You are not going to believe the quotes that I found, all in one story, in a major mainstream publication! Here are a few examples. (Some are direct quotes, others are the reporter's paraphrases.)
1. "Rather than fret about the potential pitfalls of shifting marriage expectations...it would be more helpful to create a culture that addresses the new challenges, such as more flexible jobs and social policies that treat unmarried and married people equally."
2. (About a couple who stayed unmarried for 21 years, then wed for the legal protections): "...aside from those protections, a great party, and having a wedding anniversary...marriage has made no difference."
3. [Marriage is] "adapting to a 'post-romantic spirit that doesn't assume a spouse must be your end-all, be-all forever."
4. "Half of the young adults she interviewed whose parents stayed together said they may have been better off if their parents had divorced."
5. "...kids need a consistent, attached, decent relationship with at least one adult, preferably two, but marital status doesn't matter. What's more damaging to kids not living with their married biological mom and dad is living in a culture that stigmatizes it."
6. (About studies supposedly showing that married people are happier and healthier): "...those studies unfairly count only married couples who have stayed married (and therefore probably like it) and not those who abandoned ship, which gives a misleading message that marriage necessarily leads to greater happiness."
OK, here's the link. Check it out and you will find that I am not making any of this up. The story, "Marriage? Let me think about it," appeared in the Chicago Tribune, and reporter Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, actually spoke to a whole array of people who were not the typical Marriage Mafia sources. She did include the perspective of the National Marriage Project, and it is entirely appropriate for a journalist to describe different points of view. Reliably, the National Marriage Project wants us to know how doomed we all will be if we do not all get married, have kids, and stay married. This time, their scare story is about what they see as the disaster of cohabitation. Cohabiting couples, they proclaim, are "the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children's family lives." I didn't doctor that - it is a verbatim quote.
Unless you are an academic or someone who keeps track of the people participating in our national conversation about marriage and single life, the names of the people who made the other six points (in the list at the beginning of this post) may not be familiar to you. They deserve credit, so they are acknowledged below. Perhaps you even guessed one or two of them.
1. Kathleen Gerson, author of The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America
2. Katia Garrett and Don Salzman, who were interviewed for the story
3. Pamela Hagg, author of Marriage Confidential; you may have read about her work here at Living Single in this post and this one
4. Kathleen Gerson, author of The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America
5. Judith Stacey, author of Unhitched
6. Me! The new Singlism book is noted.
I hope you enjoyed the surprise of reading the title of this blog post and then discovering that I was actually astonished in a good way. If you are someone - whether single or coupled or anything else - who appreciates journalists who do not just write matrimaniacal articles, then let that be known. "Like" this blog post and the Chicago Tribune article, tweet them, blog about them, email them, or do anything else you can think of. It is so good to have this opportunity to praise a media discussion of marriage and single life, rather than just finding one story after another drenched in singlism and matrimania.
