Top 10 Marriage Stories
Across the pond, a young couple got married in an even more lavish and public spectacle than the Kardashian knees-up, and everybody loved it. The future heir to the British throne, which is one of the few monarchies that has any juice left, married his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton. It was a traditional wedding with horses and footmen, leagues of bridal train and foreign dignitaries in funny hats. But in many ways it was a very modern union. Middleton is the first British Queen-to-be who is university-educated, and the couple lived together before marrying. Neither of those things is a surefire prophylactic against divorce, but they don’t seem to hurt either.
Judging by all the commercials for cleaning products, it’s not clear that marketing people have caught up with this one, but households headed up by married people are no longer in the majority. This information comes to us courtesy of the most recent Census figures, which have been trickling out this year and are supported by a bunch of other studies. Wedlock is barely a minority, though: in 2005 49.7%, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households were headed by married people, according to the American Community Survey. Five years earlier, the number was 52%. The other 50.3% is made up of unmarried couples, people living alone and, increasingly, homes headed by a single parent.
The wealth gap between married and unmarried people keeps climbing. Married people on average have a higher household income than the unmarried. There’s robust academic discussion about whether this is true because richer, better-educated people are more likely to get married or because the stability of marriage leads to the ability to acquire more wealth. Recent studies have indicated that wealth seems to make it easier for folks to marry, and also that materialistic people are less happy in marriage, which all seem to suggest that money can’t buy love, but it can buy you a whole lot of wedding.
Another reason the Defense of Marriage Act doesn’t work? It didn’t prevent the “kalamity” that was Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries’ marriage. After 72 days, just slightly longer than it takes for an Australian Kelpie to have puppies, Kim and Kris cried uncle. What irreconcilable differences they discovered in just under 2½ months of wedded life that weren’t apparent in the six months they dated or during the preparations for the reportedly $18 million wedding will no doubt be revealed on a reality show in the near future.
Internet dating has been around for a long time. Chatting up an appealing person who happens to be standing nearby has been around even longer. Combine these two with a smart phone and — yay — you get mobile online dating. Users typically check apps like Skout, Blendr, Zoosk and HowAboutWe to see if there are fellow members in their neighborhood who want to hook up. But some use the apps in more traditional ways, to meet somebody for a drink or to find out if anyone wants to see a Wim Wenders movie. As the technology grew in popularity this year, big-league dating sites got on the location-centric bandwagon; in February, Match.com bought OkCupid, which has a Locals app, and eHarmony released its Jazzed mobile dating app in August.
It’s possible that 2012 will be recorded as the tipping point in gay-marriage history. After President Obama’s announcement that he would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, Delaware, Hawaii and Illinois all signed legislation granting gay couples the right to form marriage-like civil unions. In July, New York went all in. Phyllis Siegal, 77, and Connie Kopelov, 85, became the first gay New Yorkers to wed officially on July 24.
In February, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama Administration no longer believed that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, passed under President Clinton, was constitutional, because it discriminates against gay people. Social conservatives were shocked, but some President Obama watchers were even more surprised. Previously, he had expressed only mild distaste for DOMA and tepid support for legalized gay unions. This signal that the federal government would no longer oppose same-sex marriage cleared the way for several states to pass laws to allow it, including the one I talk about in the next item.
In addition to gestating weird new ways to find potential mates, with some sites sounding suspiciously like they were created just to generate news — SeaCaptainDate.com, really? — the Internet has created new places for lonely hearts to be bamboozled out of their cash. A survey by the University of Leicester in England estimated that as many as 200,000 people in Britain had been scammed by, ahem, heartened criminals, who sometimes wooed their victims for months and then asked them for money so they could visit. Other sites lured new members by posting profiles of people who didn’t exist, or people whose details had been lifted from other sites. As if figuring out dating wasn’t hard enough on its own.
How far can the definition of marriage be stretched? That seemed like one of the Big Questions of 2011, as polygamy moved into the mainstream. Viewers were treated to a second season of Sister Wives, a reality show that centers around the family of Kody Brown, a Kato Kaelin lookalike with four wives and 17 children. Not only is the family living a wide-open polygamous lifestyle in Nevada, but its members are attempting to establish in federal court that they have a constitutional right to do so. Meanwhile, the judicial system in Vancouver heard arguments for and against legalizing polygamy in a case designed to clarify the province’s law. On one side, lawyers asked, If women choose to share a spouse, why should anybody else care? The other side’s response: Because there’s no polygamous community on earth that lets women choose whom or when to marry. In Canada, the polygamists lost. In the U.S. court of opinion, they’re gaining ground but have a long way to go.
There’s always plenty of terrible marital advice being doled out on TV, and not just on Jerry Seinfeld’s show The Marriage Ref, which has surprised critics by lasting long enough to attract at least one lawsuit from a disaffected spouse. So it wasn’t odd that Pat Robertson offered some couples counseling on The 700 Club. It was what he said that was unexpected. He too surprised critics, and outraged some supporters, by suggesting that it’s better to divorce your Alzheimer’s-stricken wife than to cheat on her. Doing neither, apparently, is not an option. Source -Time
