EXCELLENT.

Also, Delta? Poetic. I like it.

I can attest to deliberate living minimizing same-sex attractions. It can fluctuate.

Disallowing breakups used to be the primary mechanism by which “Marriage keeps people together even when love wanes and commitment erodes.”, and it was the context of the exchange with Fitz, so I assumed you were. But now that you mention it, I don’t ever recall you defending for-fault divorce. I suppose I should have considered the possibility that you thought marriage was a magical carrot that worked entirely by vague slogans like “foundational social institution” in that area as well.

* * *

I have not defended “disallowing breakups”.

I have talked of the influence of a foundational social institution.

And I’ve talked of the adverse influence of undermining the social institution.

Fitz did not say what you imagined him to have said. Apparently that is your cue to manufacture yet another strawman.

But I’m not suggesting it’s mysterious at all. I’m all for couples being educated on potential problems, being encouraged to try and solve them, having ready access to counseling, etc, etc, and I’m sure it works some of the time. I’m just pointing out that you’re talking about the successes to defend disallowing breakups, which is implicitly denying failures and leaving their costs out of the cost-benefit analysis.

CO: “And I said nothing about married people in difficulties being “wrong”.”

Quite so – I was just making a confident bet that it was unlikely you could help yourself for long. It didn’t take long with Fitz.

And I said nothing about married people in difficulties being “wrong”.

* * *
You said:

“the circular selective callousness of the moralizing conservative [...] show off [...] people who lose out and complain are written off as immoral and selfish, and not to be sympathized with.”

Well, I guess you told me. Whew.

End of conversation as you stomp out the room.

No, what I’m doing is pointing out that when you said earlier that marriage was the “best protection & provision for society and children as well as the male & female involved”, you were kidding yourself and us with the bit about the male and female. The adults in the picture (especially the women) aren’t actually on your radar – any and all expressions of dissatisfaction are pre-defined as selfish and to be ignored.

You don’t actually know that. What you know is that the married couples who thought their problems might be resolvable and tried to resolve them were often right. That doesn’t mean the people who thought their problems weren’t resolvable and didn’t try were wrong. I don’t apologise for much less inclined to dismiss their judgement about their own circumstances than you.

CO: “I know it may seem odd to some people (not necessariy to you, Mark) that an unhappy wife might actually find greater happiness staying in marriage rather than divorcing. Again, this especially applies to couples with children.”

I don’t at all find that surprising. Some troubles can be worked through, and some troubles are worth it for a good cause, such as a more stable environment for children. I just want to see a balance, and I don’t think you do. I think you have the circular selective callousness of the moralizing conservative: you might make a show of doing a cost-benefit analysis of your moral principles to show off to yourself or others, but the result is pre-ordained because nothing is ever allowed to count as a cost – people who lose out and complain are written off as immoral and selfish, and not to be sympathized with.

It morally bankrupt & intellectually vacuous. It is however rather popular and has been since 1968.

An excellent primer on the intersection of this world view and its detrimental effects on our most vulnerable citizens can be found in the work…

Freedom’s Orphans:
Contemporary Liberalism and the Fate of American Children
David L. Tubbs

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8569.html

I know it may seem odd to some people (not necessariy to you, Mark) that an unhappy wife might actually find greater happiness staying in marriage rather than divorcing. Again, this especially applies to couples with children.

The “working through it”, well, that’s a mutual endeavor between husband and wife — and, yes, kids too. Instead of disaggregating, the family unites. This does not swallow up the wife but empowers her both as a wife and a mother. That said, it is very often a root problem with the husband that needs the most effort from all concerned. All of this is applicable to the modern family perhaps moreso because of the equality of husband and wife.

Sure, but then marriage always was in large part just a formalizing of a behaviour that lots of people would have been doing anyway. Most people are straight, and like to be in opposite-sex relationships, and most people (not necessarily exactly the same ones) are broody and like having kids. And it doesn’t always end badly by any means. But sometimes it does, and the coercive aspects of marriage and related arrangements were presumably intended to control problems, as you seem to concede here:

CO: “Marriage keeps people together even when love wanes and commitment erodes. ”

The scenario you mention is a potential problem, and making it difficult to dissolve a marriage was undoubtedly in part an effort to address that problem. However there are at least three different interest groups involved (fathers, mothers and children) and thus three different problems to address. My point to Fitz was that someone who takes for granted that marriage was an optimum balance between the interests of the various stakeholders is an idiot. Rather, one should expect to find that marriage was skewed towards protecting the interests of the group with power, which was the men. Now indeed, _some_ of the time, a man rejects his wife, and the wife is out in the street without support and that’s a big problem for the wife. If you want to make a case for how woman-friendly traditional marriage is you can pound the table about that. But equally, some of the time, men are abusive or otherwise intolerable to live with, and women quite reasonably want to get away. It turns out, go figure, that when you make separation easier, it’s disproportionately the women who request it. That strongly suggests that the traditional status quo wasn’t protecting women from being thrown out by men, it was more about protecting men from women leaving.