why is marraige a goodthing?

[kimba1]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061015/ts_alt_afp/afplifestyleussociety

in all this talk about marraige very little said about why it`s good or what to do to make it work.

[Amianthus]

in all this talk about marraige very little said about why it`s good

So you have someone to drive you to the hospital when needed.

[Michael Tee]

Funny article.  So now it's official - - the Moral Majority is the Moral Minority.  This is gonna cause some righteous fulmination in the various Houses of God.  I can hardly wait for Falwell's take on this, or Pat Robertson's.   Probably praying right now for al Qaeda to chastise the ungodly nation and  prepare it properly for the End of Days.

[kimba1]

in the giant effort to save marraige they never did anything to make couples happy.
if anything it almost treated as a trivial thing.
note how little attention is give to make couples happy.
those statistics shouldn`t really be that surprising really.

[larry]

Commitment is a good thing, but marraige is a legal binding contract with many nagative aspects, i.e liabilty for debt, power of attorney issues, joint property issues and getting out of the contract, if it fails to a bad contract for one or both parties. When people place themself in legal bondage, they give up their right of individual freedom. If people understand these things, then I say fine, get married and live a happy life.

[Amianthus]

Funny article.  So now it's official - - the Moral Majority is the Moral Minority.

For those who have less then adequate math skills, a married household is 2 adults, while the vast majority of unmarried households were shown to be single people.

So, married people outnumber single people by nearly two to one.

Interestingly enough, my daughter caught this - before I even said anything - when it was reported on Headline News this morning.

[Lanya]

Non-married households: 50.2 %.
Married households: 49.8 %.

"In addition, there were more than 30 million unmarried men and women living alone, who are not categorized as families, the Census Bureau reported."

So I guess I don't understand your point, Ami.

[Michael Tee]

<<For those who have less then adequate math skills, a married household is 2 adults, while the vast majority of unmarried households were shown to be single people.>>

I make it 19 million households headed by single men or women and 36.7 "non-trad" being mostly gays.  Since each "household" is by definition a grouping of at least TWO individuals (the live-alone singles were counted separately) I make that 19 + 36.7 = 55.7 households, minimum 2 people per household or 111.4 million individuals in households without a marriage holding them together and 55.2 "married" households, minimum 2 people each for a total of 110.4 million living in households held together by marriage.

The article even went out of its way to assist people who have trouble grasping the significance of these facts by pointing out that it was a FIRST.  There is obviously some significance to this article that you are incapable of comprehending, but why take it out on the rest of us?

[Amianthus]

So I guess I don't understand your point, Ami.

Married couples were reported as "households", while others were reported as individuals.

Married households: 55.2 million (x2) = 110.4 million people

Unmarried: 36.7 million
Single: 30 million
Single heads of family: 19 million
Total: 85.7

So, it's not 2 to 1, but more like 1.5 to one. Still doesn't make married couples a "minority" as Mikey called them. Unless you want to remove the vote from the women or something.

[Amianthus]

Since each "household" is by definition a grouping of at least TWO individuals (the live-alone singles were counted separately)

You're making an assumption I did not make. I have yet to see the definition and data the study used.

The wording "while 36.7 million belonged to a category described as 'nonfamily households,'" is ambiguous.

It could mean "36.7 million (groups of two or more)" - your read - or "36.7 million (people)" - my read.

[Michael Tee]

Since they established a specific and separate category for the live-alones (30 million if I recall) it seems "household" meant something other than live-alone.  That "something" could only be either a totally vacant household or one with two or more members.  Somehow I would think the latter is what they had in mind.

[Amianthus]

Since they established a specific and separate category for the live-alones (30 million if I recall) it seems "household" meant something other than live-alone.  That "something" could only be either a totally vacant household or one with two or more members.  Somehow I would think the latter is what they had in mind.

Looking at the CSV file of the 2005 data, it shows "all non-family households" at 36,485,000, and "one member non-family households" at 30,137,000, with the balance being spread among 2 or more member households. Look specifically at cells H7 and H8.

Since they have a "one member household" listed, I would say that your assumption is most likely incorrect. Unless, of course, you now want to argue that there is a difference between "one member household" and "people living alone."

[Michael Tee]

It seems that the 30 million was a portion - - and obviously the biggest portion - - of the 36.7 non-traditional households.  In other words, most of the non-trads are just single men or single women living alone and counted as a household.  The "in addition" wording of the article threw me off, making it sound like the singles were counted in addition to the non-trads instead of being a part of them.

You still missed the significance of the story.  The trend is downward for marriage and in fact as a percentage of households if not of individuals, non-married has already crossed the 50% line and is growing.

[Amianthus]

You still missed the significance of the story.  The trend is downward for marriage and in fact as a percentage of households if not of individuals, non-married has already crossed the 50% line and is growing.

I didn't miss it. I was just pointing out that your math skills were lacking, since married couples are still a majority. I guess you missed my point.

[Michael Tee]

Math skills my ass.  If the article implied that the single households were counted apart from the other non-trads, my math skills drew the correct conclusion and yours did not.  The error was in the article that misinterpreted the survey.  You were fortunate that when the error of the article's interpretation was corrected, the conclusion that you had incorrectly drawn became the correct one on balance, although the factor of 200% that you originally calculated is still pretty far off the actual factor of 150%.