American Women

Joe, you can't really rely 100 percent on the studies. Sometimes different environment or objectiveness can taint these statistics. There may be another study that proves the opposite that is what opinion is about. Most of these posts are definitely not fact but opinions the way various individuals see things. I agree with Angus on that women tend to want sex less than men and lesbians have much less sex than married couples and homosexual men. Another study might prove this statistic wrong and give good evidence of it. Single men might have more sex than married men in a more liberal country like Europe whereas sinlge men are sex starved in the small cities or suburban areas. Married couples definitely have more sex than single people in these areas because they just do each other while single people have no place to go for sex or meet people. In Europe or South America in a big city, they have FKK clubs or PartyTreff clubs where they just pay to get in and have sex every day or week whereas a married couple there might be sick of each other and not have sex often. They too might also use these clubs to find people other than themselves to have sex with.
The US has lots of suburban areas and more couples are happy with their marriages in those areas or just put up with each other because they can't find another partner. Europe has more big cities and in big cities there is more variety and therefore more divorce or infidelity. Other factors may come to play like wealth, health, children, religion, etc that may skew these statistics. Statistics should be taken in the same environment and same conditions for them to be true. For example, they should have statistics comparing divorce rates in big cities in Europe, South America, and US and separate them from divorce rates for the suburban areas. Perhaps this would tell a different story.

No, you can't rely on these studies absolutely, but they're a better guide than random opinions about marriage based entirely on personal anecdotal experience -- from someone who's never been married. (poke, poke :D) When there are several studies indicating the same thing, as there are in most of the instances I cited, then things can be said with somewhat more degree of assurance. And noting that a study doesn't break things down into the specific categories you prefer is a valid complaint, but it's not one that invalidates the information or somehow lends credence to your opinion.

Yes, posts here are opinion, mine most definitely included, but same as in any discussion there's informed opinion and uninformed opinion, and part of the measure of the persuasiveness of an opinion is how it can be backed up. I don't feel the need to defer to someone saying that the moon is made of cheese just because it's his opinion.

The United Nations has broken down divorce rates by country into rural and urban factors, but I've not been able to put my hands on that. I agree that generally the rate is somewhat higher in urban areas, but I don't agree with you that Europe has necessarily more people in urban areas or large cities -- some of that is a matter of definition by each country (Sweden and Denmark, for example, consider any place with more than 200 people to be urban, and the US says it's 2500. France, which uses 2000, still has about the same overall percentage of people in urban areas using that number as the US does using its higher number) and some of it is comparing apples and oranges, as "Europe" is a lot of very different countries, with different cultures, rates, and makeups, and twice the overall population of the US. Depending on what countries you're including, there are the same general number of cities over 750k in the US and Europe, for example. Higher population density overall in Europe, though, I believe.

Obviously, many factors affect divorce rate, from religion to availability of divorce (in much of southern Europe, for example, divorce hasn't been available as long as in the nordic region) to age to education and economic status. The same thing is true of how often people have sex, but it just seems to me that if someone is going to throw out general statements and expect them to be taken at all seriously, they ought to either be able to back them up, be very specific in those comments, or note that they're just "feelings" based on personal experience and how they look at the world as opposed to something necessarily having weight or relevance to other folks.

That's only my opinion, of course.

Divorce has only one cause, and that cause is marriage. B follows A, therefore A caused B. But seriously folks, isn't marriage an anachronism? Why risk it when out-of-wedlock births are becoming so acceptable? Here in the good old US (20 days and counting), you have the same legal obligation to support your kids whether they are out of wedlock or of wedlock.

Now that I write this, I am noticing the possible significance of the word "wedLOCK." As in "throw away the key"? As in "imprisoned"?

Marriage is an institution. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in an institutuion?

Marriage is a tool of the ruling class.

[QUOTE]
But seriously folks, isn't marriage an anachronism? Why risk it when out-of-wedlock births are becoming so acceptable?

Marriage is an institution. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in an institutuion?

Marriage is a tool of the ruling class.
[/i][/QUOTE]
Gotta hand it to the ruling class, they have a great sense of humor – now the state of non-marital bliss, aka domestic partnership is being treated as marriage when it comes to shafting the guy (‘she got the goldmine, I got the shaft’) when the thing breaks up. These are the new rules being pushed by the American Law Institute in their ‘Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution’ proposal [not a lawyer, but I understand these guys set forth guidelines for judges which because of the ALI’s influence gets treated as law].

The upshot is that not being married is no safety against being stuck with a whopping alimony payment (the main risk assuming you don’t have children) for one’s 3.75 years or however long of free sex (even though you weren’t married to her, and you cohabited precisely to avoid the cost of marriage).

The funny thing is you **can** opt out ie make it clear you were cohabiting for the free milk and not living in a state of quasi-marriage by doing a prenup type agreement. In a normal world that fact that you weren’t married would be sufficient and would be the default interpretation of one’s living together. However lawyers have worked it that the default condition is cohabiting is intent to establish a domestic partnership – and possibly resulting in a clean 50% split of your incremental earnings during the relationship.

It’s like you thought you had given the ‘social structure’ the slip instead they caught you at the pass ahead – the fact that marriage is dissolving as an institution has empowered feminists and lawyers to treat everything as marriage – including your male or female roommate.

Nowadays you could unwittingly be in a domestic partnership with a **male** roommate if you pass the 20 or so tests (even if your ‘partner’ is already married). But the law is really aimed at the transfer of wealth from men to women.

[url=http://www.law2.byu.edu/lawreview/archives/2001/3/War5-13.pdf]Deconstructing Family: A Critique of the American Law Institute's "Domestic Partners" Proposal
[/url]
has some interesting info about this – it’s a pdf in readable legal mumbo jumbo style]

Darkseid & DH,

Had a real life experience this weekend which supports many of your views of American women.

I was at a family party and I have about 4 nieces around 23-24 years of age. I overheard one of their conversations which dealt with one of my nieces who was going to break off her engagement and was asking one of her female cousins (who is in law school) how to break it off but still KEEP the ring. I had heard that the ring cost the guy over $5,000 and he had to take out a serious loan to purchase it. I hardly know how to respond to vile stuff like that. Geez!!!

You know, in the long run, I think that this poor guy losing $5,000 is money well spent in order to avoid getting married to a treacherous individual like my niece. If he married her, he'd end up losing a lot more than $5,000.

paddy:

wow, that's evil stuff, and what's even more astonishing is that it's fairly common practice. this is why i can't find the strength in me to even get engaged.

one guy i know who got engaged & eventually married was chastised by his wife that her engagement ring didn't have a big enough diamond on it and how it was going to ruin her reputation with her married friends. he had to go sink another $10,000 in the ring before she begrudgingly accepted it. :(

this is the same shite that keeps me from diving in to anything even remotely approaching marriage ... and i'm almost 36!

but, that said, i've always felt a kind of sadistic glee in knowing there are plenty of women i've pissed off by not doing anything like proposing and all that [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord134][CodeWord134][/url]-[url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord134][CodeWord134][/url] ka-ka. call it laser intuition, but these same women have turned out to be seething assholes in their eventual marriages.

and paddy, if there's any way you can tell your niece exactly what you think of her treachery, i think that'd really teach her a lesson. stuff like that needs to be pointed out ... at least in my humble opinion.

-- l

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not a marriage apologist, and I've got plenty of friends who've been badly burned by their experiences "inside." (One of my best friend's settlement from his marriage included getting the entire debt load from the bankruptcy his ex-had driven them into, while she got all the material possessions -- and she made as much money as he did. Took him eight years to pay it all off.) I just think such discussions are more powerful and convincing when they're not pumped full of wild assertions and false statistics. Clearly, the perspective of almost everyone here is that AW aren't worth the effort, and that marriage is a bad idea -- but a discussion where everyone agrees gets pretty boring and repetitive, which has happened here in the past.

I'm curious, Paddy -- what advice did the law school cousin give your neice?

Usually the girl will have to return the ring. Most but not all courts believe if there's no wedding the ring should be returned-doesn't matter who changed their mind.

Although things sometimes gets complicated.

Well, duhhh. I know what the general situation is, and that wasn't what I asked.

Oh really? I suppose you expect people here to know whether or not you knew the general situation.

joe_zop, when you ask someone what advice did a lawyer give so and so it can often be taken two ways : what is the law or what is the gossip between the two people. Looks like you were asking for the gossip.

I'm not quite sure which side I back on the engagement ring dilemma. (Yes, I've been married, but no, I didn't have an engagement ring - I even paid for my own wedding ring!)

One side of me says that if it cost heaps of money and she accepted it as kind of a 'promise' of marriage, and if SHE was the one that called it off through no fault of his...then perhaps she should give it back.

But the other side says, what if he screwed around on her, or he was the one doing the abandoning? Should she still have to give back her prized possession? Wouldn't it hurt a hell of a lot to know that he is just going to pawn it, or even worse, give it to his new girlfriend? And why should an engagement ring be any different to any other gift? Nobody would expect her to give back the stereo he bought her for Christmas or the bracelet he gave her for Valentines Day.

I'm really not sure what I would do in that situation.

It is difficult for the courts to decide as things can get nasty.

For example she might have broken it off but it was because he was screwing around. And so on.. It is hard to determine who's fault or who really broke it off or force the other person to say "I've had it" and break it off.

So pretty much it is no wedding no ring. Gifts like stereos etc. a girl gets to keep.

I don't give rings. I have to be got darn positive this is the girl I will marry otherwise it is just trouble.

The legal issue is whether or not a ring is a "conditional" gift -- with the condition meaning that marriage is to follow. That makes it different than a stereo or bracelet or anything else, which don't have the same promissory implications. When someone says "she returned his ring" it means something vastly different than "she gave him back the bracelet." It's a material symbol of an intimate bond, and has social implications, which a stereo doesn't.

Most courts have used this definition, and the issue comes down to who breaks an engagement. Traditionally, if a man [i]unjustifiably[/i] breaks the engagement then he isn't entitled to a ring's return but if a woman breaks it she must return the ring. The more modern trend says things are "no fault" (since it's often impossible to properly assign blame for a breakup) and it's not a conditional gift but a contract. If the contract isn't fulfilled, then both parties should be restored to their previous positions -- meaning the ring should be returned, unless the "donor" is in unjustifiable breach of contract, in which case fault might be considered. The whole idea of an engagement is a period of preparation, where each party has the ability to re-examine their promise before things become legally binding.

RN, your perspective is the older, traditional approach -- that a woman done wrong is entitled to compensation for being unfairly seduced, and thus suffering damage -- the "breach of promise" approach. There used to be lots of lawsuits based on this, so-called "heartbalm" suits, as the woman was now "unsuitable" for marriage to someone else. The rise of sexual freedom, feminism, and a trend to use such suits as blackmail helped shift the law toward the no-fault perpective that dominates today. It's really kind of a revenge approach, and if it's one to be used, then the question might justifiably be asked -- what should a guy get as compensation from a woman who breaks an engagement? Just getting back something you went in hock for hardly seems like a good deal -- you're still stuck with an expensive bauble and no marriage. If a guy has to cough up an $8000 ring because he abandoned her, should she have to give the ring back and buy him a car if she does the same? It's a very slippery slope.

(For what it's worth, I spent time years back researching this for a friend whose engagement went kaput, who was having trouble getting his ring returned. His ex was the one who ended things, not because he did anything but because she decided they weren't compatible enough. I ended up convincing her that she needed to return it -- one of my less pleasant duties as a friend.)

And DJ, I very specifically asked Paddy what advice a female cousin who was studying law said to another -- I didn't ask for a legal opinion, but a sense of how one woman gave advice to another who was clearly being greedy. If you're not sure what I know, and can't properly figure out the context, then why don't you just stay out of it? I've very studiously followed my promise to Skinless to ignore you to this point, despite your various pokes and gibes aimed in my direction, and I have zero interest in having any discussions with you.

I never gave my ex-wife (who is now in a mental institution) an engagement ring. I did give her a plain gold band at our (private) wedding ceremony. She lost it down the sink drain while she was kneading bread. I noticed she wasn't wearing it any more but I waited to see what she would say. Finally on our first anniversary she confessed that she had lost it. I told her I would buy her another one for our fifth anniversary. We never made it that far so I saved some money there, plus I never wore a ring (don't like to wear jewelry of any kind) so even further savings there.

The fact that a partially reasonable woman such as RN would even think of justifying not returning an engagement ring really scares me.

I remember seeing my mother flush her wedding ring down the toilet when I was a wee lad; the engagement ring she pawned. And my parents never even got divorced.

What a fucking crock marriage is. Please shoot me if I ever even consider doing it again.

Guys & RN,

As offended as I was by the actions of my niece, I thought that Lookr's recollection of a guy having to drop an extra $10,000 dollars into a ring before the girl would accept it is, well, a virtual obscenity.

I fully understand that this is a generalization but I guess we have a pretty firm idea of what really matters to American women. I think that I can also safely report that there is yet a whole new generation of young girls here who see dollar signs and status before love and genuine affection. They seem to be intrepidly carrying on the traditions of their mothers.

As far as her rationale for wanting to break it off with her boyfriend/fiance I don't know too much other than he is a beginning dental student and will be faced with many years of studying and debt. I met him and he seems like a real nice guy. Way too nice for a "viper" like my niece IMHO.

Joe, I wasn't privy to what legal or quasi-legal advice her cousin gave her. I've heard that the courts where I live don't want to get involved in something so domestic and trivial. So, my guess is that she can keep the ring. It would probably cost him thousands in legal fees to try and recoup his loss.

So, all is well here in the good old US of A and a whole new generation of young girls are intrepidly carrying on the traditions of their mothers.