Archive for the 'Marriage' Category

Glenn Stanton:

There are some curious things going on with cohabitation and marriage that seem to tell two different stories.

First, the folks at Pew recently told us (see p. 36) that young adults have the strongest desire to marry of any generation alive today. Other data supports this. And the unmarried folks in other generations are not, nor have ever been, disinterested in marriage.

But unmarried cohabitation is the fastest growing family/domestic form in the United States as well as most of the Western world. It’s exploding, having increased 15-fold since 1960. And that growth has more than doubled in real numbers since the mid-1990s in the U.S. and by much more than that in other countries. In fact, more than 60 percent of marriages today are preceded by some form of cohabitation.

Young adults are pro-marriage, but cohabitation is sky-rocketing. Is this ironic, or does it make complete sense?

I address this curious question — and many others — in my latest book, The Ring Makes All the Difference: The Hidden Consequences of Cohabitation and the Strong Benefits of Marriage. In preparation for writing this book, I carefully collected and read nearly all the leading published academic studies on cohabitation published over the past 30 years. Yes, I’m a sad research nerd. And my book explains in plain, straightforward language what this impressive body of literature teaches us.

Most people cohabiting today (75%) see their live-in relationship as some kind of step toward marriage, and 62 percent of young adults believe cohabiting before marriage is a good way to avoid divorce. Very few are cohabiting with no eye toward marriage. And these marriage-minded folks are either cohabiting as a test drive of a potential marriage or are cohabiting with Mr. or Mrs. I Don’t Think So as a place holder until Mr. or Mrs. Right comes along.

But how wise of an idea is cohabitation? Is there a track record to examine? These are critical questions to ask because many millions of people are doing it and in dramatically increasing numbers.

Well, the good news is we don’t have to wonder about strong, reliable answers to those questions. An absolute wealth of social science research by leading sociologists and demographers of the family are telling us much about the consequences of living together before marriage. Here are some of the most startling findings: . . .

Read the rest here.

I officiated for a funeral today for a lady who died a few months before her 7oth wedding anniversary.

The widower is in his 90′s.  He and his wife were married just before the outbreak of World War II in which he was a fighter pilot.  She worked as a seamstress during the war.

He is still sharp as a tack and committed to showing respect to his wife at every point.  He would not allow any chairs at the committal service.  He said to me, “There will be no sitting for my wife.  People will stand out of respect.”  When asked by the funeral home if it might be a good idea to have a chair or two on hand given the heat and the possibility that the elderly (including him) might want to get off their feet, he flatly said, “no.”  He wanted to stand out of respect.

Mike Wittmer wisely explains:

A friend of mine left his wife and three children. Although he knows better—he was a seminary professor—he continues to lie to his family and is filing for divorce. Another friend abuses her family. She wastes their grocery money on her own wants, and then swears and screams when their bank account runs dry. Both of these friends are behaving irrationally, perhaps because both are guilty of unrepentant and repeated adultery.

There is something about sexual sin that ruins the minds of previously healthy people. Paul explains in Romans 1:18-32 that idolatry leads to sexual immorality, which swiftly degenerates into a laundry list of “greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip.” Such people are “backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning” (v. 29-30).

Why is sexual sin a gateway to this smorgasbord of lethal debauchery? Maybe it’s . . .

Read the whole thing here.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I agree with this quote in a recent Collin Hansen post:

The fabric of the family is unraveling at an alarming rate,” said Chris Brauns, pastor of the Congregational Christian Church in Stillman Valley, Illinois. “Divorce is such a problem in the churches where I have served that if I so chose, I could have more than a full-time job working with couples in the midst of marital crises. Or I could have another full-time position working with children from divorced homes.

The disintegration of the family is alarming. Hansen begins his post on this subject:

Late last year you may have seen the disconcerting report of marriage’s decline in America’s moderately educated middle class. It is no hyperbole to conclude that marriage is disappearing in Middle America. We already knew that the disintegrating nuclear family has resulted in a social crisis among the poor. But this news applies to a much larger swath of America: the 58 percent of adults who earned high-school diplomas but did not attend or finish college. During the 1970s, 73 percent of this group was married to their first spouse. During the 2000s, however, only 45 percent could say the same.

One other troubling statistic stood out: In 1982, 13 percent of children were born out-of-wedlock to moderately educated parents. That number has spiked during the last three decades to 44 percent, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and Chuck Donovan, senior research fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.

As much as I don’t want to believe the grim truth, this dramatic change corresponds to anecdotal observation. The divorce epidemic among my parents’ generation devalued marriage among Generations X and Y. Social stigmas against cohabitation have largely disappeared. The two-parent family appears anachronistic to much of the American middle class.

There is one bright spot in the study, however. . .

Read more here.

Here’s an article that will benefit all married couples.  Below is an excerpt from the end of the article.  You can read the entire article by clicking on the link.

Paul Tripp warns couples that unforgiveness can lead to “fantasies of escape.”

If kept alone, unforgiveness always seems to lead [to fantasies of escape]. You are angry, hurt, and overwhelmed. You don’t really like the other person very much, and you don’t look forward to the times when you are together. You feel overwhelmed and smothered. You tell yourself that you are the daily victim of the other’s sin. You can’t imagine that the other person is really going to change. It all seems impossible, so you begin to fantasize about escape.

At first, it’s just the unrealistic daydreams of the tired, but it becomes more than that. The road between fantasy and obsession or fantasy and resolve is often not very long. You are in a place of being very susceptible to walking away, allowing this relationship to be yet another casualty in your relational history.

You may be thinking, “Wow, Paul, that is a very bleak picture!” Well, I would ask you this: do you have a relationship in your life that is moving or has moved down this pathway?

The God of forgiveness and grace enables you by his forgiveness and grace to live in relationships of forgiveness and grace. By his grace you can plant seeds of forgiveness that grow relationships of appreciation, respect and love even though you’re always in relationship with sinners.

Read the whole thing.

HT: Andrew Ford