Couples Who Marry Due to Family, Social Pressure 50% More Likely to Divorce: Study – reportage by Leonardo Blair

Couples Who Marry Due to Family, Social Pressure 50% More Likely to Divorce: Study – reportage by Leonardo Blair

And what do conservative Christians (who tend to be hyper-pro-marriage-and-pro-parenthood-and-pro-nuclear family) do BUT to highly pressure and shame single, childless adults into marrying.

I did a post here years ago about a woman who says she felt pressured to marry by her church, so she ended up marrying the wrong guy, and she regretted it, and she divorced (link to that is below, under “Related Posts”).

Christians and pro-nuclear family conservatives deify marriage (and parenthood and the nuclear family) to such an un-biblical, absurd degree that they end up alienating, insulting, and marginalizing any adult who doesn’t marry or have kids for whatever reason, and it needs to stop.

And by the way, for single adult women who had wanted to marry but remain single after the age of 30, 40, or older, getting married is not easy, but so many conservatives incorrectly assume that if you want marriage, it is easy-peasy, it’s a total snap, that if you want marriage, it will “just happen”,

(or, conservatives – and sometimes secular liberals, too – incredibly, insultingly, and unrealistically – expect single, adult women to “settle” for marrying stupid, abusive, weird, disturbed, sexist, ugly, fat, or idiot men
– of course, they hypocritically would not expect their own single adult daughter to marry a loser or weirdo (no, they advise their own single adult daughter to hold out for a quality catch),
but they feel fine advising non-family single females they run into to marry ANY GUY with a pulse who they cross paths with – it is so hypocritical and demeaning).

If one is a single, adult woman who desires marriage, it is not easy to find a decent, compatible man to marry – not on dating sites, bars, or in churches, either (most churches lack marrying-age single men, and some of the men who attend are abusive or are pedophiles who want to marry an adult woman to act as a “beard” to hide their sexual attraction to children).

(Link): Couples Who Marry Due to Family, Social Pressure 50% More Likely to Divorce: Study by Leonardo Blair

Excerpts:

Nov 2, 2022
by Leonardo Blair

Couples who get married due to family or social pressure are up to 50% more at risk of having a union that ends in divorce, according to a recent study from the Marriage Foundation in England and Wales.

The study, “Attitudes towards marriage and commitment,” published in October, asked 2,000 adults who had ever married how much they agreed or disagreed with each of 12 reasons presented by researchers for why they got married.

To ensure that the findings were relevant to today’s families, researchers then focused on 905 couples from the sample who married for the first time after the year 2000 when online dating emerged.

“What this research shows conclusively is that the reasons why people get married has a significant material impact to whether they stay together. While this might seem obvious, this has never been quantified,” said Harry Benson, Marriage Foundation’s research director, in a statement about the study shared with The Christian Post. “But the message is clear. Get married for love and your future together and not because it is either expected of you or because of family pressure.”

Why Can’t Other Christians Understand I Am Happy Being Single? by Emily Brown

Why Can’t Other Christians Understand I Am Happy Being Single? by Emily Brown

The essay I am excerpting below is pretty good and contains a lot of truth.

It’s certainly true that a person who wanted marriage but remains single can eventually learn to accept their own single status, mostly make peace with it, but well-meaning friends and family (Christians are the worst, they worship marriage),
can make one of their well-meaning comments, and it can send you spiraling – until you learn to let it bounce off you, develop boundaries, and let that well-meaning person know that their comment does offend or hurt, even if that wasn’t their intent.

I also recall years ago seeing Christian singer Carman, who died in 2021, who was single until he got married in his 50s, say on a TBN program (while he was single) that he would be going along okay in life doing just FINE with his single status,
until he’d run into a Christian friend or family member who’d make those passing, sometimes well meaning, comments or questions like, “Why are you still single? Aren’t you depressed or lonely being single?”

Carman said on those occasions, his thoughts were, “You know, I WAS doing okay with being single UNTIL you had to rub my single status in my face and act like I SHOULD feel inadequate about it.”

The following is from Relevant, which only permits a person up to around five free articles per month:

(Link): Why Can’t Other Christians Understand I Am Happy Being Single?

Excerpts:

by Emily Brown

As a lifelong single person, I’ve had a lot of time to come to terms with my singleness. And not even just come to terms and begrudgingly accept it, but truly learn to enjoy and love being single.

So when people ask how I feel about being single I don’t have to fake a smile. I excitedly share the happiness and joy I feel about being single.

That being said, there are still moments where I do feel sadness or shame or embarrassment about my singleness.

Do you know why? It’s because of the response people give me when I tell them how I feel about being single. Because when I tell people that I’m single they often respond with some iteration of:

“I’m sure you’ll find someone soon!”

Uh, thanks?

Nowhere in my explanation of my relationship status did I mention I was upset or worried.

Yet why do people — and let me be clear on which people I am specifically talking about: already married Christians — always assume I am sad about being single?

It has been a long, long journey to finding happiness. I worked really, really hard to unlearn the lie that being with someone would make my life complete and replace it with the truth that God is all I need.

I had to realize that there isn’t anything wrong with me and being single is not a curse.

…But it can take just a few words from well-meaning, ultimately misguided people to crack holes in my happiness.

Americans Increasingly Ditching Religious Marriage for Secular, Interfaith Relationships: Study

Americans Increasingly Ditching Religious Marriage for Secular, Interfaith Relationships: Study

Not only has there been a surge in editorials the last few weeks by conservative marriage-pushers beating young people over the head to marry and marry really young (I’ve not gotten around to addressing those articles and editorials)-

But I wouldn’t be surprised in the weeks to come if conservatives, both secular and Christian, don’t see this new study about interfaith marriages being on the rise, freak out, panic, and start publishing a lot of fear-mongering editorials or pod-casts guilt tripping or manipulating Christian singles into abiding by “equally yoked” and not even thinking about marrying a Non-Christian.

I have some more comments to make below these two links with excerpts:

(Link): Americans increasingly ditching religious marriages for secular, interfaith relationships: study

Excerpts:

by L. Blair
Feb 18, 2022

Fifty years ago, religious marriage ceremonies were the norm. Most people got married to someone who shared their faith, and just a small fraction of husbands and wives were in relationships where no one practiced a religion.

That trend, according to the latest American National Family Life Survey, is now on the decline as the influence of religion in society has been progressively fading.

…“Only 30% of Americans who were married within the past decade report having their ceremony in a church, house of worship or other religious location and officiated by a religious leader,” the study said.

Interfaith marriage — a union between people who have different religious traditions — has also grown increasingly common and make up 14% of all marriages. Another 14% of Americans are in a religious-secular marriage where one person does not identify with a faith tradition while the other does

The Best Cities For Single Adults in 2021: Report

The Best Cities For Single Adults in 2021: Report

(Link): The Best Cities For Single Adults in 2021: Report

Madison, Wisconsin, was at the top of WalletHub’s list

By Ann Schmidt

If you’re single, you might want to consider relocating to Madison, Wisconsin.

That’s according to a recent report from WalletHub, which found the best cities for singles. Madison was at the top of the list.

Rebuttal to, Or Observations About, the Kerwin Holmes Jr. Editorial “On Finding ‘The One:’ Another Correction on Christian Teaching Concerning Romance”

Rebuttal to, Or Observations About, the Kerwin Holmes Jr. Editorial “On Finding ‘The One:’ Another Correction on Christian Teaching Concerning Romance”

The following post has been edited after publication to fix typing mistakes or to add more commentary.

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I will be commenting on this editorial about singleness and marriage on The Christian Post:

(Link): On finding ‘the one:’ Another correction on Christian teaching concerning romance by Kerwin Holmes Jr

That post as linked to on The Christian Post’s Facebook page:

(Link): On Finding The One – post on Facebook Page

This guy’s editorial is written in an odd way, so I’m having to go back and re-read it to just to try and comprehend some of the points he’s making.

Maybe I am totally wrong about this, but my impression is that Holmes is either in his 20s at this time, or in his 30s.
(Wait until he’s in his 40s or older and STILL single.  If Holmes still has not married by age 40 or older, his views on these matters will likely shift in time, thanks to good old life experience.)

Also distracting: his first name, Kerwin, reminds me of Kermit the Frog, so I unintentionally keep visualizing Kermit sitting at a keyboard typing this editorial I am reading. (That is not intended to be an ad hominem, just a random aside.)

At the beginning of Holmes’ editorial, he tells readers to view or read dating advice articles or videos by Christian pastors or personalities that he agrees with, such as the works by Reformed pastors or personalities in general and Voddie Baucham in particular .

Let me stop him right there.

I spent years following Christian dating advice (stuff I read or heard in the 1980s and 1990s, advice by and from standard, run- of- the- mill conservative Baptist or evangelical Christians), and none of that smelly, stupid advice ever actually helped me to marry, though I had wanted to be married for many years (I am currently in my 50s and still single). 

As a matter of fact, a lot of Christian dating advice, even the advice by conservative Christians, is counter-productive and actually plays a role in keeping single adults single (this includes, and is not limited to, the “be equally yoked” rule).

Men with ‘Golden Penis Syndrome’ Are Ruining Sex and Dating for Women

Men with ‘Golden Penis Syndrome’ Are Ruining Sex and Dating for Women

The following reminds me of an article I linked to months ago, about how single men in conservative religious communities, such as Mormonism and Judaism, know they out-number single women, so they act like entitled, overly demanding jerks towards single women.

(Link):  How ‘Golden Penis Syndrome’ is ruining dating for university women: Deficit of male students means men develop inflated egos and become ‘Casanovas’ who ‘cheat’ – despite a ‘lack of social and sexual skills’

(Link): Men with ‘Golden Penis Syndrome’ Are Ruining Sex and Dating for Women

By Andrew Court
Nov 2, 2021

Beware of the college grad cad!

Men with college degrees have become so cocky that they’re ruining romance for their female counterparts, one “leading expert” alleges.

Just 40.5% of college students in the United States are male, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, meaning they’re in short supply and high demand when dating on campus.

A lack of competition has led these men to develop (Link):  “golden penis syndrome” — an arrogance that stems from the assumption that a steady supply of females will be sexually interested in them.

“Golden penis syndrome” has led these smug males to engage in dastardly dating practices, such as cheating and ghosting, because they’re confident that another woman will always be waiting around the corner.

Joy Pullman at The Federalist is At It Again: This Time, She’s Promoting ‘Bedroom Evangelism,’ Which is Not Biblical

Joy Pullman at The Federalist is At It Again: This Time, She’s Promoting ‘Bedroom Evangelism,’ Which is Not Biblical

As a moderately conservative individual, I agree with much of the content published at The Federalist, but certainly not all. This is one of those times when no, I don’t agree.

The name Joy Pullman looked familiar to me, and sure enough, a few years ago, I did a post or two criticizing (Link): one of her other articles.

This time, I am disagreeing with this following piece at The Federalist by Joy Pullman;
I will put some excerpts in, and below that, discuss where my areas of disagreement are
(and it’s a super long excerpt – my comments will be way, way below):

(Link): Christianity’s Growth Problem Isn’t Politics, It’s Our Failure To Have And Evangelize Children

Like just about every other Western Christian body, as well as the United States, the SBC is left to squabble over shrinking slices of a dwindling pie.

by Joy Pullman

The New York Times put out a lengthy preview of the Southern Baptist Convention’s top controversies heading into their annual meeting this week in Nashville, Tenn. Members of the nation’s largest evangelical denomination are weighing the future of their religious body amid numerous theological controversies.

… Decline Stems From No Babies, Not Being Too Trumpy
The Times reports that one of the SBC’s concerns is “15-year decline” in members, both through potential theological schisms intertwined with politics, such as critical race theory, and through an aging and thus declining membership.

….While the Times makes much of contrasting the SBC’s political conservatism with its forecast of demographically decisive American leftism, it doesn’t note that the SBC’s decline is directly related to following broader American culture, instead of Christian beliefs, on a keystone of institutional vibrancy: fertility.

Thoughts Regarding ‘Crisis in the Christian Church: A Lack of Young, Single Men’ Essay by S. Green

Thoughts Regarding ‘Crisis in the Christian Church: A Lack of Young, Single Men’ Essay by S. Green

I will excerpt this essay from The Christian Post, which was published about a month ago, then offer my thoughts.

I will start out by saying it’s not just a lack of YOUNG men in the church, but a lack of single men of ANY age at churches that is a problem for any Christian single woman who expected to be able to find a marital partner at a church.

I remain single past my 30s and 40s. I had wanted to be married, I was taught by Christian culture and my parents that if I was just a good Christian person, prayed, and trusted in God, that I would be “sent” a Christian spouse, and that I could likely expect to meet this spouse, whoever he was, at a church.

So, over the years, in my 20s and older, I would pop into the occasional church every so often. However, any time I attended,  there were never any single men of my age, once I got into my mid or late 20s, my 30s, and my 40s.

It’s not just women in their 20s who’d like to marry, it’s women in their 30s and on up age-wise who’d like to marry. Why oh why do Christians always ignore them? It’s not fair or okay.

Never, ever focus solely on 20-something singles.

With that, here is the article – below the article, I will offer my observations:

(Link): Crisis in the Christian Church: A lack of young, single men

Excerpts:

By Solomon Green, March 4, 2021

….Churches are increasingly becoming a (Link): very unpopular [PDF document] place to meet a future wife or husband since the 1940s. The truth is, Christian Culture is dying.

…new families cannot be formed when there is a barrier of severe gender imbalance.  According to (Link): Lyman Stone’s study, a typical Sunday service has 71 eligible men to 100 eligible women.

This is an enormous problem within the Body of Christ that isn’t getting any better or going to fix itself.

New men aren’t just going to walk into churches. So how do churches fix this? Well, here are three steps to help solve the problem.

Step One: Have more Sunday sermons focused on careers, sex, and marriage. These topics are of great importance, yet are hardly covered from the pulpit …

Awful Early-Marriage Promoting Editorial, ‘The Future of Christian Marriage,’ from The Christian Post that Actually Cites Deviant Mark Regnerus (December 2020)

Awful Early-Marriage Promoting Editorial, ‘The Future of Christian Marriage,’ from The Christian Post that Actually Cites Deviant Mark Regnerus (December 2020)

Below: another article (this time from The Christian Post) seemingly advocating for the good ol’ days when, supposedly, most women got married by the age of 21 and popped out 10 kids apiece and lamenting at how folks just aren’t quite into marriage now as much as they used to be.

Such articles inadvertently suggest that being single and/or childless are somehow “wrong,” immoral, dangerous for society, or “second best.” They are sometimes (Link): intentionally or inadvertently singles-shaming.

Seems that about once a year, every year, some secular conservative or Christian group or person releases some kind of editorial bemoaning delayed marriage.

You can count on these things appearing regularly. Just like death and taxes, or the sun rising in the east tomorrow.

The “Dating Market” Is Getting Worse by A. Fetters and K. Tiffany

The “Dating Market” Is Getting Worse b A. Fetters and K. Tiffany

For anyone who cannot wait to get to it, here’s the link to the piece on The Atlantic:

(Link): The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse

Some of my comments about that piece before I put in some excerpts from it:

About the only “numbers approach” I have ever mentioned on my own blog here is that Christian women really do unnecessarily limit themselves if they try to live out the “Be Equally Yoked” philosophy in regards to dating and marriage, because the reality is, yes, the math is that there are not enough single, Christian men to go around for all the Christian single women who’d like to marry.

So, it makes sense to forgo the “equally yoked” rule, if one is a Christian, to date outside the Christian faith.

At the same time, though, I have seen other adults singles make much too much out of the “numbers game” philosophy on dating sites or comments sections on blogs about dating, where they make finding a romantic life partner sound so cold, or as though they’re shopping for a car.

There’s nothing wrong with having standards, but I am afraid there is a category of single adult who is too stringent or unrealistic with their lists of “must haves.”

I am personally turned off by anyone dispensing dating or “how to get married” advice who behave  as though there is a sure-fire guarantee way to land a spouse – because (Link): there is no such thing.

So, I’m really turned off by the many (sexist) attitudes and lists out there telling women if only the women do X, Y, and Z, they will absolutely get married to a great guy.

One problem is that most of these lists (which go viral on Twitter) are predicated on the notion that all men want and prefer 1950s, submissive, uber-feminine women.

Well, I lived that way for many decades – I was raised in a very traditional family that was into conservative values – so I had many of those prized traits sexist men online say will grant a woman a husband, but I remain never-married into my late 40s.

I was a very meek, docile, passive, sweet woman with traditional values, and no, it didn’t get me a husband.

(As I’ve aged, I’ve realized that it’s not a healthy or safe dating strategy for a woman to fit the picture of docile, overly feminine, passive, etc, that the “dating advice” gurus suggest on twitter and elsewhere, because many abusive, selfish, or controlling men intentionally seek out women with such qualities so that they can control, abuse, or take advantage of them.)

There are many conservatives – including women authors, unfortunately – who keep writing dating advice books for women, or who go on to FOX cable news morning shows, who keep encouraging women to engage in these dangerous dating strategies (of being a doormat, where being “feminine” is associated with doormat behaviors), which I’ve written about before (Link): here and (Link): here, among other blog posts.

The article below states at one point that men out-number women on dating sites. That may be so on some sites, but certainly not all.

Years ago, I had a paid membership on a dating site, and the site was forever claiming they could find no matches for me, most of the time.

For the four or five month paid subscription I had, I was only linked up to a total of about three men in that time.

My research on that particular online dating company found it’s the same with a lot of women, as it had been for me: that site tends to only “dribble out” a tiny number of matches for women, while they send male members more matches per month, every month.

Here are excerpts from…

(Link): The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse

The old but newly popular notion that one’s love life can be analyzed like an economy is flawed—and it’s ruining romance.

…It’s understandable that someone like Liz [a 30 year old single who is using dating apps to find dates] might internalize the idea that dating is a game of probabilities or ratios, or a marketplace in which single people just have to keep shopping until they find “the one.”

The idea that a dating pool can be analyzed as a marketplace or an economy is both recently popular and very old:
For generations, people have been describing newly single people as (Link): “back on the market” and (Link): analyzing dating in terms of supply and demand.

What Christians Really Think About the Church’s Relationship Advice by Anna Broadway

What Christians Really Think About the Church’s Relationship Advice by Anna Broadway

The following article (book review) from Christianity Today covers several topics about singleness and the church I’ve been pointing out on this blog for literally years now.

One big point it brings up that I have: there are more single Christian women in the church than there are single Christian men. This means if a Christian single female insists upon following the “equally yoked” rule (that states a Christian may only marry another Christian), she will remain single.

If you are a single Christian woman who desires marriage, it is imperative you ditch the ‘equally yoked’ rule. You must learn to judge men based on their character, not what their stated religious beliefs are.

(Link): What Christians Really Think About the Church’s Relationship Advice by Anna Broadway

Excerpts:

New survey research sheds light on how believers navigate the stickier matters of dating and marriage.

July 10, 2019

Over the years, Christians have produced and read far more books on how relationships and singleness should work than on how these things actuallydo pan out. Vicky Walker’s new book Relatable: Exploring God, Love, & Connection in the Age of Choice, based on a survey of more than 1,400 people, aims to change that.

Walker writes from a more-or-less Protestant British perspective, but American Christians will find much they recognize.

Over the course of 12 chapters and several appendices, Relatable covers everything from the history of marriage to typical teachings on gender roles to, of course, sex. But she also gets into stickier matters like the role of technology and the church’s significant sex-ratio gap—the latter a topic that raises questions of dating outside the faith.

60 Year Old, Never- Married Woman Asks Christian TV Host Pat Robertson If Some Are Just Not Meant to Marry

60 Year Old, Never- Married Woman Asks Christian TV Host Pat Robertson If Some Are Just Not Meant to Marry

Below, in this post, is a video on You Tube, via ‘700 Club,’ uploaded on October 25, 2018, in which a 60 year old woman says she “never found a godly man to marry” and her church never has any men her age there.

She asks Robertson if some people are just never meant to marry.

As I’ve been saying on this blog for ages now, you cannot count on God, prayer, churches or Christians to fix you up with a spouse, because they won’t (churches will even shame and scold you for asking).

The woman says she’s never found a “godly” man to marry – I think that is Christian code-speak for “I haven’t found a Christian man to marry.” This woman has probably been brain-washed into accepting (Link): the “Equally Yoked” teaching.

Single ladies, if you are Christian and want marriage, the numbers are stacked against you, as I’ve explained in numerous posts before. You need to get away from this “I must marry a  Christian and only a Christian” belief, or you will end up in your 40s, never married like me, or like this 60 year old woman.

It’s better to find a kind-hearted, loving Non-Christian man to marry than end up at 60 never having been married because you could not find a compatible Christian man – there are no single Christian men in churches for you to meet and marry who are over age 30 and under age 80. They don’t attend church.