Anyone who thinks that Cameron Diaz has anything useful to say about marriage should automatically be considered suspect in any advice on marriage he or she dispenses. Such is the case with noted psychiatrist and Fox News contributor, Dr. Keith Ablow. After singing Ms. Diaz’s praises for her view on marriage, Ablow shared four reasons why he believes “that marriage is a dying institution.” Ablow noted this past May:
It’s only a matter of time now. Marriage will fade away. We should be thinking about what might replace it.”
With a hint of smug self-righteousness, Dr. Ablow began his latest article, “Let’s Make a New Way to Get Married and Get the State Out of the Matrimony Business,”
As I have predicted in the past, a new Pew Foundation study of U.S. Census data confirms what I’ve been saying — marriage in America is falling out of fashion.
What a bold prediction. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a psychiatrist to understand that marriage is no longer held in favor by many Americans. As the Pew Foundation study found:
In 1960, 72% of all adults ages 18 and older were married; today just 51% are, a record low, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data. If current trends continue, the share will drop to below half within a few years. The median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides (26.5 years) and grooms (28.7), and the number of new marriages in the U.S. declined by 5% between 2009 and 2010.
What reasons could there be for this continuing (and precipitous) decline in marriage rates? Thankfully we have Dr. Keith Ablow to bring his vaunted wisdom to bear so that the unenlightened masses might have a better grasp on what ails the institution of marriage in America and how it can ultimately be fixed. Ablow’s astute personal observations serve as the basis for his latest marriage post-mortem:
I believe the reasons for marriage falling out of favor with Americans are many, including my own clinical observations that the vast majority of married people consider their unions a source of pain, not pleasure, and that too few of them are equipped with the psychological and behavioral tools to achieve true intimacy or maintain real passion.”
Would it surprise anyone that Dr. Ablow’s patients who have come to him for marital counseling would themselves be in marriages that, shall we say, might not be the best barometers of what healthy marriages look like in the first place? Having conducted marital counseling as a pastor, I can tell you that couples who engage the services of a minister, marriage counselor, psychologist, or psychiatrist because of their marital problems might just believe that their unions (at least at that point in their lives) are indeed sources of pain and not pleasure. Many married couples — including many Christian couples — would admit that there are times in their marriages when that is likewise the case, whether or not they ever seek the advice of professional marriage counselors. That doesn’t mean that marriage, as an institution, is no longer viable.
I can perhaps understand Dr. Ablow’s bias in this regard, given his own personal experiences with family, friends, and patients who have suffered in bad marriages. However, what I find incomprehensible is what Dr. Ablow describes as the main reason for the decline in marriage:
Perhaps no factor, however, is more responsible for the decline of marriage in America than government participation in it. The fact is that getting a marriage license means, essentially, signing a Draconian contract with the state to manage the division of your estate in the event of a divorce, without ever having read that contract.
Say what? I’m sure that this sounds like a brilliant analysis, but this has to be one of the most preposterous reasons that could be given for the declining marriage rates in America. Are we to believe that 49% of Americans are shunning marriage because they don’t want to sign a “Draconian contract with the state?” If only the state were out of the marriage business, does Dr. Ablow really think that marriage will make a comeback?
Dr. Ablow is right in this regard — “the institution (of marriage) is doomed and will barely exist in 75 years.” However, the marriage rates will continue their downward spiral, not because of the government, but because of the rapidly changing social mores that no longer believe that sex should be saved for marriage. When more and more couples — including self-professed Christian couples — are cohabitating before marriage, then marriage will continue to be diminished in the eyes of our secular culture. In fact, younger Americans are cohabitating at higher rates than ever before “with nearly 50 percent of young adults aged 20 to 40 cohabiting.” That number is only going to grow when cohabitation is seen as the norm, even for Christians. When the Church as a whole winks at the pre-marital sexual revolution among Christian young people, then we should not be surprised at the marriage downgrade.
The downgrade will stop, not because of what the government does or does not do (in fact, the government can accelerate the downgrade), but rather what our society does. When we dismiss marriage as nothing more than a contract as opposed to the God-ordained covenant that marriage was designed to be from the very beginning, then marriage will continue to lose out. Dr. Ablow and others might think they have wise words when it comes to saving marriage, but only a spiritual revival and a return to Biblical values will heal what ails marriage. Any fool can see that. Well, maybe not any fool!