MARRIAGE: hungh! What Is It Good For?

3/15/06

Today, ladies and gentlemen, the first part in a two or maybe three-part expose on marriage. Why would you want to listen to an unmarried, childless (paternity test pending) male alcoholic who watches too much porn? To that I cannot attest. Perhaps you are mentally deficient in some capacity; I don't know.

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It's nice that even in these times of widespread cynicism and apathy I can still be shocked if not surprised by the callousness of advertising. Consider this recreation of a recent ad I ran across in the newspaper:


DIVORCE!

$189!

In most cases you can be divorced in 45-60 days

and you'll never need to appear in court!!!


We all know the state of marriage is under somewhat of a crisis in this country. Whether you choose to focus on the 50% divorce rate or are scared cowering in your closet in protection of your butt-hole from the prospect of same-sex unions, we can all agree something fucked up is going on here. For those marriages that somehow magically don't end up on the compost heap of the big D, we can pretty much guess that another 20% are unhappy. Add another hundredth of a percent or so for those rare occasions when one of the couple shoves a meat cleaver up the other, and we're left with a whopping 70.01% failure rate. Good gods.

But perhaps I'm being too hasty here. Conservative and complex estimates put the actual divorce rate at 43%. Still not good, but sometimes when very drunk I like to be optimistic. (I would like to get married. The whimsical, naïve part of me that still believes in unicorns would love to find someone else who wouldn't mind being annoyed by me for the rest of their life.)

Whenever I started out to write this I had planned on just giving a sort of general cataloguing of divorce statistics in the US and maybe a few dick and poop jokes thrown in for flair. Sort of interesting, but admittedly kind of flat. Then I ran across some fascinating facts concerning the divorce rates among different religious groups.

A study of 4,000 people conducted in 1999 and updated in 2004 reveals that faith has absolutely no correlation to marriage success, and in some cases, is at least statistically less successful.

As I write this I can hear thousands of angry Christians loading automatic weapons and looking through the phonebook for my address. I would point out here that my whereabouts are well hidden and technically—if not currently in fashion—I still have protection of free speech in this country from people who'd like to make new and interesting puncture wounds in my body.

About 25% of all US adults, regardless of religion, have experienced at least one divorce. Broken down by religion, the divorce rates look like this:


Denomination % who have been divorced

Non-denominational (independents)…...34%

Jews……………………………….........30%

Baptists………………………………....29%

Born-again Christians…………………..27%

Protestants………………………………25%

Mormons………………………………..24%

Catholics………………………………...21%

Lutherans………………………………..21%

Atheists……………………………….....21%

Agnostics………………………………..21%


I honestly did not expect this result. I figured the statistics would actually be closer together, with little difference between the religions (or not) at all. Like I said, the statistics of religion are not necessarily causical; just because you're keen on Jesus doesn't mean that's the reason your divorce rates are higher. But if taken in a tongue-and-cheek sort of way, the crippling guilt of Catholicism seems to work just as well as the pricks who make fun of organized religion, and playing with a dreidel or holding someone underwater for the Almighty is as good as a kiss of death, matrimonially speaking. Please stop loading your shotguns, I can't hear myself think.

Is there a conclusion we can draw from this? Probably not much of one; the best we can say is that religion seems to have no bearing on a healthy marriage. (Food for thought for all of you out there dumping in your shorts about queers getting hitched) Whatever your particular breed of superstition, at the end of the day we all have to sit there and accept being annoyed by that one person for the rest of our lives. If we're lucky, that is.


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Sources: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm http://www.valleyskeptic.com/christdivorce.html http://www.barna.org