Comments on America and the transactional marriage.

This is a comment I posted in Google+, and also a comment to America, Home of the Transactional Marriage, published in The Atlantic.

about not marrying

Marriage has become quite formalised, and it's wisely avoided by men (I think) simply to avoid divorces. If the coupling is amicable, then open marriages allow shared custody of children, and without the possibility of one of the parties adversely affecting the finances of the other through divorce proceedings. There's still alimony.

wrt family planning

If I recall correctly from the "Living Longer" episode of BBC's "People's Century" documentary, then one of the early XX _c._ proponents of family planning was one Dr. Denmark, whom I saw make her case in a black-and-white recording from the 1920s or 1930s.

If I'm not wrong, then this Dr. Denmark could have been the same lady, who eventually became the world's oldest practicing pediatrician. She died in 2012 at the age of 114 years and 60 days.

Solutions?

I read the article the other night, and the end offered a number of solutions that would offset the stresses that unemployment would place on the cohesion of families. These policies were long ago implemented by Canada. Ditto most of the EU.

Yet the article seems to have been left intentionally open-ended, stopping short of projecting what may happen in the future; because the present is not shiny, and there is no legislative movement to change anything for the better within the next three years and five months. — Not even in terms of marriage, but in terms of couples actually choosing to stay together as a cohesive unit.

(Even if the midterm elections fare well, the results will simply make the situation less worse.)

The article's pointing out the cultural differences is also salient: In the U.S. these are set remain deeply entrenched, and will not change until enough safety nets become implemented, and then given at least a generation to be in force.

There is re|post ruminating about 'Generation X/Y/Z killing this or that industry.'

The comments pointed out, that it's poverty.

Some even, that it's white middle-class poverty. Well, actually, poverty is pervasive, universal, and does not discriminate.

Despite the economic upturn and inspite of who is occupying the Oval Office, the U.S. shockwaves of the Great Recession have since not stopped reverberating into the present, and maybe even the future.

Maybe I'm too harsh here.

These rings in water have slowed down all right, yet the accumulated effects of the many crises in the U.S. are not at all likely to be undone or improved in the near-to-long-term, because many of the necessary safety nets are weak or non-existent. Apparently by design.

The Affordable Care Act (collectively dubbed "The ACA" and "Obamacare") offers some relief. The fact, that it could not be repealed after four times of trying, and that in a Republican-majority Congress, says a lot about the strength and force that the ACA possesses.