The Marriage-Go-Round by Andrew J.Cherlin

Description

In this provocative account we can to see that America’s relationships are in chaos. Even when we live together without marrying, we break up faster than in other places, he says. In one of the book’s surprising findings, he says that American children whose parents are married are more likely to experience the turmoil of a parental break-up than Swedish children whose parents live together without being married.

Marriage is our battlefield. Only in America, Mr. Cherlin says, are gay people campaigning so determinedly for the right to marry. Most gay men and lesbians in Europe, he maintains, view marriage as another oppressive heterosexual institution.

How to interpret this exceptional paradox — we idealize marriage, and yet we’re so bad at it. Mr. Cherlin, who is also the author of “Public and Private Families,” has taken upon himself the task of explaining and has come up with an original thesis: There are two powerful forces at war in America, a historic belief in marriage grounded in our religious heritage, on the one hand and a foundational principle of individual freedom and a post-modern sense of the right to self-fulfilment on the other. When these values clash, breakup and divorce follow.

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