Articles

Recent research on Millennials and young adults identified a trend that startled contemporary scholars and journalists. Findings revealed that an increasing percentage of high school seniors and young adults espouse the traditional norm of men being the primary breadwinner and women being the primary caregivers at home, a percentage that has been increasing since the mid-1990s. This rise in “traditionalism” took many by surprise, uprooting the assumption that each new generation would continually move toward a highly prized value of “gender equality,” where men and women divide professional and family work equally. For many journalists, the only explanation for such a finding was that Millennials just don’t seem to care about “gender equality” in marriage. But a more accurate analysis suggests that many Millennials just don’t adhere to the narrow definition of “gender equality” that assumes men and women are only equal if they do the same things, professionally and at home. And it is not just Millennials who appear to desire a more “traditional” approach to family life. Married mothers and fathers in America today (the parents of these Millennials) typically divide caregiving and professional work hours along traditionally gendered lines. And they do so, “because that’s what most of them want to do.”

Wheatley Roundtable on Family gathered students and faculty from BYU, intrigued community members, and scholars from across the country to discuss philosophical defenses for the family and its value to society. On February 14, Mary Eberstadt gave the conference’s keynote address, “Family & Faith in a Pagan Time,” acutely focused on the societal shift of family and faith in Western civilization. She began, “Once, belief in God and traditional religion were unremarkable. Now increasing numbers seem to think both those things require explanation and also resistance. That difference between cheering God and jeering God is not just a sea change; it is wholly uncharted water.” Eberstadt argues that the shift away from Christianity and towards Paganism has everything to do with the collapse of the family. She explains that there is almost “a rival secularist faith that sees Christianity as a faith to be crushed.” This persistent attack on the traditional moral code has become “an engine of secularization itself,” one that denies any distinction between male and female and therefore the role of mothers and fathers. She continues, “Here is the fundamental question: Why the drive toward androgyny in the first place? Who benefits? What is it about our time that makes this more attractive or desirable to some people than it used to be?” Years of secular attack on the family, protests for a redefinition of marriage, and legislative rulings have fractured the family and created a new kind of cultural system. “The collapse of the family has left a great many people more vulnerable than ever before. It has meant the disappearance in the lives of many children of the one figure meant to protect them from physical harm, their fathers.” This vulnerability does not come without consequence. It forever alters an individual’s life, whether for better or for worse. Decades of breaking down society’s core institution was bound to create unprecedented ripple effects.

When the Pew Research Center released their report on America’s religious landscape in 2014, they noted a striking change—specifically, a dramatic increase in the share of Americans who identify themselves as religiously unaffiliated The increase from 16% to 23% between 2007 and 2014, was largely driven by Millennials, a generation that is not only less religious, but also less likely to view religious organizations positively reported in 2016, that Millennials’ ratings of churches and other religious organizations had dropped 18 percent over a 5-year period. In that time, the percentage of Millennials who said churches had a positive impact on the country fell from 73% to 55%.

This fellow note is an excerpt from a recent article in The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy and modified from a plenary address delivered at the World Congress on Families (WCF9), Salt Lake City, Utah, October 29, 2015.

In this fellow note, I would like to share a few thoughts about how we can promote better marriage readiness among young people. For me, the key to doing this lies in getting to the whys behind the whats in the patterns we see in our society. We must be able to explain, not simply describe, what is happening if we are going to make meaningful changes. Part of the explanation for the marriage struggles we see in our society today is that many young people today are preparing for marriage in ways that are actually producing the opposite of what they intend. In short, their preparation for marriage is paradoxical in nature. A paradox is a proposition that, in spite of apparently sound reasoning, leads to a conclusion that is senseless, logically unacceptable, and self-contradictory. Let’s explore some of these widespread paradoxes and then I’ll suggest some steps we can collectively take to counter these marriage preparation paradoxes and foster a culture of true marriage readiness.

How important is love in marriage? Most people would almost instinctively answer this question by saying that love is very important to successful marriages. However, such an answer assumes that each of us knows what is meant by the word “love.” Although we use the word love all the time when we talk about couple and marriage relationships, we rarely are clear about what exactly we mean when we say that someone is “in love” or “loves someone”. In fact, many young adults today struggle in their dating efforts because love is seen as some sort of state of existence or intense feeling that they can’t quite explain, but they are sure they will know it when they see it. Part of our current cultural confusion about love comes from the fact that there are different types and expressions of love. We use the term “love” to describe our relationship to our spouse, but we also use the term “love” in referring to our grandma and our newborn baby daughter. We also say that we “love” double fudge chocolate ice-cream and getting a foot massage. Clearly our relationship with our spouse should involve a different type of love than our love for ice-cream or the “love” we felt for that pretty girl in our math class in 9th grade. In order to better understand love, we need to appreciate that there are different types of love. Furthermore, we must understand that some types of love are better than others in forming and maintaining a strong marriage relationship. In fact, the type of love a marriage is based on will be one of the most important determinants of whether the relationship will last or not. Marriages based on mature love will last. Marriages built upon immature love will not. It is as simple as that.

The current debate over the definition of marriage is typically portrayed as a decision about whether to “expand” or “extend” marriage to include same-sex couples. This argument, however, assumes that the basic nature of marriage will remain largely unchanged by granting marriage status to same-sex partnerships. It implies that all this policy change would do is absorb same-sex partnerships within the existing boundaries of marriage, thus extending the benefits of marriage to a wider segment of society. Indeed, the very term “same-sex marriage” implies that same-sex couples in committed relationships are already a type of marriage that should be appropriately recognized and labeled as such. This understanding is deeply flawed. It fails to recognize how defining same-sex partnerships as marriages would fundamentally change both how marriage is collectively understood and the primary social purposes for which it exists.

For years, the phrase “sowing wild oats” has been used to describe the sexual activity of single adults—particularly young men. However, what exactly does the phrase mean? And more importantly, does having multiple sexual partners help or hurt single adults when they eventually get married? These are important questions to ask since most single adults in the United States today desire to one day have a successful, lifelong marriage. However, they also report desiring to have multiple sexual partners before they get married. In fact, recent studies show that most college students would like to have multiple sexual partners each year and that college men, on average, desire to have ten sexual partners before getting married; while women, on average, desire to have four sexual partners before they marry. Are these desires for “sowing wild oats” in the single years compatible with the desire to have a loving and lasting marriage later? Let’s take a look at these questions.

Is it better to test sexual compatibility early in dating or to wait to have sex? Does “true love wait” or should you “test drive” a relationship before saying I do? These are important questions to ask since most single adults report that they desire to one day have a successful, lifelong marriage. However, in their dating many couples move rapidly into sexual relationships. In fact, recent studies have found that between 30 to 40% of couples report having sex within one month of the start of their relationship (Busby, Carroll, & Willoughby, 2010; Peplau et al., 1977; Sassler et al., 2012). Are these dating patterns compatible with the desire to have a loving and lasting marriage later? Let’s take a look at these questions.