Stealing the headline from Joy Jones who quotes one of her black students: "Marriage is for white people".
I was pleasantly surprised when the boys in the class stated that being a good father was a very important goal to them, more meaningful than making money or having a fancy title."That's wonderful!" I told my class. "I think I'll invite some couples in to talk about being married and rearing children."
"Oh, no," objected one student. "We're not interested in the part about marriage. Only about how to be good fathers."
And that's when the other boy chimed in, speaking as if the words left a nasty taste in his mouth: "Marriage is for white people."
He's right. At least statistically. The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States. In 2001, according to the U.S. Census, 43.3 percent of black men and 41.9 percent of black women in America had never been married, in contrast to 27.4 percent and 20.7 percent respectively for whites. African American women are the least likely in our society to marry. In the period between 1970 and 2001, the overall marriage rate in the United States declined by 17 percent; but for blacks, it fell by 34 percent. Such statistics have caused Howard University relationship therapist Audrey Chapman to point out that African Americans are the most uncoupled people in the country.
She goes on to write that black women are the least-married group in America and explains that the others she knows have largely decided to avoid marriage because of all the baggage that men bring, with little apparent benefit.
Among African Americans, the desire for marriage seems to have a different trajectory for women and men. My observation is that black women in their twenties and early thirties want to marry and commit at a time when black men their age are more likely to enjoy playing the field. As the woman realizes that a good marriage may not be as possible or sustainable as she would like, her focus turns to having a baby, or possibly improving her job status, perhaps by returning to school or investing more energy in her career.As men mature, and begin to recognize the benefits of having a roost and roots (and to feel the consequences of their risky bachelor behavior), they are more willing to marry and settle down. By this time, however, many of their female peers are satisfied with the lives they have constructed and are less likely to settle for marriage to a man who doesn't bring much to the table. Indeed, he may bring too much to the table: children and their mothers from previous relationships, limited earning power, and the fallout from years of drug use, poor health care, sexual promiscuity. In other words, for the circumspect black woman, marriage may not be a business deal that offers sufficient return on investment.
I agree that the decline of marriage in our country, among all races, is primarily a failure of men and only secondarily a failure of women. Men need to want marriage and need to make themselves worth marrying, and I suspect that then most women would be be eager to meet men's needs in return.
(HT: Paul Hsieh.)
I disagree that the decline in marriage should be blamed primarily on men. Women have greatly reduced the incentives for men to get married.
What do men get out of marriage these days? Sex? You can get that easily enough without getting married. Someone to shop and cook and clean and generally take care of you? Women who still do that kind of thing will do it for a boyfriend, and women who don't do it for their boyfriends won't do it for their husbands. Someone to take care of the kids so you can have kids without getting up at 3am to change them or 6am to drive them to practice? Now a common duty. The social prestige of being the head of a family? No longer a big deal. Meanwhile, men who get married and then divorced can pretty much expect to get screwed in the divorce settlement.
All of these changes are largely attributable to the actions of women. Women have made marriage much less attractive to men, so I hardly see how you can blame the decline of marriage on men.
I agree with Doc, except for the penultimate sentence. Like any large group of people, men act rationally within the system in which they find themselves. Men didn't change; the rules changed.
So who changed the rules? It isn't accurate to say 'women'. Yes there were women involved, but only a few of them. And lots of men were involved, too. Broadly stated, the problems were the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, and the Great Society. It's strange that, despite all the misery that those things have caused, nobody is talking seriously about fixing them.
One thing that puzzles me is how that author got the idea that men "need" to want marriage.
I've seen this usage before on US TV shows here in Australia, where someone might say "you need to do ...", when what they are really after is "I want yo to do...".
Where are these people (including this author) coming from, in saying that men need something just because it suits their own agenda? Clearly these men don't need any such thing, judging from their behaviour and the analysis of previous commenters.
Society needs men to want marriage, to support mothers in creating and raising children. Human gestation, birth, infancy and toddlerhood are too demanding for one woman to handle alone. A society won't survive for long if it doesn't find some way to channel men's energy and resources towards helping raise children.
PML: What Ben said.
Doc and Ben: I see where you're coming from, and I agree, but I'm also looking one level deeper. Why was there a sexual revolution? Why did no-fault divorce become popular? Why do so many women do everything for a boyfriend they would for a husband? My belief is that these women were also acting rationally within a system -- the patriarcal system -- that was collapsing and no longer meeting their needs. It's my belief that a genuine and loving patriarcal system is best for society, but a tyrannical, oppressive, smothering partriarcy will push women to "rebel" against it (for lack of a better word).
If men are supposed to be the leaders in families, as the Bible teaches, then it's our responsibility to lead wisely and rightly. If no one wants to follow, the supposed leaders must bear the brunt of the responsibility.
Michael you are wrong about the revolution. It was marxist and anti-family to begin with. The writings of the cultural revolutionaries sees marriage itself as a kind of slavery for women.
dude why are you blocking my comments? When I type in my real email address I get a nasty message.
Sam: Email me your comment and real email address and I'll try to figure out why it's being blocked :)
I've tried various comments - it seems to be the email address:
t e l e r i n e l d a y a h o o . c o m
Why was there a sexual revolution? My thoughts here.
But "waht Ben said" is no answer at all. What society needs is something quite separate from what the men need - which was my question.
PML: I think that in the larger scope of things, what is "good for society" is also good for men and women individually and as gender-groups. Otherwise your definition of "good for society" is flawed.
Sam: It should be fixed now.
I'm tempted to say "gotcha". When men's intersets are identical to society's, that's a patriarchal society almost by definition, one that prioritises their needs. But, once you don't have that, the gaps open up.
I'm really objecting to the attempted weasel wording, trying to con men into thinking that just because it's for the greater good, it aligns with their own interests. The whole point of what has been described here is that it doesn't.
Weasel wording isn't going to persuade many men to act against their own interests, not once they have had their noses rubbed in the gaps between the two lots of interests. Sure, it's not in men's wider interests that there should be a wider collapse - but then again, their interests really have been lined up differently from society's.
I still don't see any honesty in telling men that they need to want something, not when the writer was getting at what somebody else needed from them. The only way to make that work is to provide different incentives, not to try to con men into acting against their own interests but to realign those interests so it all comes together.
Almost everything before that "need" stuff was sound, but it was either self deception or deliberate hypocrisy to write that. And wrongly assessing what men get out of things is not going to help get a decent alignment of mutually supporting interests for the different parts of society. At the moment it's like "why buy a cow when you get less milk that way?"
PML: Uh, gotcha? I said that what's good for society is also "good for men and women individually", so I don't see that as the traditional definition of patriarchy.
As you say, it's not in men's interests for society to collapse. Men who don't marry are free-riders, and though they may benefit in some ways they will ultimately break the system, to everyone's loss.
This is going to take a lengthy reply, so if you don't mind I'll prepare it off line and email it to you. It comes down to the fact that many systems are not the sum of their parts, though you can treat things like genuinely free markets that way. The lack of additive behaviour leads to all sorts of oddities, and this is one.
I think the problem is that society as a whole has coddled some men to a point where they no longer hold commitment, responsibility and fatherhood to any great regard. The hedonistic indulgene of selfish pleasures of many men supercede the desire for commitment and stability. Women are forced to act in a patriarchal way by the sheer lack of a suitable patriach. The state of relationships among black men and women is dismal at best and only a concerted effort between the two will ever make anything better. And that will take a change in society, because society as a whole, women included, support the immature and irresponsible behavior that a lot black men display. I would like to tell the sisters to keep their heads up because beleive it or not, there really are some damn good black men out there who want a family and children and who can be faithful. They do exist.
What I find to be sad is how confusing the whole dating scene has become.
I am a black female in her thirties who married in her twenties and then divorced.
I spent three years in a relationship I thought was going to lead to marriage.
It didn't. I was raised in the south-Mississippi-for most of my girlhood and then for a few years in the north.
I was raised to believe that in order for a woman to build a strong foundational lasting relationship with a man, she had to make him wait for sex; show him that she could maintain a household; and also show him that she could support him in times of crisis.
Recently-on the advice of my "new age" girlfriends- I dated a man in his mid-forties.
We dated for some time before we became intimate.
I tried to do everything right. I liked the guy and I thought we could possibly go somewhere together.
I never asked him for money or expected gifts because I did not want him to think I was driven by material desires.
I did not argue or fight with him. I even stood by him during a conflict he had with an old flame.
I expressed to him that while I knew we were not in a committed relationship as of yet, that I was still being faithful to him sexually. I wanted him to know that I could be trusted.
Imagine my surprise when he responded to my comment by telling me that it did not matter that I was faithful to him.
He told me that my faithfulness to him only mattered to me. I was confused but not angry. I simply chose to leave him alone. It was obvious to me that we simply were not on the same page ethically.
Ironically, he still calls me and tries to set up dates with me. When I explained to him why I did not want to continue our "extended encounter", he complained that I was "Old fashioned", and that I would never find a man who would want to marry me because I was not “free enough" in my thinking where sex and life were concerned.
What he said left me even more confused. So much so that I took myself from the dating game altogether.
What exactly is it that men want? Is it wrong for a woman to have "Old fashioned" values? Is it wrong for a woman to enter a relationship with the hope that it may one day lead to marriage?
Asha: Well, it seems clear that this guy just wanted to use you for sex, so he probably isn't the sort you'd really want to build a future with. It would be pretty tough to be married to someone with an entirely different set of ethics.