views and thoughts on topics, especially ones pertaining to christianity – with an emphasis on how most christians either ignore or discriminate against unmarried christians – and how christians have turned marriage and parenting into IDOLS and how there is no true support for sexual purity, virginity, or celibacy among christians – this is a blog for me to vent; I seldom permit dissenting views. I don't debate dissenters ————-
Before I paste in excerpts from that editorial by David Brooks below, I wanted to say a few words, and I will be pasting in any relevant links about the Brooks piece even farther below that.
I’ve been saying on this blog FOR YEARS many of the same things that Brooks has outlined in his essay.
Some of what I’ve been saying on this blog for years now includes:
that Christians and conservatives have turned Marriage and The Nuclear Family into idols,
that they have placed weight upon both that the Bible never did, and in the process of advocating marriage, these conservatives and Christians have marginalized the never-married, the divorced, the widowed and the childless or childfree among them, and this is wrong.
The Bible does not teach that marriage – or parenting – are going to “fix” society, or that being married or becoming a parent is necessary to make a person into a moral, upstanding, responsible individual.
If you’re a conservative or a Christian who keeps sounding the alarm about falling marriage rates, you need to accept reality for what it is: most people now are either single and childless by choice or by circumstance.
The United States is simply never going back to the June and Ward Cleaver family structures in mass droves that existed in the 1950s; (Link): so get over it already, and stop trying to punish or guilt trip anyone and everyone who doesn’t marry or have children.
John and Phyllis Cook fell for each other in their shared assisted living facility
A senior couple is proving that it’s never too late to find love, even if it comes many years after your first.
According to NBC 24, John and Phyllis Cook have been dating for a year after meeting in their shared assisted living facility in Ohio. Their love blossomed over the course of their courtship, and on Wednesday, the two sealed the deal and secured a marriage license, making their union official.
I saw a Tweet by a lady the other day who said she is in her late 50s, that she would very much like to be in a serious relationship (she’s tired of being single, I think), and she was feeling discouraged because her friends are telling her that she is ‘too old to have a serious relationship at her age.’
No, she isn’t, and no, it’s not.
First of all, may I suggest that if you are constantly surrounded by recurrently negative friends and family, and ones who complain a lot and are fault-finders, who do things like talk negatively about your hopes, dreams, and goals, who tell you that your dreams will never come to pass, that you begin by limiting your time with these people?
Research has shown that it’s better for your mental health and increases your chances of success at whatever your goal is if you more often than not surround yourself with regularly positive people, and ones who support you and your goals.
If you are someone going through a difficult time right now, whatever your situation is, it’s not true that “you are too old” or “it’s too late” for your goal or dream in life.
York Spratling contracted gangrene after staff at Consulate Health Care in Jacksonville, Florida, failed to help him with his personal hygiene, even though they could smell the stench of his rotting flesh as soon as they entered his room.
The Florida state review ruled that workers there failed to seek treatment for Spratling or report his condition, but no action was taken against the facility, according to News-Press.
The Call to Care for Aging Parents Comes Sooner Now
More millennials are responsible for their parents and grandparents, sometimes derailing careers and family life.
… As the country grows older, its caregivers are growing younger and more squeezed. Millennials now make up 24% of the nation’s unpaid caregivers, up from 22% of young adult caregivers in 2009.
…Their numbers are expected to grow and so, too, are their challenges.
Maria Aranda, an associate professor of Social Work and Gerontology at the University of Southern California, says caregiving responsibilities can come at pivotal times in the lives of millennials and threaten to derail expected milestones, like starting families and buying a house. “Those things are being eclipsed,” says Dr. Aranda, who conducted a study of millennials … who are caring for those with dementia.
Grieving for My Sex Life After My Husband Died by A. Radosh
One minor theme I sometimes bring up on this blog is that getting married is not a recipe for ever-lasting happiness: your spouse, should you marry, can develop early on-set dementia, or die from cancer, a car accident, etc. Or, maybe your spouse turns out to be abusive or so self-centered that he doesn’t care to meet your emotional needs.
So, here we have an article by a lady whose husband died, so she’s not having sex.
I’ve mentioned before in a few other posts on this blog that married people should not think they’re off the hook just because they have a spouse and a spouse is providing companionship – because if your spouse dies before you, you will be single again and find yourself lonely.
In this case, if you know and believe sex outside of marriage is morally wrong you’re not going to start having sex with other people after your spouse dies. This should be another reason why Christians teach that sexual purity, chastity, and celibacy are for all people, not just teens or single adults.
…Bart and I never bought into that stereotype. We were septuagenarians now, and the sex was still fun. It bound us together.
When Bart was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in his mid-70s, we were both stunned. He had always been strong, athletic, energetic, and healthy; but now the cells in the marrow of his bones were being destroyed by cancer. Within a few months, our hikes up the Catskill high peaks were replaced with quiet walks along the stream near our house.
American churches continue to fixate upon youth. They are always chasing after kids or college-aged people.
Meanwhile, the elderly face their own set of problems and issues, but do churches care? No.
The elderly can be just as vulnerable as children, in that some of them are frail or they have dementia.
Senior citizens needed to be cared for and advocated for just as much as any infant or child, but I rarely see Christians show as much interest in helping them as I do them looking after abused, poor, or neglected babies and children.
Some of the victims can’t speak. They rely on walkers and wheelchairs to leave their beds. They have been robbed of their memories. They come to nursing homes to be cared for.
Instead, they are sexually assaulted.
The unthinkable is happening at facilities throughout the country: Vulnerable seniors are being raped and sexually abused by the very people paid to care for them.
It’s impossible to know just how many victims are out there. But through an exclusive analysis of state and federal data and interviews with experts, regulators and the families of victims, CNN has found that this little-discussed issue is more widespread than anyone would imagine.
…Now, with TV veteran Peter Tolan, he’s got “Guess Who’s Dead?” a droll comedy set in a Palm Springs nursing home with frisky post “Golden Girl” types. There are also young people as regulars, so the whole thing isn’t liver spots. The show comes from NBC and Sony.
Last year at the Austin Film Festival, Lear and Tolan tested out a reading of a pilot script.
Robert Walden (from “Lou Grant”) and Oscar nominee June Squibb (“Nebraska”) played Murray and Patricia, a Jew and an Irish Catholic who fall in love when Murray’s wife who’s also her sister, dies.
Even If You’re Married You Can Die Alone – Elderly Married Couple Found Dead
Sad story linked to below.
One scare tactic people (usually my fellow conservatives) will pull on singles to get them to hurry up and marry is to tell them that if they remain single, they will die alone, or that being married some how makes dying easier.
By the way, side note, here – if the church did its job and acted as spiritual family to everyone, instead of focusing on their blood relations, then elderly single people who are unrelated to them would do just fine.
A Christian man or woman should not have to marry to have “family” look after them – if churches stopped worshipping The Nuclear Family and actually got off their marriage-worshipping asses, they could look after elderly people who live alone!
Anyway, about this view that you should marry or have to so that you won’t die alone: this is a pretty dumb argument, because married people die alone all the time.
My mother died in the wee hours of the morning in a hospital. She was supposed to be there for only about a week before returning home.
My father and I were not with her when she passed – we got a phone call from the nursing staff that she had passed away. My mother was married to my father. Her being married did not prevent her from dying, nor was my father with her when she died.
In this story below, an elderly married couple died. They were ‘kind of’ together when they died, but it did not help them.
The husband in the story had dementia, and the wife could not walk, or not walk well.
The husband accidentally drove off the road, got the car stuck in the mud, left his wife in the car to go get help, walked down the street – he died (not sure if he had a heart attack or what).
His wife died in the car, some X feet away from her husband who was dead on the road side.
She was in the car alone in temperatures over 80 degrees. (Remember, she could not walk, or found it difficult, and her son or the cops or whomever, found her wheelchair back at her house, it was not in the car with her.)
Okay: so you can be married and still end up dying. You can end up dying alone.
I’m not sure if your husband dying a few feet of where you are (as in this story) would be any more comforting than your husband not being there at all.
So to all the singleness-shamers out there, stop telling us singles that we’ll die all alone, because you know what, married people? You may die all alone, too.
Not everyone dies in a warm, cozy bed surrounded with the smiling faces of loved ones before they kick off.
…Getting around became even more difficult for the Tarnowskis – Mary, 78, and Ron, 81. The couple hardly ever left the home which their son, Karl Tarnowski, built adjacent to his own so he could keep an eye on them.
…On Saturday afternoon, eight days after the couple went missing, the family received their answer, and a tragic end to their strenuous search.
A U.S. Border Patrol helicopter found the couple’s Chevy Tahoe on an overgrown, abandoned driveway in a swampy area off the road just two miles away from the family’s hunting property.
They were near Brookston, a town about 30 miles from their Duluth home.
75 Year Old Politician (Democrat) Fondles Breasts of 103 M-I-L Who Has Dementia
(MIL = Mother In Law.)
This is so disgusting. I’m also at a fail to see how my fellow conservatives keep promoting these views that marriage makes makes men more godly and mature, or how being in a nuclear family makes society better in some fashion, when I see news stories of married men who are doing things like fondling elderly women who have dementia.
All the dirt bag in this story is concerned about is that this act has him in trouble and may ruin his career. He doesn’t care that he objectified a woman, and his own MIL, plus, she has dementia. This guy is a sicko.
A former Pennsylvania politician has been convicted of indecent assault after admitting that he fondled the breasts of his 103-year-old mother-in-law suffering from dementia — the “biggest mistake” of his life, he said.
William Spingler, former commissioner of Radnor Township, said during a hearing Thursday that the “stupid, harmless act” has destroyed his life, (Link): the Delaware County Daily Times reports.
“‘I Kissed Dating Goodbye’ [Book] Told Me to Stay Pure Until Marriage. I Still Have a Stain on My Heart” – Regarding: Dating Book by Author Josh Harris (with other related links about the IKDG book) and Criticizing “Purity Culture”
August 24, 2016 update: I added a new link at the bottom of this post: people continue to attack the idea of sexual purity by publicizing backlash against the Harris IKDG book.
I myself have never read the IKDB book, which was written by Harris. I have read about the book on other sites in the past, and it is my understanding the book discussed how to date, and other such topics, and is not strictly about sex or virginity.
The author uses this review of the IKDG book to bash “purity culture,” and in so doing, touches on the topic or staying chaste until marriage.
I am in the middle of this debate. I cannot completely agree with all the critics of “purity culture,” depending on what they are criticizing about it and why.
I believe that the Bible teaches both male and females are to sexually abstain until marriage, so I don’t believe in tossing out this teaching all because some young women feel they have been hurt or oppressed by it.
On the other hand, how some Christians have taught about sexual purity has been lop-sided – males are typically not addressed, only females – and Christians could do a better, or more sensitive job, in how they present the concept of remaining a virgin until marriage.
With that introduction, here is the link, with some excerpts (and note, I am not in complete agreement with all views in this piece; however, I’m not a supporter of a lot of Christian dating advice. Christian dating advice tends to act as an obstacle to singles who want to someday marry):
In 1997, Joshua Harris published “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” a book that was in part a warning about the harm that relationships before marriage could cause. Harris evoked images of men at the altar bringing all their past partners with them into the marriage to reinforce the point that love and sex before marriage took pieces of your heart and made you less.
At the time, Harris was just 21, but he was already a rising star.
…He [Harris] was what we, as young evangelicals, wanted to be. And so we strove passionately to attain the ideal of premarital purity he laid out for us. Now, almost 20 years later, even Harris appears to be questioning whether his advice did more harm than good.
…But Harris’s book was hugely influential.
…On the surface, I am a purity-culture success story: I am a heterosexual woman, a virgin until marriage, now with two small children and a husband I deeply love. We attend church. We believe in God. And yet, for me, the legacy of purity culture is not one of freedom but one of fear.
Purity culture taught me that I ought to be passed down from father to husband, more an inheritance than a human.
I was taught that men are my cover and my shield, when for the most part they have been the ones causing damage through molestation, rape and abuse.
I was taught that my holy calling was to open my legs for one and only one and bear him children. Barring that, I was to keep them closed and never express desire or lust or fear or longing.
So many women in my life cracked under the untenable pressure, often giving up on God all together. Others were forced into marriages with men who hit them and hid their abuse behind another message of the church borne from purity culture, that God hates divorce.
The world has a new oldest person. Meet Emma Morano of Verbania, Italy. At 116-years-old, Morano is believed to be the last documented person alive who was born in the 1800s.
A baby boom among older women has trebled the number giving birth after their 40th birthday.
Almost 27,000 babies were born to mothers over 40 last year, figures revealed yesterday.
The unprecedented level is nearly three times the total of 20 years ago and up by 50 per cent over the past decade.
Even during the post-war childbirth peak in the Sixties there were fewer children born to women in their fifth decade and beyond.
Britain now has one of the highest birth rates for older women in the world, with 3.8 per cent of all babies born to mothers over 40. Only Italy has a higher level in Europe.
A woman in India could make the record books as one of the oldest ever to give birth.
Daljinder Kaur, who’s believed to be at least 70 years old, gave birth to a son named Arman (meaning “wish” in Hindi) on April 19. The baby was the first for Kaur and her 79-year-old husband, Mohinder Singh Gill, after nearly five decades of marriage.
“I feel blessed to be able to hold my own baby. I had lost hope of becoming a mother ever,” said Kaur, who underwent two years of (Link): IVF treatmentand had two failed attempts earlier.
For Kim Jackson, staying single into her 50s wasn’t a “big holy decision.” She dated through her 20s, but never met the right person.
“I had some pressure from friends and family for quite a while—now I’m so old, I guess they gave up,” said Jackson, now 58.
The percentage of unmarried adults in America has been growing since the 1970s. Today, almost half of U.S. adults are either divorced, widowed, or never married. But much church activity revolves around couples and families.
Jackson doesn’t begrudge the church its focus on families, but more could be done to make singles feel comfortable, she said. Sunday school class names like “Pairs and Spares” or “Fish Out of Water” make singles feel like they don’t have a place in the church.
And according to data in a recent study of 3,000 people by Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon, professors in the Department of Economics at Emory University in Atlanta, it [age differences between spouses] could be a considerable factor.
Randal Olson, a fourth-year computer science graduate research assistant at Michigan State University, crunched the raw data from Emory and found that a larger age gap is related to a higher divorce rate.
A five-year age gap statistically means you’re 18 percent more likely to divorce (versus just 3 percent with a 1-year age difference), and that rate rises to 39 percent for a 10-year age difference and 95 percent for a 20-year age gap.
Partners from different generations may have different cultural reference points and values, and polar opposite tastes in music and film, and even friends, and also have different approaches to their sex life, says Fran Walfish, Beverly Hills psychotherapist and panelist on “Sex Box,” a forthcoming We TV relationship therapy show. “Sex drive goes up for women in middle age, but sexual function decreases for men.”
…The high number of short marriages could be people remarrying and choosing the same type of partner. “It does not work for the same reasons the prior relationship did not work,” he adds.
Others caution about confusing stability or longevity with happiness. Many marriages that appear stable to outside observers may just be an “empty shell” for couples who stay together for legal, religious, financial and/or child-rearing reasons, says Simon Rego, director of psychology training at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.
Age may really be more than just a number.A large age gap may be a big contributing factor to divorce rates, according to a new study on 3,000 people in Atlanta, the (Link):New York Post reported on Tuesday.
Randal Olsen, a computer science graduate research assistant at Michigan State University, found that how close a couple is in age can predict if they get divorced or not.Statistically, a five-year age gap means you’re 18 percent more likely to split, against just 3 percent with a single-year age difference. At a 10-year difference, that number rises to 39 percent. It soars to 90 percent for a 20-year difference in age.Reasons for the conclusion are opposite tastes in music and movies, different needs and desires from sex and vastly different pop cultural values and references.
“Sex drive goes up for women in middle age, but sexual function decreases for men,” said Fran Walfish, a Beverly Hills psychotherapist.
Having your first baby before marriage can mean you’re 59 percent less likely to end in divorce, as opposed to a childless couple. Though having a child while you’re married shows a 76 percent decrease in divorce rate.
In regards to education, a couple is 43 percent more likely to divorce if they have different levels of education than a couple who has the same qualifications.
And there’s some good news: couples are 94 percent less likely to divorce if they make it to their 10th anniversary, (Link): Market Watch reported.
Critics of the study warn not to equate a long marriage with a happy one. Marriages that appear happy on the outside may still be going on due to religious, financial, child-rearing or other reasons.
“So while having children with your spouse may be a factor that decreases the chances of divorce, it may be that a couple with kids chooses to stay together for the sake of the kids, despite the marriage having nothing else to it,” said Simon Rego, director of psychology training at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.
The Never Ending Love Affair by The Barna Group With The Millennials
Evangelicals and other conservative Christians have a nasty habit of ignoring certain groups of people – such as the elderly, widows, widowers, the divorced, and never married adults who are over the page of 30.
At the same time these groups get nary a mention – or tweet – other groups, such as The Millennials, are focused upon obsessively. (That, or married couples who have children. Married couples who have kids get lots of coverage in evangelicalism as well.)
I began following the Barna Group Twitter account about two or three months ago (or it feels that way; it may have been longer or shorter than that).
During that time, I have noticed that they tweet about the Millennials frequently, or on a consistent basis.
Every so often, the Barna Group will tweet about general topics that are not necessarily pertaining to Millennials, such as…
Real data confirms how drastically the moral,social, and spiritual lives of Americans have changed and are changing. https://t.co/5EUnqFSQZA
(Barna Group tweet: “Real data confirms how drastically the moral,social, and spiritual lives of Americans have changed and are changing. https://www.barna.org/churchless“)
Which is fine.
However, I have yet to see a Tweet, or a regular series of tweets, addressing studies or articles about Gen X, Gen Y, adult singles, the divorced, or widowers, and, in particular, why these slices of the demographic pie have stopped attending the church, or why they are feeling neglected, and how churches can win these groups back.
If you’ve read blogs and books by people in those demographics, or the work “Quitting Church” by Julia Duin, you will see that many other people, who are not millennials, are dropping out of church also.
But all the publicity and hand-wringing by Christians (including the Barna folks) concerns the Millennials.
Is this a money making thing? Do churches or Christian groups or polling groups get more money by focusing on the current crop of 20-somethings?
Because I’m at a loss to understand what the extreme concern is over whether or not a 21 year old frat boy decides to stop going to church – and little to no attention is being shown for, example, the 38 year old, never married, childless woman who has had it with church and has quit.
I find it ironic that Barna Group seems to be concerned over Millennialls quitting church, but one factor of several I have personally quit church (and possibly the entire Christian faith) has to do with evangelical Christianity’s fixation upon youth. Christians never shut up about married couples, marriage, or “the millennials” and “how to reach children.”
Meanwhile, next to no effort is made by Christians to minister to anyone over the age of 29. If you are over 30, never have married, and never have had children, churches are not welcoming.
I have tweeted to The Barna Group several times in the last few months pointing this glaring omission out – that they rarely tweet about other groups.
A couple of times, one Barna Group lady, and some Barna Group guy told me they do sometimes do research on other groups. The guy who has tweeted me back two or three times seems annoyed by me.
I’m not purposefully trying to annoy him or anyone at his group, but I am merely pointing out the on-going tendency by their group, and Christians in general, to completely ignore non-Millennials, and I find this tendency, well, highly annoying.
Today, under yet another Millennial themed tweet by the Barna Group, I replied, “Another tweet about the Millennials,” and this exchange happened:
October 23, 2014 Barna Group Tweets
I don’t recall ever asking or demanding that the Barna group cease tweeting or writing about the Millennials (though I do think it an enormous waste of time and concern to expend this much effort on 20 somethings).
My point is, if you are going to yak about the Millennials, research them, tweet about them, coddle them, and try to reach out to them to win them back to church, you really ought to be spending an equal amount of time on other groups.
For every tweet, survey, or article about The Millennials, how about one about widows of any age, or divorced people or adult singles?
Over half the American adult population is now single – adult singles now out-number married couples in our nation. You’d think this would merit more attention (and in the form of Tweets and surveys) from Barna, but they seem overly preoccupied with the Millennials who are already a very self-absorbed bunch; they don’t need any more attention.
If you’re in a group that insists on tweeting about the Millennials five or more times a day, how about an equal amount of tweets about other demographics?
Here are some more tweets from the Barna Group about Millennials, observe the date and time stamps on each (farther below).
In-between these tweets, Barna Group does sometime tweet about issues that pertain to everyone, not just Millennials, such as this one, which mentions “adults,” and not millennials in particular.
(I tried to copy only different tweets from their Twitter page, but there may be one or more duplicates below that I pasted accidentally. Barna Group sometimes re-tweets the same material several times over, so some of what you see may appear to be a duplicate, but is not.)
(And you see that “Continue Reading” link below (if you are viewing this on the blog’s main page?) Click that to continue the post and see more Millennials obsession by Barna Group, there are even more tweets)
