While I'm not as pessimistic as you appear to be (I think the monsters we create are transitory, and that in the long run our better natures will prevail), I think you have something there. Great post.

One word of advice for women living with men while not married... Don't get fat.

I currently work for a bankruptcy attorney. Being married is the worst thing that can happen to people who have to declare bankruptcy. It DEFACTO puts their mates on the hook for their obligations and often forces people into more expensive bankruptcies than if they were single.

Being the daughter of divorced parents, I have always considered marriage an absurdly outmoded construct. From a financial stand point, it can be very nearly suicidal.

In every human society marriage serves basically the same purpose — it formally, publicly establishes a series of commitments of mutual and continued support. The people involved in a marriage (however many of them there might be) pledge to care for one another and for their children together. They thereby serve a valuable function for the community at large, which is assured that its newest members have a decent chance of being raised well, and that nobody will waste away in lonely starvation.

Marriages can be childless, they can be formalities, they can be devoid of institutional recognition. They can many different things. But a private marriage is almost a contradiction in terms — it doesn't mean anything to be married if nobody ever knows but you.

Also, the idea that marriage is somehow tied to a particular economic system is facile. Marriage in a capitalistic society takes on a capitalist form because everything in a capitalistic society takes on a capitalist form. That's what it means to be a capitalistic society. One may as well say, "I refuse to marry because Mao Zedong was married and I hate Communists."

So for that reason, in a society in which women are better and better able to care for themselves and their children on their own, of what benefit is a staunch insistence on the ubiquity of marriage? Among some American demographic groups women are better able to care for their own children than the fathers are.

It's unsurprising that we see a general reluctance to marry quickly, and a lack of rigor in social enforcement of marriage as a custom. That only emphasizes what marriage is, and always has been, for.

Isn't it called living in sin?

of course, eventually she married someone else.

play house and have sex but who are not really that sure about each other

of course, eventually she married someone else.

-- John Anderson

Obtuseness does not become thee.

It may read quaintly conservative but there is no such thing as 'playing house' in the context you posit.

Cleaning, managing, breaking, fixing, breaking again, finally calling plumber to fix what was broken twice, painting, washing, arranging, and so on are exacting actions that take on the same physical demand whether you live by yourself, with a girlfriend, with three girlfriends and a dramatic gay man that talks with his mouth and hands, a savanna-forlorn hippo that escaped from the zoo, or the wife you'll be with until you've died twice.

with an ez-bake oven

"The MSM will simply do to the Hispanic and Islamic domestic cultures what they did to African American and "White" cultures. Within a decade or so there kids will be as vacant and alienated as American youth are and addicted to video games, pop product, and bad social and cultural memes."

You have a part of truth but not the whole truth. There are two different cases: Hispanic and Islamic.

Regarding Hispanic people, they are eager to integrate. They adopt the host culture very quickly. This means that second-generation Hispanic people have a birth rate closer to WASPs.

When Hispanic people is fully integrated, it has the same birth rate than the native people. The birth rate is below the replacement rate. So you have to "import" people to keep the economy running. So you must have more immigration and more first-generation Hispanic people coming to America.

I see the future of America as mostly Hispanic. A majority of Hispanic people who has assimilated to the US culture, which are dwindling because of the low birth rate these cultural patterns produce. And a steady flux of new Hispanic immigrants coming from Latin America to fill the void. Of course, WASP will disappear in a century or so.

With Europe and Islamic people, the thing is very different. Islamic culture is not as easily assimilated as Hispanic culture. I know what I say. I have lived 27 years in Europe, 1 year in USA and 9 in Latin America. In Europe I have lived in Islamic neighborhoods, I have been a high school teacher to Muslim boys and girls. In USA, I have been elementary teacher to Hispanic immigrant boys and girls.

Muslim people are proud of their culture and don't want to change it or integrate: I have known third-generation Muslim people who do not feel European (while Hispanic are embarrassed for their culture and want to become American as soon as possible: my Hispanic students in USA pretended not to understand Spanish although they understood it).

In Europe, Muslim people are refusing to integrate. The community is watching for everybody to be faithful to Islam and traditional customs. They control each other in a totalitarian manner. The vast majority of Muslim people preserve their customs. In some European countries, they are demanding to be judged by sharia (Islamic law) instead of civil law. They are more and more and we are less and less. My hometown is becoming a kind of Middle-East town (but with wealth and technology) where European people are a minority. European culture is doomed and Islamic culture is the way of the future.

we were trying to make lasagna

with an ez-bake oven

-- John Anderson

And bathe in the Barbie Dream Bathtub afterward? Now THAT'S playing house.

Guess what -- marital statistics break down along socioeconomic lines, something Tracy Clark-Flory's little piece doesn't look into.

The upper and upper-middle classes are marrying just as much as ever (except a few years later). College-educated people by and large have extremely stable marriages. High school educated folks, and those with some college, are caught in serial marriage mode -- they want the stable "until death do us part" bit, or at least "until the kids are grown," but in fact are forming complicated family arrangements based on two and sometimes three marriages strung out through their childrearing years. (I'm a therapist, and one client said she didn't have a family tree, she had "a family bush.")

The least educated and successful are giving up on marriage altogether. Among those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, a strong and supportive committed marriage is considered an unattainable dream.

These attitudes toward marriage directly parallel the experience of the workforce, especially for men. College-educated men feel they can make a reliable living (even though their wives may work as well), so they make a long-term commitment. Men in the middle, whose work is both less reliable and possibly less well-paying than their wives', end up only semi-partners in life, and the men who can't depend upon making a living at all neither want to make a commitment nor are their girlfriends wanting them to (since they're most likely economic liabilities).

None of this matters as long as there are no kids involved. But there is no doubt that the lack of stable and committed father figures hurts both girls and boys.