Introduction of Marriage

The purpose of this blog is mainly for my Marriage class that I'm currently taking online through my University.  I will be making a new post weekly about what I have learned that week, my feelings and thoughts on the lesson, and whatever I feel impressed to say on that subject.  Sure, many of the things I will say will be my opinion based on what I've learned, but the statistics I am taught are not biased, so for those reading please keep that in mind. 

Here I will begin my first week.  I did a large amount of reading on marital statistics in the U.S. and how children with and without married parents fare.  From looking over The State of Our Unions: Marriage in America 2012, I can say confidently that children are better off living with their biological father and mother who are happily married than in any other situation.  Those other situations of which I am referring to include single parents (where only one parent is alive/involved in the child's life, a parent who is cohabiting with someone other than the other parent) divorced parents, remarried parents, and parents who live together but never married.  I also read that the relationships of these couples do best when married (surprise!).

To me, this just affirms the importance of marriage.  However, marriage has been taken less seriously as the years go by.  It is treated as a contract that you can get out of once things get uncomfortable.  Commitment is a joke to those who treat marriage as this.  Convenience is what's most important to a lot of people in our society today and so the number of marriages is lowering and the wait for marriage is increasing.  The norm of marriage age back in the 1960's were 20 for women and 22 for men.  Today it seems to have jumped up to age 26 women, 28 men.  

I guess my main message here is that even though society and the media treat marriage lightly, it is fundamental for our society and for the family.