Picture two scenarios:
1. A loving unmarried couple, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or child bearing, lives in an affluent neighbourhood, in a rich country, have steady incomes, and decide to have a child. After ten years they decide “I love you so much. I don’t need a piece of paper to prove that, but let’s get married. It’ll be a great opportunity to connect our friends and family, and it’ll give us some legal and financial protection when one of us dies”.
2. In a poor neighbourhood, a woman who was mistreated all her life marries her high school sweetheart, who turn out to be abusive. He not only beats her, he rapes her regularly. Like too many victims of domestic violence, she’s afraid to move away. Eventually she becomes pregnant and has the child against her will.
Which of those do would produce the better outcome?
Being fatherless isn’t in itself the issue, but everything which came before to reach that point might be. There is a huge difference between not having a father because he abandoned you, or because he died, or because your mother as a single affluent woman with the means to do so decided to do in-vitro fertilisation.
I highly recommend “New Family Values”, by Andrew Solomon, to get a feeling for the different types of families which work. It goes way beyond “one mother, one father, married”.
https://andrewsolomon.com/books/new-family-values-audiobook/
But all that is irrelevant because what I posted above wasn’t an analogy. It was… A thought experiment? A purposefully exaggerated example? Anyway, not an analogy. Analogies compare two different things via a third thing they have in common, but here I used examples which are directly related to the subject matter. The point was to make it clear, via extreme but realistic examples, that correlation does not imply causation.
Statement: Statistically, seatbelts reduce the chances you’ll die in a car accident.
You: But, what if your car crashes into a lake and you get trapped underwater?
Statement: Statistically, richer people die less in a car accident.
You (or GP): get rich and survive car accidents!
Quantifying something doesn't explain it, it just... Quantifies it, deeper inspection is needed to understand what the statistics says.
You are prescribing what needs to be done based on something that is, ultimately, descriptive.
Now you need to do the qualitative research to understand what are the causes for it, it could be that marriage is a signal for stable relationships, in that case marrying doesn't matter but a stable relationship does (which is quite self-obvious, it's just an example). Marriage could also have tax implications in some countries, which in turn could help the average to better outcomes, so on and so forth.
The data on this is enveloping much more than just "marriage" as a virtue, or any other moral aspect of it, you are using the data to imply that marriage is virtuous and is the cause for better outcomes which doesn't hold by just quantification...
It's blindness by statistics, it's quite common when ascribing data as the sole truth. Data can guide you to investigate other aspects that will qualify why the data shows what it shows.
I have unfortunately not spent enough time at a university to follow this line of reasoning. Must be wild to be able to follow it. I'm of the yokel type that thinks if all data and tradition we have shows something works, then it's probably best to do the thing that works instead of trying things that we have no reason to think would work.
But in line with tradition, the underclasses in the west has always been the favourite laboratory for the cultural elites in the west.
That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children before marriage, when marriage was "the only way" to a family. Nowadays things are different, and you can totally be a functional family without signing any contract on paper.
If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes. If we redefine marriage to not mean what most humans that have ever used the word meant by it, then yes.
But why would we do these things? If you call all relations between two human beings marriage, you gain nothing, you just lose a word.
Marriage is a covenant between two people, a man and a woman, with God, and incidentally, this covenant, not a piece of paper, it's also a precondition for two people to live together and in harmony. It's a commitment by both people to focus not on themselves, but on the family unit and the wellbeing of that family unit.
> You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
Children of married parents still have better outcomes, and the lower income people are, the bigger the advantage of having married parents are.
By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
If we consider what the word meant up until about 50 years ago, then yes. If we consider the new definition, of "you signed a piece of paper given to you by the government, and gave it back to the government". Then, sure, you are married.
I'm not trying to insult you or denigrate you, but again, if we use the word marriage for all relations between two human beings, then we gain nothing, we just lose a word.
This seems pretty narrow-sighted and Christian-oriented.
50 years ago was 1975.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of formalized marriage about as old as historic records.
I'd think they would be the poster children for the two-week marriages that Hollywood is notorious for, but they aren't.
Even in the most barren wastelands, flowers can grow.
If a couple lives together in harmony and have children together, they are married.
but is the modern way better??? or people just don't want to be held accountable if things go south in traditional way????
