With sex on tap, why should men wed?

May 26, 2018 by

by Harry Benson, The Conservative Woman:

There’s a deep irony about the subject of men and marriage.

On the one hand, marriage appears to benefit men more than women. Men’s health, in particular, is better for those who marry and stay married.

On the other hand, men appear to resist marriage more than women. In a couple of surveys for the law firm Seddons in partnership with Marriage Foundation, we found that more men than women remain unmarried because they are ‘waiting for the one’, and 30 per cent of unmarried women have not married because they are ‘waiting for him to ask’.

Actually, because being married helps couples stay together and it’s invariably women who end up carrying the baby when couples split, stability is a very specific benefit of marriage to women.

But there is a growing view that men are turning their backs on marriage because they have become confused about what women want, what they themselves want, and how to get it.

The stream of unpleasant stories of #MeToo, #everydaysexism, and inappropriate behaviour from MPs, may well have made some men wary of relationships.

I think the real reason men are more resistant to marriage is much simpler. The introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1970s made it possible for men to sleep with women without fear of pregnancy. Unmarried cohabitation was the obvious consequence. So birth control broke the age-old prerequisite that men had to prove their long-term prospects before getting what they wanted. And that’s where we are today, with – as the American sociologist Mark Regnerus writes – cheap sex, easy cohabitation, and men who’ve forgotten how to woo a lady.

Read here

The wretched unmarried state we’re in, by Kathy Gyngell, The Conservative Woman

 

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