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The most common reasons given for the breakdown of marriages or live-in partnerships in Britain are communication problems and growing apart, according to analysis by UCL researchers of the latest National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3).
[...] Natsal is the largest scientific study of sexual health lifestyles in Britain. It is carried out by UCL, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and NatCen Social Research [sic]
Natsal is run every 10 years, and includes a representative sample of men and women resident in Britain aged between 16 and 74. Natsal-3 was carried out between 2010 and 2012.
The study focused on the responses of 706 men and 1254 women to questions about their reasons for breakdown of a marriage or cohabiting relationship in the past 5 years.
[UCL is, of course, University College London. It has as part of one of its faculties the above-mentioned school.]
I would have guessed footie.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:32PM (33 children)
The fact that more marriages are ending like this may indicate that in our era, marriage may totally be a thing of the past.
People may scoff at Hobbes or Plato for offering radical new ways of life in their political books, but with sufficient technology, life might just evolve into societies without a need for arbitrary social contracts like marriage and whatnot and instead we can just enjoy each other without stupid and useless cultural relics from ancient times which cause MANY more problems than solve.
Imagine a world without spousal abuse or child abuse. We're getting there.
(Score: 2, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:40PM (17 children)
There's a reason basically every culture on the planet honors something very much resembling marriage. Natural selection long ago found that it was preferable for the species if children were brought up by both a man and a woman. Argue with Darwin at your own peril.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:01PM (1 child)
However it was an optimization for the living conditions of the stone age, which no longer apply to modern life. Also, it is not exactly true that the natural uprising of human children is by a man and a woman; rather the natural uprising is by a big family where lots of people have their part in it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:41PM
A bold claim. What evidence do you have to back it up?
I don't disagree. The married couple were simply the core of the family unit not its entirety.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:05PM (6 children)
Wrong. Pre-industrial societies (and even most post-industrial societies, until the advent of today's idiotic "nuclear family") had children raised not by two parents, but by a sizeable group: either an entire extended family clan (consisting of grandparents, several of their kids and those kids' spouses, etc.), or a whole village. In pre-contact Hawai'i, they didn't have marriage at all, and didn't even know who kids' fathers were, nor did they care. The kids were raised collectively by their village. Now you could make a case that in all these instances, there were usually both men and women involved in raising the kids, and that's correct, just not necessarily their biological parents. Kids don't need a singular man and woman (and their bio-parents at that) to raise them, they need multiple different people, and really the more the better (up to a point). Honestly, I think many of today's problems come from society turning to nuclear families, and not having enough people involved in a child's upbringing.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:34PM
I think this is considered fake anthropology these days.
Everybody knows that the nuclear family has been how things are done for the past 4 million some odd years, right up until millennials invented gay. Also we've been at war with Eastasia far into the future, thousands of years ago according to my alternate fossil record.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:39PM (4 children)
Isolated exceptions do not disprove rules of a general nature. Logic fail. And I was not arguing for an only-existed-on-TV nuclear family consisting of only the biological parents and the children, so there goes that. Did you have any other arguments you wanted to make?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:44PM (3 children)
Are you stupid? I just disproved your central thesis. People did not live in nuclear families before ~1950s, period.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:39AM (1 child)
You do know that "nuclear families" are not radioactive, right?
The term refers to the committed parents and their kids as the nucleus of the family. It's a very common pattern through history for kids to be raised by the extended family, or small group of a few families ("village" is too big a thing, I think), but kids having specific people they know as Father and Mother is found throughout written history.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:37PM
No, that's not what the term means in practice at all; it means a family stripped down to its nucleus: the parents and kids only, no extended relatives at all (at least not actively involved in raising the kids on a day-to-day basis). It's an entirely modern phenomenon. Before that, at least in western societies, kids were raised by extended families or groups or villages.
And no, having specific people they know as "Father" and "Mother" is not found *universally* throughout history, though it definitely is the norm for places with written history I'll admit. Many more primitive cultures, such as pre-contact Hawai'i, did not have this.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 29 2017, @09:24AM
You disproved nothing. All you did was deliberately misunderstand in order to create a strawman.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:06PM (3 children)
Natural selection long ago found that it was preferable for the species if children were brought up by both a man and a woman. Argue with Darwin at your own peril.
While I have nothing necessarily against marriage, your invocation of Darwin seems a bit odd here. There are many possible patterns of raising young in various species, some of which are centered on two primary parents, many where the young are basically just raised by the mother, plenty where other social groups are important in raising young within a community (pack, herd, whatever).
My understanding (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that humans within the primate group we come from probably tended toward smaller bands consisting of an alpha male with one or more females. Children in prehistory were therefore likely raised by this group, a feature that continued to be part of most human societies (i.e., "it takes a village" kind of stuff) with women communally sharing child-care responsibilities, etc. It's only really in the past century or so that the "nuclear family" of just man-woman-children isolated from larger social groups has been seen as the norm in many societies. And it's this isolation of a nuclear family (with the added issues and tensions it often creates) that's abnormal for humans and perhaps leads to greater stress and frustration.
Anyhow, are there other primate species that operate under the single lifelong pair-bond scenario you describe? It seems singular marriage (as opposed to polygamy, and generally polygyny, which was common to many human societies in the past) is more of a creation of civilization, something to regulate and distribute the sexes in a way that minimized the conflict common in polygamous societies (which often tend to have a lot of warfare among males seeking to become alpha and take over a clan of women or whatever).
But I don't claim to be an anthropologist or expert in primate social groups, so maybe somebody else has better info...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:47PM (1 child)
I think you're reading what you wanted to argue against rather than what I said. I've made no claims that a nuclear family consisting only of both parents and the children are how humans function best. I did not exclude extended family members or friends in any way.
The point of my claim was more along the lines of if you do not have both a mother figure and a father figure, you are far more likely to end up with fucked up, antisocial kids. Which utterly fails all success criteria for species survival and prosperity.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:08PM
I've made no claims that a nuclear family consisting only of both parents and the children are how humans function best.
I didn't say you did. But our modern conception of marriage often focuses on it.
I did not exclude extended family members or friends in any way.
And yet monogamous marriage does precisely that, unless you were also admitting polygamous unions as options (more likely resembling prehistoric structures)? As others have noted, humans are likely inherently promiscuous from an evolutionary standpoint and/or likely to have a structure involving multiple mates. Defending the modern civilized conception of heterosexual marriage doesn't generally admit those sorts of social groupings.
The point of my claim was more along the lines of if you do not have both a mother figure and a father figure, you are far more likely to end up with fucked up, antisocial kids.
[Citation needed.] The concept of families with two moms or two dads or whatever is relatively recent in Western cultures (at least as considered acceptable), and most preliminary studies I've seen seem to show no such negative impacts. I'm willing to admit the data may still be limited. But even the impacts of divorce have frequently been overstated (though that at least has some clear negative impacts). If you're talking about the impact of single parents, I agree there's an issue there, but I'm not sure it's mostly caused by the lack of the opposing sex in a parent as the extra difficulties and stresses caused when people don't have the support of another full-time adult in a household to raise kids.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 28 2017, @07:36PM
Take a look at Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee.
We are best classified as one of the great apes, a subgroup of the primates. Chimps and apes have a wide variety of reproduction strategies. Mountain gorillas do indeed have the alpha male and harem set up. Chimps such as the bonobo are much more freewheeling and promiscuous, mating with each other all the time. Diamond points out that there is a correlation between male testicle size and sexual behavior. Relative to body weight, chimps have very large testes, the better to flood the females with lots of seed, and to shorten recovery time, increasing their odds of becoming fathers. The male gorilla doesn't need large testes because he doesn't mate that often, as he relies on physical force to keep other males away and doesn't have to guess when the female is in heat. Humans fit in at "mildly promiscuous". Monogamy was never entirely our way, though we're close enough to that lifestyle that we can do it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:54PM (3 children)
basically every culture on the planet
Note that contemporary non-marriage cultures are uniformly ... not doing well by any bean counting measure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:12PM (2 children)
Chicken and the egg.
Marriage does not cause create financial security.
Marriage is a symptom of financial security.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:20AM (1 child)
Marriage is pretty much nothing. It isn't some magical fix for relationships. The only practical effects it has is that the government foolishly grants some legal privileges to people who get married. Aside from that, it's much like rain dancing: Magical thinking nonsense.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:03AM
Don't worry. Some people think more babies are magical fixes for bad relationships..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:48PM (11 children)
Well, I see how abolishing marriage would remove spousal abuse, by the simple fact that there would be no more spouses (not that it would reduce the total amount of abuse, it would just be labelled differently). However I don't see how it would remove child abuse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:00PM (10 children)
Child abuse can be mostly eliminated pretty easily: prevent people from having children. Private rearing of children is what leads to child abuse. Instead, let the state take over that function, so that professional child-rearers can be employed for this. There was a pretty good book a while ago about a society like this, called "Brave New World".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:06PM (6 children)
You seem to have missed all the cases where children were abused by teachers, priests or others professionally tasked to care of them.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:31PM (4 children)
You have a good point there. Eliminating child abuse by priests is easy: get rid of religion. But the others aren't so easy, and that really comes down to society wanting to invest strongly in childrearing, which means finding the most qualified people to do jobs involving children (like teaching, nannying, etc.), which is different from today where we massively underpay teachers and then wonder why they're frequently so lousy. Also, in addition to making these jobs prestigious and well-compensated, they need to have a good amount of oversight and cross-checking to keep standards of care high and eliminate anyone who's lacking. In a society which really wants to raise children in the best way possible, these investments will be made. In a society like ours which doesn't care about raising kids well, we get what you see today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:39PM (3 children)
You have a good point there. Eliminating child abuse by priests is easy: get rid of religion.
You are joking, right? It isn't the religion that causes the abuse, religionists are no more prone to child abuse than any other group. The reason pedo-priests were such a big problem is because the church covered for them to protect its own reputation rather than protect the children. Just like UPenn covered for Sandusky.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:44PM (2 children)
Right, it was the organization. Get rid of organized religion and there's no more organization and no more potential to cover up abuse that way.
Getting rid of big-money collegiate sports would be a good thing too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:55PM (1 child)
Where you do stop?
Boy scouts?
4H?
Schools?
Pee-Wee football?
What organizations are you going to allow to exist?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:23PM
NAMBLA. All organizations are now NAMBLA.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:33PM
I certainly don't want to downplay your valid point about child abuse occurring among non-family caregivers. However, it's worthwhile to note that most stats suggest it's a lot more common for abuse to occur in the home (from parents, siblings, other extended family members, family friends, etc.). Stats I've seen are that parents are generally implicated in ~75-80% of substantiated cases of child maltreatment, and ~90% of child abuse is caused by relatives of the child.
Perhaps those stats are so high mostly because of "opportunity," i.e., most kids spend a lot of their free time with family, and perhaps rates among non-family would be higher if more children were in the care of other people. (This is suggested by the high rates of foster care abuse, for example.) But the fact remains that right now a lot more abuse occurs at the hands of family.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:46PM (1 child)
I must be really weird. The only thing I found really disturbing about Brave New World was how certain people were intentionally retarded with ethanol in the maturation chamber or whatever it was called. It's easy to criticize a 1931 novel in 2017, but it seems that robots and AIs would do a better job of replacing the lower castes. Everything else I thought were interesting ideas that could improve the human condition, including some kind of outlet for people who can't fit into the system. I would need that outlet personally, but so many people are so desperate to be told by somebody else what their lives mean and what they must do with them.
Granted, I haven't read it since I was a teenager.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:59PM
Yeah, I always wondered why it was deemed a bad society when it really seemed ideal in many ways. But you're right, it was written ages ago (I thought it came out in 1947 or 49 actually, very close to when "1984" was published, in 1948), so some things seem a little silly. They didn't have real robots back then, and given technology now, we're already looking at replacing our crappy jobs with automation and robots, so in such a future society I think that's a given, so we wouldn't need to artificially breed dumb people for them. Also, in the book they had women carrying around "birth control" and having to remember to take it regularly. We still have a lot of that today, but only because many people don't want to take the permanent step of a vasectomy or tubal ligation. In a future society where natural births are eliminated, there'd be no reason to even bother with medical birth control; we'd do permanent sterilization on everyone automatically. I'm guessing they hadn't yet invented these procedures in the late 40s.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:11AM
Child caring from people without a vested interest in those children in combination with low probability of discovery or deterrent is a fertile ground for abuse.
And the state have many perverted interests. They are not suitable to raise children. Private homes have risks but they are lesser than the state has and doesn't carry nasty systematic feedback.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:32PM (2 children)
The fact that more marriages are ending like this may indicate that in our era, marriage may totally be a thing of the past.
And yet, only 13% of never married people say they do not want to get married. [pewsocialtrends.org]
Imagine a world without spousal abuse or child abuse. We're getting there.
Neither of which are functions of marriage. Unmarried partners are abused all the time too, as are children of single parents. [nih.gov]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:50PM (1 child)
And yet, only 13% of never married people say they do not want to get married.
They're asking the wrong people; they should be asking both married (and unhappy), and divorced people about their views on marriage. People who have never married haven't had to learn from harsh experience what it's really like. It'd also be interesting to see how the never-married people respond based on age range. The over-40 crowd probably has a different take than the under-25 crowd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @04:26PM
That's goal-post moving of the first degree.
The OP's thesis was that marriage as an institution is going away due to reasons. If that were the case then unmarried people would be happy with their unmarried status because of those reasons, not because of a lack of personal experience.