New Study Confirms Benefits of Marriage

A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that, controlling for individual pre-marital happiness levels, "the married are still more satisfied" and happier than the single. The "well-being effects of marriage are about twice as large for those whose spouse is also their best friend." 

Moreover, researchers John Helliwell and Shawn Grover found that the "married have a less deep U-shape in life satisfaction across age groups than do the unmarried, indicating that marriage may help ease the causes of the mid-life dip in life satisfaction and that the benefits of marriage are unlikely to be short-lived." Reporting on the study, the New York Times writes

The benefits of marital friendship are most vivid during middle age, when people tend to experience a dip in life satisfaction, largely because career and family demands apply the most stress then. Those who are married, the new paper found, have much shallower dips – even in regions where marriage does not have an overall positive effect.

“The biggest benefits come in high-stress environments, and people who are married can handle midlife stress better than those who aren’t because they have a shared load and shared friendship,” Mr. Helliwell said.

Overall, the research comes to a largely optimistic conclusion. People have the capacity to increase their happiness levels and avoid falling deep into midlife crisis by finding support in long-term relationships.

Walsh: Monogamy is Unnatural

Matt Walsh's response to a college professor's assertion that "monogamy is unnatural" is witty and thought-provoking on so many levels that excerpts simply can't do it justice.

If you've ever given two seconds' thought to marriage — or dealt with an insufferably arrogant professor you wanted to slap in the face, for that matter — you'll want to read Walsh's post in its entirety!

How Relationships Today Affect Success of Marriages Later

"A new study shows that the more relationships you've had prior to marriage, the less likely you'll have a good marriage," writes Mollie Hemingway, reporting on a new study from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

She highlights findings in the study that point to the kinds of sound pre-marital decisions made today can improve our chances of marital quality and success. Read more in What You Do Before you Say 'I Do' Matters for Marriage Happiness.

Rules for a Happy Life

You're young and you want to live life to the fullest. How do you do that to ensure the greatest happiness? Charles Murray offers this advice:

When it comes to a life filled with deep and lasting satisfactions, most of the clichés are true. How could I make them sound fresh to a new generation? Here's how I tried. 

1. Consider Marrying Young—You've got to wait until the right person comes along. I'm just pointing out that you shouldn't exclude the possibility. If you wait until your 30s, your marriage is likely to be a merger. If you get married in your 20s, it is likely to be a startup. ...
   
   Lots of things can be said in favor of merger marriages. The bride and groom may be more mature, less likely to outgrow each other or to feel impelled, 10 years into the marriage, to make up for their lost youth. ...
   
   What are the advantages of a startup marriage? For one thing, you will both have memories of your life together when it was all still up in the air. ... Even more important, you and your spouse will have made your way together. Whatever happens, you will have shared the experience. And each of you will know that you wouldn't have become the person you are without the other.


2. Learn How to Recognize Your Soul Mate—Marry someone with similar tastes and preferences. Which tastes and preferences? The ones that will affect life almost every day. It is OK if you like the ballet and your spouse doesn't. Reasonable people can accommodate each other on such differences. But if you dislike each other's friends, or don't get each other's senses of humor or—especially—if you have different ethical impulses, break it off and find someone else.
   
   What you see is what you're going to get. If something about your prospective spouse bothers you but you think that you can change your beloved after you're married, you're wrong. Be prepared to live with whatever bothers you—or forget it. Your spouse will undoubtedly change during a long marriage but not in ways you can predict or control.

Solution to Income Inequality is Marriage

"Marriage inequality is a substantial reason why income inequality exists," writes Ari Fleischer in the Wall Street Journal, and he presents considerable research to make his case.

...among families headed by two married parents in 2012, just 7.5% lived in poverty. By contrast, when families are headed by a single mother the poverty level jumps to 33.9%. [snip]

Attitudes toward marriage and having children have changed in America over the past 50 years, and low-income children and their mothers are the ones who are paying the price. ... As the Heritage [Foundation] study states: "The U.S. is steadily separating into a two-caste system with marriage and education as the dividing line. In the high-income third of the population, children are raised by married parents with a college education; in the bottom-income third, children are raised by single parents with a high-school diploma or less." One of the differences between the haves and the have-nots is that the haves tend to marry and give birth, in that order. The have-nots tend to have babies and remain unmarried. ...

Given how deep the problem of poverty is, taking even more money from one citizen and handing it to another will only diminish one while doing very little to help the other. A better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children—in that order.

Hemingway: Marriage Culture, or Government Culture?

"The more we move away from a marriage culture, the more we move to a government culture," tweeted Mollie Hemingway following the Virginia election in which candidate Ken Cuccinelli won the 'married women' vote but lost the 'single women' vote. She explains more fully in Pick One: Marriage Culture or Government Culture, which is worth reading in its entirety.

The University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project came out with a fascinating report (“When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America by Brad Wilcox“) showing that marriage in America is becoming something of an elite institution, reserved for older individuals. Wealthy white people are getting married and having strong marriages. Other folks less so. Far less so. Delayed marriage has both costs and benefits. It’s worked out well for elite women and helped them have more career advancement. But the failure to marry has had some serious destabilizing effects on non-elite women.

One of those effects on non-elite singles is economic instability. According to the report, "[c]ompared to those continuously married, those who never marry have a reduction in wealth of 75 percent, and those who divorced and didn't remarry have a reduction of 73 percent."  Hemingway concludes:

It’s pretty simple, really. It may be popular to pretend that women and men are identical, but women and the children they love are the most vulnerable to the downsides of a culture where marriage is delayed or forgotten. We bear far more economic risk and suffer through the deleterious effects of instability. Women in strong marriages tend to have their basic needs cared for by their own family unit and the civil society closest to them. Women who are not in strong marriages tend to rely on the government. Voting patterns reflect how women’s incentives change with changes in their marital status.

We should never forget Julia, President Obama’s central character in the “War on Women” campaign. She lived “her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work,” as David Harsanyi wrote. And she never married.

Polygamy Next?

via Instapundit:

MATT K. LEWIS: The Case For Polygamy. “This is not some straw man argument. As BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins pointed out, polygamists are, in fact, celebrating the court’s decision. And they have every reason to do so. After all, why shouldn’t marriage equality apply to them, too? . . . What’s magical about the number two? . . . As a man, I can only imagine how much more efficient it would be to have one wife in the workforce and another wife at home with the kids. This would be much better for the children than shipping them off to some nursery school. And having three parents is a lot better than having just one … or none.”

Parker: How Abortion Has Changed America

"Let’s be clear that pro-aborts and pro-lifers differ on far more than technicalities about when life begins. They differ about what life is," writes Star Parker.

20-week baby in utero (WEBMD)

In the state of Pennsylvania, where Gosnell was doing his dirty business, abortion is legal until the developing child is 24 weeks - 6 months - old. Among Gosnell’s many transgressions was performing abortions after 24 weeks.

But Planned Parenthood, and their guest speaker, our president, oppose that 24-week limit. They believe abortion should be legal until the child is born.

[snip]

Justice Kennedy, who wrote the [Partial Birth Abortion Ban] decision, included a description of one of these procedures on a 26-week-old infant. It takes a certain deadening of the heart, of the soul to read the description of the little baby clasping his fingers and toes as the doctor jams his scissors into his skull, and still believe this should be permitted.

Since Roe v Wade, we’ve given birth to a new materialistic culture of narcissism where reverence for life itself is gone. Life has become a commodity and people use each other as cavalierly as they destroy innocent young life.

As our reverence for life has diminished, so has our reverence for the institutions that surround and support it.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution observed in 1996 that Roe v Wade contributed to the collapse of marriage and the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births. The idea that children were part of a sacred institution called marriage started disappearing.

The sense of honor, the sense of shame disappears in this culture of self.

Chick-fil-A, Gays, Marriage, and Tolerance

Chick-Fil-A had a great day Wednesday, as did the millions of Americans who quietly showed their support for traditional marriage, free speech, and free enterprise. Fr. Dwight Longenecker called it “the triumph of the ordinary.”

Yesterday’s Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day was the sort of ‘revolt’ this country needs, but it was even better than the non violent revolutions and peaceful protests which have changed the world because it was so ordinary. It was just plain, ordinary Americans getting in their cars and doing a plain, ordinary American thing: going out for lunch to a fast food joint. It was just plain, ordinary Americans doing something plain and ordinary, but positive and joyful and good. In buying an ordinary tasty chicken sandwich at their corner fast food emporium ordinary Americans were expressing the wish to be left alone to be ordinary Americans.

Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are a tiny fraction of the U.S. population—3.5% at most, according to demographer Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA. (The population is even smaller in the United Kingdom, where a national 2010 Integrated Household Survey found that only 1.5% of Britons say they are gay, lesbian or bisexual.)

Yet they so militantly promote their lifestyle and agenda that they have fooled many Americans into believing that they are a much larger segment of the population.

A 2011 Gallup survey found that only 4% of American adults estimated—correctly—that gays and lesbians were less than 5% of the U.S. population.  Over half (52%) of adults in the U.S. thought 1 in 5 Americans were gay, and 35% of adults thought 1 in 4 were gay.  Women, young people, lower-income and less educated Americans have been snookered most (see chart below):

Americans with lower incomes and less education give the highest estimates, on average, of the U.S. gay and lesbian population, and far higher estimates than those with higher incomes and more education. Americans aged 18 to 29 give a higher average estimate than older Americans, and women give a far higher average estimate than men.

"For all the talk of the traditional marriage supporters being full of hate, there was not hatred apparent” on Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day, notes Fr. Longenecker.  Hate is the currency of the Left these days: Hate for centuries of traditions and definitions that don’t suit its contemporary whims. Hate for speech that isn’t synonymous with its own. Hate for a free-enterprise system that refuses to buckle to the un-ordinary demands of a tiny segment of the population.

No, no hate Wednesday, just (as Fr. Longenecker put it) "ordinary Americans sticking up for their way of life by buying a chicken sandwich with their friends and neighbors.”

Gavora: Julia and the New Hubby State

"The Life of Julia," writes Jessica Gavora, "follows a cartoon everywoman, Julia, through the milestones of a middle-class American life: education, work, motherhood, retirement. One milestone is pointedly missing: marriage. But, then again, why should Julia get married? She doesn't need to. Like a growing number of single women with children, Julia is married to the state..." Read Ms. Gavora's insightful perspective in the Washington Post.