For those of us, men and women, raised in an adolescent culture and really trying to become better men and women in our marriages, the axiom “children make adults of their parents” is a sad but true statement.

My wife and I, both practicing Catholics, married at 23, strongly desiring a big, holy family. When my wife was pregnant with our first and had such bad morning sickness she was hacking up blood and stomach acid, I had to be a man and tell her we were going to the hospital even though she was terrified of needles. I almost had to get her dresses she refused so strongly. I learned to provide and protect, even when it’s unpleasant, and she learned to place the needs of her kids before her own. The same sickness ran all the way through the pregnancy and we almost lost our son at birth. He was blue, the cord wrapped twice around his neck and once around his chest, no thicker than my index finger, with a placenta no wider than a portabella mushroom. It was a challenge and a time for real growth. For we who are trying to put the sacrament to work in our lives, its demands are difficult. I fail often. However, young men and women everywhere should know this: there are few, if any, better ways to take away adult adolescence than marriage and family. Just make sure you marry someone who understands, as you do, that it must be lifelong and self-less. It’d be a terrible shame to marry someone expecting them to challenge you when in reality they will just want out when they don’t want to leave behind their adolescence. Marry someone, at least, who wants to be an adult.

Kids make adults out of their parents. The more the kids, the more true it is.

When morals and values declined and tolerance became status quo,God got put on the back burner. We are so afraid to accidentally offend someone, except God. Families broke apart when it stopped being fun and instant gratification took its place. The churches felt they had to compete to get people to come, and make them happy to come back instead of teaching them how to save there soul. I have attended other churches and thank God I was baptized Catholic, I love the consistency- and overall reverence for God. At one time coffee and donuts were offered prior, then I found out we could bring them in with us. People greeted each other, we sang some songs, words were spoken and the collection basket was passed. I felt like I was paying for coffee and felt like I needed to go to church afterward. It was happy, fun time-not that I learned anything, I sing more in my car. Children learn from their parents example, my son didn’t get a male role model except what I have tried to teach him. We are a team and work together, where every decision concerning the family is discussed since each person effects the other. I hope my kids can find someone worthy to marry, not so selfish that they have children. I would like to see the church teach acceptable teenage dating practices, respect, responsibility.

When we opened up our copy of the WSJ Saturday morning, my husband and I both devoured this piece after reading the headline, and I too noticed all the immediate comments on the WSJ’s combox as well as their Facebook page. Made for an entertaining Saturday morning! :)

My husband’s initial reaction? The same one you’ve shared here from some of those men who commented: “Well I could say the same thing for good women. Where have they gone?”

My reaction: Radical feminism has pushed us to this point. “Men don’t know how to men; women don’t know how to be women.” Yes, a blanketed statement, but one I feel has much truth.

“Marriage as a sacrament belongs to an entirely different order than the mere union of man and woman through a civil contract. It basically regards a husband and wife as symbols of another marriage; namely, the nuptials of Christ and His Church.”  “The Family Bible recording dates of birth and baptism is no longer existent because few read the Bible, few give birth, and few are ever baptized. One of the most evident symptoms of the breakdown of the family is divorce. The universalizing of easy divorce means that the institution of marriage is slowly degenerating into State-licensed free love.”
you see this is not a recent problem…Bp Fulton Sheen wrote these texts in 1943.

The debate over this article hit the boiling point on MetaFilter, which has a slight skew toward young, male, tech-savvy folks.  The language is a bit salty but the issues you mention are repeated and worked over rather well… http://www.metafilter.com/100750/Where-Have-All-The-Good-Men-Gone

They threw the baby out with the bath water in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The baby boomers cried out for freedom and instead of freedom became enslaved to sin for there is no true freedom without resposibility. Responsibility went out the door with artificial birth control and abortion on demand. Why should men grow up when they can get what they want, sex, without having to worry about consequences? Why should women behave themselves when men would rather have a woman they can have sex with than a woman that has self respect enough to wait for marriage. Things need to change. Oh, and as for “children make adults of their parents”, that is definitely not true. I deal with kids and parents and trust me most of those parents have not learned to be adults yet.

It is really sad when you think that 3 generations back was the generation of men and women who felt putting marriage and family on hold to fight WWII was important.  Now we put marriage on hold to “find ourselves”. 

I think we have been slipping down to where we are now since just after WWII.  Once divorce became easy and socially accepted, a large percentage of the children in this country lost the single best role model for how men and women should relate—their married parents and most of them ended up with limited exposure to how a man should act at all since fathers often only had visitation rights. 

Of course, then we had the 60s with the advent birth control, and “free love”..

Well, in any case, our children will grow up in a culture that values freedom over sacrifice, confuses sex and love, and tries to claim that you can have everything.  Its up to us to show our children that a life of self-sacrifice can be more satisfying than a life of self-indulgence, that what we can have is dictated by the choices we make.

My non-Catholic in-laws divorced when my husband was 18. They married young after college (she was a teacher, he a doctoral candidate when they met) and quickly had three sons. While she was extremely conservative and destined to be the stay-at-home mother type and my father-in-law was a true husband of his times with his weekly poker games and long hours. The family attended a Presbyterian church not out of any strong belief but out of social norms and well, socialization. Their marriage disintegrated after years of alcoholism, absenteeism (by both parents, while my mother-in-law was physically there, she raised her sons in a “boys will be boys” hands off manner)and general agreement that since divorce was now socially acceptable in 1980, it would be okay. My husband floundered as a young adult and essentially became a guy because his parents’ marriage, despite children, made two selfish adults out of them. I met my husband when I was 19 and he was 36, after facing his life as a “guy” he was tired, lonely and just plain angry. He works hard, every day, to ensure our two young sons do not have the skewed view of marriage he grew up with. He works hard to learn how to undo that image himself. This problem isn’t new, but it seems to have gotten worse. For any variety of reasons, young people may not be able to be married in their early 20’s but that is no reason to give up their standards and bow down to the culture of “guys and chicks.”

Fraternal correction:

Here it is written: Jennifer Fulwiler is a writer as well as the Director of Chaos Management for her growing family, which currently includes four young children (with one on the way).”

Since a person starts from conception, it should have been:
includes FIVE young children (one on the way).

Let’s fight the culture of death. An idea: at your birthday don’t say I am 30 year old, but 30 years and 9 months old (you started at conception).

yours in JMJ
Fred

Everyone seems to forget that back when there were good prospects for women to marry men were paid half-again what women were in the same position (because, after all, the man was expected to support the woman.)

Now we have equal pay, “promoting diversity”, “free trade” (to “lower labor costs”), and illegal immigrants to compete for the jobs that are remaining—and women complain that there aren’t enough good peroviders around?  The problem isn’t that young men are trained to be adolescent, but that it’s harder for them to find jobs that pay a family wage.

Don’t lose hope.  God has a plan.  Pope Leo XIII had a vision in the mid 1800’s that was so terrible it caused him to faint and when he woke up, to compose the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel.  Satan appeared before God and said he could destroy faith in God and the Church if he was given 100 years.  God permitted it.  The century God gave him in the vision was the twentieth century so we have been through alot - two world wars and the holocaust, Korea and Viet Nam, the industrial revolution, the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution,the homosexual revolution, increased materialism, many crisis within the Church, natural disasters and on and on.  The hundred years are over and I have to hope that we are on the mend.  Alot of evil has come to light and people are working to overcome it. Recognizing the difference of the sexes should never be recognizing a dictatorship though. It is a partnership. Perhaps a 51/49 per cent partnership with the man having the final say in his home, but not a blanket dominance of men over women in public life or the workplace. The sanctity of marriage and all male female relationships is founded in mutual love and self-giving, not power, control or dominance.  Publicly we are brother and sister and we complement each other. We need to become holier.

My analysis? The ultimate cause is the industrial revolution, of which the digital age is just a continuation. Over the past few centuries, technological advances have radically reordered our society in a way far more profound than the discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The world we’ve created quite literally clashes with our biology; we simply did not evolve to live in such an environment. Homo-sapiens are nomadic hunter/gatherers, not world-colony builders. And now we’re feeling the strain more than ever.

It’s not that the new world is better or worse than the old, it’s just different. But there’s no way back, so we might as well adapt and be honest with ourselves. It’s true that we’ve lost many noble traits that would be useful in the old world, but like medieval Europe, that world’s dead. And the traits were noble only relative to that world.

If we wish to survive, we must conform ourselves to the new order. In time, it will attain a nobility of its own. Or maybe it already has, but our former allegiance to bygone ways blinds us to the future.

For example, isn’t the entertainment industry the realization of every poet and storytellers’ greatest dream? They thought life was about tale-spinning, and now the whole world is spinning with tales. If we look with objective eyes, each Final Fantasy video game has a storyline of at least as high of quality as the Iliad. We don’t realize it, but even the most mediocre achievements of our age outshine the ancients.

Just because we stand on their shoulders doesn’t mean we should bemoan the fact that we can’t feel the dirt beneath our feet like they could; after all, they were the ones who hoisted us from the ground to begin with. We must continue our climb, even if that means redefining who we are. Life is about change, about becoming something new. To desire stability is to desire stagnation and death. Why return to the old ways when they were the ferrymen who carried us to the new shore?

Echoing Pam a little, I think the next path of the author’s argument to uphold the sanctity of marriage is to recognize the personhood of the other person.  This woman is a fellow sister in Christ even before she is my wife.  If you don’t have that understanding, how unsurprising marriage or pre-marriage relationships can spiral out of control.  Again, echoing Pam, this is another symptom of our lack of holiness.

Among the discussion of morals and maturity, let us also pause to note that it’s a lot harder for a man in his 20s to achieve “financial independence” after getting that high school diploma these days. (Or worse, after then going on to college and taking on a heavy, non-dischargeable debt burden.)
   
Given the following:
a) The economy continues to transform in ways unfriendly to the “living wage” and many workers, and the Boomers are busy pulling up the ladder after themselves, making long-term job prospects grim, even for men with multiple degrees under their belts. Also, while women still face subtle discrimination in a dwindling number of areas, non-minority men face overt discrimination in a growing number.
b) Student loan burdens are high, and housing is still unaffordably expensive even post-bubble (while mortgages have gotten much more difficult to obtain), making it harder than in the past for a freshly-minted college graduate to find his way to anything more than either a crash pad or moving back in with the parents.
c) Cultural cues tell us that men being immature and foolish and stupid are the norm, and manly virtues are either forgotten or proscribed or in a state of complete confusion.
d) Female empowerment has had certain side-effects, for instance: of empowering women to be demanding, self-centered, and unforgiving, with unrealistic expectations; and to elevate their female friends (often along with the popular gay male mascot) above all others including any man they might marry, whom it is all too easy to relegate to the status of a junior partner.
e) Women are much more eager to get married than to stay married. I know so many good guys who married, tried—albeit imperfectly—to please their wives and be the men they wanted, stayed away from the worst vices, had children with them…and then wound up kicked out or abandoned at the wife’s whim. This is a very, very common story these days.
   
Given all of this, why not take a slacker McJob, share a crash pad with some buddies, and retreat to a world of videogames, TV, beer, hookups, and porn?

I remember reading a survey a few years back about why so many young men don’t want to marry.  The answer most of them gave: why get married and tie yourself down to just woman, when there are so many women available for sex?

I guess the old-fashioned idea that women should withhold sex until marriage makes sense after all.  Too bad it took wrecking our society to figure it out.

We can expand the question so that it asks, “Where have all the good men who I would want to be the father of my children gone?”  Men are supposed to take their example of fatherhood patterning God the Father, “from whom all fatherhood is named” (according to St. Paul).  Can we expect anything less from men who are orphans?

Great discussion! I think it is a very complex issue, but a trend I am noticing as my children and the children of my friends reach marrying age, is that a lot of people are just NOT getting married at all! If they do, sometimes it is just a signature on some documents.

Secondly, college graduates are not able to enter the job market because baby boomers are hanging on too long! Baby boomers have affected me my whole life, but I didn’t think it would have such a negative impact on my children. So, I have a 25 year old with a college degree who works menial labor. He refuses to date, feeling he has nothing to offer a prospective bride. On top of that, he finds tattoos repulsive and refuses to date anyone with a tattoo. I tell him I think that is certainly going to be hard in this peer culture.

I have heard of girls at bars sizing a guy up for what he has to offer, but my son certainly doesn’t look for a mate at bars. Sadly, the young women are not at church either.

I like the comment about feminism.  Most men still want to be the providers and will not stay at home to raise children.  Women have been told that they can have it all and are frustrated when men will not cooperate with these feminist ideas.

For better or for worse, our society accepts a high unemployment rate while at the same time embracing a materialism that encourages both spouses to work which inhibits the raising of children both in its potential and in actuality.  Kids are not parented well when both parents are out at the job.  Twenty-somethings can’t get the necessary experience to move on in life.

With respect to sofablue, I think blaming the baby-boomers is a bit of a cop out.  The first wave of boomers just hit retirement age in the last few years; many are still in their 50s.
—
While we would all like to be able to choose our careers based purely on what we would like to do, the reality is that we need to consider the demand in different fields before we make a choice.  Indeed, one of the first adult choices many of us have to make is to choose a different career than we might have liked.  So while the boomers do dominate some fields, there are other fields with growing demand and a shortage of workers. 
—
As for finding a wife, this is the twenty-first century.  I agree the bars are a terrible place to look for women and unfortunately many churches are not great places to look either (In the latter case, many churches don’t have effective young adult ministries; the young single people are there, its just hard to find them).  That being said, there are some great Catholic Matchmaking websites (I won’t say dating sites, since the ultimate goal is not a relationship, but a marriage).  As for tattoos, well, I agree tattoos are bad ideas, but everyone can and does make mistakes.

I’m sure it’s been said, but let’s read it again. Financial independence doesn’t come after the high school diploma.

It comes after the college degree, which results in debt which precludes financial independence.

Causes?

•Dual income households, which drive up the price of living to levels unpayable by the single-income households.
•60% female college & university attendance.
  °Resulting in double debt and half the earning power for a traditional family.

Theo on Wednesday at 12:18:

Yeah, when Jane Austen has been saying it eloquently all along…

With respect to Anonymous, I think their analysis is simplistic at best.  Lets look at each of the claims s/he made.
—
1. Financial independence comes after a college degree with results in debt which precludes financial independence.  Well, to begin with, there are ways to become financially independent without a college degree.  I can think of a number of trades, such as auto mechanic which pay well and don’t require a college degree; they do require training though.
—
Also, yes, college often results in debt, but how much debt is under more control than most would have you believe.  According to the College Board, the average cost of a 4 year private university is $27K per year.  Add in room and Board, and it is easy to imagine coming out with $100K in debt.  However, we don’t have to go to a private college.  A Public 4 year university averages about $7600 for in state tuition.  After the 4 years, even if you borrowed every cent, you would be looking at a much smaller debt to pay off.  Even better, rather than start at a 4 year school, start at a 2 year school and pay $2700 and then transfer to the 4 year school to finish up.  So I figure you can finish school with far less than average debt if you decide to let go the ego value that causes many students to go to expensive prestige schools. 
—
2. Dual income households drive up the price of living?  Well, maybe to a certain extent, but my family, and quite a few others in a reasonable DC suburb are able to make due with one income.  A lot of the “extra” income two income households make goes to paying for daycare, take out and pre-prepared food and general luxury items. 
—
3. 60% female college attendance results in double debt.  Well, my question is, why are so few guys going to college?  Last I checked there was near parity in numbers between college age men and women, so why is there 3 women in college for every two men?  Yes, it means the woman has debt too, but since she might not get married for 4-5 years after college (or more), she will have time to pay some of it off and as I pointed out earlier, how much debt is at least somewhat under our control.
Further, I am glad my wife has a career that she can fall back on if something happens to me.

It didn’t start as recently as you posit. The Bible says concerning this exact point, the relative rarity of good women (Ecclesiastes 7:29, Douay-Rheims) “One man among a thousand I have found, a woman among them all I have not found.”

My comment is rather a question—How do we fix this? as a baby boomer, I saw the writing on the wall.  I see how men are so lost, their roles have been taken away by women wanting to be more like men.  God is smart he put women and men on this earth and we each have our distinct role.  However human nature took over and we wanted to change things, now look at us, God is not on the words of family, Family is no longer a unit, men dont’ know how to become men and women are out with little or no clothes and not acting lady like. Women have made men ashamed of whom they were once supposed to be. So how do we fix things?

Well, MarylandBill, I too live in a DC suburb and I agree with most of what you say, but you’re simply wrong about the dual-income problem. When the median household income in Montgomery County is 80,000 and the median house price is 450,000, you have to be a lawyer to “make do” with one income.

That said, I am glad that my wife has something to “fall back on” too, but I don’t think she should have to take on insoluble debt in order to do so.

Great conversation.  One issue that hasn’t come up is the erosion of trust, and its replacement by mutual self-interest or advantage.  For young people today, relationships work when mutual advantage is satisfied; that is, each person is happy so long as their needs are being met.  Today, “needs” consist in tingly feelings, fun, good sex, a measure of respect, and aspirational longings (he makes money, he’s hot, she looks good on my arm, etc.).  Notice this assumes a deep commitment to self-interest, and once needs aren’t met, the relationship begins to fray.  Our young people (I’m now 37) have taken refuge in relationships-as-mutual self-interest because our society has systematically undermined the sources of trust.  Trust is about taking a chance, reaching out beyond the limits of self-interest, daring to put yourself out there and having faith in others.  Why don’t we trust?  We don’t trust because we’ve witnessed divorce and dysfunction first hand.  We don’t trust because it’s easier to retreat into a carefully managed private world of entertainment and hobbies.  We don’t trust because we’ve been taught to always question/challenge authority.  We don’t trust because we have a culture that often says that if someone is doing something for you then they must want something.  We don’t trust because we are a tower of babel that has been splintered into a million sub-cultures, and everyone finds it easier to seek refuge in those who speak their “language”.  For many liberal democratic social scientists and philosophers, the erosion of social trust is the great challenge, the huge “sneaker wave” that threatens to destroy the democratic, secular project.  So dating/the family is just one casualty of this larger problem.

This sort of thing is wonderful!

Seems like all the “attractive” women I approached had something better in mind rather than what I offer: serious Catholic, great income, physically fit, not unattractive I guess, Master’s degree philosophy, well-traveled, military veteran, no other baggage!

Or, they offered “hook up” to me, and that just seemed a little dirty and not exactly what I wanted.

Now we’re older, slightly past our prime, and I laugh at their predictable results.  And who wants them now, now that everyone has already HAD them?

As for me…..I’ve pursued Wisdom and other laudable goals.

I’ve been reading the comments, and for the most part I agree.  I have been married for 11 years my husband and I have 3 children.  I am a stay at home mom and run a business at home to try to help with our financial situations.  I often feel guilty for not being able to make more of a financial contribution, but I am also thankful for the time I have to spend in the home with our children. 

As for some of the problems in home life, I believe that a big part of the problem is what feminism has become.  I am a feminist insofar as it means equal pay for equal work, and that some women are well suited for “non-traditional” jobs such as being a mechanic. 

It is hard to live in this world being a stay at home mom or wife because the modern feminist movement is telling me that I am “being lazy” or “overly dependent on a man.”  I see nothing wrong with being dependent on my husband, in a healthy manner.  He earns a living for our family, we pay the bills and live within our means.  There aren’t a lot of extras and that is just fine. 

There are also family of origin issues that I believe are rampant in our society at large.  There are so many people who are getting married with out a clue on how to manage conflicts that will happen when two people share a space, their parents never tried to get through the conflict, just got divorced, or they witnessed violence in the home.  So many people are ill equipped to handle conflict resolution in their personal lives.  I know it’s a struggle for me, coming from a single parent house hold.  I have had to learn skills to make our marriage work, especially effective communication. 

Because of my own family of origin issues, it took me a long time to trust that my husband was never going to hit me.  It took me a long time to trust that my husband really means what he says.  It’s still a struggle from time to time.  This struggle is still worth while to me, and it is one that I will continue with because I do not want to fail in my married life.

And we can blame perpetual adolescence on contraception.

Contraception gave us recreational sex without consequences, preventing the need for teens to actually grow up and be adults.

Root cause = contraception.

-Tim-

Even with a college degree establishing financial security is a difficult task.  The cost of college education is going up (at least in California, and I suspect in other states as well given the recession), and students ARE piling up more college debt than ever before.  Tuition will increase for the UC system by 8% next fall.  Last year, tuition increased 32%.  This does not include all of the fees hikes and “educational services” that the Universities decides to put on your tab. 

By all means this debt is not insurmountable, nevertheless, it is still burdensome considering the nature of the job market. 

Even with a college degree finding a decent paying job is a difficult task.  Companies are constantly outsourcing labor which means that opening a small business is out of the question when companies like Wal-Mart are continually diversifying and offering roll-back prices. 

All of my friends who don’t have college degrees are working jobs that pay just enough to cover their apartment rent (which they share with multiple roommates) and basic living expenses.  My friends who do have college degrees have tested the waters of the job market and realized very quickly that we will only be making slightly more than our buddies without a degree.  Thus, all my friends with a BA (including myself) have fled to graduate school only to take out an even larger debt to pay for school.  And unfortunately, the name of the school does matter. I have friends who graduated from law school and still cannot find a job since their law school was a “lower” tier one.   

Right now i’m in graduate school, and my colleagues and I joke around saying that after we get our phds, we will be pumping gas or mowing lawns for a living. 

A lot of young men in their 20s are incredibly hard working, and are dedicated to school work, family, church and God.  Yet, we’re having trouble establishing ourselves financially.

Great comments,Kell.  To all those who are worried about financial stability, I would remind you that you do what you can in this life and pray, trusting that God meant what he said in Matthew. Our life should not be about money, but about Him and everything else will fall in place one way or another.  We are worth more than a flock of birds. Look at how the flowers are adorned. Study hard. Look for work. Work hard at what you find. Pray for God’s guidance. Pay your bills as best you can.  Live at home for a while or with roommates if you need to.  Somehow we make it through each day and if we do it with love we have really accomplished something!

I should have said “God has really accomplished something through us!”

I read a book recently by Theodore Dalyrymple who claimed that the origins of feminism could be traced to the plays of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen who portrayed women as oppressed by their husbands, a theme that was taken on by subsequent playwrights such as Shaw.

The comment by Tim H is perfect. Root cause = contraception. Pope Paul VI predicted these effects on an artificial contraceptive society in the Church Document “Humanae Vitae”.

Link: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html

“Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”

Aaron

Great post, Pam!!!

Not everyone leaves college with debt.  My parents paid cash for my tuition, so I left college with no debt.  Also you can take classes when you can afford them, you don’t have to do it in 4 years.  Two parent earners can afford to send their children to college, maybe a one parent earner can not.  Trades such as auto mechanic, plumber, etc, may not require a college degree, but they require training and certifications which cost money and in some instances the same as a 2 year degree. 

Please stop whining about outsourcing, illegals and women in the workforce, they are not the reason you can’t find a job.  There are many industries that are looking for workers, but everyone gets a degree in a job market that is already saturated.  Small businesses are created by creative people who see a niche in the market that is not being met.  Their competition is not Wal-Mart.  Starting your own business requires no degree, so there is so much more opportunity in entrepreneurship than you can imagine.

Aaron, I agree with your point, and the point of Pope Paul VI.  There was once a time that I saw contraception as a source of freedom, but the more I look at it, the more I see it as a form of sexual bondage.  You’re not allowing your body the freedom to do what it is designed to do.  I think that casual sex is the worst thing that has happened to the human race.

Great post Pam:

I think society as a whole and women are mislead to think that if your not financially secure, money,home you cannot have a good life. And you cannot support your kids, Trust in God! it is very true, and it makes us better people when we can do without, we appreciate the gifts that are given to us later. Too many young couples believe that you need to put your children in everything; for their sake teach them humility.

As a 27 year-old male, I agree with Jennifer’s conclusion about marriage being a significant key.  Feminism bears some responsibility for having encouraged both sexes to use each other. Men lost all their respect for women in general, while women had a reason to hate men more than ever.
  But from a personal perspective, a key issue that stands out is the loss of fatherhood.  Dad isn’t there for his kids - physically or emotionally - anymore. As a result, young and middle-aged men still feel like boys and behave accordingly.  There is no bar mitzvah, nothing to validate him, to usher him in to manhood. Homer Simpson doesn’t help the situation.  What particularly aggravates the problem are mothers who try to compensate for the lack of a father and husband, something she cannot nor ever was intended to do.  One of two things result - a son will hate his mother for forming a bond so suffocating that it resembles a marriage and he eventually rebels, or he surrenders and models himself on her.  The boy who forms a codependent relationship with his mother runs a significant risk. At adolescence he might well begin experiencing same sex attraction, in a desperate sexualized search for the masculine.
In either case, the boy has not become a man.  But the boy inherits a man’s body and with that body he can use a woman (or a man) as both an object and a mother (father), albeit he cannot deal with the consequences. Boys aren’t ready to be fathers.
  The only way to fix men is to fix fatherhood.  Healthy fatherhood leads to healthy sons, faith and love for the Eternal Father. All the rest follows.

The subtext of the article that she misses entirely is that society is decaying badly. Men are losing their motivation not just for having families but for everything else as well. Women have drive towards everything. Intimacy, children, career, etc. They try and do it all and do nothing well.

There is a huge lack of a big picture. The secular world and life view is not providing and reason to sacrifice, procreate, and build a better society. It is providing huge distractions that effect men disproportionately. That is porn, video games, and drugs. School keeps getting longer and more expensive. Why embrace self control if there is no God that demands holiness?

People don’t seem to get the problem. Society cannot do this and not crash. It is like the Roman empire thinking it can just continue with drunken orgies forever. Eventually everything collapses.

When I was growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1950s and 60s, the Church high schools used to turn out large numbers of fine young people prepared for and desirous of marriage, family, and devotion to Christ and the Church. We young men referred to them as “good Catholic school girls” - young women with strong and unambiguous moral standards and compass, self-governing and desirous of “doing the right thing.” I was fortunate to be selected by a “good Catholic school girl” who was the product of a fine Italian Catholic family and St Franciscan School in Cairo, Egypt. My lovely wife inspires me to want to be a better man and to be mindful of my spiritual health and development. She is a wonderful friend and companion. The world could benefit mightily from the positive presence and influence of legions of “good Catholic school girls.” Thank you, family, Church, and Catholic school, for your input in her formation.

And don’t forget the fact that women demand to be paid at “comparable worth” to men (forget about getting the same pay for the same job: these days women demand to be paid just as highly as men are, even if men take jobs that are harder, filthier, and more dangerous than the ones that women take in order to support their families.)
And women still complain that there aren’t enough men with good-paying jobs out there.

Good men are easy to find. They are the guys that women are always turning down because they would rather be going out with some piece of crap loser because they are stupid enough to think they can change them. Good men are also the ones that are turning down women with enough baggage (from their “bad boy” phase) to fill up a big city airport at Christmas.

I read the original Wall Street Journal article the other day when my friend posted it on Facebook . When I first read the article I was glad to see that this was actually being talked about because it hit home hard with my own personal experiences. I had very similar reactions to your commentary, which I later read as a follow-up post on Facebook. I recognized though that the article was missing the importance of God in a relationship. The more I thought about it my initial reaction was not to blame the men, but to recognize that woman have also played a role in the current state of men delaying marriage. By taking away the role of a man or needing a man we have taken away their identity of being providers. The thing is though that as marriage gets delayed women have no other choice than to take care of themselves since men aren’t jumping in to marriage sooner. This viscous circle results from original sin and not recognizing the truth of our bodies, marriage, and love.

The article made me recall a talk given by Kimberly Hahn called “Dating and Courtship” (produced by Lighthouse Catholic Media LH3-1). She talked about urging men not to delay marriage. Of course I am not going to explain it as eloquently as she did, but basically she explained that our vocations are meant to bring us closer to God so we should not delay them. If we have discerned that our vocation is marriage then we should not delay pursuing that vocation because the longer we delay, the longer we are delaying the closeness to God that our vocation would bring and our ultimate sanctity to be with God in Heaven.

In my experience men (and women) have delayed to really take the time to discern whether they are called to marriage so when a good girl/guy comes along they bring that confusion to the relationship. I really urge men (and women) to discern before they are in a relationship whether they believe they are called to marriage. Of course none of us can be 100% sure of God’s will and He can always call us to something else, but at least if we have spent time discerning we will be ready when God puts the person He wills for us in our lives. While I agree with what Mary Beth Bonacci said at one of her talks to singles a few weeks ago (January 2011), that God is very generous with the back-up plan, I also believe that our actions do affect the original will of God for others as well. There are some theories, which I tend to agree with, that say that your actions to not discern/follow the will of God not only affect God’s original will for your life, but also the original will of God for the person you are dating. That is why it is so important that God is part of the picture because our decisions not only affect our life, but the lives of those around us as well. That is a lot of pressure, so who would want to make those decisions without including God. I remember when I was dating someone I had spent a lot of time praying about God’s will and while we never truly know what is in someone’s heart, I felt the person I was dating was not spending as much time discerning God’s will for the relationship. The relationship eventually ended (badly might I add), but we had a discussion after it ended. It went something like this…”If I felt the relationship was God’s will and he felt like the relationship wasn’t God’s will then who was right?” One of us was wrong… granted we never sought outside guidance or spiritual direction to help us make this decision so we may never know what the original will of God was, but I do know that God will always bring something good out of it especially if we are truly open to his will. So yes he will give us a second chance, but God’s original will is his perfect plan for us. Just like the Garden of Eden was the perfect plan before original sin when Eve ate the apple. God will bring something amazing out of it, but his original plan is His perfect plan so we must strive to be open to God’s will at all times not just for our sake but for those around us.

I would urge all of us to pray for men and women of our generation that we do not delay our vocations. That we be open to God’s will and grace because women really do need and want strong Godly men.

My husband and I met at a Catholic college we were both attending. When we were married the year after we graduated seven years ago, we received a lot of shocked and incredulous comments and looks from extended family members, acquaintances, strangers (no one who knew us well had any doubts about our marrying). On a trip to Boston the month before I got married, a friend of a friend congratulated me on my engagement and asked about the house where my fiancee’ and I lived. When I explained we were not living together, he laughed, then realized I was serious and said “wow, I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t know anyone who does that. Anyone.” For deciding to get married at “such a young age” I continued to be the butt of jokes that weekend. I think we’re a bit sheltered living in the Midwest (I actually do know other couples who waited until marriage to live together…) but that experience really brought into perspective a lot of society’s viewpoint. And how against the grain we were.

We were really fortunate to leave college without any debt, to both secure jobs prior to graduating, and to know enough about money not to get sucked into credit card debt but instead to live well within our means. I have watched acquaintances get married later in life, choosing to wait until careers are well-established and homes are large and well-appointed. And I think how much more fun it was for us to learn about decent cookware together (after our cheap-o wedding registry teflon fell apart two years into marriage), to go through the ups and downs of home-buying together for the first time and to experience the generosity of an older couple on our block, who offered us furniture from their recently-sold lake house because we were “just starting out” - and they remembered what it was like to do that too.

What about economics and consumer expectations?  I work with young adults and personally see about 70 couples a year who are marrying.  Most are in their mid to late twenties.  However, the neighborhood I work in is very affluent, with lots of brokers, traders, IT professionals, top sales people, etc. (Not the parents, who live elsewhere.  These are the young adults themselves.) They are the ones who got out of undergrad, scored great jobs, are finishing grad school, and both partners are each earning more than I am, the lowly church worker.

They get married in their twenties because they can afford nice homes, nice cars, great vacations, the beginnings of the substantial college fund, right off the bat.

When their grandparents married, in the 1940s and 50s, only one person needed to be earning to have the basics of middle class life:  a post-war tract home, one car, a washer and dryer, and a night out once a month.  Two things have happened:  the current generation would think that they are living in the dregs of poverty to ‘settle’ for what their grandparents had - and even then, it takes two middle income jobs to just afford one step up from that.

You have two things colliding - and the effects are not good:  more expansive expectations and the need for two wage earners to afford them.  This delays both marriage and childbearing for a large proportion of the population, and they end up in an extended adolescence.  (Women tend to snap out of it sooner, because they do want children and have them, even if they are not married.)

As a teacher, wife, and mother, I completely concur that marriage and children can be used by God to mature and refine adults beyond our wildest imaginations.  However, I would humbly suggest that we look not to marriage or parenthood themselves as the path out of delayed adolescence.  I have seen the sorrowful wounds of children struggling with the burdens and effects of immature, neglectful, broken, or even abusive parenting and marriages.  It hurts when the immature parent or spouse, unconnected or uncommitted to God, rejects the day by day and moment by moment salvation Our Lord and Savior offers and either lashes out or turns away from those holy relationships of husband, wife, father, or mother.  Believe me,  we do not want this for our children.  Let us approach these relationships with appropriate fear and trembling.

My own husband is a child of divorce, and at 41 he has seen his father once since third grade.  I was looking for a husband who shared my commitment to following God closely, and as the article suggests, such men are wicked hard to find, so I was very glad of that college degree I had so I could support myself in the meantime.  God didn’t bring my husband to a place where he was reconciled to Him and following Him until we were 34.  In the waiting years, it was the work of churches, prayer, reading the Bible, understanding better the story of Jesus, worship, serving others in need, and fellowship with other believers that God used as His tools of maturing in both our lives, and I am so thankful that there were people willing to reach out to my husband in Jesus’ name and love back into God’s family.  Can we as the people of God not reach out in love and welcome those outside of God’s fellowship in so that such maturing forces could become active in their lives before they step out into marriage and parenthood?  Wasn’t this exactly the sort of blessing and welcome the author and her husband received and benefitted from, from which their children still benefit today?

Since finding each other at last, there is no doubt that God has used our relationship and marriage and the children with which he has blessed us to mature and shape and refine us beyond what I could have ever thought.  But to God be, the glory, not me or him or those kids!  To God!

Society seems to be hell-bent on defining manhood and womanhood to bolster its particular agenda, depending on the segment of society that you talk to. This is making true love of brother and sister particularly difficult. People working cooperatively vs. competitively is rarer. Reasons to distrust each other are everywhere and emotions are the guiding force for most. For some there is a laundry list of things men do and women don’t and vice versa. For some there is no distinction whatsoever.  The truth is in between.  It all comes back to faith in God.  We are created male and female to support and complement each other, not dominate or subdue the other.  Denying that is denying reality.  We are each and every one of us unique,also, and given gifts and talents and a spirit by our God.  He has given us the Holy Spirit to guide us to all truth, but we have an obligation to have our consciences formed in that faith and that is where our culture is so off track.  People are following their own reasoning. Leaders are using peoples emotions, not Christ’s teaching and love to force their point of view.  Where I live some religious leaders are abusing their authority interfering in lives to gain control of public opinion and justify the liberal agenda.  We are in a serious spiritual crisis and the answer is repentance, prayer, fasting and faith in Jesus Christ.

In the process, parenthood has been devalued, both by society generally, and by a growing number of children whose strongest sense seems to be one of “entitlement.” School and social policy often undermine family and Church, confusing and failing to serve young people well. Like Pinocchio, many children opt for Pleasure Island rather than a more fully satisfying life focused on love of God, family, and Church, a life which requires sustained effort aimed at meeting the needs of others. With so many parents caught up in materialist secularism, who will help growing children to see the bigger picture?

Glenn, It is true. The liberal agenda wants children raised by the world, not two loving parents.  Parental values are undermined in schools and liberal churches. Being a “team player” is more important than being a Christian. It is a spiritual battle so the answers are spiritual weapons.  Educate your children to the socialist agenda.  Reinforce their faith every chance you get. Pray the rosary as a family as long as you can. And choose their friends for them. That’s one place I let my kids down.

Marriage and family are extremely important to society; however, there are some who are called to be single. I think the bigger picture here is we all need to serve one another in love. We need to realize that life isn´t about “me” but about God and about fulfilling His purposes.

I think the aurthor missed the point of the article in writing this response! Kay Hymowitz’s idea of a grown up man is a man that get marreid without a prenuptial agreement & spends the rest of his life taking oreders from her, and tolerates bad behavior from her. FEMINISM IS UTTERLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS, IT’S BECAUSE OF FEMINISTS THAT WE HAVE NO-FAULT DIVORCE.
This has made marragie a raw deal for men, so of course a smart man is never going to eneter an institution which the odds of him losing 50%-75% of everything he has, maybe even more are better than 2-to-1. Especially in Catholic Oriented states such as California, Florida, Texas & Liousiana which were not English colonies, but Spanish & French colonies with heavy catholic systems before becoming (by force) part of the US. Let’s not forget US robbed Mexico of half of her land & the American Cathoic population of the time was fighting on the Mexican side.
Fathers are not around because Women of today don’t want them around, they just want the man’s Child Support money which they in turn can spend however way they like.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO BENEFIT FOR A MAN TO GET MARRIED THESE DAYS, HERE WHAT HE GETS: A punk loud mouthed screaming woman who will not be nurturing to the kids, will not cook or clean, & yet demand that the man pay all the bills, gets fat as hell & lets her self go & is not interested in pleasing him at all, why should she, if he doesn’t like he can leave but not without leaving behind 50-75% of everything he’s got for her plsu additonal pensions.

Dear Juman, Attitude is everything.  I have four brothers who I love dearly so I see both sides of this issue.  Men are not just sexual beings. You are body, heart and soul. Some women only see a source of security and children so you need to look at the character of the girl you are involved with.  Alot of men haven’t developed themselves.  They are happy to settle for stereotypes and then are surprised when they find themselves married to a REAL HUMAN BEING with gifts and flaws, desires and traits, etc. Not having the robot they were looking for they are highly indignant.  That self-giving stuff wasn’t high on their list. They are thinking they are so special the girl should feel lucky to have them!  Wish I knew the mother that raised a son like that. She’d hear an earful.  Really, alot of guys just make a laundry list of flaws when the thrill wears off and it’s too much work to have a real relationship.  Then the woman is the problem - who could possibly live with these flaws! Life is so HARD! Guys just want to be HAPPY. All that responsibility is a bummer and its all HER fault!  Hence the feminist movement.  Women are more than cooks and sex dolls and most men need to grow up.  Most men who struggle with that don’t communicate well so they brood instead.  That’s the real problem. Learn to use WORDS and hear out the woman and use more WORDS until communication happens.  Hopefully nice WORDS.  Then some amazing things happen - understanding, and with understanding perhaps some solutions to issues and with some solutions greater respect and with respect flows love, and with that love and communication comes trust and with the trust comes a stronger bond and all kinds of good things. Don’t give up on true love, sacrificial, Christ-centered love because there are alot of immature people.  You may find one with a great heart that you can grow up with.

There are some good points here, however marriage is the only sacrament that is also defined by the state. And when one party to the covenant decides she’s done, it’s the other party who has to lose half his life’s work and a substantial percentage of his future earnings. He will almost certainly go from being a integral part of his children’s lives to being an every other weekend baby-sitter. I’m a devout Catholic, but I would no sooner marry than I’d saw off my own legs. Almost all interaction with women these days is fraught with peril, from false allegations to the police, or false sexual harassment charges to the HR department at work, to the ultimate danger of actually being so foolish as to marry one. No thanks, I’ll stay celibate, single, childless, and SAFE!

Jason, So fear runs your life, not God.  You of all people should know God is omnipotent.  If you pray for the right girl to come into your life and if you choose a girl who loves God and you are married through the SACRAMENT of marriage, what can overcome that marriage?  You have a rope with three strands as they say: the husband, the wife and God.  A rope with three strands is much harder to break then a rope with two strands. As head of the household you lead your family to pray and to go to Mass and confession and you have nothing to fear. “La Confiance”, St. Therese of the Child Jesus would say! Have confidence in God’s love and care!

I would equate that advice with praying to win at roulette. No offense intended, but you win 100% of the bets you do not make and the only way to win a rigged game is to not play. There is no commandment to marry, so your fear vs. God argument is irrelevant. I’ve seen too many righteous men despoiled of their life’s work and have their children seized from them to ever want the same. An honestly, given that there is a better than even chance that any children I had would end up in a broken home, I think it more holy to prevent that from happening in the only way a man can - not to have them. It seems to me that Holy Mother Church has recognized the reality of the modern situation as can be seen by the hundreds of thousands of annulments granted annually now.

“When women dress immodestly, and men despise religion, it is the beginning of the end” -Seneca

“A man without religion should be pitied. A woman without religion is a horror beyond all things”

Society depends on women’s virtue.  Whether it was biologically there or culturally conditioned and enforced, women were the control gates to men’s insatiable and nondiscriminating sexuality.  Things happen gradually, but surely and irreversibly.

Family and marriage are empty words without women.  The natural difference in sexuality between the sexes makes women the control gates of the morality of society. Once sexual morality goes, so does real religion, so does childhood, so does romance, so does courtship, so does undying love for one person, so does marriage, so does family, so does decency, so does civility, so does almost everything worth living for except sex. Society has given up everything in intangibles for vulgarity and informality.  And the problem is it affects the entire society, not just those that participate in it.  Things happen gradually, but surely and irreversibly.

Jason, You seem to be contradicting yourself.  You say you are a devout Catholic but that is a strange statement for a man who writes like someone with no faith.  A devout Catholic would not rule out marriage because marriage is under attack and fifty percent of couples get divorced. ( Among practicing Catholics it’s only about 25%). A devout Catholic would pray God’s will be done in his life and would grow in love, not misogeny or fear or hopelessness.
Julian, Nothing is irreversible with God.  If you repent and I repent and Jason repents we start a wave of grace.  If we love God and live our faith we draw God’s grace upon us.  Remember Ninevah.  Forty days and God will destroy Ninevah! But the people listened and repented and so God repented. Mother Theresa said to start “one by one by one.  I will love and follow Christ.  Will you?  Amazing things will happen.  God bless.

Jason,
I’m sorry the example of womanhood you have experienced is been so pitiful.  Not all women are what you have described.  Having a good marriage takes work and compromise from both wife and husband.  Both have to work on communication, remembering the other’s “love language”, reaching out during conflict, and many many other things.  Also remember that people change and grow in time.  That doesn’t mean that people should set out to change their spouse because that is impossible and rather egotistical.  It means that when you are married to somebody for a length of time, both you and your spouse change, just make sure that you can change together.  Don’t let hurts make a chasm between you and your spouse.  It’s a tough bill to fill, that is why Christ should be the center of your marriage, and every relationship you have, whether it be you and your friends, spouse, the person you’re dating, your children.  Look for the face of Christ in all of your relationships and in all the people you see.

I agree not all women are like that. Not all hand grenades will explode. I’m not about to choose a hand grenade from a box of hand grenades and pull the pin just because ‘not all hand grenades are like that.’ Marriage is the only sacrament in which a man can partake, uphold his end of the bargain in a holy way, and still have the state and his soon-to-be-ex-wife loot his life’s work, take his children thousands of miles away, and make him pay half or more of his wages for the next two decades or more in a form of modern indentured servitude. This sort of thing does not happen to men who partake of the other sacraments. And as I said, since the church does not enjoin marriage on believers, I see no conflict at all with being a Catholic and a celibate bachelor. There is simply FAR too much risk for no real benefit. Would I like to have children? Of course I would - but I’d rather not have children than to have them taken away from me and dragged across the country and made to call some other man ‘daddy.’ And please spare me the ‘Catholic women don’t do that’ since we ALL know at least one man in this situation, likely more.

So Jason,  Did you come from a broken home?  I know I did.  This is why I fight to stay married and keep my family together.  Not all Catholic men are holy.  Not all divorce is caused by women.  You’re making offensive blanket statements, blaming only women for the ruin of marriage.  I agree that most of the divorces happening aren’t necessary.

Actually, no I did not. And yes, many marriages fail due to men, HOWEVER women file for 80% of them, and I am speaking about the IMPACT of divorce. Most women make out like bandits with alimony and child support payments, plus half of the man’s assets. She usually keeps the house, and almost always gets to kids. These are not offensive statements of blame, but simple facts easily verified. And I was not ‘making offensive blanket statements blaming only women for the ruin of marriage’ - I was answering previous posters who were trying to convince ME I was wrong about why I don’t want to get married. I was answering from my own perspective about my own situation. I know lots of divorced men who have to live with roommates in their 40s and never see their kids, and all the divorced women I know live in the marital home, have nicer cars than the ex, and they all have the children. Sorry, from my point of view, a man would have to be psychotic to risk a marriage in the modern age.

Well, in my families case, yes my mother did file for divorce, there was also many, many documented cases of domestic violence involved in that situation.  As I said the casual divorce or the “no fault divorce” is wrong.  Perhaps you didn’t mean for your comments about women to be offensive, but I find it offensive and see your statements as blanket about all, not just what you have observed.  As with all things worth doing it takes work to make a marriage work, and time and dedication.  With the people you have observed, do you know the ultimate reason for the marital collapse?  Are you fully aware of the circumstances, or what was building up to cause the marriages to fail?  There are many reasons people get divorced and yes, a lot of the reasons are petty.  You don’t want to get married, then don’t get married.  There are plenty of people who are called to be single, and there is nothing wrong with that.  Take care and God bless.

Jason, Still see no faith in your statements and alot of bitterness. You were made to love and be loved!  Sounds like you don’t think anyone could love you for a lifetime and that’s not true. God can overcome obstacles you and your wife face. Grace is real.  and more powerful than “the world.” You sound very young.  Perhaps over time you will mellow on this or perhaps your distrust is God’s way of calling you to single life.  That could be too. You don’t sound like a good sharer! LOL You seem to be hung up on the financial side of things. Not all states give 50/50 splits - usually it depends on the length of the marriage and other factors. But beware your God isn’t money! Also,courts are splitting custody much more evenly these days,should, God forbid a divorce happen. But fear should never be the motivating factor for a Christian, unless it’s fear of God!  God bless.

The fact remains that women are the ones who file for divorce 80% of the time, they agitate for “comparable worth” and affirmative action against men, and then they wonder why there aren’t enought “good” [financially secure and willing to risk alimony] out there.

Mark Twain once said that there are three kinds of lies.  I won’t repeat the first two types, the but third type was “statistics”.  Saying that women file for 80% of divorces really only tells us who filed for the divorce.  It says nothing about who was ultimately responsible for the divorce.  Now I personally believe that most marriages fail for a variety of factors, some of which can be blamed on both the men and the women.  On the flip side though, I am also sure that at least some of the divorces filed by women are definitely the fault of the men.  A woman who files for divorce to get out of an abusive relationship, or because her husband is cheating on her and refuses to amend his ways, regardless of the compromises the woman is willing to make, are really the fault of the men.
Also lets not forget the men who actually let their marriages fail by their own neglect, but never filed for divorce because they didn’t want to be the “bad” guys.
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There are an awful lot of men on here that act more like perpetual victims than men.  Are there feminists who I wouldn’t want to know?  Sure.  But not because they are arguing that a woman doing a comparable job should be paid the same, or that a woman should have the same chance at the job as the man.

I’m 36 actually, and I’ve seen more than enough to be steeled in my resolve. I’m going to ignore the attempts at shaming language and sappy appeals to emotion. I know many men who continue to pay half or more of their paycheck to support a ‘family’ they no longer get to see. Did you know that a man losing his job is no defense about falling behind on alimony and child support? There are literally men in prison in this country because they got laid off and couldn’t meet the financial demands of an ex. The original article focuses on why men don’t want to get married or grow up anymore. I’m but one of millions. There is absolutely no benefit to it anymore, and WAY too much risk. Would you bet on a roll of the dice, where you bet half or more of all your assets, and half or more of your future pay, plus access to your children - when they only thing you ‘win’ if your number hits, is the right to keep what you already had before? Until the laws regarding divorce and custody in this country are RADICALLY changed, don’t be surprised that ever increasing numbers of men simply refuse to play.

I have just realized what is bothering me about some of the men here.  They talk about marriage in terms of risks versus rewards.  Any man or woman who thinks about marriage in these terms is of course going to have a negative view of marriage; and not just today, they would have found reasons to complain about it 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years ago.
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Marriage is not about reward, particularly not reward in this life.  Christian Marriage, which is what I hope we are all talking about here, is about sacrifice.  The moment I said I do, I agreed to put aside my needs for those of my wife and future children.  Whether I am “Legally Married” or “Divorced”, I made a commitment to my wife and God that my needs come after hers and our children.
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Thus, while I might complain about how easy it is to get a divorce in this country, I won’t complain about how men are obligated to support their ex-wives and children.  In this case, state law only reflects God’s law.  My marriage may “legally end”, but my obligation to them can never end.
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Marriage is about making the decision, every day, to love.  And deciding to love means deciding to sacrifice.  The days of living for myself are over.  I live now for my wife and my children.  God willing, if I am ever faced with the choice, I hope I would have the strength to choose to die them (Though obviously I would much rather live for them).
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Now, I am not saying marriage doesn’t have rewards; it does.  I can tell you right now I am fundamentally happier living my current life of sacrifice.  But I also know there are times when it is rather hard to choose to love my wife and children (and I am sure my wife would say the same thing about choosing to love me :)).  To get married for the rewards is setting yourself up for failure.
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One last thought.  Did God become man for the rewards?  Or because he was willing to sacrifice himself for our sake?  In marriage we are called to be like Christ for our spouse.

To Maryland Bill and Don and Jason,  There is one other aspect to this attitude. It is dangerous because it leads to misogeny and this misogeny is tool some homosexuals will use to convince a young man they are homosexual.  You need to love your sisters.  If society is harming them and you, don’t fight the men and women, fight the attitudes and politics that are feeding it.

Pam:
“Misogeny”?
The whole string of posts began with a man-despising essay complaining that there “aren’t enough good [wealthy] men.”  Stop looking down on men so much.

Don, When women are always the problem,as some of these last posts are intimating: women do the divorcing, women take what they haven’t earned and don’t deserve, women steal the children from the father- then you are developing a unhealthy attitude of dislike for women instead of objectively looking at the individual situations.  You are stereotyping and developing hatred for women.  That’s all I’m saying.  You are in sin and inviting more serious sin. Stereotyping men is just as bad. But I haven’t seen that here.  The men are saying why they aren’t committing and it is boiling down to fear, stereotyping and labelling - none of which is particularly Christian.

Interesting discussion, I think probably more than a few guys see things Jason’s way, especially those who know guys in those situations; this doesn’t make pessimism the right answer though.  This view kinda blame’s women for taking everything, but regardless of the outcome, I can guarantee the whole issue is not the women’s fault alone.  Usually it’s mutual selfishness with the tit for tat mentality.  I’ve heard that by the time couples reach the phase of realizing there is a problem, far too much baggage has accumulated for them to sort out alone.  The prescription seems to lay in mutual respect, willingness to forgive, honesty, willingness to die to selfish gains, willingness to trust, etc. Basically, the Gospel message. 

The sense I get is that society thinks all this can magically be yours along while pursuing pretty much anything you desire, and, that’s kinda the whole lie of it all.  Society is in big trouble because they think they can scrounge these personal characteristics up somehow without work and sacrifice, even worse, without a relationship with God.  There are many ways of going astray, but there is only one way back, and that’s through Jesus and us changing as people.  Anything else won’t cut it.

Alex, Not only is society telling the lie, the liberal agenda is jumping right in there to divide the families.  For example, not happy?, we’ll make her (or him)look like the bad guy and we’ll put pressure on the Church to loose the sins of divorce, homosexuality, oppression of women (sure takes alot of pressure off the Church to loose the monkey of homosexuality off their back and is alot easier than conversion!) and who knows what other sins.  It’s all done under the guise of “compassion” (none for the victims that I can see) and the fruit is incredibly destructive.  In my area people actually judge families and marriages and drop little destructive hints about how much better it would be to leave. They promote negative gossip etc.  What happened to “What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”  Liberal priests are involved in this, probably because of the coverup of homosexuality in the priesthood but whatever the reason, it is not Catholicism or Christianity.

Pam, I’m just asking you “Christian Feminists” to stop attacking men. Who’s the one who has an unhealthy attitude here?

It’s a two way street Don, there has been plenty of attacks here on both sides.  I think rather then attacking each other perhaps we can come up with solutions to problems.  If people don’t want to change they aren’t going to, the best we can do is to serve as examples of what we ought to be doing in our marriages and with our spouses rather then being destructive to each other.

As a mental health professional and a survivor of the 70’s, I support most of the casual factors that so may posters have written here, related to the decline of family, faith and culture. Wandering from faith in those days, many of us gleefully took advantage of the “newfound freedoms” that contraception and the overall libertine mentality offered us. Sadly, thousands of young women were our willing partners, assuming that they could not only be “equal” to men but to be free to “act like men”. I had a friend from college a number of years ago defend her 2 year period of causal sex and a string of “boyfriends” in those days by responding to my inquiry as to why, with “if girls didn’t have casual sex, then with whom would guys have it with?”. This was a young woman raised in a Christian home by conservative middle class parents. She had bought the societal message that pleasure trumped responsibility and that she should not ever be judged. Well, that conversation was over thirty years ago and at a recent reunion she tearfully remembered and retracted her story, sharing the her history of abortions and failed marriages (her husbands being unable to fathom her past, when revealed). This sad case is only one personal example of the hundreds of casualties of the sexual revolution that I have treated in the last 28 years. Now many approach and enter middle age, filled with guilt (much if it appropriate)and have lost their way. I pray for them, as well as myself everyday and hope in his infinite mercy our saviour will rescue us and our nation. However, I fear that the enormity of our national sins (60,000,000+ abortions, promiscuity, homosexuality, the list goes on)may be too much for us to bear and that the battle is lost, except in small pockets of faith across the land. I pray I am wrong.

Don Please point out ONE comment of mine that is an attack on men!? The name calling seems to be coming from you whenever a valid point is made.  “Christian feminist?” “It shall not be like that among you.  No male and female, slave or free…” Jesus.

Pam:
“The men are saying why they aren’t committing and it is boiling down to fear, stereotyping, and labeling—none of which is particularily Christian.”  You don’t regard THAT comment as an attack on men?
Marriage used to be a covenant between two people.  If modern-day “marriage” means that the man has to commit himself whatever the woman wants, and men become gun-shy, don’t attack the men.

Don, Absolutely NOT! Saying that the reasons men are giving are based in fear -“I’ll lose everything.”, stereotyping- “women are the problem. they take the money and the kids and file for the divorce. they make out like bandits (when in fact most women who head households suffer greatly financially as do their children)” and labeling-“Christian feminist, reason for the problem” is mereley pointing out the flaw in the argument and the lack of Christianity in the thinking that is leading to this. It isn’t an attack on MEN it is refuting bad logic and showing the lack of Christianity in the thinking!
Modern day marriage doesnt mean men have to do whatever the woman wants.  It means what it always meant - the union of a man and a woman under God, loving each other and growing in love for God, accepting children into their family and loving them. Serving each other and serving God through the love and care they give to each other in the family.  It is not a domination thing.  It is a loving thing.  It is not a material thing. It is a spiritual thing that has material aspects.

Kell:
The initial attacks, such as the article, come from women.  I won’t defend myself if you stop atacking.

Pam:
So when are you going to stop attacking men for pointing out the reasons that they say that they’re gun-shy about “committment”?
Maybe you may believe that all men—or at least the ones who are “good providers”—are called to be martyrs who serve women while women have no complimentary responsibilities, but that means that you have more of the dominatrix than the Christian in you.

Don I have not been attacking.  I have been showing the error of the thinking without name-calling and with logic and Christian principles.  Very different from attacking. Men staying married and growing in love and faith is martyrdom?  Women doing the same is not? Isn’t every Christian called to die to themselves?  Isn’t growing in love overcoming our selfishness and so is martyrdom for both! Women have no complimentary responsibilities?  Where is all that coming from?

And Pam:
I’ve only been pointing out the facts, and showing the error in your thinking, which cares nothing for the poor suffering men in our country.  (Just writing like a woman there.)

Don, No you have been accusing and name calling and writing responses that do not take into account the teaching of Jesus Christ.  If you are suffering in your relationship with a woman, how have you communicated your suffering?  Can you carry on a civil conversation with her stating particular instances of behavior and how it made you feel or do you just expect her to read your mind?

Folks, I think the best talk about marriage came from a man named Stephen Valgos (I think I spelled his last name wrong) it is from his talk about the sacraments.  He was talking about how married men and women should be with each and what marriage can be if we are willing to live the sacrament.  I’m sure you can google him and find his website.

Pam:
Who’s been doing the accusing and name calling here?  I’m merely responding to the attacks on men that women made—even the ones who believe that “the teaching of Jesus Christ” condemns normal male behavior and that men should leave the Church.

Don, I just reread the article and it is not a man-hating article.  (Labeling it that is an accusatory thing isn’t it?) Where did you read any comment that made you think someone thinks “men should leave the Church?”  And you HAVE responded to statements that are not accusatory as if they are.  The objections that are raised in the article are not “normal male behavior” when the behavior results in men being afraid of or disliking women because of a perceived danger.  Something has gone wrong when things are at that point.  I can understand someone seriously dating someone and deciding that the persons actions make them unable to trust them. But I can’t understand not trying to get to know someone because you think EVERY woman is not able to be trusted. That’s just not healthy.  If you are there, that’s not normal and I hope you learn to overcome it on your own or you get help to overcome it.

Pam,
You say potayto and I say potahto.  You really don’t think your bashing men?

I find it funny that I was accused of bashing women when all I pointed out was that the legal system is so amazingly stacked against men that a man risks almost everything to become married, not to mention the societal and religious pressure to be the primary provider.

Women on the other hand, have an enormous financial incentive to divorce, are almost certain to get custody, and can easily destroy a man’s life with a false accusation of violence.

This does not say ANYTHING about women, but merely the LEGAL system that has made marriage so amazingly unappealing to men.

That said, men took the venomous attacks of feminists for decades, and those men like myself who were raised by feminists have never seen marriage as anything approaching appealing. Now that men are beginning to break the taboo of speaking out against anti-male policies and statements, we’re the bad guys?

With no apologies to Steinem - Bicycles are finding fish quite expensive these days.

No Don, this is not potayto/potahto.  This is much more serious.

Jason, You are stating opinions as facts and this is a Catholic blog and yet you want an eye for an eye (even though it isn’t the women who are attacking). The truth is that women and children are often forced into poverty through divorce.  The truth is every divorce is a unique situation and they shouldn’t all be lumped together. The truth is refraining from marrying because nonchristians divorce at a high rate is a reaction of fear or anxiety and shows a lack of faith.  God is all powerful and He loves you.  If He is involved in your choices then what is happening will be blessed with His grace. Do you see that?  When you use labelling language you are attacking.  I wish you peace and pray that YOU pray about this.  God bless.

An eye for an eye? Really?
The original article was on the subject of why MEN aren’t behaving the way women want them to, and how fewer and fewer of them are marrying. I offered a very cogent observation that the manifest and inherent inequality in the laws regarding marriage and divorce are an enormous part of this phenomenon.
And ‘labeling language’? How about your ad hominem use of shaming language? What about the inherently anti-male bias in culture that presupposes there is some ‘way’ in which men should behave and that pattern of behavior is decided by men? How is this in any way different that women being told by men that the only appropriate way for them to behave is to be barefoot and pregnant?
And personally, attacking my Catholicism because I point this out is less than charitable, and dare I say, less than Christian.

Jason the title of this article says “(Wo)Men” because the author brought up points from BOTH sides. Yes,an eye for an eye because your reasoning is reactionary, not based on gospel truth or God’s law of love or your individual dating experience, but on statistics. And nice try with the “shaming” language ploy.  Stating the truth is shaming?  I believe the shaming came from your conscience not what I wrote!  The cultural bias you speak of exists for men AND women and as we mature we ignore it if we believe it is wrong in light of the gospel! I confronted the discrepancies of your statements with Catholic teaching.  That is not attacking your Catholicism.  It is calling attention to how your statements don’t follow Catholic Christianity. It is what a brother or sister in Christ should do if they see you heading so far off course.  We are called to admonish one another.  It is the height of charity to correct an error rather than to watch it balloon out of control. Sometimes people think political correctness is Christian.  It most definitely IS NOT!  Sorry if you   felt attacked. It was not meant that way.  Peace of Christ.

I did not in anyway contradict Holy Mother Church’s teaching on the sacrament of marriage. I illustrated why men are choosing to avoid it. And to be honest, the article written by Kay Hymowitz in the first place was decidedly NOT limited to Catholics. You disagree with me, and that’s fine. But I challenge you to find any place where I either lied or contradicted the magisterium vis a vis marriage. You’re admonishing me to either get married, or to be silent about unfair divorce laws - not to correct me on a matter of doctrine.

Pam,
if women are forced into poverty by divorce, why is it that 80% of divorces are begun by women?
Could an incident that I know personally about have something to do with this?  One wife abandoned her husband for a far wealthier man, but since she and her boyfriend weren’t married, while in reality she became far wealthier, he was the one who the courts forced to pay alimony and child support.

Both sides are forced into life changes with a divorce.  A 2 income household becomes a one income house hold.  Whom ever has custody gets paid child support if they are lucky.  There are many people who don’t pay child support.  Yes I agree that custody is primarily given to women, in many cases men don’t fight for their children.  If there where more men willing to fight for 50/50 custody then there would be no child support issues.  Alimony is only granted if the spouse in question didn’t work outside of the home for the majority of the marriage, or didn’t make as much as the other spouse.  I know a few women who pay alimony to their ex husbands.  I know a few men who have full custody of their children and receive child support and alimony from their ex wives.  The original article was very sexist to be sure.  Let’s be honest in the fact that both men and women are to blame for the pathetic state of marriage in today’s world.  There are still people who are working on their marriages, there are still people who are called to be single.  Instead of arguing about which gender is right or wrong, or who profits more from divorce; perhaps we should look at how we can educate people who are married in communication, compromise, and when to seek help in their marriages.  Maybe if the “no fault” divorce wasn’t so appealing people would look at how to fix the relationship rather then get a divorce.  Just a thought.

Jason, Your arguments for not marrying are not the arguments of a Christian.  That is my point and that is the point.  You use a statistic from who knows where that 80% of divorces are begun by women but you take it totally at face value. You don’t look at what makes the woman file as Maryland Bill pointed out. That is not loving neighbor as you want to be loved.  I am certainly not admonishing you to get married nor am I asking you to be silent about unfair divorce laws, but you are making general statements that are not really accurate at all to bolster your position instead of seeking the real truth.  And I am admonishing you that it is not Christian to base your decisions on fear or stereotyping!

Don, Many women begin divorces because they can’t take it any more and in that sense it is a failure to carry the cross.  They file because of mental abuse,verbal abuse, physical abuse, cheating husbands, they are cheating, the spouse has a substance abuse problem or gambles or has emotionally deserted them. They file because the husband is passive aggressive and is pushing them to be the one to file. They file because the husband will not work or hits the children or is a control freak or emotionally unstable or extremely immature.  They divorce because they can not discuss anything without being called a name.  They divorce because the man is so insensitive that they have killed every ounce of love the woman had and on and on.  The list is as varied as the people filing for divorce, but in EVERY case a divorce is a failure of the commandment to LOVE by one spouse or the other or both and it is a tragedy. Your example of a woman marrying someone wealthier is a failure to love.  What made the wealthy man attractive? Is all she wanted from life money or did the relationship she was in have issues that made her weaken and settle for money since she gave up on finding true love?  Divorce is never Jesus’ choice for us.  We forget sometimes our real goal in life is to be with God forever in heaven- eternally!  That is not going to be achieved without the cross.  If Jesus was at the forefront of our minds all the time, that bad day someone is having wouldn’t turn into a bad week or month or lifetime.

I think we can all agree that men and women alike have allowed pride and selfishness to wreak havoc on the institution of marriage…

For every Christian man who values his property and prosperity to much to risk a marriage, there is a Christian woman who remains unable to bear children and live life as God intended it.

Who knows how she squanders her time while she waits in vain for the hard-working man for whom she would love to bear children?

Perhaps it is old-fashioned to speak in this way, but I see so many good young women wasting their time, waiting and wishing for a good man that will never come. The “good” men, in turn, are holed up in little bunkers of marginal success, a marginally nice car, and entertainment with television and internet to fill the void.

Sad. That’s now how God intends us to live our lives. I think we can all agree on that.

There is a new factor working against marriage these days. It is that network of people who think they are “helping” when all they are doing is destroying. (maybe that’s the plan.)  So much gossip and sin and enabling and everyone is ok with it.  Liberals want to destroy Church teaching and go after Catholic couples too. We live in a very difficult time.  Hope people are reading the signs of the times.

Pam,
if “mental abuse,” a “passive agressive” husband, one who isn’t wealthy enough (“will not work”...in the present economy?) is a good excuse for a woman to destroy her marriage, can you blame men for being gun-shy?
And why don’t we have it that when the wife leaves the husband keeps the kids and doesn’t have to pay alimony?

Don, There is no good excuse to destroy a marriage. Period. And it is particularly abhorrent when it is a group effort. Jesus could not have been clearer.  When He is in the picture GRACE happens and love can grow and wounds can heal.  In some ways divorce is like abortion.  Pressure mounted, people were hurt and afraid and society didn’t want to hear about it or put their money where their mouth was so sin happened.  A marriage ended, a baby died.  Believers should still not be gun-shy because they aren’t just anybody.  They have an army in heaven on their side and they have the sacraments to help them day to day.  They understand that every life has a cross and usually many crosses and they have the examples of Jesus and Mary and Joseph and all the saints to guide them.  They know their partner is a soul that Christ paid dearly for and that He “thirsts” for their salvation. The believer’s focus is broader than happiness NOW in this world.  They can bear some suffering for a greater good.  That kind of example bears fruit. Jesus promised it would. And it is always easier to bear if it is embraced.  Resenting the burden of the disabled or the loss of freedom and joy of total health, resenting that your partner has faults and failings, resenting that you know better and aren’t listened to, resenting that life is more expensive and you want more - it just adds to the cross.  There is beauty and love and grace all around and God shows it to us when we need it.  He is giving my daughter puppies to see and talk to at college, for example.  Whatever is good, whatever is beautiful… that’s what Jesus said to focus on.

Jesus also said to for us to be wise as serpents, and ignoring the reality of the world out of some sense of hoping really really hard that things aren’t like that is madness! The Church did not hope and wish away the Islamic hordes drawing down on Europe - instead they organized their members to do combat against the enemies of the church. Walking headfirst into a dangerous trap is not being wise as serpents…

Oh Jason, You are not open to faith.  Believing God is true to His word is not madness. It is not hoping and wishing. It’s a kind of knowing.  You aren’t wise as a serpent when you are closed to love because secular marriages fail at an alarming rate. You are foolish for letting the world run your beliefs.  The world looks at men and women as sex obects.  They see sexual threats whenever a man and a woman are in proximity.  They are living in a cesspool.  They don’t see a soul or a brother or sister in Christ.  They don’t care that women were made to complement men and work side by side with them.  We have to let our light shine and not hide it under a bushel basket and desexualize our own little corner of the world and make it more truly loving and holy. (Not so easy with the music playing in most workplaces!)  When you relate to women as sisters in Christ, treating them with the love and respect a daughter of God should have, they may be confused at first, but they’ll see the difference and understand what they have been missing and they’ll look at you as a human being, not a sex object.  It’s catching.

Pam, the issue is not men looking at women like sex objects, it’s women looking at men like ATM machines.

Sorry Jason, You just don’t seem to have love in you.  God bless.

Pam,
If you really believed that all Christians should “trust in God,” wouldn’t you insist that all women sign pre-nups before they get married, in which they promise to refuse to ask for alimony or child support, and promise to go for joint custody, if they’re the ones who leave the marriage?

The fact is that divorce doesn’t solve the problems.  Just because you get a divorce doesn’t mean that your spouse goes away, nor does it mean the problems go away.  Chances are in the next relationship the same problems will follow that person with the added baggage of an ex spouse.  I believe people need to look at the person they want to marry and really get to know that person, learn how to communicate, and problem solve.  Not all women are bad people, that’s not to say that there aren’t some out there, just like not all men are abusive, that’s not to say that there aren’t some out there.  Jason’s example of the hand grenade is inaccurate because of the simple fact that the hand grenade is designed to blow up.  Men and women are designed to complement each other and to be holy.  People are made by God to be holy and happy.  We abuse the freedom given to us by our Father, most especially in marriage.  Marriage is about having a family and having the freedom to be loved completely for the person you are and the person you are becoming.  There are those who abuse that freedom by abusing their spouse and children.  Some spouses allow themselves to become cold to the other, others have issues with adultery, others still believe that they don’t need to work on the marriage because it’s the responsibility of the other.  I believe that the immature attitudes of both men and women are to blame.  There is no such thing as “happily ever after” life is never that easy.  There are always complications and because of our immaturity, we can always find somebody else to blame for our failings in both our marriages and ever other aspect of our lives.  We can be innocent victims or we can be the heros or anything else we choose to paint to the others around us, anything to deflect any part of the responsibility away from ourselves.  Terrified to admit that we aren’t perfect and blameless for the problems in our lives.  Rather then trying to make the whole situation look like the fault of the other, how about we look at the whole picture, what behavior do I have that triggers this behavior in my spouse?  How can I approach this situations differently for a better outcome?  For better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health for as long as you both shall live.  Those are the vows I took, and I intend to keep them.  I gave my word not only to my husband, but to God, and everyone there to witness our wedding, I have no intention of breaking my word, I don’t care what the world says.

Don, How about we make men sign an agreement that says they understand the two become one?  If you are Christian you shouldn’t be so wrapped up in losing material goods.  Especially when it’s child support!  So many men hate their wives so much the kids live in poverty or on public assistance.  This just shows how sinful divorce is.  As bad as a marriage is, if God is allowed in it can heal.  That’s just the truth.  And when sin is the victor all this bitterness and hatred festers.  I have seen many men who have shown me they married the “wrong” woman or that the woman has a REALLY aggravating flaw.  And from appearances there is no doubt they have a cross, but that cross gets infinitely heavier because they resent it.  Instead of speaking frankly and with love about faults or being a positive partner to overcome them, they detach or put down or yell or blame - all sinful behavior that gets more sin.  Instead of working to grow together with the “wrong” woman, they refuse to joyfully do any joint activity. They distance themselves even further despite the fact that they had plenty in common when they decided to get married or some of the nastier ones sabotage the woman, preying on the weakness and making it worse.  Some of them network and bombard the wives (or husbands) to show them how flawed they are. Some women are so beaten down by this.  Some handle it better because they have Christ and at least recognize the brokenness of a man who would do this. The men have forgotten that whatever you do to the least you do to Jesus Christ.  If Christ were ALLOWED in the marriage the perspective would change and the
communication would change and grace would work miracles.  People have forgotten that our faith is a faith of the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ in our lives.  I read St.Paul’s letter to Galatians in its entirety today and his message basically boiled down to “You have seen the power of the Holy Spirit in your life while I was with you.  You saw miracles! What happened to you, you foolish people that you are going back to following a bunch of laws when you have been given the miraculous, incredible gift of faith and grace? No one is saved by laws. The flesh is useless to us. The things of the world have no more attraction to us. We have died to it. We are saved by a faith that acknowledges and EXPECTS the miraculous!! A faith that KNOWS Jesus Christ is God and is true to His word.  Ask and you WILL receive. Seek and you WILL find. Knock and it SHALL be opened unto you - that kind of loaves and fishes faith. Don’t go backward.” Don can you imagine how many marriages would be saved if couples understood Jesus can and will do ANYTHING and held God to his promise?

Pam, the issue is that ONE partner (almost always the wife) can simply hit the eject button, leave, take most of the property, and go shack up with someone else while the man’s kids are in the new place with the new stud. If the husband is totally on board with the church’s teachings and is a devout man, it makes no difference in the reality of what happens. You say I have no love in me, but after reading your posts, I think what you mean is that I have no delusion in me. I can see how it’d be hard for you to tell the difference.
And as to child support - this would not be an issue if it was an automatic split of 50% custody. The parent who had them would feed and clothe them 50% of the time. The myth of the deadbeat dad is one of the greatest propaganda victories of the feminist movement. A man is assessed child support as a percentage of his income, not the needs of the child. This amount does not take into account alimony, nor does it consider the income from any assets or businesses he may have lost in the divorce. And here’s the rub - in almost all cases, IT CANNOT BE LOWERED! That means that a man who gets fired the day after his divorce is finalized must pay child support or else he is in contempt of court. There’s a case before the Supreme Court right now about a homeless man who was imprisoned for a year because he couldn’t pay his child support. Not only was he homeless, he was not even afforded a lawyer. If women really want men to call off the marriage strike, then they should begin loudly advocating for the total reform of divorce and custody laws. Until then, there is simply WAY too much risk in marriage.
The church should take the lead by performing the marriage ceremony without a state license. This would have no effect on the sacrament, as no no one must be licensed to be baptized or confirmed, but would prevent one spouse from looting the other if/when they leave.
And Don - pre-nuptual agreements are voided every day in so-called family courts across this land, and the worst thing about it is that pre-nups do not affect custody of the children. Even if you get a 50/50 split in writing, it has no effect. Ironically, an unmarried couple who sign a parenting contract and file it with the court have the legal right to agree on custody in the event of a split, but married couples do not.

Folks, not that I have any authority here, but don’t you folks think you have reached a point where the only thing to do is agree to disagree?

That being said, I would point out, to those who suggest that one way out of the crisis is prenups, that pre-nuptial agreements are incompatible with the very idea of Christian (and especially Catholic) marriage.  How can you claim to have made a life long commitment to another person if you have made plans, even before the marriage starts, as to how it is going to end?

The final thought is that blame rests on both men and women.  The man who tries to blame women and the woman who tries to blame men, in my mind, more often than not only highlights their own part in the decline of marriage as an institution.  If both sides wait for the other to make the first move to correct the problem, I very much fear that the problem will only get worse.  Both sides need to remember that in marriage, we are called to love our spouse unconditionally (not uncritically… we are suppose to help them improve after all); we are called to sacrifice a big part of who we were as single men and women to embrace a new identity as husbands and wives.  When we embrace that vocation totally, and stop trying to hang on to what is “mine”, marriage can become what God meant it to be.

Mary [and Bill?],
If a woman signs a pre-nup agreeing not to go for alimony or child support and agreeing to joint custody if she’s the one who leaves, why is that incompatible with the idea of sacrimental marriage?  After all, isn’t it her leaving and going for a divorce that’s against the idea of sacrimental marriage?

EXACTLY Don! I’d happily sign a solemn pledge using my blood as ink pledging to never overthrown the government of Poland. Why? Because it is so far beyond my intention that I am 1000% certain I’ll never have to worry about it. Any person committing to a true sacramental marriage would have no issue signing a pre-nup either. And to be technical, remarriage is really the issue when speaking of a sacramental bond. A Catholic couple could split, and as long as they’re celibate from then on, they’re not in sin.
And something else no one here has mentioned - between 10-30% of men worldwide are raising children that are not theirs. In the US, proof that you are not the father is not enough to have child support rescinded. The divorce laws in this country are so insane that there is no way a relatively sane man would ever marry. Widespread ignorance of these laws is the only reason an ever decreasing number of men still do it.

Don, I misspoke earlier.  Prenups in and of themselves are not incompatible with Catholic Marriage.  That being said, prenups that involve the dissolution of a marriage prior to the death of one or both spouses are incompatible.
—
Yes, her leaving is incompatible with the idea of sacramental marriage, but so is making plans for her to leave.  Marriage is in some sense like Cortes burning his ships.  If you leave yourself an “out” you are not fully committed to the marriage.  In fact, the marriage ceremony requires the couple to confirm that they are giving themselves freely and without reservation.  A prenup of the type we are discussing is a big reservation.  It says, I am giving myself fully to you, unless…
—
Now you might argue that if the woman signs the prenup agreeing to limitations on what she can receive in a divorce, she is not placing reservations on the marriage.  You might be right, but the husband (who also needs to sign the agreement after all) is!
—
When I got married, I agreed to give my whole self and everything I own to my wife and she agreed to do the same.  Now, obviously we don’t succeed in this every day (or even most days), but we are obligated to try.
—
I will also point out that even if prenups were not prohibited by the Church, I would be against them for several reasons.  The first is that I believe that they set up for failure.  In WWI, pilots were generally not given parachutes, not because they were not available, but because it was believed that pilots might bail out of planes that could be saved.  Now that calculus applied to air planes is shocking, but it is one that should be applied to marriage!  If you have a way of bailing out of the marriage, I think you are more likely to take it than if you have left yourself no outs.
—
The second reason is that often, while the woman may file the divorce, it is the husband who bears the greater blame (not always, or maybe even most of the time) for the failure of the marriage.  If the husband was abusive or habitually unfaithful, the wife might have no recourse other than ending the marriage.  Such prenups could essentially be used by such predators to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions.

I shouldn’t have let myself get pulled back into this debate.  Jason, I am offended that you think the only reason that I and other men get married is because we are ignorant of the laws regarding the divorce and child support in this country.  If I found out today, that somehow I was not actually married to my wife, and I could walk away from the marriage without any consequences, I would do my best to make sure that we were married by the end of the day!
—
So much of this thread keeps focusing on how little advantage is in marriage for men.  Well marriage is not about advantages to me; its about sacrifice.  I did not choose to get married because I would be better off (though I think I am!), I did it because I loved the woman who became my wife, and I realized that with her, I could live out a vocation to God.  So, hopefully there will be a benefit to me from this marriage; God’s grace to live the vocation faithfully and thus be found worthy of God’s salvation!

Jason, I think you are hurting more than I think you don’t love. and I think you haven’t yet experienced how wonderful your God is and how much he loves you. Alot of the “facts” you state are just plain inaccurate, at least in my state.  Alot of women work hard at their marriages and don’t want divorce. There are alot of men who quit their jobs rather than pay a dime and in my state divorced couples spend way too much time fighting over lowering/raising support.  You are way too attached to money. Forget about the prenup unless you have special circumstances that require it.  You must have no faith in your own ability to judge a woman’s character!  You say you have no delusion in you, but the delusion is that you think you are Christian when you aren’t open to God’s grace and that you think you are Christian when you speak of women as hatefully as you do! Don’t you see it when you reread your posts?  God bless.

Mary and Bill,
Read Jason’s post; that’s exctly my point.  That women expect men to “commit” themselves while there’s no corresponding obligation for women to commit themselves to a sacrimental mariage for life is not Christian (because women qare free to leave) it’s a one-sided deal.

Don, I think you will find I did read Jason’s post.  Here is the thing, we, as men, cannot blame women for our lack of commitment.  I am sure that women are to blame for their share of failed marriages (Though I refuse to believe that initiating a divorce is the same thing as being responsible for the divorce), but that is irrelevant.  You don’t marry women, you marry a woman and there are certainly enough successful marriages to show that their are many women out there who are fully committed to their marriages. 
—
When God calls you to a vocation, which marriage is, the proper response is to embrace that vocation.  The Church and our world would be far poorer if everyone who received God’s call started trying to figure out if saying yes to God was in their best interest or not. 
—
Ultimately you and Jason are using inherently selfish arguments to justify not embracing a vocation that is inherently selfless.  Marriage would be hard even if there were no divorces.

Maryland Bill?
If men are called to the vocation of marriage, and should get married, aren’t women called to shun divorce?  And if they do feel oblidged to separate, shouldn’t they also shun Alimony—because, after all, they’re still married in the eyes of the Church?
Arguing that women have no moral obligations while men have many isn’t Christianity, it’s misandry.

Don,
1. Don’t you think your insult of me (not to mention the vulgar and profane way you expressed it) is unworthy of a post on a Catholic Blog?
—
2. No one here is claiming that women have no obligations, nor that they have no failings.  On the flip side, what I am saying is that I cannot, as a person, fix women or men.  Only God can do that.  Further, avoiding marriage to protect oneself (and I wonder how many men who do that are willing to live chaste lives?), or trying to place preconditions on a marriage based on the ending of said marriage are ultimately incompatible with Church teaching about marriage.
—
If I want to change someone, I can only do my best to live the best Christian life I can and pray that I may be an instrument of God’s grace in the life of the person I want to change.  In other words, if we want women to be better wives, as men, all we can do is pray and try to be better husbands. 
—
Here is a few closing thoughts.  If you want to get married and make the marriage last, embrace what the Church teaches on marriage.  Did you know the success rate on marriages that practice NFP faithfully is over 90%?

Don, I didn’t realize that we had gone to insult land.  MarylandBill is stating his perspective.  I think you will find that many people share it, and no not just the “pussy-whipped” men.  What is wrong with MarylandBill having this perspective as a man?  Does it threaten you in some way?  Alimony is for the spouse who didn’t work outside the home during the marriage.  Honestly it is irresponsible to cut ties with no obligation to the other.  As far as child support goes, if more men would fight for their children, they wouldn’t be responsible for paying child support, they would have their children at least 50% of the time.  Yes the court system is more in favor of women keeping custody, but if fathers would fight for custody they would get it.

Kell,
“Let a woman learn in silence, with all submissiveness.  I permit no woman to teach or over men; she is to keep silent.” (1 Timothy 2:11-12)

Okay, that sentence from 1 Timothy 2:11-12 should read “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men,” and it probably only refers to during Mass; but where do women get the idea that God calls them to be dominatrixes?
Just this morning it was mentioned that feminists are suing Walmart over the “comparable worth” issue; they feel that just because women don’t put in the same hours or stay as many years as the men, they should be paid the same (on average, not if they work the same hours or years).
And women still complain that there aren’t enough “good” (well-paid) men out there (by the way, there are 13 single men for every 10 single woman in their twenties) and that women shouldn’t be denied alimony just because they’re the ones who broke up the marriage.

Don, I would be very careful of pulling scripture passages out of the Bible like that.  Yes, Paul is essentially stating that women are not to be church leaders (i.e., bishops and priests), nor to preach in church, that does not mean they are enjoined to keep silent about all things.  Did not Mary, the mother of God, instruct the waiters at the wedding feast of Cannan?  Was it not Mary Magdeline who was first charged with bearing witness to Christ’s resurrection?

Don, I would in turn like to refer you to Ephesians 5:21-32.  Enjoy the read.

Don,
You do realize you are no longer even approaching any form of argumentation that is going to win anyone over to your position?  You increasingly appear to simply be a bitter misogynist.  BTW, where did you get the “stat” about the ratio of single men to women?

Mary(and Bill?),
Mary Magdalene was NOT one of the apostles; it is usually theorized the the point of her position in the Resurrection narratives is that we should listen even to women, not that we should obey them.
Kell,
How exactly does Ephesians 5:21-32 cancel out 1 Timothy 2:11-12?  We may be all equal in the sight of God, but that doesn’t mean that women should have authority over men.

And Mary (let’s get serious, obviously Bill doesn’t have any say in that marriage),
While it’s true that I won’t be able to convince anyone who’s insanely feminist, I still feel poblidged to defend true Catholicism against any attempt to replace the covenant relationship between husband and wife with a one-sided relationship in which women have authority over men.

Husband and wife are to be subordinate to one another in the forum of marriage.  1 Timothy 2:11-12 is speaking directly about women not having authority over men in church, not in marriage.  What I’ve referenced doesn’t cancel out 1 Timothy 2:11-12, it puts this argument back in perspective in the forum of marriage.

Oh and Don, Did you ever think that MarylandBill might just be in Maryland?  Just a thought.

Ok, yes for the record, Maryland is my state (as was indicated earlier in this discussion actually), my wife has a different name entirely which I will not divulge to protect her privacy.
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Believe it or not, I do have a say in the marriage.  In fact, my wife and I both strive very hard to maintain a proper marriage.  I see my role as husband and father to be similar to that of an abbot in a monastery; when decisions are to be made, the best option is to reach consensus.  If consensus cannot be reached, then it is my job to make the decision, but tempering that decision such that it is not my desires, but the good of the family and the good of the individuals in the family that rule that decision.  I rightfully should come last in those decisions… I don’t always succeed, but it is the goal I strive for.
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Don, there are two principle things that bother me about your arguments.  The first is that you show no charity towards women in your argument.  You seem to be now trying to swing it towards feminists, but even then, you don’t seem to understand that there are some legitimate (from a Catholic perspective) feminist issues (equal wages and economic opportunities for example), and illegitimate issues (abortion for example).  The second problem is that your arguments are not rooted in any proof.  In other words, your entire set of arguments about marriage is based on one factoid—that the majority of divorces are initiated by women.  The problem is that initiating a divorce is not the same as being the one at fault in the divorce.  Lets provide an hypothetical situation that probably happens all the time.  If you were a woman what would you do if you discovered your husband was cheating on you and when you confronted him, he refused to even attempt to amend his ways.  Under such a circumstance, I think many would accept that the woman might have little choice but to end the marriage.  Thus, even though she initiates the divorce, is she really at fault?  And should she forfeit the right to support for herself and her children? 
—
Now let me stress, I am not saying that most, or even a large minority of marriages are the fault of the men alone (or the women alone either).  Most marriages fail because both the husband and the wife let themselves give in too often to selfishness.  But even then, blaming the divorce on the woman is unfair just because she initiated it.

“MarylandBill”,
I “only” mentioned that it’s women who break up marriages 80% of the time?  then you obviously haven’t read all of my posts.
If I’m “only” mentioning one thing, it’s that women dominating men IS NOT Christianity.
By the way, did any of you feminists ever get around to Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, be submissive to your husbands”?
And if women want more “good” (well-paid) men out there, maybe they should hope for the days when mwn mwde a “family wage”, not “comparable worth.”

Don,
Men and woman both should earn a wage that allows them to support their family if they need to.  Thank goodness I have a job where I can support my family, but if something happened to me, I certainly hope that my wife would be able to support herself and my son on what she could earn on her own.  To deny women fair pay for their work is just as unjust as denying a man the same thing. 
—
Also, I don’t feel dominated.  Certainly not in my marriage, nor in the broader culture.  Unless of course by dominated, you mean that women are allowed to hold jobs as managers instead of as secretaries and receptionists.  If you want America to return to 1955, that is fine, though I think you will find that the divorce rate was every bit as high in 1955 as it is now.

Don, did you even bother to read the rest of Ephesians 5:21-33?  Ephesians 5:33 NAB “In an case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.”  If all you take from Ephesians is that women should be subordinate to her husband you are missing the whole of the point of marriage.  Ephesians 5:21 states “Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.”  That is not to say that women should have dominance over men, it is however to say that both men and women ought to have equal say in making decisions for the family.  For one partner in a marriage to have dominance over the other is wrong, when one is dominant over the other or has power over another, that individual begins to loose their worth as a human being God has made.  That is when it becomes ok to be abusive to that spouse, because they don’t deserve to be treated as an equal in the marriage. 
I will end this post with Ephesians 5:6-7 “Let no one deceive you with empty arguments, for because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the disobedient.  So do not be associated with them.”

Thank you Maryland Bill for your posts and explanation of manhood.

I think that we have forgotten how to love.  I just stumbled upon this today.  It’s a youtube video of Mother Angelica talking about love.
Mother Angelica Live Classics - How Do You Love - Mother Angelica - 03-29-2011 http://bit.ly/eqczRu

Kell,
“Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as to the Lord.  For a husband has authority over his wife just as Christ has authority over the Church; and Christ is himself the Savior of the Church, his body.  And so wives must submit themselves completely to their husbands, just as the Church submits itself to Christ.” (Ephesians 5:22-24, Good News Bible)
Did you read that part of Ephesians 5:21-33?
If you want to argue that marriage is a two-way covenant, the question is, where have all the good women, who support their men instead of criticize them, gone?

Maryland Bill,
But that’s where all the “good” (well-paid) men have gone: their “family wages” were replaced by “equal pay” and then “comparable worth.”

Don, I’m not arguing against those points in Ephesians 5:21-33.  I know they are in there, but husbands are to love their wifes as Christ loves the church.  The idea of worrying about financial gain or loss in marriage isn’t love, it is selfishness.  Love is selfless, love thinks of others first.  In Corinthians 13, St. Paul tells us what love is, and what it isn’t. The fact remains that people have forgotten how to truly love.  Love isn’t just a feeling, love is a daily decision.  If you love somebody, you’re not going to hurt them with your words or your actions.  If you love somebody you are going to put them first in your decision making process, not yourself.  Again I have to refer you back to Ephesians 5:33 “In an case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.”  As far as wives submitting completely to their husbands, to what point is it sinful?  If my husband wants to have an affair, am I to submit to that completely?  Or am I to correct him for it?  If my husband feels the need to hit myself or our children because he is stressed out, do I submit to that completely, or do I tell him I think its a good idea for him to take a walk?  Just a couple of thoughts to ponder.

Kell, Men will have authority like Christ has over His Church - and how did He show that authority? He spoke with deep love and conviction and compassion.  He healed and set free and worked miracles of grace.  Finally He took on the faults of those under His care and died for them to protect them from the consequences of those faults.  This is not someone who was concerned with domination.  He calls Himself shepherd, servant, lamb of God….What woman wouldn’t be devoted to that man?

Pam, that is exactly my point.

And Kell,
If a woman feels that men sre just walking ATMs, to use when they find it convenient or to leave and hit with alimony when they find someone better, is that “Chriatian”?

Don, If you read my earlier posts, I have agreed that women who use men for money is wrong.  My main objection to your arguments is that you have been rude, and that blanket statements have been made against all women.  Your argument has been that women have no place in authority, whether it be in the home or in a work place, you’ve been arguing against women having equal rights in the work place and that is wrong.  You’ve been very misogynistic through out the entire discussion.  What you have described is a minority of women, not the majority.

Kell,
All I’m saying is that you have a choice: either go back to the days when men made “family wages” or admit that it was feminists who chased away the “good men.”

So Don, you’re saying that if a man and a woman hold the same position, and have been there the same amount of time that the man should be paid more?  No it’s unethical.  Traditional feminism is equal pay for equal work and for the right to vote.  You can’t go back in time to those days, and modern feminism is insane I’ll agree with that.  It sounds like you want women to be both able to take care of her self in the event of a divorce but dependent on her husband for all financial needs while married?  That argument doesn’t make any sense to me.  Women went to work full time because of World War 2, that is when America changed how the work force was made up because the majority of men went off to war, and lets face it somebody had to pick up the slack left behind.  Women had to do the work that men where doing, so if you really want to blame somebody blame Hitler.

Don,
With respect, your explanation of why men don’t make “family wages” is at best simplistic and probably just plain wrong.  Yes, I am sure that an increase of women in the work force exerted some downward pressure on wages, but that only is one small element in the larger equation.
—
Lets remember that America occupied a unique place in the post-war world.  It was not only the largest economic power in the world, but it absolutely dominated the rest of the world in terms of manufacturing, trade etc.  In fact, in the post war world, we came to expect a standard of living that was, on the whole far higher than it had been before the Great Depression.  So what happened?  Germany, Japan, Taiwan, China and various other countries became developed enough to compete with us.  Our wages are low not so much because women are competing for the same jobs as men, but because workers in China, Japan, Taiwan, India, Korea, Mexico, etc are competing for the jobs as well.

Kell,
I’d be happy if a man with the same amount of seniority as a woman who worked the same amount of hours got the same pay.  But that would mean no more “affirmative action” for women or companies “promoting diversity”.
What I’m saying is, don’t demand that men don’t receive “family wages” anymore, and then wonder where all the “good” (well-paid) men have gone.  You chased them away.
MarylandBill,
Yes, one-sided “free trade” (they put up barriers to americcan-made goods, we’re “free”) and illegal immigrants competing for jobs added to what “affirmative action” did to impoverish formerly “good” men, but so what?  My point is that that is where all the “good” men have gone.
(By the way, back when I was working at a steel mill the company representative argued that we guys were a bargain, because we worked at $13.65 an hour whle the Japanese steelworkers produced half the steel per man-hour that we did for $11-sometning an hour.  It was just that management in the company was top-heavy, he explained.)

Don, affirmative action laws not only where to help women get jobs, but also for people of other races.  As for the “good men” I didn’t chase anybody away, I have a good man of my own thank you very much.

Don, maybe it is just me, but it seems that you are willing to blame everyone for the problems of men except us (i.e., Men themselves).  I am not saying that women don’t need to work on their issues, they do.  But we need to improve ourselves, and treat them charitably regardless of what they might or might not do.
—
Jesus did not come to save perfect people.  He didn’t get to the Garden and say, “Father, let me get out of this because frankly they don’t deserve it!”.  It would have been true, but that was not his response.  As men, called to be like Christ to our wives and children, our motive must be based on unconditional love and sacrifice. 
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Is it hard for families to make it on a single income these days?  You betcha.  But its not impossible.  I also think the prosperity in the past is often overstated, and focused on essentially a 25 year stretch of American History where America was not only the dominant economic power in the world, it was the only economic power in the world.
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In addition, I think we need to consider how much more we spend on stuff we don’t really need than we did 40-50 years ago.  In 1970s, many people still had B/W TV’s as their only Television.  Single car households were a lot more common than they are now.  Most houses had one phone (not line, phone).  There was no cable, broadband or cell service, until rather late in the decade, video games were extremely uncommon.  So, while it is undoubtedly true that many lost jobs in the 70s and 80s and never recovered their salaries (my Dad was one of those people), and that even happens today, by and large, I wonder how much of the current situation is that we are not being paid a living wage and how much of it is that we want so much more stuff than we wanted 40 years ago.

What About the Gay Movement? 
  I am constantly searching for the research to be done on the number of men (marrying age) that have chosen a gay lifestyle-thus taken themselves out of the eligible dating pool.  How many of the “good men” have been seduced into relationships without having to “grow up” for sex or the responsibility of family?
  The gay lifestyle seems to be taking more and more men away from a life of marriage and well…fertility.  I know that at the root of this consequence is what Jennifer has stated- the sexual permissiveness of our society- however, I would be interested to see more reflections on how the gay movement is stealing men away from a life of true fulfillment and love and lowering the numbers of marrying men for women today.

MarylandBill,
I simply pointing out the reasons that “the good men” are disappearing, and your complaint is—that I should blame men for the reasons that the “family wage” is disappearing?
I’m merely noting that it’s illogical to be in favor of “equal pay,” “comparable worth,” and “promoting diversity,” and then complain that men aren’t making enough money to satisfy women.

Don,
All I am saying is that you are wrong.  Good men are not disappearing for any of those reasons.  They are disappearing because our culture as a whole has embraced materialism and selfishness; men and women.  Men can’t change women, they can only change themselves. 
—
Ultimately, when we face God we are responsible for our own actions.  The sins of women should not, and cannot be used to justify the sins of men.  Maybe family wages have disappeared, or maybe we have just gotten so greedy that the wages we have won’t support all we want.  I do know quite a few good Catholic families where the husbands make modest incomes, and yet the wife is able to stay home and take care of the children (often including homeschooling them), and this is in the DC suburbs—if you can do it here, you probably can do it anywhere.  I am sure not everyone can do it, but then again, that was always the case.

MarylandBill,
So all that you’e saying is that it’s all men’s fault, and that other factors—feminist wage demands, “free trade,” illegal immigration—have nothing to do with men not making enough money to be “good”?

Don,
You keep trying to tie this all to “making enough money” but that is not what it is about, it is about responsibility, or rather the avoidance of it.  I suspect that there are plenty of women out there who would be happy with a guy who worked a steady 9-5 job, came home was willing to help out with the chores around the house, willing to have kids and help out with them, etc. 
—
Instead, we have guys who want to spend their free time playing video games, drinking and hooking up (and often avoiding the hint of even a steady relationship let alone anything approaching marriage). 
—
Are there other factors?  Maybe.  But the decision and responsibility, as always, is ours.  Do we embrace responsibility or do we embrace selfishness?  How petty will we sound when God asks us why we were selfish and we respond that they were selfish first.
—
So, yes, I am saying it is all men’s fault that men are screwed up.

MarylandBill,
See?  You admit that you’re a misandrist.
I’m trying to hold myself back from talking about wom en the way you do about men—that the problem is all those sluts whoa ct like Peg Bundy from Married…with Children, except that they leave as soon as they find something better—but that would be as unfair as all of these Unchristian attacks on men.

Don, your last post is filled with such hatred.  Peg Bundy isn’t representative of most women, just like Al Bundy isn’t representative of most men.  By our fallen nature, we humans have a tendency to be selfish, in our walk with the Lord we are called to rise above our fallen nature.  We don’t always get it right the first time, or the hundredth time, the point is to work with the graces we are given and try again.  Men and women are made to complement each other, woman was made to be mans help mate.  Marriage is a challenge, you can make it a challenge to stay selfish (as many do and end in divorce) or as a challenge to be excellent, to be a true servant to Christ by carrying on the domestic church, educating your family in the faith.  Our Lord doesn’t want each spouse to be selfish, but rather to serve one another, as Christ came to serve his and our Father and save us.  This is how we ought to think of marriage.  God bless and be well.

I am a misandrist because I claim that we, as men are responsible for our own failings?  I don’t hate men, I am a man, and I find many men admirable.  What I hate is how so many men have embraced a life that avoids responsibility.  What I hate, is the attitude of some that this lack of maturity is justified by the behavior of others.  What I hate is how some people will blame everything on someone else and never examine themselves to determine if they might be part of the problem. 
—
Some of the things you cite may be factors in what have lead so many men to their current state, but those factors do not take away the personal responsibility that every human bears for making the best of the gifts that God gave us.

And MarylandBill,
Why do you insist that men have all the responsibility to be perfect in their lives but women don’t?

And Kell,
Just as Peg Bundy isn’t representative of all women, your hate-filled charicatures of men don’t represent all men.  I already pointed out that Peg is representative of all women only in the sense that these posts represent men.

Don, It is hard to take you seriously when you take sincere thoughtful comments and characterize them as hateful.  If you aren’t open to discussion what can be accomplished here?

I haven’t made any hate filled comments about men Don.  What I have been trying to point out is that most of the women in the world aren’t the picture you have painted.  What I define as a good man is a man who treats me with respect, a man who will gently point out when I am wrong and show me where I’m wrong, a man who understands when I’m hurt and will hold me when I’m crying, a man who is willing to talk to me about his fears and whom I can talk to about my fears, a man who is willing to make decisions and take action when it comes to the children.  The picture of a good man made in these posts is all about money.  Money is easy to walk away from because money doesn’t make a loving relationship.  A good man isn’t easy to walk away from, because a good man, a good woman, and God can make a great relationship.

I never said that women don’t have a responsibility to try to be better in their lives.  Rather, I reject the notion that the failings of women somehow inevitably lead to the failings of men (or vice-versa) and they certainly don’t excuse them. 
—
Men cannot wait until women improve before they work on improving themselves.  Likewise, women can’t wait for men to do the same.  Until one side or the other breaks the cycle, accepts responsibility for their own failings, things will only continue to get worse.

I think we can sum it up like this: Men have problems. They should fix them, with whatever help other men or women provide. If, in fixing them and behaving as they should, they suffer here on earth, then so be it. Suffering happens; do what’s right and deal with it.
___
On the other hand, women have problems. They should fix them, with whatever help other women or men provide. If, in fixing them and behaving as they should, they suffer here in earth, then so be it. Suffering happens; do what’s right and deal with it.
___
Consequentialism is wrong. If it’s hard, then it’s hard. If it hurts, then it hurts. Yes, some actions by men/women might have made things harder for women/men. Yes, our culture glorifies what should not be and doesn’t glorify what should be, which complicates things. These are reasons, but not excuses. There are no excuses. There is certainly no reason to try to lay the blame at the feet of one sex or the other, what’s needed is for society to collectively man up (or woman up, as the case may be) and start behaving.

Believe it or not, I agree with Jacob.  All that I’m objecting to is the original article, and the following posts, that take a one-sided criticism of men as if they’re the only ones responsibble for what “affirmative action” and other liberal causes did to their wages.

I agree with Jacobs post to Don.

I also agree with Jacob.  Thank you.

Pam, if you write that you agree with Jacob’s post to me, does that mean that you don’t realize that it also applies to you?

Don, I think in agreeing with Jacob’s post we are all agreeing that it applies to all of us.

No Don, Sorry if I was unclear.  I was saying that I too agree with what Jacob wrote.  Men and women both are called to great love.  They each need to work on getting the log out of their own eye before they get the splinter out of the other’s and they are helpers to each other so they need to work on a loving, committed relationship.  The world doesn’t like loving, committed relationships, especially when they take work so men and women are battling societal pressures at the same time they battle personal problems.  But with God, nothing is impossible. Peace of Christ.

Pam,
Oh come on.  Why did you single out me for criticism, if you believed that you are equally guilty of not loving the opposite gender enough?
And if you’re in favor of loving, committed relationships, does that mean that you object to the women who are the ones who break up a marriage 80% of the time?

Don, I don’t think I am equally guilty of not loving the opposite gender enough.  I had four great brothers and I have always liked men and had a positive attitude in large part because of my brothers.  I was speaking in general of male and female relationships. And I am Catholic. I believe, as all Catholics should, that divorce is a failure of love, so I don’t believe in divorce. I was blessed with an unusually good religious formation because my mother knew her faith well. Not everyone has that gift. I have witnessed that our culture is trying to change Church teaching on divorce and the cultures perception of divorce.  Men and women are setting up scenarios, being abusive, exaggerating male/female roles and stereotyping, magnifying weaknesses in relationships while burying strengths, whatever it takes to say to the Church “See how nasty this is?  How can you expect people to stay married. Jesus never intended people to live like this!  The protestant Church has it right.  We should allow divorce!”  I see it in my area, a liberal stronghold. It is offensive to everything Christ teaches.  It is all a lie. People have crosses and are rejecting them and in their resentment destroying everything around them. It is a time of martyrdom for devout Catholics. Probably alot of women and men don’t know why they are going through what is happening. I don’t judge them.  Heaven weeps.

Don, glad you came out some fuller comments on your position.  I agree that blind affirmative action can be quite frustrating at times.  I know of some cases in the 90’s where white males mere basically being discriminated against because those hiring needed to make statistics work out.  Stuff like that is wrong.
But, no offense to you (this is a discussion after all), I disagree that stuff like that is the main cause of the problem we are talking about.  For the sake of argument, let’s say economic issues *are* the main problem, then if that were the case, then fixing the economic issues would greatly help men and women become better men and women.  I disagree that would happen.

In my case, I am a woman filing for divorce—but I don’t want to. My husband left me and our daughter. He decided that he wanted to live an “alternative lifestyle” and just left and is out sleeping around, spending money, getting drunk, whatever he wants, etc. He left me with a a secret debt of $20k to boot. I have some legal protection, but according to my lawyer, I don’t have the degree of legal protection a full divorce would give me. My husband already told me he won’t file even though he’s the one who left—there is no reason for him to he has all the advantage. So in order to protect myself and the life I am trying to rebuild, I have to file (I’ve talked to my priest and he agrees. He also thinks I should seek annulment). It’s heart-breaking because I loved him, did everything a Christian wive is supposed to, and held on to a marriage for years and pushed for counseling when I discovered my husband had same sex attraction and was thinking of leaving to pursue that—but he wasn’t interested. I’ve paid off half the debt and am starting to recover financially—and while it breaks my heart to file, I have to accept he doesn’t love me and I can’t risk letting him destroy what I’ve rebuilt. I don’t think my husband is typical. But he lied to me when we were married about his same-sex attraction. I think he married me to cover it up since he was in the military and to get paid more as military personal get bonus money for dependents. I don’t find it co-incidence that he left me right after he left the military. But though divorce groups I’ve learned that a lot of abandoned women are like me, left to file to legally protect themselves. So you end up having the selfish women leaving their spouse and filing for divorce and you have the selfish men leaving their wives to file for divorce for them. The result is more women file. There are good men out there—very good men. And good women as well. It’s too bad the good men and the good women can’t meet each other and leave the “bad” lot to themselves.

A good place to meet good men and women is at Church. Get involved in your parish and attend Catholic oriented events that are outside of your parish.There are good men and women out there. You just need to know where to look.

Mellow, Nothing is impossible with God. Your reasons for filing are financial.  You don’t need to divorce to protect yourself financially, you can file for separation, remain married and be protected.  If you love your husband or don’t know if you love him, but recognize he is a soul Jesus died for, you realize he is caught up in a web of sin.  Walking away from him while that’s the case is not witnessing to your faith. Separate, pray, love him dearly and honestly everytime you interact and don’t be afraid to confront the problems.

I wish there were more nice young Catholic men at church.  The evangelical young women go to church to find a husband.  Catholic girls have to go to the bar.

The Mass is the best dating place! If you frequent the Eucharist, I’m sure you will not be afraid to wait and find a holy woman or holy man to marry.
Love is patient and never fails! Look for someone who will have a deeper love for God, Jesus and Mary.
Where have all the good women/man gone? He or she is praying for you to come back to the Father and love Him first, before loving the one beloved on earth!

All the good men have gone to pave the way for the next generation of young boys [my 8yrs old included] who will soon take back the controls these silly,brain-washed, vulgar,dis-honourable women who run around hyping that feminist putrid…which was only instituted to destroy the family structure in order to weaken the society as a whole and allow sick, satanic forces to infiltrate and take CONTROL, so that we spend every waking moment serving them.  The real men are cleaning out that abyss called hell to which they will forever confine feminism to ensure that it will never again be let loose upon men and women who LOVE each other and who truly understand their purpose of being.

Well now I think you miss the point a little.  My husband watches Star Wars and plays video games, as do most married men I know.  I don’t think that makes him childish.  Heck, I play video games once in a while (my favorite is Tetris). 

BUT, the difference is he’s not doing these things INSTEAD OF having a family, raising children and working a real full-time job, but in ADDITION to. 

I will tell you one reason I agree that children make adults out of their parents: because my parents no longer treat me like a child.  I think parents nowadays are willing to treat their unmarried 28 year old son as a child and spoil him on Christmas and loan him money because they don’t really realize that the childhood part is over now.  Having kids proves it!  Now they if they need someone to baby they have actual grandBABIES!

meeting women today has become very difficult for me. as a straight man that was married twice, i was a very caring and loving husband. i was a very happily married man at the time. they both cheated on me, and i never cheated on them. i was also very committed in my marriage. now that i go out a lot, i seem to meet the very nasty ones, instead of the good ones. they play games, and games are for kids. the way women have become, they are out there to break our hearts. they cheat, steal, lie, and go with other men behind our backs. they just cannot commit themselves to just one man, and a lot of them need at least ten different men to please them at one time. very sad, but true. i will go out every night just to not be home anymore. i have no reason to stay home since i am by myself now. if i had met the right woman to begin with, then i would surely be home with her. i hope god brings me luck soon to meet the right one for me, it would be like winning the lottery.