A few good finds…
Fredricca Matthews Green has a great article on young people that get married and sexual desires of young people via. I really appreciated this article because I think she’s saying thing that the church doesn’t realize in many ways.
Here are some quotes from it.
Marital durability has more to do with the expectations and support of surrounding society than with the partners’ age.
A pattern of late marriage may actually increase the rate of divorce. During that initial decade of physical adulthood, young people may not be getting married, but they’re still falling in love. They fall in love, and break up, and undergo terrible pain, but find that with time they get over it. They may do this many times. Gradually, they get used to it; they learn that they can give their hearts away, and take them back again; they learn to shield their hearts from access in the first place. They learn to approach a relationship with the goal of getting what they want, and keep their bags packed by the door. By the time they marry they may have had many opportunities to learn how to walk away from a promise. They’ve been training for divorce.
My friend Kyle also has a great post recounting the top 10 moments that he had at Tyndale.
I could write an article as long as this woman’s just replying to everything she has said. However, I’m going to just stick to one aspect of her article, because it was the most ridiculous to me:
“During the last half of the 20th century, as brides’ age rose from 20 to 25, the divorce rate doubled. The trend toward older, and presumptively more mature, couples didn’t result in stronger marriages… A pattern of late marriage may actually increase the rate of divorce.”
Talk about using statistics out of context and drawing conclusions for your own purposes!
The reason the divorce rate rose so much in the latter half of the 20th century is because divorce laws did a complete turnaround in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. Divorces were no longer next-to-impossible to get, and a lot of people who had been dealing with awful marriages could finally be free of them.
I just HAD to comment on that. So much of what this woman said was ridiculous, but this took the cake. You can’t conclude that just because the divorce rate rose at the same time that the age of first marriage went up that later marriage may actually increase the rate of divorce.
Thanks Lauren, i think though you should write an article refuting her :) hahaha….i would like to read it. Most of what i liked about that article wasn’t statistics but more about her saying young marriages are ok and communities of people to get behind them.
Speaking of Frederica Matthewes-Green, she will be speaking at the Nidus Festival at the beginning of August in Kitchener as well as many other bands and speakers.
http://www.nidus2006.ca/
Dave