Since the institution of divorce by Henry VIII, along with the creation of the Church of England, divorce rates have only risen. This is due in part to the secularization of marriage, as well as the decreasing fervor of society toward religious involvement in marriage. People have started to see it more as a legal thing than a spiritual one, generally.
While that's all well and good, I see a more urgent issue with divorce rates being on such a rise. Since the act of divorce has become more socially acceptable and less demonized in the eyes of Americans, this increased rate implies that people have desired divorces for a long time, but were unable to obtain them. As it stands, half of all marriages end in divorce. That tells me that marriage is not a suitable institution for romantic partnership. A system with a 50% success rate is unfit for every other aspect of modern life. A car that starts only half the time is replaced. A syringe that only moves half of an injection load into a patient is thrown out. So I think marriage needs to be replaced with something more effective.
Consider this: love is caused by chemistry. Oxytocin is the love hormone. When you feel like you love someone, you're feeling a rush of oxytocin and dopamine in your brain. However, oxytocin can also be released when you pet your dog, play with a baby, hang out with friends, etc. Romantic love is just a much stronger source. Dopamine can be released through drug use.
Now also consider the implications of marriage. Marriage is, at its core, a contract. It has certain expectations and limitations attached to it, as well as rewards. The reward is oxytocin, but the limitations include monogamy, fidelity, consistency, economic support, general responsibility for one's own person and their spouse's, etc. Unfortunately, these limitations are often too much for a reward like oxytocin, which can much more easily be obtained from a side affair, or other activities that leave a partner neglected or alone.
Knowing what we do about oxytocin and human interaction, we should conclude that humans are not meant to be monogamous, or restricted inside of a relationship in any way besides. Marriage shouldn't be a personal binding between two people for extended periods, it should be an open, unrestricted affair between any willing partners that satisfy each other's chemical needs, which can change or terminate at any point. This is what makes the most biological sense.
To avoid miscommunication, I don't mean to say conventional marriage should be abolished, I just think that the societal expectation of marriage conventionality should change.
Thoughts?
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Both of my marriages were good. So were both of my divorces.
can't help much here. was married only once, then widowed. relationships since were just that, relationships. some ended good, some were doomed. otherwise, it is just me myself and i.
however, i do not feel marriage is actually necessary. if two persons of consentability are willing to put up with each other, then so be it. if they feel they can no longer put up with each other, so be it.
my wife and i only got married because it was what was supposed to be done back then. if we were in this world, here and now as we were back then, we may never have gotten married. hell, we were married to each other in our hearts anyway. we didn't need no stupid laws to tell us we were married to each other.
as far as i am concerned, fuck marriage laws, fuck divorce laws. just let people decide for themselves. it's their lives, not the government's. although I know a few absolutists who would beg to differ.
rmfr
I think a lot of marriages fail because people see marriage as the key to the happy-ever-after section of Fantasy Land. A marriage is always a work in progress, because the people in it are always changing. I'm not an expert on marriage because I've only done it once, but I can say based on empirical observation that it's possible for two people to stay married and love for at least 45 years.
If people want to be serial monogamists or polygamists or whatever, that's their business, but I am concerned for the effects on children. And I think the rights and needs of children trump the rights and needs of their parents every time.
I have no time for the religious aspects of marriage. If people want to have a big spectacular church wedding that's fine. But my observation has been that the bigger the wedding, the shorter the marriage. I hate elaborate public proposals at ball games or with sky-writing, etc., and I cringe when I hear people reciting elaborate vows to each other in front of an altar.
I do value the legal aspects because of the protection they provide for partners and children.
Average life expectancy worldwide in 1900 was 31 years, now it's above 70. I'm not really that surprised that divorce is higher nowadays.
1. Love is much more complex than you’ve described. It is something that effects and is affected by every stage of the human hierarchy. As such, it makes no sense to reduce it to a chemical consequence. Love is synonymous with a wide range of non-overlapping activities from sexuality to friendship and is also directed at a wide rage of objects, from music and food, to another person. There are also a wide variety of approaches to love, from evolutionary explanations, behavioral explanations, cognitive explanation, humanistic explanations, and socio-cultural explanations (Friedman & Schustack, 2016). You seem to be taking a biological approach, wrongly, and to the exclusion of all other factors.
2. Love is not caused by chemicals. Hormones, first and foremost, regulate physiological changes. Oxytocin is much more important in females than in males. In females it facilitates breast feeding and birth, whereas in males it facilitates ejaculation (Costanzo, 2018). The secondary psychological effects of oxytocin seem to revolve around maternal bonding between mother and child (due to its obvious relationship to lactation and birth). It also appears to reduce anxiety and increase a sense of trust. People call oxytocin the “love hormone” but this is more of nickname than an actual description of what it does. So, oxytocin plays a role when it comes to motherly trust and bonding, but its correlation with love in every other aspect tends to be absent. In males, vasopressin which physiologically regulates fluid retention, plays a role in paternal behavior (Carlson, 2013). Bonding is a factor of love, but it is not love in and of itself. The biggest thing to realize is that these hormones facilitate the behavior of paternal and maternal trust and bonding, but it doesn’t cause them (Sapolsky, 2017). They say the brain is like a crime scene, for any given psychological behavior such as love, lots of difference areas are indicted but none convicted.
3. The divorce rate: Such percentages don't give you insight into the cause of the divorces, yet you take it as signifying a fundamental flaw with marriage itself. For example, research shows that couples that attended premarital communication training have less fights, were happier, and divorced less (Stanley et al., 2006). So, we can assume that one major contributor to divorce, is not marriage itself, but improper communication strategies. Financial problems are bound to be another big contributor to divorce; college education also seems to contribute to lower divorce rates (Aron, Coups, & Aron, 2013).
4. You made it appear as though marriage piggyback rides oxytocin. We've thus fallen into this marriage trap, seeking to get a rush of oxytocin, at the cost of everything else: "Knowing what we do about oxytocin and human interaction, we should conclude that humans are not meant to be monogamous..." I will counter that by saying the complete opposite. Given what we know about oxytocin, humans are supposed to be monogamous. The bonding behavior associated to oxytocin, would lead to marriage-like and other long-term relationships. Studies done on two species of prairie voles, one of which monogamous, the other of which is promiscuous, show this. The difference between them? More oxytocin receptors in monogamous voles (Bear, Connors, & Paradiso, 2007).
References:
-Aron, A., Coups, E. J., & Aron, E. N. (2013). Statistics for psychology (6th ed). Boston: Pearson.
-Bear, M. F., Connors, B. W., & Paradiso, M. A. (2007). Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain. -Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
-Carlson, N. R. (2013). Physiology of behavior. Boston: Pearson.
-Costanzo, L. S. (2018). Physiology (6th ed.). Philadelphia: Elsevier.
-Friedman, H. S., & Schustack, M. W. (2016). Personality: Classic theories and modern research. Boston: Pearson.
-Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. New York: Penguin Press.
-Stanley, S. M., Amato, P. R., Johnson, C. A., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Premarital education, marital quality, and marital stability: Findings from a large, random household survey. Journal of Family Psychology, 20, 117–126
Thanks, this was very informative. I'm going to read up on those sources you provided. Although, I am still inclined to think that a long term relationship between people could be executed more ideally than by conventional marriage. It seems odd to regulate a behavior like love or bonding in the way marriage does. My question though, is that if humans were meant to be monogamous in their relationships, why is there such a high rate of infidelity among committed people? I think my example of hormones being unconsciously viewed as a reward by the brain is a possibility, considering how good romance feels for us. When you bind humans in the way marriage does, they seek other means of getting that same reward if the original means becomes too much effort or provides too little payout. Incompatibility would be another possibility, and a likely one, but it seems like half of all people finding incompatible partners would point to an ineptitude in either the system or the execution of the participants. Marrying young seems like a bad idea if you want success, as well as marrying poor or marrying uneducated. However, I don't think these things would be as problematic as they are now if the system of marriage was different.
If marriage were more open, allowing for multiple partners, they could pool assets to more stably support each other, and the lax attitude attached to the affair would promote better bonding among them with less stress on any given individual.
Alternatively, if we as a society stopped pushing people to get married and have kids as soon as humanly possible and just let people do what they want without societal expectation on the matter, that might solve things just as well. Too many people feel obligated to get married before they're out of college, even when they can hardly support themselves. And it makes sense, because we love marriage, and people that sleep together but aren't married are looked down on by society. It's gotten better, but the expectation for every young woman to get married and have two or more kids before she's 30 is still palpable. And then whenever two young, dumb, irresponsible lovers tie the knot and have a kid, they almost inevitably realize they either can't stand each other, can't manage money, or can't raise a child. Then comes fighting, trying to make things up, more fighting, divorce, a kid growing up in a broken home, psychological damage for all involved, and a plethora of other pleasantries.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I think that real change in either marriage itself or the expectations of society about marriage could fix things. But either way, the current state of affairs is in a bad way, and some sort of change is necessary.
Marriage and divorce were always legal things, long before Henry.
A 50% success rate aint all that bad for the messy emotional and sexual interactions between humans with faulty perceptions and personalities; its an irresistable force determining sexual selection. Always has been, always will, nothing much has changed. No-one could expect 100% efficiency here as one does when they turn the ignition key.
The institution of marriage was conceived to keep the mess to a minimum and it doesnt do that particularly well.
Netflix has a new more informal news series in combination with Vox News called "explained" they did an 18 minute segment on monogamy and lack of, that was excellent, anyone interested in this topic and learning more should watch it.
In short summary of that episode, monogamy, especially in it is current form is very new, (in terms of human race history) and very unnatural in terms of what our closest ancestral relative, and the retelling of what cultures did out before influenced by western culture.
I quoted this same survey a few months ago, but I think it's very proper to bring it back.
According to the anthropologist Helen Fisher, probably the most important researcher on human love from an evolutionary point of view, monogamy (and romantic love) is neither unnatural nor a recient invention in human history. In her research commentary of "The Nature of romantic love" she concludes that
"romantic love is a cultural universal which evolved in our first hominid forebears some 4 million years ago" and "serial monogamy during reproductive years has had adaptatives advantages throughout human evolution"; also "natural selection has resulted in primary human mating behavior that are still visible in worldwide patterns of marriage, divorce and remarriage".
@Flamenca
I think, both the episode, and your survey is correct.
First, do not get me wrong, I believe in love, I am happily married to my wife now for 5.5 years and we have an amazing and great monogamous relationship that is the best most satisfying and happy relationship I know of, out of relationships where I am privy to the details behind the scenes.
Probably all this comes down to both definitions and perception of the the same data.
2.2 million marriages in USA in 2016, 800,000 divorces (CDC) A good success rate? Depends on how you look at it. 63.4% of marriages do not end in divorce, but 36.4 do, based on 2016 rates. So slightly less than 2 in 3 marriages make it to death, and probably a good portion of those there is some sexual infidelity going on at one point by at least 1 of the partners. I suspect the trend of decreasing numbers of people getting married and staying married percentage wise will continue.
Bringing world wide marriages into the picture and "arranged" marriages ends up being front and center focus. Opening up a whole new can of worms on "what is marriage and how does monogamy/polyamory relate in arranged marriages?"
A quote I like in that episode is: "love is a feeling, marriage is a rule." A rule often times enforced by law. Adultery is still illegal in one form another in 20 states in the US, and in many places around the world.
Until the women rights revolution, it was a common "unsaid" contract that: "women needed men to provide and protect them and their children, so women trade sexual fidelity to men in exchange for goods and services." This of course continues to this day, in many places, but also, there is a huge and very overdue rise of women's rights and equality, women can now provide for themselves and their children without a man, shaking up this "unsaid contract."
Another issue that has changed recently is it used to be, that the male partner in a relationship has to take the women's word for it that the child is his. A powerful reason to expect sexual fidelity in a female partner until more recently where dna markers or testing can assure the male the child is his.
Going into anthropology, the modern human is at least 300k years old. For 95+ percent of that time, we were hunter gatherers. Anthropology suggests that: mostly due to survival needs, humans were very egalitarian and shared everything. There is no evidence that points to that: humans race and culture was not also egalitarian about sexual partners.
There is evidence that the middle east and western Europe influenced all the other societies of the world to monogamy. All of course very tied up in the religions as that was the dominating cultural influence back then. Religion had powerful reasons to push marriage and monogamy to consolidate and gain more power.
Monogamy in the animal world is very rare, monogamy is more the exception to the rule then the rule. Even looking at our closest ape relatives, bonobos and chimps, of which we are very closely related. (We share 98.8 percent of their DNA.) Chimps and bonobos are not even close to monogamous.
There is also evolutionary evidence that nature did not intend humans to be monogamous through various anatomy features.
There is fairly compelling evidence that monogamy did not really start occurring until the agricultural revolution started to become wide spread. And humans moved away from more egalitarian ideals to more property rights. And marriage followed, as a way to increase family labor force, to create alliances broker deals and so forth. The very prevalent social hierarchy determining who marries who, of these marriages that occured back then points strongly to this. Again something that still continues, just not as strongly, to this day.
Marrying for love was probably quite rare until only a few hundred years ago. A good advancement, I personally agree emphatically, but it does not solve the issue that monogamy often times fails, either in divorce or cheating. Monogamy and marriage is made especially new by the women's rights and equality movements. Where many marriages and vows of monogamy are not based on some form of coercion, which means in its current form, marriage and its usual monogamy promises are going to be tested as coercion increasingly frequently is no longer a factor. (Thankfully!)
Another good quote from the episode: "Monogamy is like vegetarianism. You can choose to be a vegetarian and that can be healthy. It can be ethical, it can be a wonderful decision, but because you've chosen to be a vegetarian doesn't mean that bacon stops smelling good.
There is good reason to believe monogamy is unnatural, but that is fine, humans are adaptable and everyone should find relationship styles that suit them.
This is mostly all taken from the Netflix series: "Explained" from the episode "Monogamy."
Divorce rates jumped because of liberalization, not because of secularization. This happened in the 1960s, the most religious decade in US history when no fault divorce came about. Really what this did was reveal how messed up many marriages have always been. Personally, I think marriage is great, and also think it's great that women don't have to feel trapped in a marriage that's abusive like they did in the past. At the same time, I think we should put more emphasis culturally on in the importance of communication, counseling, and working hard to keep marriages together. Divorce is not ideal, but sometimes it's better than the alternative. Work hard for the sake of the kids to keep it together, but if you're married to a douche bag who won't change, and all else fails, cut the strings.
Have not heard before that 1960 was most religious decade in US history. By my understanding, US citizen participation rate in weekly church service was already in steep decline by 1960's with that participation rate continuing to decline quite a bit to this day in the US.
But yes, like my post above, as the coercion behind marriage fades away as men and women become more equal, there is going to be increased divorce rates, simply because people are more free to do so.
I do agree communication, and work (sometimes hard work) is needed to keep healthy marriages going. With counseling in times of distress that may also help. Also feel parents should try best as they can, to be a unified force in raising their children to adulthood to give the children the best opportunity possible.
Since you can't measure that directly; I'm betting a rather dubious metric was crafted to specifically generate that result. In short: bullshit!
Do you know what operational definitions are? Its interesting that you bring up thermometers and yardstick, because that is literally how things like religiosity are measured. Yardsticks are made up measurements; there's nothing intrinsic about a yard that says it must be that length, nevertheless at some point that length was decided by somebody.
The same applies to concepts like religiosity, you just come up with some way to measure it. For example, a few thread pages back, in the study about damage to the vmPFC and fundamentalism, the researchers measured fundamentalism with a survey.
All measurement use a dimension (or are dimensionless). When you measure a board, you are using the dimension of length. Notice the sources listed by Glacier aren't using the same dimensions. Leading me to ask: what is the dimension of religiosity?
Right, and I'm saying something as simple as a survey can measure something like religiosity. Secondly, even if his sources used different measurements, researchers who run meta-analyses can often convert different measurements into a common language.
@Breezy
Lots of ways to measure without explaining implicitly how it is measured. I can make just about any statistic of measurement support or deny an argument without tight specifics.
@Thread
A simple way to measure would be how many new housing units have been built versus how many new churches have been built. Churches that even have the capacity to seat thousands, has not kept up at all with how many new housing units have been built in the US. A steady decline in ratio of churches being built compared to housing.
In the far north east in the US, according to pew research, weekly worship attendance is below 25 percent. If most people can not even be bothered to go to church weekly how religious are they really?
@Logic, thanks for unraveling the thought, it was really interesting. You may be right: monogamy and romantic love already existing in early forms of hominids doesn't automatically mean that these two are intrinsic to the contract of marriage, especially on those arranged ones; although it's also true than in most marriages in Westernized socities our expectations are of a long-term commitment and fidelity, regardless what happens during the course of the relationship.
@Glacier and @Logic: In my country, the first divorce law is from 1932, during our II Republic; it was derogated in 1939 by the dictator (due to the RCC asfixiating influence), and it wasn't until 1981, on democracy again, that divorce returned. So I think both secularization and liberatization were indistinguishable factors here for its approval.
@Glacier: "Divorce is not ideal, but sometimes it's better than the alternative..." 100% agree.
Marriage is great. It’s the spouses who are sometimes less than desirable. :p
"Since you can't measure that directly; I'm betting a rather dubious metric was crafted to specifically generate that result. In short: bullshit!"
Actually, you can measure religiosity scientifically. Check out Charles Murray's discussion with Sam Harris or on Uncommon Knowledge (I can't remember which one he talks about it on, but I'm leaning toward Uncommon Knowledge). Better yet, read his book "Coming Apart."
Just because you don't understand something, that doesn't make it bullshit. You can spend 20 seconds Googling to confirm or deny what I said. Obviously, every country is different, but in the USA the peak was around 1960 (+/- a few years depend on depending on how you measure it).
Google returns for ya...
Peak in 1959 with the 1960s being the most religious...
http://historum.com/american-history/108002-1950s-us-government-turned-a...
Richard Dawkins confirms this statistic: https://www.richarddawkins.net/2014/08/the-great-decline-61-years-of-rel...
Another source says the peak was 1956... http://news.gallup.com/poll/1858/americans-more-religious-now-than-ten-y...
Religiosity may have peaked in Canada in the mid-1960s (although this is only look at the Anglicans, which is still a fairly good metric of where Christianity sits)... http://individual.utoronto.ca/hayes/xty_canada/xty_1960.htm
http://nineteensixty-four.blogspot.com/2011/03/sunday-morning-deconstruc...
Of course, other nations are quite different. The USA was far less religious than other western nations prior to the 1960. One source I'm reading says New Zealand church attendance peaked in 1890, but that seems to be at odds with other western nations that generally peaked in the 20th century.
@Glacier
Hard to think of New Zealand as a "western nation" Of course we do not mean physically east end or west end of the international date line, but the culture influence of Western Europe's colonial expansion.
The first 3 links only shows data (2 of them the same data) that starts from 1940 or later. I think it would be hard to argue that if you include the 18th and 19th century that 1950-1960 was the most religious the US was.
US was less religious than some nations, more religious then some other western culture countries.
@LogicForTW: Hard to think of New Zealand as a "western nation"
New Zealand is further East than Japan and is the first country to see the sun every day. Culturally it's firmly part of the West, albeit with a strong Maori influence. Economically it's moved closer to Asia since Britain joined the EU.
Religion is definitely in decline in my opinion, as evidenced by falling church attendances, and the election of an openly atheist prime minister. When I first arrived in New Zealand in 1965, I was surprised to find that most of the kids in my high school class went to church. In the UK I didn't have any friends who went to church.
Settlers from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales brought Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Catholicism, Baptism, and Methodism. Missionaries went to work on the Maori population, many of whom remain extremely devout. More recently Seventh Day Adventism and Mormonism have gained footholds, and Christianity is also quite strong among recent Chinese immigrants from Taiwan and Mainland China.
But the Pakeha (European) majority seems to be becoming increasingly secular. Like Australia, New Zealand has had big child abuse scandals in various churches, including the Catholics, Salvation Army, and exclusive Christian cults.
(These comments may be out of date. I haven't lived in New Zealand since 2009.)
Really? How? Do you have a religiosity thermometer or yard stick that can measure some quantity of a decade? To rephrase my complaint: what exact measurable quantity made the 1960's the most religious decade?
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For what it is worth, the sources (blogs) you cited described it as declining in the 1960's; which seems to contradict what you said before.
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Also it seems you have preformed a small bait and switch. Originally you claimed the 1960's was the most religious decade. Now it seems you are claiming that religiosity peaked in 1960.
I feel like the 1860s were probably more religious than the 1960s. The 1690s was by far the worst, seeing as religiosity was so powerful that neighbors turned on each other in witch trials all because of teenagers dancing nude. The 1960s may have been a relative peak, but not the absolute, I don't think.
@Glacier
from your first source:
Over the past fifteen years religion has once again declined. But this decline is much sharper than the decline of 1960s and 1970s.
from your second source:
Over the past fifteen years, the drop in religiosity has been twice as great as the decline of the 1960s and 1970s.
from your third source:
...before the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s took their toll on most institutions, including religion.
your 4th source uses a totally different metric than the others, and a rather dubious one at that: it uses the raw membership numbers of the Anglican Church of Canada and it is not normalized (in English: since it only counts the number of names on the roles, but does not divide by the population; very suspicious).
Your 5th source does not mention the 1960's. Its graph shows a marked decline in self reported weekly Catholic church attendance during the 60's.
If you took the time to read the graph, you would see what I mean. It declined in the 1960s, but was still higher than the 1940s and slightly higher than the 1950s when religiosity was on the rise.
Yes, you can scientifically measure and evaluate it just as you can measure the temperature of the earth. There's no such thing as an exact thermometer, but we take hundreds of thermometers, and make estimates and assumptions about those in relation to the rest of the earth not measured, and come up with a fairly accurate datapoint.
Similarly, we do the same with religiosity. We take various factors into account like church attendance. Scientific papers have been written on the subject.
Right, you create an arbitrary metric; to get whatever result you want. I'm guessing this is why your sources contradict each other.
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And it is funny that despite the claims of two posters above; neither have even told us what the dimension of the result is (English: what are the attributes of it are, for example it might be: people who report weekly church attendance per 1000 population). Of course this was not the metric used by any of the sources (as far as I could tell, many of them didn't reveal the metric).
I don't think you understand science. Scientific studies contradict themselves all the time. In fact, if the all agreed with each other, you start to get suspicious, especially when dealing with past and future events. Reconstructing the past or predicting the future is never an exact science, but it can still be done within a scientific framework. Conspiracy theorists say that climate change is not science because the past climate data keeps changing and getting adjusted, contradicting previously defined figures. But that's exactly what you'd expect, especially when dealing with proxy data. You have to make assumptions in science when comparing the past to the present because you cannot fully verify all the data (climate science, evolution, historical events, social trends, etc.). It's still science, however.
@Glacier
If you told me your car had a higher top speed than mine; and I asked you what the dimensions of speed are and if you couldn't tell me distance/time (or at least give a unit like miles/hour); I would assume you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
You told us that the 1960's was the most religious decade in US history. I have asked you for the dimensions of religiosity several times now, and yet you seem unwilling or unable to tell me. So like in my example with speed; I have to assume you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. But I'm still hoping that you will tell me.
If I had to venture a guess, I would say the dimensions are things like frequency and popularity of traditional rituals like holidays, rates of church attendance, rates of participation of previously mentioned rituals, levels of acceptance of science (particularly any scientific facts that contradict the popular holy text), things like that. Also participation in secular or irreligious activity like pornography or pugilism as compared to religious activity like raping children and buying them from their fathers or beating homosexuals to death.
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