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Generation Z: Desperate for Rules

Betsy VanDenBerghe

I recently attended a meeting that many would consider anachronistic: Standards Night, an annual gathering for Mormon youth and their parents encouraging chaste and porn-free living. Some call this...

Suzuki Method Uberparenting

Betsy VanDenBerghe

My oldest child started piano lessons back in the nineties, due to somewhat base parental motives. A friend who volunteered in prisons had told me that a common denominator...

Unsolicited Advice On How To Find A Mate

Betsy VanDenBerghe

In one of his lesser known comedies, playwright Neil Simon depicts the irrationality of undiluted physical attraction through the love-struck yearnings of Norman. A โ€™60s radical, second in his...

โ€œKnot Yetโ€: Marriage and Other Choices

Betsy VanDenBerghe

In the final scene of A&Eโ€™s Pride and Prejudice the camera pans a double wedding tableau: Elizabeth and Darcy and Jane and Bingley, both couples surrounded by family and...

Evangelicals vs. Mormons: Blessed Are the Peacemakers

Betsy VanDenBerghe

We refer to it in our family as โ€œthe clown episode.โ€ Over a dozen years ago our family visited a collection of rare Bibles open to the public as...

The Unacceptable Alternative Lifestyle

Betsy VanDenBerghe

They occasionally populate New Yorker storiesโ€”characters on the peripheries of the narratorโ€™s life, somehow only half human, almost surreal, because theyโ€™re single, celibate, and plan to stay that way...

Cohabitation, Marriage, and Brangelina

Betsy VanDenBerghe

While single and working in the Boston area during the 1980s, I observed the cohabitation phenomenon up close. My friends moved in with guys anticipating stability along with the...

Why Bigger Might Be Easier

Betsy VanDenBerghe

In the National Marriage Projectโ€™s exhaustive 2011 โ€œState of Our Unionsโ€ report, a sidebar among the analyses and graphs draws attention to a subset social scientists tend to ignore...