evidence presented here that men have gone on a marriage strike or that the author has correctly identified any cause of the decline in the marriage rate. Of course it’s possible that she has, but her argument is terribly weak.
April 1st, 2004 at 4:39 pm
Thanks for the interesting link: I’ve been thinking about this post. I have heard that marriage rates have been declining but when I tried to go look for a specific source to post here, I couldn’t find one yet…
April 1st, 2004 at 5:13 pm
I’m not sure about the statistics either. She links to this CDC site which gives stats for 1996-1998. It says that marriages declined from 8.8/1000 to 8.3 or 8.4/1000 depending on whether you use corrected or noncorrected numbers.
In another post, they link to this Michigan State U. table, which indicates that the marriage rate in 1990 was 19.6/1000 in 1990, 16.6/1000 in 1998, and 15.6/1000 in 2002. That’s a 20% drop in twelve years.
I wonder how much of it is due to the aging population. For every 1000 people, a lot less of them are of marrying age these days.
I also don’t know how the CDC can say the rate in 1998 was 8.3/1000 while the MSU can say it was 16.6, exactly twice that number. Both sites say their rate figures are per 1,000.