"The Imitation of Marriage" (Lower/Middle Class Compared to Upper Class)

[HammerStone]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-the-imitation-of-marriage.html

I find Douthat to analyze some of these issues from an interesting perspective. We've proclaimed the freedom of sexual expression as a society, but even the facts continue to bear out that the most stable homes look unmistakably like a traditional family. Not even pondering the homosexual question, and wholly putting it aside to exame the heterosexual landscape, I think this article underscores a point that goes often unnoticed. Lower and middle class individuals cannot live a life beyond their means. We've seen this born out financially, but I would argue this article makes both a spiritual and mental case that it doesn't work as well.

We (culturally) all imagine and somewhat idolize the cosmopolitan bachelor or the startup-leading bachelorette as the romantic role, yet many of these folks are married when they truly achieve success. (Or, they may "settle down" shortly thereafter.) I wonder aloud how much of this conception comes to us from Hollywood and the movies? Even then, though, a number of romantic comedy films which would seem to address this seem to almost always result in the guy and girl casting off their previous tendencies and settling down for what looks like a family life? (Boy, you could go Freudian on that, I think!)

What do you think? I was particularly caught by this quote myself:

The college-educated are also now more likely to attend church than other Americans, and are much less likely to cohabit before marriage than couples without a high school degree. And despite a rhetorical emphasis on Emersonian self-reliance, children reared and educated in the American meritocracy arguably learn a different sort of lesson — the hypersupervised caution of what my colleague David Brooks once dubbed “the organization kid.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-the-imitation-of-marriage.html