This latest report on the benefits of marriage won’t be a surprise to First Things readers. But it’s encouraging to see that the findings of family researchers in America are being confirmed by Europeans:
Marriage cheers you up, improves your diet and helps you live longer, researchers say.
It brings better mental and physical health, reducing the chance of premature death by 15 per cent, according to major studies in seven European countries.
And the longer a marriage lasts the more the rewards accumulate – the only catch being that the relationship has to be loving and supportive.
John Gallacher, a Cardiff University academic who reviewed the European studies, said the happily married were more likely to eat healthily, have more friends and take better care of each other.
January 31st, 2011 | 11:45 am
I’ve been happily married for 13 years. My wife is my best friend, and I wouldn’t trade my life with her for anything. No doubt we’ve both made each other happier and healthier (despite the spreading waistlines).
However…
- My father used to run a cemetery. It took up 10 city blocks and was very old, some burials going back to the 18th century. Sometimes we’d just walk the grounds and look at headstones. He began to notice, and pointed out to me, a startling fact. If there was a plot with a double headstone for a husband and wife, and one of the couple was in the ground and one was not, 85% (roughly), it was the husband that was six feet under, while the wife was still among the living. In the ensuing 30 years I’ve made it a point to check this statistic every time I visit a cemetery. So far, it’s pretty consistent.
- When I was in high school, I had an AP physics teacher that was 80 years old. He was in excellent health in both mind and body. He was a recreational mountain climber, and could run circles around people half his age. When I asked him to what he attributed his long life and good health, he didn’t miss a beat: “Never being married.”
Just a couple of points of (admittedly anecdotal) data. :)
January 31st, 2011 | 12:41 pm
Is it possible that marriage is more a symptom of a better life than the “key,” that is, a cause?
January 31st, 2011 | 2:10 pm
So, the conclusion is that a supportive and loving marriage is beneficial to one’s health. Brian’s question is apt: might it not be that a supporting and loving marital relationship is at least partly a consequence of some more general source of health?
It’s fascinating whatever the case. Perhaps we harm gays and lesbians in more ways than we might have thought when we coercively prohibit their marriages.
January 31st, 2011 | 3:32 pm
I’m inclined to think marriage is a cause of good health. I’ve seen some ugly marriages that I’d hate to be trapped in, but many of those nonetheless seem to offer some sustaining force for the couple.
And I agree with you, Erhlich, it’s one more argument in favor of gay marriage.
January 31st, 2011 | 5:02 pm
Why stop with gays? Every other group that is not allowed to marry is harmed too, so by that argument there should be no restrictions on marriage at all.
If the logic holds true, then any group that feels they should have the right to be recognized as loving and supportive should have the right to do whatever is necessary to force people to go along with “affirming” their relationship, even if it means lying, redefining institutions in destructive ways, causing child abuse, or encouraging denial.
Of course, the logic doesn’t hold true. A person’s right to happiness does not give them the right to force others to lie, nor does it give them the right to deprive other people of their rights – for instance, the right of every child to have their well-being, rather than their parents’ desires, be placed at the center of custody disputes: there is no way around this central right (“Freedom from exploitation”) that does not involve child abuse, no matter how much those who are ideologically committed to the idea of a free and open market for child-selling try to argue that no real harm is done.
January 31st, 2011 | 5:18 pm
Err, hmm, Mr. or Mrs. Ehrlich… Coercively prohibiting gays from marrying (if by that you mean each other) is about as logical as coercively prohibiting men from having babies. Simple biology says that a gay man can’t marry a gay man anymore than a lesbian woman can marry a lesbian woman any more than my father had the slightest chance of giving birth to me.
If on the other hand you are suggesting that gay men and lesbian women leave those lifestyles and settle down into a true biological marriage, reports like these do give you (and me) reason to encourage such choices! Let us hope and pray that many such men and women can be blessed with good, lasting marriages of the kind that God has created.
January 31st, 2011 | 7:08 pm
TimC:
Excuse me, errr, hmmm, since when marriage is a biological fact as conception is? Your analogy seems…absurd, if you excuse the term.
January 31st, 2011 | 11:02 pm
Sergio,
How do you know the benefits of marriage aren’t a direct result from making a healthy commitment to one’s family?
Gay marriage is an attempt to dodge the responsibilities to one’s family – the responsibility to honor the man or woman one makes a child with, the responsibility to consider the child’s well-being before one’s own personal pleasure.
Sometimes growing up means realizing that your needs, desires, and feelings aren’t the only ones that matter. If my hunch is correct, and it is responsible living – including the cultivation of healthy, reciprocal relationships – that makes marriage a superior lifestyle over the id-chasing pleasure-hunt, then for gays to derive the benefits of marriage, they would do well to relinquish their desire to “have without paying for” (or “taking without honoring”). They would have to find a solution to their biological dilemma that does not require denial, forcing people to lie, or forcing children to be deprived of important things, and forcing them to say they don’t mind.
I believe that lies, like all sins, estrange a person not only from God, but from the rest of mankind.
January 31st, 2011 | 11:53 pm
Blake and TimC,
Before you trot out all your prejudices and sterotypes, read the article Mills referred to and think it through. The authors find that marriage supports better health when it is mutually supportive, long lasting, committed, and is granted legal status. The study does not mention children, and it appears to have excluded gay relationships.
It stands to reason that gays can be as mutually supportive and committed as straights and that they can have long lasting relationships with legal status. More importantly, you can see evidence of those kinds of gay relaionships all around if you care to look.
So yes, gay marriage would likely promote healthier lives for gays.
Now, that’s not the same thing as saying that gays can raise successful families or that gay marriage is morally right. It’s just to say that marriage would be healthier for the couple itself.
Of course, gays have raised children successfully, and gay marriage is morally right, but those are other subjects.
February 1st, 2011 | 6:50 am
Michael: I do not speak of raising children “successfully”, as if we could measure how they turned out using Total Quality Management metrics or something, because I would hate it if my parents had ever done that to me.
Children are not products. They’re people. They have rights too – a fact that gay marriage advocates must minimize and try to gloss over, because those kids’ rights are in direct conflict with what gay marriage advocates want.
February 1st, 2011 | 10:25 am
TimC,
Well put. It is not possible to discuss “including” homosexuals in marriage any more than it is possible to discuss including men in the definition of what we mean by women. Yes, we can collectively decide that henceforth we will refer to all mankind as women, but all we will have done is to strip the word of any real meaning. (This is an argument I make at greater length here.)
Of course there’s great fear among the homosexual community of the suggestion that “gay marriage” redefines marriage in any way. I read a tweet the other day by a gay marriage proponent that summed it up nicely: “I’m against marriage in general, but I support gay marriage!” It’s one of the best polemics I’ve read on gay marriage over the past year and it still has room for 79 characters!
What this random tweeter understands, is that marriage only came into existence because men and women procreate children. It would not exist outside of that fact, because the relationship would be of no more consequence to anyone than the declaration that so-in-so is your best friend. The idea that we should strip marriage of the only reason it came into existence (i.e. that men & women mate), is nothing more than an attempt to render it an entirely inconsequential relationship.
There are honest advocates of gay marriage, among them Paula Ettelbrick and Michelangelo Signorile (again you can read what they say here). What makes their points of view more honest (along with the tweeter) is the recognition that the real debate is over whether or not we should up end the meaning of the word itself, and thus end the existence of an institution which these advocates argue has limited their political power.
As for Sergio, Michael, et. al. I think limiting the debate to name-calling has proven effective in many circles, but I don’t think it’ll win you any converts here.
February 1st, 2011 | 10:34 am
Michael,
I’m sorry I can’t resist…you write:
Blake and TimC,
Before you trot out all your prejudices and sterotypes,
Man, this got my morning off with a chuckle! Yes, don’t you hate those stereotypes! Up until a handful of years ago, there wasn’t a gay person alive that had even heard the term “gay marriage,” and then poof! Just kick around the term for a couple years against the span of all human civilization and suddenly the whole world is bigoted! Why are they bigoted? Because you thought up a new idea that even you had never heard of before 1980 (at the earliest) and those that haven’t signed up yet…well let’s do the best we can to make them out to be Klansman.
February 1st, 2011 | 10:35 am
Blake,
We’ve discussed this before, and I would think that you would remember that I don’t consider children as “products” and that I don’t define success in that way.
While you have some valuable arguments about rights that I’ve since pondered, you seem unable to move a conversation forward rather than circling back around to the same point. Let me know when you’re able to stick to a subject (here, marriage and the couple’s health) instead of sliding off in order to make the same point (the rights of children putatively violated in gay families) or when you are able to push the conversation deeper by answering questions directly, by asking questions that push at logical flaws, or by bringing fresh insights to bear. I’m always happy to discuss further.
February 1st, 2011 | 11:54 am
Douglas,
I hadn’t seen that Ngram viewer before. It’s a fun tool. Thanks!
It seems to me that significant cultural advances with respect to human and civil rights can be made within relatively short periods of time, even within a single generation (which is not to say that prior generations and circumstances didn’t lay a lot of the needed groundwork for such advances). That certain civil rights issues were not part of the popular discussions of an earlier generation is no reason for dismissing them.
With gay marriage in particular, we seem to find the following trend: when people do deeply think about the issue (perhaps because their gay friends or family members have now come out of the closet), there is a tendency for one’s pre-critical attitudes and judgments to soften. Except in cases of conversation to fundamentalist religion, I’ve never seen the change go in a regressive direction, from sympathy to antipathy towards gay rights.
So I think you are right. If someone has never thought about gay marriage before, and then opposes the idea when suddenly asked about it, this doesn’t mean that this person is the moral equivalent of a Klansman. Most people, once given the time, opportunity, pressure to deeply think about these issues will begin to change, following their more well-founded moral sensibilities. The people who display truly objectionable character traits are those who dogmatically refuse to budge from their pre-critical prejudices–even when faced with evidence that such prejudices are positively harming their friends, families, and people they’ve never even met.
February 1st, 2011 | 12:28 pm
C. Ehrlich,
Nice try.
In your second paragraph you draw a parallel between homosexuality and the racially segregated south (or perhaps that never entered your mind?), so okay, got it: to oppose the redefinition of marriage makes one equal to those who wanted to treat human beings as less than human because of their skin color.
But wait!….You say I’m right. I’m right because you think we should allow a certain grace period for us knuckle-dragging troglodytes to get with the program. But then once your grace period expires and there are still some snake-handlers who have the audacity to believe that marriage only exists because men and women mate, well then those “people who display truly objectionable character traits are those who dogmatically refuse to budge from their pre-critical prejudices–even when faced with evidence that such prejudices are positively harming their friends, families, and people they’ve never even met.”
I do love your penultimate paragraph wherein you identify this sociological trend. The deep thinkers, you say, soften their pre-critical attitude (that attitude that says marriage only came into existence because men and women procreate) and then abandoned the meaning of marriage because they met a homosexual. Deep thinking is right!
Anyway, as I said, nice try.
February 1st, 2011 | 12:46 pm
Douglas,
I think you’ve misunderstood me. I don’t find their positions against gay marriage prejudiced and stereotyped. On another forum, I’ve had a long, serious conversation with Blake about his reasons for being against gay marriage, and I’ve indicated where I think he has a point and where I think he doesn’t.
In response to Carter’s post, however, they both ignored his point and the article he referred to and rushed headlong to leap onto their own hobbyhorses.
Here’s a sample of the statements made by Blake and TimC that I think are either stereotyped or prejudiced:
Gays believe “there should be no restrictions on marriage at all.”
They “force people to go along with “affirming” their relationship, even if it means lying”
They “are ideologically committed to the idea of a free and open market for child-selling”
“Err, hmm, Mr. or Mrs. Ehrlich,” which I take to be a gender slam.
“Simple biology says that a gay man can’t marry a gay man,” which is an example of his mind running to sex, not to a supportive relationship.
As for gay marriage being a recent idea, the idea of a “Boston marriage” is a century older, describing two women living together for mutual support, which may or may not include sex. Think, too, of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the 1920s.
February 1st, 2011 | 1:17 pm
Douglas:
Excuse me, where did i name call any other person in this blog? Cause I said TimC analogy between gay marriage and the imposibility for men to procreate is not evident and “absurd”? How is that “name calling”?
Blake:
To be honest I do not understand your comments to me, since I was not talking about anything about “healthy commitments” or responsabilities of gay parents. Based on what you write, I see you are only repeating what you already said on this topic on other discusions, and to be honest I do not understand your insitence to attribute homosexuals in general for being irresponsible and egoists . When you manage to explain me how that is inherent for homosexuals (or homosexuals that intend for form unions and call it marriage) maybe we could get anywhere in the discusion.
February 1st, 2011 | 2:04 pm
Michael,
I am not aware of anything relating to Gertrude Stein’s relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and in fact I have no idea of Alice B. Toklas is. Apparently, they were lesbians together. So?
That two homosexuals lived under the same roof (or if 2,000 did same in Carthage for that matter) in the 1920′s has no more to do with marriage than does the fact that I took my basset hound for a walk this morning. You’ve simply decided, in an effort to support your effort to redefine marriage, that it has never been anything more than an association of any two persons all along, with no particular connection with procreation. Hey, who knew?
I’m curious though what you think about this though…when divorce courts ask when or if a marriage was consummated, why do you think the law has always seen that as a relevant question?
As for what you find stereotypical or prejudiced, it’s a little tough to pinpoint from the quotes you provide. As best I can tell, something is stereotypical and prejudice if you take offense to it in some way.
February 1st, 2011 | 3:53 pm
Douglas,
A “Boston marriage” is a term from the 1880s. It uses the word “marriage.” People have thinking about alternative families for awhile now.
It’s too bad you don’t know Stein. She was a great writer and patron of the arts.
You can find my views on marriage in the “On the Square Column” entitled “Marriage and the Liberal Empire.” The subject here concerns the health benefits of marriage.
Neither prejudice nor stereotype is about taking offense.
A prejudice is a judgment made before you know someone, like stating that gays believe there should be no restriction on marriage at all.
A stereotype is a fixed impression, like believing that gays are liars.
As Sergio observes, you’ve leapt into this conversation accusing people of things they haven’t done, which I find to be tiresome behavior.
February 1st, 2011 | 5:14 pm
Michael, there is a difference between a conjugal relationship vs. recreational sex.
Forcing people to pretend there is no difference is forcing them to lie.
You are welcome to believe that the differences do not matter. But that is your personal belief. It is subjective. It is religious in nature: only one religion (humanism, also called Unitarian Universalism) rejects the idea that conjugal relations, and blood kinship, are sacred in favor of the optimistic ideal that mankind should live without limits and should have absolute control over every aspect of what we used to call natural law.
Every other major world religion recognizes the family-making union of man and woman as different in kind from sex that is primarily about recreation and pleasure.
February 2nd, 2011 | 1:52 pm
Michael,
I regret that my use of “Mr. or Mrs.” for C. Ehrlich came across as a “slam” to you. I had first written “Mr. Ehrlich” before realizing that I had no idea what C. Ehrlich’s sex is. Preferring to address people by a title and surname when possible, I tried to allow for my ignorance while still upholding the measure of respect due my interlocutor. Apparently, I missed the mark in your reading, and I regret that.
On the other hand, “Simple biology says that a gay man can’t marry a gay man” is neither prejudicial nor stereotypical. My mind “ran to sex” because that is fundamentally what marriage is about, or at least what differentiates it from all other relational arrangements. Others such as Robert George, et al, have argued this more clearly and persuasively than I can. There are myriad “supportive relationships” of all kinds in the world and these have existed from time immemorial with all justified social approbation. However, it was not until the last 30 years (thanks, Douglas!) that anyone had the absurdity to argue that these “supportive relationships” were automatically due the term “marriage.”
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