
Americans aren't getting married, and researchers think porn may be to blame - ilamont
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/21/americans-arent-getting-married-and-researchers-think-porn-is-part-of-the-problem/
======
visakanv
Here's my random, unsolicited opinion:

I doubt porn is the cause. Porn might be a comorbidity (what I'd put my money
on), or maybe a symptom (I doubt that, too), but the idea that it's the cause
is pretty odd to me.

I think marriage is fundamentally an economic institution. People got married
because it made economic sense. You needed a partner to rear children with,
assuming you wanted children at all. There's all the stuff about love and
companionship and all that, but there's no reason why we need to fixate on one
particular arrangement. It was about partnerships of families.

I think marriage made a lot of sense in small towns. It makes sense for large,
political dynasties, for the old wealthy, etc. It doesn't make so much sense
for the young middle class today.

This is my rough, unvarnished opinion. Would love to hear criticisms,
refinements, etc.

~~~
jerrac
Porn is purely selfish pleasure. Thus, when a person is married, they're used
to being selfish about their sexual pleasure, resulting in strife. And when
people think about getting married, they realize that would require them to
stop being so selfish, since marriages don't last unless you are willing to
sacrifice your own desires in order to help your spouse.

So, porn is a cause, or at least, part of a cause.

As for marriage being an economic institution... Not really. Male and female
are different. We think differently, our bodies are different, and so on. In
most cases, those differences complement each other. So, marriage is the
joining of two people into a partnership that lets them cover each others
flaws.

~~~
aikah
> Porn is purely selfish pleasure.

Some couples watch porn together.You make it "a selfish pleasure" only if you
want it "a selfish pleasure". And yes,women watch porn,like they buy dildos,
though they might not be interested in "Bangbros like gonzo" ,but something
with a higher production quality.

~~~
stevewilhelm
HBO's 'Game of Thrones' for example.

------
logn

      Marginal Effect on Marriage Probability
      Porn Site -0.6310
      Finance Site -0.5889
      News Site -0.5877
      Education Site -0.5823
      Health Site -0.5744
      Sports Site -0.5928
      Religious Site +0.5399
    

_A natural public policy option is web filtering. [...] If the results in this
paper are correct, policies along these lines have the potential to reduce
pornography usage and increase marital entry, with its attendant welfare
improvements._

Is allowing only religious sites another natural policy option? Because that's
what the data suggests too.

Edit:

Linked study: [http://ftp.iza.org/dp8679.pdf](http://ftp.iza.org/dp8679.pdf)
\-- table data from PDF page 31 and quote from page 25.

------
numair
Yeah, because the fact that the average young American can barely support one
person, let alone two + child, on a basic income can't have anything to do
with the reduction in marriages...

~~~
thret
Plus the expense of the ring, the wedding, the honeymoon. People put it off
until it can be done 'right'.

~~~
_delirium
An interesting trend in Greece, where due to the economic crisis many people
can't afford to "properly" get married, is that it's become common to get a
simple civil-ceremony marriage, with an intent to get a "real" marriage
(church ceremony, reception, photos, etc.) sometime later. That may or may not
eventually happen, but it seems universal that people at least theoretically
consider it their plan (the civil paperwork-signing isn't culturally
considered a "real" wedding). Not getting married at all is also increasingly
common, but many people choose the in-between option of a legal marriage
without the ceremony. The plus side is that you get the legal benefits even
while waiting to plan the "real" wedding (things like medical visitation
rights, joint property ownership, etc., become simpler).

------
msandford
Seems like someone needs to read this again:
[http://xkcd.com/552/](http://xkcd.com/552/)

People consuming more porn is a more likely a symptom of what's going on
rather than the cause. As whatever forces cause people to be less likely to
get married it creates a larger market for porn that the industry is more than
happy to supply in greater quantities.

What forces are causing people to be less likely to get married? I can
speculate but I suspect it's highly multifaceted. I doubt there's one thing
that's largely to blame but more of a death by a thousand papercuts kind of
situation.

1\. Housing is a bigger commitment

2\. Job security is less available making buying real estate less attractive

3\. Expectations of what should happen once you get married aren't necessarily
realistic

4\. Ending a marriage is highly speculative and non-negotiable (a judge says
what goes and that's it) and can have lifelong or very long-lasting
consequences financially

5\. There's a lot less societal pressure to get married to have kids from a
moral perspective

6\. The economic incentive for a woman to get married so she can stay home to
raise kids has largely disappeared as pay equality has largely arrived (so has
the notion that it's what a woman should do). It's not 100% across the board
but women don't work for 30% of what men do, meaning that marriage might only
bring a marginal improvement in financial circumstances.

7\. Child support being completely unrelated to marriage means that women can
choose not to settle for a man they once liked/loved but who isn't their ideal
partner.

I'm not saying that any of these factors are good or bad or just or unjust. I
suspect that there are 20 more factors that I couldn't think up in the last 10
minutes.

~~~
jseliger
_1\. Housing is a bigger commitment_

Interestingly, this is a policy choice—and a bad one—foisted on us primarily
by incumbent land owners who vote:
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO) ,
rather than a law of nature.

------
creativeidiot
The thieving nature of the divorce and child support regulations in the USA
are clearly unrelated.

~~~
_delirium
Worries about child support aren't a particularly good reason to get married
or not get married, because they apply iff you are a parent, regardless of
marital status. If you get married and don't have kids, there is no issue of
supporting kids. On the other hand, if you _don 't_ get married and _do_ have
kids, you're still legally required to support them. The obligation to support
isn't a consequence of marriage, but of being father or mother to a child. In
fact a pretty large proportion of child-support cases that end up in court
involve parents who were never married.

~~~
baddox
Still, the fear of having to pay child support could discourage people from
having extended exclusive relationships, and those are generally a
prerequisite to marriage.

~~~
dragonwriter
Not having "extended, exclusive relationships" doesn't decrease the risk of
having to pay child support. (Not having unprotected sex with people you
aren't both married to and going to stay married to does, but, all other
things being equal, avoiding "extended, exclusive relationships" seems to be
more likely to increase that risk than decrease it.)

~~~
baddox
I suspect it does, given that the likelihood of conceiving a child (from
protected or unprotected sex), as well as the likelihood of a female knowing
who the father of her child is, increase as relationships become longer and
more exclusive.

~~~
dragonwriter
Exclusivity isn't inherently symmetrical, neither is the interval between
different relationships. The effect you are referring to doesn't come from
whether the relationship is exclusive _on your side_ , or from whether it is
long term, but from whether it is exclusive _on the other side_ , and whether
there is a long gap before/after the other partner's previous/next
relationship.

------
r109
Really? From my perspective people can't afford marriage, a kid, house, cars,
and ultimately a divorce. Man it would be nice to just have $3k for a wedding
ring, I could pay off a fraction of my debt! Oh! Wedding reception costs? Fuck
that, I need to finance a good car that gets excellent mpg! OH, child support
laws? Yeah I had an older brother that had his wallet raped for 14 years of
his life. He's now looking at houses, hopefully his current wife doesn't
divorce him with the kids they have. :P

~~~
kingmanaz
Usury. Not long ago one high school educated American working a factory shift
could support a wife and four kids. His large, hand crafted home is now found
in the gentrified corner of town, which today's blue collars couldn't dream of
buying a piece of. Today's "middle class" typically live in a chicken-wire-
and-stucco tract home built by economic refugees rather than craftsmen, lease
to own a $40,000 sedan, and dream of one day paying off their education debt
before their medical bills start to pile up after mid-life. Marriage has been,
like every other thing in America, reduced to a question of economic
efficiency.

But hey, there's always Bing Crosby this time of year to evoke an America that
was more than a place to make money.

~~~
sliverstorm
You can still have that large hand crafted home if you don't expect to live in
the middle of San Francisco or Boston. There are gorgeous houses within two
hour's drive of me that cost five figures.

I can't afford my parent's house. But when they bought it, it was surrounded
by peach fields, not bustling metro America with top schools.

To me, it is like bemoaning how your Grandma was able to afford a house in
Beverly Hills in 1920, but you can't today. How unfair the economy, how cruel
the world! Except Beverly Hills wasn't Movie Star City in 1920.

My take is that our nation's appetite for coveted, increasingly scarce real
estate has silently grown without our realizing it. Not one of my friends
today would consider moving to a house surrounded by orchards.

~~~
sdenton4
Right idea, different trend: The boomer generation coincided with the suburban
boom, with its emphasis on car culture and mass produced goods. But the sheen
of an industrially produced life has worn off, to a large extent: Long
commutes and the expense of owning and regularly driving a car don't look as
good as they used to. We're seeing a massive move back into the cities,
contrary to the (white) flight from the cities in the sixties and seventies.
And this means higher real estate prices.

~~~
sliverstorm
Either way though, it means we live in very different times than even as
recently as our parents, which makes "what my parents could afford" a poor
rubric. We are looking to live very different places than they were.

------
raincom
Porn is one of many causes, but not a clinching cause. It is all economy.

1\. In 1970's highschool graduated were able to raise families on a single
salary, could afford a home, a couple of cars.

2\. The above situation does not exist anymore. Have you seen graduates from
places like UC Irvine, working at Enterprise car rental?

3\. Yes, there are jobs for students graduated from top schools like HYP,
Stanford, MIT. For others, it is either a tech job or a job like that.

4\. Wherever there are jobs, there the cost of living, raising a family is a
darn expensive. Imagine Silicon valley for instance: if you are just a
software engineer, you can't afford raising a family here, unless you and your
spouse slave away at work and in commutes. Then add day care costs, mortgages,
etc. It is a stressful situation.

5\. For many in the middle income bracket, the future is bleak: you can't
guarantee that your kids gonna have same economic opportunity as you have.

~~~
InternetUser
You may be familiar with the "Old Economy Steven" meme:

[http://www.quickmeme.com/Old-Economy-
Steven/page/1/](http://www.quickmeme.com/Old-Economy-Steven/page/1/)

Bloomberg: What the Economy Has Done to the Family (some shocking statistics)
- Nov 10, 2014

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-10/how-the-bad-
economy...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-10/how-the-bad-economy-
breaks-up-families.html)

"Is a college degree worth the cost? You decide."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXpwAOHJsxg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXpwAOHJsxg)

And see this 8-minute video, comparing the 1970s economy (and how it shaped
the lives and choices of young adults) with the economy of the 2010s:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzOTykfGxzE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzOTykfGxzE)

More about that:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/2m7xp1/bloomberg_w...](http://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/2m7xp1/bloomberg_what_the_economy_has_done_to_the_family/)

------
wes-k
Been with my partner almost 10 years (I'm 29). We most likely will never get
married. We feel we don't need it and plus, the institution from an equal
rights point of view is fairly troubling. Even today's traditional wedding is
filled with male / female imbalances, not to mention gay marriage is still not
universal. I'm also happy to keep a few extra thousand in my hands instead of
De Beers.

~~~
parag_c_mehta
That will be nice for now until one of you decide to move on for greener
pastures. Lonely old age may also follow...

------
bluedino
I'd have never noticed. A large amount of the people my age (25-35) that I
work with are married, most of my friends are married, both of my brothers
(younger than I) are married, and I myself was even engaged for a few years.

~~~
baddox
It is reasonable to expect that marriage rates could drop significantly while
there still remains a large number of people who observe most of their peers
getting married.

------
unclebucknasty
> _" The natural reaction might be to dismiss the findings as confirmations of
> an obviousness: that men who are married tend to look at porn less
> frequently precisely because they are married._

 _The researchers, while careful to say that their findings fall short of
being conclusive, insist that the relationship between the two also "likely
runs in the direction that we assert."

The reason, Malcolm explains, is likely tied to the relationship between
marriage and sexual gratification...."_

Hmm. Seems to be a pretty massive gap in their logic path. In reply to the
very real possibility that married men simply view less porn, they quickly
spun to the reasons they suspect porn _could_ lead to men not getting married.

It also "likely" runs in the direction we assert and here is a likely reason
that it might?

C'mon guys.

------
susan_hall
Marriage in the USA peaked in 1958. Please see the chart here:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real-
re...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-
richer-people-marry.html)

Marriage peaked the same year that male participation in the wage economy
peaked. It was also the peak year of the baby boom. It was also the peak year
for the wage-to-rent ratio (average rent was only 22% of average wage, versus
32% now). It was also the peak year for wages for males under the age of 25.
(Average male wage began to decline in 1973, but the average wage for young
males has been declining since the recession of 1959.)

Internet porn was not the problem in 1959, or 1969, or 1979, though the
marriage rate, and the birth rate, plummeted during those years. But it is
possible that the sexual revolution played a role. Barbara Ehrenreich has a
fantastic book on the subject "The Hearts Of Men":

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Hearts-Men-American-
Commitment/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Hearts-Men-American-
Commitment/dp/0385176155)

Although the marriage rate is now back down to levels last seen in the late
1800s, there is clearly a big difference in people's sexual practice. 41% of
all the children in the USA are now born outside of wedlock. The number is
comparable to London in the early 1700s (see Will and Ariel Durant's book "The
Age Of Voltaire" where they quote the Bishop Of London, in 1719, estimating
50% of all couples with children in London were not married. This was at a
time when the English government had decided to suppress marriage among the
poor by raising the price of a marriage license to something only the middle
and upper classes could afford, thus turning marriage into the ultimate status
symbol.)

Marriage has once again become a status symbol. The poor raise children
without the benefit of marriage, while the (shrunken) middle and upper classes
enjoy the prestige of marriage.

The suppression of marriage in the 21st century is less easy to identify than
in 1719, because back then it was an explicit policy of the government,
whereas now marriage licenses are cheap. But marriage is a commitment to make
things work over the long term, and without a stable job no one can reasonably
make long term commitments, nor does anyone want to rush into a marriage that
they know will fail, so the poor are left going through life without the
benefits of marriage (or you could restate this as: "the poor are left going
through life without the benefits of financial stability, which limits their
ability to make the long-term commitments necessary to make a marriage work.")

------
Jugurtha
Anyone thinks they might be holding off because of insane laws? Getting kicked
out of your own house (that you bought with your own money) as if it's a
given. Getting ruined by divorce, or losing half your stuff as if it's so
natural.

I've read an article a while back. The cheapest divorces are those of
billionaires, the most expensive ones are those of artists and athletes who
married without a prenup. Who were naïve enough to think that in the case of
divorce, they'd be the same as when they first met, and they'd treat each
other with the same respect and love.

Looking at the state of things, the question to ask is How can anyone get
married in the U.S.?

------
jiggy2011
Does this study examine the difference between people who are in long term non
married relationships and those who are not?

Does porn cause people in relationships not to convert those relationships
into marriages or does porn cause people to be less likely to enter a
relationship at all?

------
ejp
I rarely hear the alternative explanation that speaks most to me: marriage as
an institution is currently a segregated privilege. I do not want to
participate, lest I lend it some small sliver of legitimacy.

Where are the articles talking about the people who don't get married because
they no longer need a plausible cover for their sexuality? Or because they are
creating loving non-traditional families? Or those like me who empathize with
those who are disallowed from participating?

(These are not rhetorical questions, if you know of such research going on I
would like to read it!)

I suppose it's easier to blame the newfangled interwebs and kids these days,
rather than talk about the very real social changes that are taking place.

------
pakled_engineer
[http://www.thelocal.de/20140117/dating-in-berlin-
unwilling-t...](http://www.thelocal.de/20140117/dating-in-berlin-unwilling-to-
commit-single)

Look up exact same articles for Japan, China, S Korea, anywhere. We work more
with less social time, prefer independence and marriage expectations are too
high so short-term obligation free hookup services like Tinder are preferred
to maintaining a relationship.

------
noblethrasher
I attended a talk where porn and video games were cited as candidates for
explaining the surprisingly low crime rate during the last economic downturn.

I mention this without value connotation since, while low crime is “obviously”
good, society may also have benefited from stronger displays of discontent in
the long-term.

------
the_decider
The Researchers of the Study miss the obvious...its hard to find an optimal
oportunity to "jack it" when your wife is constantly there, breathing down
your neck. Marriage leads to total loss of individual privacy, which is needed
to properly enjoy Porn ;-)

------
poulsbohemian
Isn't this just as simple as the US catching up to Europe? Average marriage
age throughout northern Europe is 30+, often when a couple decides they are
ready for children.

------
phazmatis
Because only men look at porn. Crap article.

------
XorNot
Correlation is not causation and they have no plausible mechanism beyond old-
style stereotypes of human sexuality.

------
imaginenore
It's not porn. Porn has been around for a long time.

It's the information. People now know more and they see that marriage is
heavily stacked against males and against higher earners. We also have a
ridiculous situation when prenups get thrown out by judges.

People just don't see that many benefits in marriage. And what are they
exactly? I can only think of four:

* Slightly lower taxes

* Visitation rights

* Ability to make medical decisions about the spouse when the spouse can't

* Spousal testimonial privilege and privileged communication

~~~
InternetUser
Regarding lower taxes, another commenter linked to this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty)

------
kingmanaz
The decrease in marriage in today's generations stems from the increase in
failed marriages of the Boomer generation. Many of today's eligible Gen-X'ers
and Millennials come from broken homes.

~~~
patronagezero
You really believe that just because their parents failed the children decided
not to try for themselves? Perhaps it has more to do with seeing how their
parents failed. Specifically since the article is geared towards men, maybe it
speaks towards a generation (or few) of boys watching the system screw their
fathers over.

------
ps4fanboy
Being young myself (early 30s) most of my male friends are terrified of
marriage because their parents are all mostly divorced and its ugly.

Men now see marriage as a huge risk, if your wife decides she doesnt like you
any more she takes at least 50% of your assets and if you have children its
very unlikely the state will give you custody and you will be on the hook for
child support if you cant pay (because you get a worse job etc) you will go to
debtors prison.

------
Umn55
The reality is women won't marry low status men and men don't really want the
burden of having to support a wife and child without any income. It's really
about money/status, in a status obsessed society.

------
Kenji
It never ceases to amaze me how sophisticated people are at demonizing porn.

~~~
spacehome
Demonizing? They're saying porn discourages people from marriage. We call that
a win-win where I'm from.

------
patrickg_zill
If a woman can be replaced with (essentially) Youtube.com , then, she isn't
offering much is she?

Something tells me the article is not right in blaming porn.

------
patronagezero
I live with a girl and have no intentions of classifying that relationship
through the state. This article is a joke. Check out the MGTOW movement if
you're interested in the real reason guys are refusing to get married.

