Family Trends

In taking this class, I have already learned so much valuable and interesting information.. to me. This will kind of be cumulative over the past week or so, so it may seem a little random. After every class I talk with my husband about it and realized I needed to be putting it on here too!

Something very interesting was pointed out to me in class the other day. It was said that marriage is the only contract where you can just break it if you want. There doesn't even need to be a real reason other than the fact that you just don't want to be with that person anymore. No other contract you can do that. When you make a contract, you are making an agreement with someone else and it is binding unless you break it. For example a housing contract. When you agree to sign a lease, you agree to pay a certain amount and have things that are expected that you with your own free choice have agreed to make. If you decide to stop paying your rent, then you will be held accountable for not living up to the contract you signed. Marriage should be the same way. You were not forced to be married, you (more or less) agreed on certain things you were expected to keep. So it makes no sense that you can get a divorce just because. Of course there are always certain circumstances where that's not the case. I'm just talking about those that decide they don't want to be married and just end the contract like that. How easily we can end something so beautiful.

In our textbook,"Marriage and Family" a woman gave a story that I'm going to share because it was really profound to me. She said:

I went through a series of relationships, finally got married, and within a few years was divorced. I thought I would never find "Mr. Right." So I decided to get my college degree. When I took a social psychology class and studied symbolic interactionism, I had a revelation: I divorced my husband because he was a man!
I know that sounds silly. What I mean is, I learned that our behavior reflects the gender roles that we learn in our society. I thought my ex-husband was just a bad catch. Now I realize that he was only acting like most men who learn the traditional male role in our society. I know now that I could have accepted this and that we could have worked together to iron out the things that were vexing me. It's just too bad I didn't take the course before I got married.

So often I feel people give up on each other because they can. Before when divorce was a lot harder to come by, and you had to give real reasons as to why you guys could no longer live together, people stayed together and worked through their problems instead of just ending the whole thing.

In talking about "family trends" we also were talking about why these things could be. For example; people waiting to marry has gone up, divorce rates have increased, household size has decreased, and people living alone has increased. We took a vote in class about whether we think these are all significant, interesting, or not a big deal. Personally, I think all of them are super significant. One of the main thoughts about waiting to marry is that you want to be sure you are marrying the right person. However as researched has shown, divorced rates have gone up a lot, and so is this necessarily helping? Just something to think about. I also find these findings significant because in the gospel we believe in families and how they are eternal and how our sole purpose is to come here to learn and grow and get married to have children. Just these few family trends have taken the importance away from having families and children and furthering careers or whatever reason people have.

As a side note. I know a lot of you watch Modern Family. I can't remember who talked with the producer or if it was just something that got brought out in an interview, but the producers of Glee and Modern Family were interviewed and it was said that their main viewing was young Latter-Day Saints. The youth of the church. They also said that that was who they catered towards. They write their scripts with us in mind. To me that's a little disheartening because I happen to like Modern Family a lot. I never have enjoyed Glee, but their whole purpose is to desensitize the youth about homosexual relationships. Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against people who are homosexual, I don't even like categorizing them as that because I think your sexual preference doesn't define who you are. However there are now a lot of LDS youth who see this as more normal, and think the church will come around to accepting gay marriage, because they don't understand the gospel fully.