The Marrying Kind: (Ghettoization of the working class)

[Nay]

19. Not celebrating it, no, because I think kids do so much better with an intact family.

dumping marriage isn't an "unalloyed good" at all -- I can't speak for low-income females because I'm not one, but if I put myself into their shoes mentally I wouldn't be able to come up with a good reason to marry the men available to me. The fact that the LIF doesn't just go ahead and marry anyway, as she would have done, say, in the 1940's, is the big change. Sure, women married low-life men back then, too, but as you say, families stepped in and helped because people lived near their families. And there was serious pressure on men from the local community to straighten up. Now, for working-class young men, we have rap culture! It's the perfect storm of shit! I have often maintained that we no longer have a culture in the US, but a commercial replica of one. And this commercial culture exists not to form a society that works, more or less, for the humans in it, but to extract the most cash from everyone's pocket. That is not a sustainable way of running a society, and it has all sorts of bad effects.

You're perfectly right about dumping marriage but not dumping men. That cycling in and out of boyfriends definitely isn't a good thing. I don't know how you'd fix that, other than focus on a full-employment society so men could be more stable and be more marriageable. Tragically, I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

I don't know why high-income females get married and stay married, other than they can see that 2 incomes are better than one, and the kids and family unit are put first in the minds of both the parents. Have there been any studies on why people in this income category stay married? Could it simply be that divorce would severely hurt both their lifestyles? That would be a kinda crass reason to stay married, but....historically, money bought you the best wife you could afford, and that was that. Maybe high-income parents focus on helping their kids, and as long as their relationship is not of the throwing-plates variety, they muddle along? It would be interesting to find out.