Why Can’t Millennials Make Marriage Work?

This week, rather than speculate on the magnitude and direction of the stock market’s next inscrutable lurch, let’s ponder a troubling opinion piece on marriage that appeared in the Asbury Park Press. The author, one Anthony D’Ambrosio, is a 29-year-old millennial whose despairing ruminations bore the headline Five Reasons We Can’t Handle Marriage Anymore. He would know. D’Ambrosio, who writes a regular column on relationships for the newspaper, was a married man himself until recently — to a woman he met in 2004 and whom he wed in 2012. So much for the supposed benefits of a long courtship. Here’s D’Ambrosio’s short list of reasons why millennials are unable forge lasting unions:

• Sex becomes almost non-existent.
• Finances cripple us.
• We’re more connected than ever – but also disconnected.
• Our desire for attention outweighs our desire to be loved.
• Social media just invited a few thousand people into bed with you.

Clearly, this is a guy who still has a lot of soul-searching to do — and maturing. One could also argue that he has missed an important clue by failing to consider why marriages used to work so much better. Men and woman shared a common sense of purpose and an unlimited vista of opportunities when the U.S. emerged from the Second World War. Today, it is just the opposite: Career options for young people are limited, if not to say bleak; and, men and women were not at war back then, nor were they burdened by a sexual revolution that has cast gender roles perhaps irretrievably into doubt.

And there are a hundred other good reasons. What say you, readers?

  • mava May 12, 2015, 9:08 pm

    It is simple, really, but hard to see, as we are not taught to think, we are taught to think along existing lines of thought.

    Marriage places huge burden on a man. There needs to be a balancing benefit for marriage to work. It used to work before, centuries before. But since about a hundred years ago, the world has changed to the point that it is no longer a smart choice for a man to get married. A woman receives unfairly bigger benefit now.

    So, what we see and will continue to see, is that where intelligent man is concerned, there will not be any marriage even to begin with. As you examine men with progressively lower and lower intelligence, you will see that they feel this change but not consciously, so they will actually attempt to enter the marriages, but will fail to stay in them. On a lower end, the men will enter the marriage to unknowingly completely waste his life consumed by woman.

    Do not however make a mistake of painting with too wide of a brush. In some countries, the things related to this had not changed a lot yet, and so the marriage is still somewhat fair proposition. So, the smart man will enter into marriage and stay in it without being abused.

    All this means that simpler crowds will multiply as will “backward” cultures. Modern and developed cultures will die out, which will be the nature’s punishment for their transgressions, i.e. their audacity to re-balance man-woman unions with the power of state violence. Deservingly so.

  • Wayne May 10, 2015, 11:46 pm

    John Jay,

    Yeah, the similarities and parallel path with Rome is eerie and troublesome. I believe that the heavy guerilla fighting in the 2nd century B.C. against the Celtic-Iberians in Spain caused massive attrition and dislocation for the Roman Citizen soldier. While they were battling for most of the century in Spain, generating debt and leaving their property to vultures and carpet baggers, the Roman aristocracy/oligarchy was developing client/patronage relations with the newly conquered territory acquiring access to Spain’s lustrous metals (including GC/SI mines), markets, and of course slave markets as you mentioned. Basically the average Roman citizen slit his own throat and lost their property, and way of life for the expansion of empire that benefited small cliques of internal cabals which included the massive slave labor you mentioned.

    Your post on May 4th pretty much summed it up. The only things I could add that are relevant for the marriage problem and demise of males would be instant access to pornography and video games that is causing stunted development. One of the few that mention this crisis is Philip Zimbardo. See here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/porn-and-video-game-addiction-are-leading-to-masculinity-crisis-says-stanford-prison-experiment-psychologist-10238211.html

    P.S. Rick your site is a lot better since you banned that gary guy who I swear was copy and pasting the note cards of rachel maddow. I can actually read the posts now and enjoy them! 🙂

    &&&&&&

    Gary continued to send me private emails for a while, but he gave up when he realized that I wasn’t reading them. For the record, I’ve always considered Gary a decent guy, if politically misguided. RA

  • John Jay May 10, 2015, 5:27 am

    Wayne,

    In other words, just like ancient Rome, our Republic was doomed once all the small farmers were driven out of business and moved to the city to “Get a Job.”

    I can’t recall his name, but there was a Senator or Congressman in the 1880s who exemplified small town common sense as expressed in the following quote of his:

    “Everything is fine in Ohio, the country don’t need no legislation.”

    Man, hard to top that!

    Brevity is indeed the soul of both Common Sense and Wit!

  • Wayne May 8, 2015, 5:25 pm

    Who is leigh? A community college “professor”? 😉 Marriage is a sociological structure, who makes up this garbage, someone who lives in a vacuum? Look at human nature, marriage is a part of that, so is monogamy, people are hardwired for it! If you doubt intuition and common sense, then consider how long a pregnancy lasts for, and how long it takes to raise children to a functioning level of basic survival and independence. With out a co-partnership of commitment and dedication to a family unit, the human race would have never gotten off the ground!

    Here is a lesson of history from Will Durant concerning our ancestors and the birth of civilization, “Each normal son matured soon in mind and self-support; at fifteen he understood the physical tasks of life as well as he would understand them at forty; all that he needed was land, a plow, and a willing arm, So he married early, almost as soon as nature wished; he did not fret long under the restraints placed upon premarital relations by the new order of permanent settlement and homes. As for young women, chastity was indispensable, for its loss might bring unprotected motherhood. Monogamy was demanded by the approximate numerical equality of the sexes. For fifteen hundred years this agricultural moral code of continence, early marriage, divorcelss monogamy, and multiple maternity maintained itself in Christian Europe and its white colonies. It was a stern code, which produced some of the strongest characters in history.”

    I would add that monogamy and marriage were essential and universal ingredients to all functioning civilizations that could sustain themselves, and was seen in all times and places.

  • mario cavolo May 8, 2015, 4:12 am

    I’m with Benjamin and your friend Leigh sounds like a sociologist sociopath which is exactly the problem with America. When marriage and family stops being the root of a society the society declines…duh, America today is the pinnacle of that societal experiment gone wrong with the evidence clear as and sad as day.

    Commitment, Decision, Devotion. Hello people? We the human race already have the capacity to be selfish idiots at times. Then on top of that, our parents get divorced and we are further emotionally traumatized with few people having the gumption to work through that trauma before they marry for the first or second or third time thus perpetuating the breakdown with more and more emotionally traumatized people walking around making more babies outside of marriage. Its ugly, its sad and the people who are most in it are the ones who rationalize away with their idiotic excuses the most. The decline of marriage values as the root of family and society is further exacerbated by the American societal attack on men/fathers which is equally misguided and extreme.

    Miss Leight suggest that meaningful context and purpose “no longer exists” Huh? It never went away. The meaningful content and purpose is written exactly in the marriage vows, there it is, and it extends to your children, whom when you decide to divorce you emotionally devastate.

    My friend’s father married and divorced 3 times. He was smart enough to learn though as he quipped “If I ahd known how it was going to be I would have simply stayed with the first one.”

    Congratulations if you can get your head around the amazing wisdom of that point. My wife and I have a great marriage because no matter what we have a marriage and a family together. “La Familia!” as the Italians say. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with how much each and every day either of takes turns being a person who is temporarily insane, weak, struggling, a complete azzhole, or sick. We are together responsible for each other and feel each other’s joy and suffering and we are responsible for the care and wellbeing of our child and her elderly mother. That’s life, that’s marriage, that’s family. There’s no rationalizing it and surely Miss Leigh could get a clue about what the deeper meaning of “love” is from reading this.

    Cheers, Mario

  • TMM May 8, 2015, 3:30 am

    When my wedding day was just around the corner, I asked my 5-language-speaking, worldly, wise old Italian boss what was the secret to his marriage of over 35 years. He told me that getting married is the same as taking on another full-time job. Work hard at it every day and it will grow. Take it for granted and it will wither and die.
    In this age of instant gratification and trophies for 8th place, that may be difficult for the young to comprehend. But for me and my spouse, now going on 25 years together, the hard work is continuing to pay off; and no, it doesn’t get any easier with time.

  • Farmer May 7, 2015, 1:08 am

    Well if Japan is our template where marriage and children are concerned it probably means America is going into early decline despite a much better demographic profile.

    No question the dating and marriage scene has changed over the years. And it would appear on the surface that a combination of new computing technologies, lack of good employment opportunity, excess educational levels and a surplus of money in the hands of the millenials parents who just bid up assets to valuations the kids cannot afford, is putting a stake in the heart of our traditional marriage views.

    Where’s the love, baby!

    It was not that long ago we used to get to know one another face to face. As teens us kids played Twister to get intimate with the opposite sex (anybody recall Twister). We hung out at the beach talking about stars of all damned things and enjoying what few beer we could liberate from the folks.

    And board games like Risk and Monopoly were the rage in the Sixties and early Seventies. People actually went on long walks for long talks and computers did not really exist in the social sphere as they were still the domain of closet nerds or scientists.

    Hmm. So maybe human contact really is necessary to develop normal human relationships and the trend to distancing everyone no matter how close they physically are to your phone App or laptop is not such a great idea after all. Why in hell would we bother to text or Tweet a person in the very next room rather than stand up and go see them in person!

    It’s funny in a way that we are lonelier than ever in a world that hosts the largest population of dating material in all history. And its funnier still that the social media meant to bring us all closer together only serves to isolate us in our own homes; prisoners to a diminishing social skill set and widening level of fear, paranoia and hostility of others.

    It’s a tough gig for younger people today as they contend with technologies for which we humans have not even come close to being adapted to yet. We probably need another few thousand years of evolution before we can come to grips with what has been developed in just the last decade alone.

    Think about that for a second. In the past 3 million years since Lucy was discovered in the Great Rift Valley it has only been in the smallest fraction of a single percent of all that time that humanity has abruptly been confronted with this blizzard of computer technology that has completely isolated us from actual direct human contact.

    And so we should be discovering we really do need one another to be a success in life just as our most primitive programming tells us to do…..but instead we are all lost in a sea of connected and socially disenfranchised humanity instead.

    Hopefully we figure the answers before we go extinct!

  • D. Barber May 6, 2015, 2:08 pm

    Saving the planet: Look at that commenter up above, me, speaks of a Marxist takeover, and then sits back to watch a movie. Global activism?
    On the environment:
    With the dominance of CO2 levels being the concentration on environmental issues for the last decade, or longer, a person should be asking “can shared ignorance save the planet”?
    The following were extracted from The Daily Caller:
    1. 2015 is the ‘last effective opportunity’ to stop catastrophic warming
    2. France’s foreign minister said we only have “500 days” to stop “climate chaos”
    3. President Barack Obama is the last chance to stop global warming…campaign promise “I will stop the rise of the oceans”.
    5. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there was only 50 days left to save Earth
    6. Let’s not forget Prince Charles’s warning we only had 96 months to save the planet
    7. The U.N.’s top climate scientist said in 2007 we only had four years to save the world
    8. Environmentalists warned in 2002 the world had a decade to go green

    As the commenter cookiebob put it
    “I want new and interesting consequences!!! They promised.

  • Rick Ackerman May 5, 2015, 7:56 am

    Posted by Rick for Leigh Collingwood:

    Re marriage: Marriage is essentially a sociological thing, ie to do with social structure and cohesion. For as long as there was meaningful context and purpose (ie an identifiable social entity with a meaningful and real contract with the individual), marriage worked. Now that this doesn’t exist, nor is there any need for marriage. Marriage cannot survive on individual motives, whims and “love” – the latter an illusion; a mere temporary, transient phenomenon. The nation state was the last socio-political entity of context and meaning, but that ended finally and decisively around 1990 for most people in the world, when governments and politicians plugged themselves firmly into a global transnational elite dominated by transnational corps, the bilderbergers, etc, when citizens really became nothing more than objects to plunder, and the nation state now becomes irrelevant, making way for regional and ultimately the global superstate.

    This is not to say that marriage is doomed, but simply that a new form of transcending or common purpose must be found. In my view, the environment should be that purpose: “Your planet needs you” rather than “your country needs you”; the planet is the only only cause left worth fighting for and is certainly the entity most in need of rescuing right now.

  • D. Barber May 4, 2015, 7:15 pm

    In answer to that question I direct attention to a May 2 article by Ellis Washington:
    On Karl Marx and the First Principles of Evil
    http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/washington/150502
    Sounds radical by the title, but consider the information within the article.

    Triple Crown, American Pharaoh could be the first champion since Affirmed in 1978, count the years! Secretariat 1973. Diane Lane, great choice, did an excellent job portraying Secretariat owner Penny Chenery in the 2010 Disney release “Secretariat”. Like the movie.

  • Traveler May 4, 2015, 6:36 pm

    Used to be children were a net economic positive for a family. They could be put to work on the farm while still young and support the parents in their old age. In recent generations, children have become a net economic negative; with current requirements for education and socialization, they drain the parents with little or no return on investment. Not to mention the kids mostly aren’t there to support the parents in their old age. Hence the decline in fertility rates shouldn’t surprise anyone.

    There also social aspects to this in our culture and the millennial generation is definitely getting the short end of the stick in this regard. Too much to discuss here as there are many views of the big picture, but one aspect might to see how negatively fatherhood is viewed today by the culture, the legal system and the government.

  • Benjamin May 4, 2015, 7:18 am

    Well, Rick, I think you were off to a good start, on bringing up the broader points. But you didn’t go back far enough, I think. Marriage was of course working well enough, way before WWII was on anyone’s horizon. And there’s been other bleak times, even in the much better Americas of bygone eras.

    Point blank: the knowledge of our own human nature is alien to us anymore. The trend that took us here was the abandonment of God and the Bible (I’ve changed a great deal from the days when I used to regularly post here!). Back when people were genuinely relgious, they had an awareness of their flawed human nature and all the tricks it could play. Love is impossible without that awareness. Love is doing what is best for both, even when one or both do not like it. How can there be any compassion and tenderness, if there is only blindness to the why of the way? Blindness to those things leaves nothing to really suffer through to bring out love. And without exercise, it withers and dies.

    Anyway, perhaps the post-war era presented too much of a good thing. While there’s nothing wrong with material success (if struggle had no rewards, it would be pointless), when it becomes too common, the only result can be the loss of necessary struggle. Ironically, with all that opportunity and success came the welfare state, which continues to “obsolete” struggles and its resultant love.

    Even though what brought it about is gone, the welfare state stubbornly remains. It’s not the bad economy per se. There’s always been bad economic times. It’s the welfare state that won’t go away. Even if one doesn’t receive any, it exercises its deleterious influence on every person. Even genuinely struggling couples, seeing less return for their efforts, can and do wither and die. Apply this confounding and tragic result over a generation or three and, well… why _wouldn’t_ this very day be the result?

  • John Jay May 4, 2015, 5:33 am

    In some ways the past is repeating itself as far as marriage is concerned.
    Ancient Rome had the same thing occur when the small farmers were run out of business by the Oligarchs of the day two thousand years ago.

    Rome had its’ own version of Open Borders back then, as Rome started to win wars of conquest, and the rich bought up thousands of slaves to labor on the huge farms they established.
    The old time free Roman farmers could not compete with that, sold out, and moved to Rome to go on the dole and sell their votes.
    And city life in Rome was not very conducive to a happy married life, too many temptations for both partners.

    The same thing happened here in America.
    One hundred years ago, when most people were small farmers, a wife and kids not only made sense, it was a necessity for survival.
    This time, mechanization and economies of scale ran the small farmer out of business.
    And so, once again, everyone moved to the cities.
    And the opportunities and temptations of city life make a happy married life problematic.

    As if that situation was not enough, the Millennials are confronted by fifty years of inflation in houses, cars, tuition, taxes, etc.
    As well as 50 years of stagnant wages, off shored jobs, and H1-B job competition.
    Oh, and don’t forget about robots and computers vaporizing old time mainstay jobs.

    So, there you have it.
    It is no wonder the young guys give up and play video games!
    For them, Homer Simpsons view that “Trying is the first step towards failing” is all too true!
    Sorry boys, that’s the facts Jack!

    And, if I may here is my opinion on the chances for Derby winner American Pharaoh taking the Triple Crown.
    Not likely.
    His quarter mile times show he was slowing down at the end of the race.
    His first quarter mile time was 24 seconds, his last was 27 seconds.
    The great Secretariat went from 25 seconds to 23 seconds in the last quarter mile.
    He was speeding up.

    American Pharaoh might take the Preakness, that race is a little shorter than the Derby.
    And of course, the field of horses he is running against might be even slower than he is.
    But the mile and a half of the Belmont will be too much for him, I do believe.

    And the temptations

  • Father of Fledglings May 4, 2015, 5:00 am

    In the gathering storm, it is increasingly difficult for fledglings to gain air speed for takeoff. Enlightened and appropriate support and guidance from the multi-generational family, when extant, may help.

  • Alan May 4, 2015, 3:22 am

    Biggest issue comes from the instantaneous gratification they expect in life. Need to know something? Google it. Years ago you walked to the library. Want to talk to someone? Talk? Why talk when you can chat via instant messenger for hours while in class or at work. And when someone does not immediately respond, OMG there is something wrong. And if you want or need a widget you can search for it, order it and have it delivered in two days. All this instant response and gratification leads to group of people that don’t understand how to hold a conversation, build a trusting long-term relationship and develop plans beyond the upcoming weekend. Where can you see this the best is in a bar or restaurant. Watch a group of 20-somethings sitting down and not talking to each other but texting others. The other place is to look at their phone plans. 10,000 or 20,000 and even 30,000 monthly text messages are common. How do you fix this? Not going to happen easily. The first step is to put away the phone and walk away from the computer. Years ago I used to go to sea for months and have no communication with my family. You don’t do that without trust on both sides. Most of this current generation need therapy for one day separation. Schools could help by insisting that kids not have phones in classrooms. Some teachers do this and have them all checked at the door. Same for businesses. Check your phones at the door. Improve productivity both in school and at work. Check your text messages on your break. But I am old school and use technology to do my job and keep in touch, but I learned how to live first without it. The last two generations learned to ‘need it’ and all the time. Good topic and one that I have had with my kids, friends and family.

  • mr May 4, 2015, 2:56 am

    More complicated than there is room for here. The institution of marriage seems to be undergoing a paradigm shift. But don’t worry. We have a SCOTUS ruling coming up that’s going to dictate to us what marriage is. That said, Esther Perel’s material can be an interesting read. “Mating in Captivity.”