Conservatism in Marriage Life

I often listen to NPR as a part of my daily routine.  I was fortunate to build this habit when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation in Boston, MA, either at home or on the way to library in the car.  The traffic in Boston is notoriously congested during the traffic hours, so it was easy to be able to listen to the whole segment in one program for one ride.  After I relocated to Cleveland 7 years ago, and it only took 15 minutes to commute from my apartment to my office.  The program I was listening to was the Diane Rehm show; although it is a good show, it took me a while to be a loyal listener–because of her voice.  No offense, I did not find her voice is uplifting (updated) and attractive to my ears.  But I have to assess the contents of the program, and I gave her some credits for that.

On May 28th, past Thursday, the guest speaker was Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology at John Hopkins University, discussed his new book, The Marriage-Go-Round,” in which, I believe, talked about American marriage and divorces.  Since I have not read the book, it will be too bias to make comments on his studies if I simply judged him by his talk and particular the answers to the audience in the program.  There are two points that he made very clear in his responses and comments on the questions raised by the audiences.  

1. Good income makes good marriage.
2. It will be good for the children, if the divorce was due to some issues regarding abuse, drugs, and others; but for other reasons, it will not be good for the children.

I found his answers are elitist, bias, and extremely conservative.   Is his study changing our view of American society, in which how marriages impacted on?  It is an old notion that most society will agree and define a successful marriage based on the wealth.  In history, both European and Asian civilizations, the purpose of marriage arrangement was to secure the financial stability and political allies.  In the process of arranging a marriage, everything is measured, especially one’s present and potential wealth.  Why I was surprised is if Americans believe that good income makes good marriage, then American society is marching to the past, or even worse, to a society which will face many challenges in its fundamental structure.  For example, if American believed that one’s needs could be fulfilled by materials, then it indicates that perhaps there are something missing in our spiritual life, that we need to fill the emptiness and holes in life by products and tangible materials, even in a form of marriage.  Consuming products and shopping are some of top expanses in American household before this current economic crisis/depression.  The US has the one of most shopping malls and stores in the world (please do not use the size of land as an excuse), and that explains that many retail stores are out of business during this downfall, the stores were outnumbered.  Because of the consuming habits, it causes the high debts of credit cards that American individuals accumulate today.  Have you noticed what topics that many Americans talked about in social events? My experiences were how much cost one’s new gadget, who bought what new stuffs…all about “stuffs” and those people are smart, educated, and nice most of time.  It seems that only materials could measure and define our social status, and gain respects.  I also question that a statistics may tell us the percentage/quantities of social occurrence on surface, but they could not assess the quality of one’s marriage.  Some sociologists will collect the data and use the data to explain human behaviors.  However, the speaker may find high percentage of married couples with good incomes remain in their marriages, but he may not know how many of them are actually in misery or how many of them had affairs outside of their marriages.  In some other cultures, which the average of individual incomes are much lower than the Americans and Europeans, they also maintain a lower rate of divorces in their society.