Marriage keeps little girls from becoming grown women.

Ditto religion. Shack up and grow up, American women!

Because I'm 40, and that's been normal as long as I've been, well, alive.

Psychology is a secular faith. This business requires you to learn a class driven lexicon of flattery to describe the more “successful” and a more pejorative vocabulary for the less so. The way you make a living inclines you to want to associate yourself with a well healed clientele. Being a therapist inclines you to see people with more education as “healthier” than those with less. Therapists typically “like” people with more money better than those with less. Therapists are apt to see conventional living arrangements that generate more income as healthier for children than those which do not. A client with a gold card flashing a Rolex will tend to appear happier and better adjusted to you than the same client costumed in blue jeans wearing a Timex. In short you tend to see a devotion to making money as indicative of a well adjusted personality.

Psychology as a profession is part of the bulwark of expertise that seeks to conceal defend and promote class bias. Your “support” is available for a price. If a client is sufficiently “successful” he is worth a $150.00 /hour to you. Your post implicates you as an intellectual victim of the class biases of your profession. At bottom you are making a case for a very 1950’s idea of normal that is in decline for more reasons than you imagine. YOUR class is in now in decline and your picture of the social world tends to shield you from making this troubling discovery.

Ultimately social decline cuts across class lines and your post describes a society that no longer exists. This inconvenient truth may not have caught up with you yet but it will, mark my words.

in a society where people matched up based on social compatibility as opposed to pure lust, the couples would work with each other to 'make things right' in the relationship. There is incentive to stay together.

Instead, today we get the degenerae downward spiral, DRIVEN BY FEMINISTS AND WOMEN, where we sample our mates like cupcakes. And when the cupcake stales, we move on. No need to treat the other as MORE than a cupcake, no need to work through issues and make things right again.

The kids are nowhere in this equation. They are supposed to just be the accessory witnesses, the tagalongs to mommie's little parade of entertaining successive waves of lying outlaw douchebags, who happen to be 'hot'.

Mommie's empowerment is all that matters today. Never mind the kids, never mind he better men, never mind the integrity of sociey as a whole.

fuck that shit. there is a reason men are morally superior to women, because given the least chance, women destroy any society they are a part of (EXHIBIT ONE: USA) by engaging in this selfish chicanery under the pretense that it is about LUV.

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.

-- Kerianfree

I was wondering when an economic-majesty and superiority zealot would rear its patronizing nose to the stratosphere.

Hmmm... People who marry are rich and successful. People who marry are educated and esteemed. People who marry are valuable to society. People who marry stand on the upper rungs looking down upon the filth at the bottom of the ladder like the good Galtists they are.

Bunch of fucking hogwash. Try telling that to the marrieds on poverty street.

there is a reason men are morally superior to women, because given the least chance, women destroy any society they are a part of (EXHIBIT ONE: USA) by engaging in this selfish chicanery under the pretense that it is about LUV.

-- Brightstar 2 - The Resurrection

Ah, no one's morally superior in the broad sense. Superiority implies a central route with zero deviation. I care little for this narrow-mindedness whether it is the man or woman claiming this vaunted position.

I believe in critiquing the feminist movement on the same level (strongly) as I would men in general but social destruction is a give-and-take process. I do see women being responsible for some social ills, to be sure, but this is one case where blame should make the rounds between the sexes because men have certainly made it clear they are quite fallible.

I have no intention of ever getting married again. I will not cohabitate (shack up) with a man either. After my huband died, I decided that dating was one rejection after another and marriage was not going to happen for me. I found out that I was infertile and did not want children anyway. I realized that I don't need to be married to support myself. I am well educated and have an advanced degree which in my racial group makes me unsuitable as a date or a marriage partner anyway. If I want sex, there are ways to get it that don't involve a white dress and a wedding band. If I happen to meet a nice man that I am compatible with, that's okay. I will keep my home and he can keep his. In today's economy, traditonal marriage is and outmoded institution. Young people today know that and don't care. It is only the wingnuts and the fundies that want to keep the illusion going that marriage is a viable institution. In my experience and that of a lot of women in my situation, it isn't.

...Tracy, I have read that couples who live together before getting married have a much higher divorce rate (something like 50% more) than those who do not live together before marriage.

I know this article is about not ever getting married, but could you, or someone who knows, please comment on this statistic?

I'm sorry that I can't provide a source right now. I'm just hoping that someone else who has also read this might have an enlightened opinion about it.

Thanks. :-)