{"id":199,"date":"2011-12-13T20:16:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T20:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2011\/12\/199\/"},"modified":"2011-12-13T20:16:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-13T20:16:00","slug":"199","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2011\/12\/199.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u201cBREAKING \u2018THE RULES\u2019<\/a>\u201c<\/span>: In which I review a couple books:<\/p>\n

Why don\u2019t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 and 90 percent of American teens want to get married someday. And yet we delay, we divorce, and we churn through relationships so quickly that in 2004 only 61 percent of American children were living with both of their biological parents. Why can\u2019t we get and keep what we say we want?<\/p>\n

Maybe we lack role models. As we wander around aimlessly, the pejorative term \u201cextended adolescence\u201d has become the euphemism \u201cemerging adulthood.\u201d Kate Bolick\u2019s much discussed Atlantic article, \u201cAll the Single Ladies,\u201d seems to offer this explanation for its author\u2019s eventual surrender to singleness.<\/p>\n

And yet two recent books argue that a big part of our problem is that we do have role models, conventions, cultural mores, and rules to follow. It\u2019s just that the rules don\u2019t work. Paul Hollander\u2019s Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America<\/span> and Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker\u2019s Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying<\/span> take very different approaches to the question of how Americans mate and marry. Extravagant Expectations<\/span> is a work of pop-philosophy that muses about how modernity and the Romantic movement have influenced personals ads and internet dating. Premarital Sex<\/span> is a research-based look at the sexual practices and beliefs of young Americans from a broad range of class, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Yet both end up arguing that Americans today are working from fairly well-defined \u201cscripts\u201d about love, dating, marriage\u2013and selfhood. Perhaps, they conclude, our marriage problems ultimately spring from a flawed understanding of what it means to become an adult.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

more<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really satisfied with this piece, and I ended up leaving out a lot<\/span> of important stuff from the Regnerus\/Uecker book, so later I\u2019ll post some of my notes from that book.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBREAKING \u2018THE RULES\u2019\u201c: In which I review a couple books: Why don\u2019t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 and 90 percent of American teens want to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEve Tushnet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""BREAKING 'THE RULES'": In which I review a couple books:Why don\u2019t Americans know how to get and stay married? 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