sexuality

Pat Fagan

December 7, 2018

Rebuilding America One Father and Son at a Time

Tags: Fathers, Feminism, Sexual Education, Sons adolescent sexuality, child well-being, children, culture, Dating, family, fathers, feminism, men, men, Pat Fagan, sex, sexuality, Uncategorized, young adults, youth No comments

To do a good job in raising their sons, modern fathers have to dig deeper into the nature of fatherhood, deeper than fathers ever had to in all of human history because of the Marxist feminist assault on “patriarchy”,amplified by technological shocks (the pill, internet pornography, etc.). Because the enemy dug deep so as to understand how to deconstruct society and family(see Shulamith Firestone’s seminal influence on 1970’s feminism: The Dialectic of Sex), men today have to dig deeper still. This may well turn out to be a great blessing because here after, men can pass this deeper knowledge on to their sons and in the process become better men themselves while forming their boys to be even better. While the father will make the boy, the boy will also make the father. As Seneca said: “While we teach, we learn.” Understanding fatherhood better, men will live it better.

What ironic justice if “man, fully alive” develops as an unintended consequence of feminism.

During the different stages of his son’s growth into manhood, the father will touch on fives themes repeatedly, going deeper each time, as he judges what his son needs to know and what he is ready to absorb:

About the physical and biological facts of sexuality (male and female) that his son will need to know during the next phase he is entering. It is best the son get this information from his father first — not on the playground from other boys nor on the screen from strangers.
About the differences between men and women. This is remote preparation for understanding and accepting the very different modes of seeing and experiencing things that are the ways of his mother, sisters, and future wife.
About how to choose a good wife. Prudently prepared and lightly delivered, these nuggets of wisdom will affect his choice of a good wife.
About the inner moral struggle that all boys and men have to engage in, deep in their own hearts, on their way to manhood. This is a key point of identity between a father and son: That unique male way of battling to live well. This aspect is the core of a father’s formation of his son.
Sadly, about the dangers of abuse and pornography, which will have to be introduced early in a boy’s formation because of their pervasiveness.

First Phase: Early Childhood

Well begun is half done.

The relational foundation of a boy’s sexuality is his earliest relationship with his father. If this is warm, affectionate and enjoyable the journey is off to a great start. The demand on the father is one of time and possibly of temperament. Giving his time to his son is his greatest gift, always. The more and the earlier the better. As the child reacts with joy and laughter the father is naturally encouraged and rewarded. The embrace and horseplay that father and child engage in develops his son’s trust and confidence.

The task is friendship, the method is play: Anything and all that the son enjoys with his father. It can be tiddlywinks or football, drawing or singing, reading or baseball, fishing or hiking. Whatever brings joy to the child.

Also, this early stage is the time that deep friendship is most easily formed. It will yield fruit in mid-childhood and adolescence when that friendship will be tested by the strains of that phase.

With such a friendship in place the later phases will be handled with much great ease.

To be continued next week….

Pat Fagan

August 31, 2018

Three Short Periods That Shape an Individual’s Journey Through Life

adolescent sexuality, child well-being, culture, economics, family, family structure, love, MARRI, marriage, mothers, parenthood, religion, sexuality, society, young adults, youth No comments

Three phases are foundational to a sense of well-being throughout life: The child’s early experience of his mother, the teenager’s decision about sex and God, and the newly wedded couples agreement on suffering. The first and last involve the two most important persons in his life. The middle- the teenager’s decision -is personal, private and alone, or alone before God. All three phases shape life way into the future by shaping the individual’s capacity for the wellbeing of spouse, children, friends, family, and colleagues at work.

The child who experiences the constant attention and affection of a self-giving mother during the earliest phase of life, is blessed beyond measure. That mother is giving him a great introduction to “reality as a pleasant place to be.” Life is good, life is warm, life is full. Well taken care of, that baby is ready to take life on! Depending on the mother’s capacity, both from within herself and from the environment around her (her own early experience of her own mother, her husband, her home, her support from family and friends), she fills her child’s emotional heart- his relational “cup”- full, half-full or quarter full. Less than full means the child will have a corresponding limp in human relationships for the rest of its life– without realizing it.

In a recent conversation with friends who live in Spain we mulled the mother-child dilemma in that country where almost all married women are expected to return to work four months after the birth of the child. Many fear that moment because of the pain of leaving their child so soon. By any research calculus, four months with mother is way too little as a norm. Spain is undermining the relational capacity of its children and guaranteeing fragile marriages and difficult parenting twenty-five to thirty years from now.

It cannot but be that most Spanish children will limp relationally to some extent, but it will be hard to spot because most other Spaniards will have been similarly affected. For almost all Spanish couples — even the middle class and higher — a culture of shame exists for husbands if their wives do not work. (The poor and the working class can’t afford the luxury of such shame.) Caring full-time for children at home has become rather socially unacceptable. In Spain, the marketplace is more honored than the child. The market now significantly shapes Spanish children’s relational capacities.

The next period to shape life takes place in the inner sanctum of each teenager’s heart. Between the age of fourteen to sixteen most teenagers decide very privately which path they will walk on matters sexual – ‘adventurous’ exploration of sexual relationships, or chaste abstinence until marriage. The other decision, rather interlaced with the first, is whether they will walk with God or without Him. Should they take the both paths the wrong way, they set themselves up for much unhappiness, broken relationships, even broken marriages, thus visiting suffering on their future children and grandchildren. Some learn their mistake before they go too far down the road. Others find chaste abstinence is possible, especially with friends who walk the same path and who go to God frequently in worship. Oh this “it takes a village” helps a lot. Though chastity leads to significant prosperity and happiness in marriage and family for decades to come, most teenagers are not aware of this, nor that, though they are free to choose, they are not free to choose the consequences, that the consequences are hardwired within them.

The third period bridges the year before and after marriage. The most basic wisdom young couples need concerns suffering. Their orientation to it shapes their future. Those who expect life together to involve some suffering and are prepared to back each other up (“for better or for worse”) will survive and thrive. Those who premise marriage only on “happy ever after” (our modernist norm) are in for a quick disillusionment, one that ends many marriages. The best definition I have come across of a great marriage is “a couple with the capacity to solve an emotionally dividing problem”. Stated differently: a couple who can confront the suffering that life throws at them and figure out how to move towards a solution they agree on.

Though all the social science dots are not yet fully connected across the three periods, enough of them are to link the first period to this last. A husband and wife whose mothers “filled their cup” in infancy are much better formed to be great problem solvers together.

Which brings me back to poor Spain! It takes the national wisdom of a child-friendly culture to deal well with family, love, suffering and children. St John of the Cross, who helped reform religious and institutional life in Spain in the late 1500’s and whose writings are explored by believers of all faiths, is one of the great teachers of the connection between love and suffering. Spanish life could do with a re-infusion of his insights. Then the rest of the world would learn from Spain, for many Western nations, and many good couples, struggle, during the first phase of the child’s existence, to solve the dilemma of mother, child and marketplace.

Pat Fagan

December 1, 2017

abortion, gender, sexuality 3 comments

For men, women are the most desirable of all in God’s creatures. Not only Adam has had this experience, all is descendants do too, and have their own ranking of the “desirability-from-afar” of women. However, all men also learn (as do women about men) that up close and real many high rankings crumble because intrinsic to her desirability is her goodness. Nobody but the insanely lustful wants a physically beautiful woman who comes with major vices. Which, sadly, brings us to “the modern woman”.

The search for the beginning of the end of Western Civilization can go back quite a distance, well into the middle ages. I vote for Ockham, though others will go further backwards or forward. But, within the modern maze of cracking foundations many would point to the acceptance of abortion in law as the most significant change. It changed, and was designed to change, the status of all women in law. In social relations it also changed the more hidden status of those women who bought into it — who accepted “non-marital sex with abortion as backup insurance”. Such women, at heart, are very different from those who reject regime. Unwittingly, most of these new women have embraced grave evils. They are changed and in this they are totally different from women “of old”.

And the men who welcome these new women are of the same heart, and probably even worse because they will have in spades that vice easily inflamed in the male: to lust after many women, not just one. He will be prone to lust after, use and then discard the woman of the moment as soon as the next desirable one comes along. Enter myriad Harvey Weinsteins. But, in this new regime, no man can be really at ease for all know we have a Harvey close within, locked up, we hope, but in a jail easily broken out of.

There is a real justice to the pursuit of Harvey and his imitators, no doubt, but I am not sure there is much virtue to it because the rather immediate root causes (abortion as backup to sex outside of marriage) are still sacred cows in the religion of the accusers and the courts of the enforcers.

I am sure it has amazed all men — sexually virtuous or not, guilty as Harvey or not — who have seen some of the accusers still dressing in a way that is real “sexual harassment” of all men. In effect these women say: “I present myself physically to you so that you will lust after me, but don’t you dare present yourself physically to me in response. Do that and you will end up in court, hopefully in jail.” It seems they are flaunting a legally protected form of sexual harassment.

This highlights the modern dilemma for Western civilization and its laws: it has lost its bearings on what it is to be a man and to be a woman, but is not yet prepared to go for deep reform on the difference, the intimate connection between male and female, where the connection which balances that difference is the child.

However, modern sexual relations are legally premised on the exclusion of the child, both in contraception and in abortion. Yet that very child is the anchor of civilization, its compass and its destination. But no one is talking child as they talk Harvey Weinstein. And most would think it crazy to bring the child into this conversation. And they are right. In the modern world it is crazy, most especially in court, where the child, the ultimate victim is not admitted as witness, not even as observer. Such is the constipated justice in this deserved but exacerbating pursuit of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world.

It used to be true that women were the cause of men becoming civilized. Today the woman who rejects the child in “contraception + abortion” is incapable of being such a civilizing source. Now the power to grow civilization lies neither with the man nor the woman but with the one between them — the most powerless of all, their child. But power provides no path to the child, only love does. And the love that unites man, woman and child —overwhelmingly is God. So the data show.

When the child is front and center in all matters sexual the world will have found its way forward again. And it will be easier for all men to keep their Harvey in jail.

Pat Fagan

September 8, 2017

The Sexual Revolution and Fatherhood

education, fathers, sexuality No comments

Many people who have absolutely nothing to do with the family are deeply involved in the sexual formation of the family’s children. They seek not to educate them as virtuous, monogamous adults, deeply committed to their future spouses and their future children, but instead, as continuously polymorphous sexual beings at ease with what ordinary folk, for eons, called grave sins. The names and forms of these practices now multiply by the year and are even infused into the kindergarten.

But the child does not belong to anyone in the education system, not even to their most devoted teachers. The child belongs only to the parents, just as the parents are the only ones who belong fully to the child. And parents, through their marital relationship and their devotion, are the ones who most shape the child’s sexuality. When children are given these two ingredients they develop into fine sexual adults.

Given the advanced revolution that is underway in many schools it is more than time for fathers to step up to the plate and claim their rights. Protecting their sons is a natural first step. Imagine this opening to a conversation down at your local school:

“This is my boy, not yours. I gave him life. From my sexual act he came into existence. From his sexual act my grandchildren are going to come into existence. One half of the DNA in every cell in his body comes from me, the other half from my wife. By the most complete, intimate and loving of all sexual acts my wife and I brought him into existence. This domain belongs to no one else. I, the male who gave him life, am the one to teach him how to be a man so that he in due time with a good woman, his future wife, can bring another child into existence this way. A quarter of the DNA of those children will be my DNA. Nobody — and I mean nobody – has the right to come into this territory that is exclusively mine and MY BOY’s.

“I am the one to guide him along this path. For this task I was created. The school had nothing to do with it. It is not your right; it is mine (and my obligation too —not yours). Except for my wife, no one else has any rights in this matter. No one!

“For this my wife and I married. This is our most prized “territory”. This is our life. It definitely is not yours. Stay out! And keep your hands off my boy’s sex and off my daughter’s sex!”

“If we want someone’s help I will ask. But first take care of your children and let us all see how well you are doing in shaping the sexuality of your children. If I like what you have accomplished you will be a candidate for helping me should I need it. And by the way, that help will be for me — how to teach him.”

When fathers start speaking this way to school teachers, principals and boards, the good sexual revolution will have begun. And, by the way, loads of teachers will love it!

Pat Fagan

May 18, 2017

Rebuilding Culture

Tags: hook-up culture Dating, sexuality No comments

The New York Times has a circulation of one million while Rush Limbaugh has an audience of 13.5 million listeners. Limbaugh devoted much time last week to a Vanity Fair Article on the hook-up culture among young professionals in New York City, a culture that is now driving women away from men of their own age. The male Lotharios boast of up to three different women bedded per week and the norm seems to be over 20 different women per year. It seems some women are now seeking relationships with much older single (divorced?) men. These older men are attractive (even though marriage to them means wheeling them around in their old-age) because they treat their dates with respect and not as one-night stands to be cast off for the next pretty young thing.

Given the habits now deeply formed in these young adults whereby they treat others as objects to be cast aside, whereas most young men in most generations honored women and were delighted to have their attention. When these New Yorkers eventually settle down how will they treat their spouses and their children when the going gets tough? How will these women treat their husbands? How will all of them treat their co-workers and customers? Can good relationships ever spring from habits like these? This is the soil of divorce, abuse, abortion, cast offs, rejection, dejection and despair. It will implode.

What these women are looking for are men who honor them, will protect them when they most need protecting (which is when they are giving birth and nursing very young children). But where can they find such men? The short answer is in church. They are there in spades though such men are likely to find their spouses there too. NYC “Tinder Girls” don’t go to church much. Yet.

The greatest secret in the social sciences (and it is good science) is the inherent need for men and women to worship God if they are to thrive. The numbers and patterns are overwhelming. There is no way that atheist or agnostic academics can hold to their conclusions and claim to be guided by science. The social sciences constantly and repeatedly contradict them.

When defeating the British in the War of Independence American men found strength in numbers and in their commitment to fighting even to death in the cause of their country. For the rebirth of the nation young single American men will need to find strength in their numbers by banding together to form the backbone around which the body of the nation will be able to stand up and face a future full of hope. Young chaste men will be the saviors of the nation and its rebuilders. Us older folk have to work with them to discover ways to cause this banding together to happen, to become visible.

Imagine the scene in New York City where young professional men get together for fun and drinks — and they are all committed to chastity. Add a bit of style in dress, a decent college education, and evidence of steady work. How many young NYC professional women would be interested in finding such men? The place would be the hottest spot in town because the Vanity Fair article shows they need men who by their stance say “Even if the culture will no longer protect your sexuality, we will.” These are the Supermen who will save Gotham City. Without them it will become a hell-hole. With them many Lois Lanes will step forward. Male and female are made for each other. Without them you have no family, no future, no child. With them we have a future, a rebirth. Ground zero is chastity.

Pat Fagan

February 22, 2017

Demographics

Census data, education, family structure, income, MARRI, poverty, sexuality, single parents, social science, welfare No comments

Over the next few weeks we will introduce you to different tools and resources in the MARRI website. Today we introduce you to a tool that permits you to pick out the charts you want to see at the national or state level (your own state for instance) on a number of outcomes such as poverty and welfare.

These graphs chart the changes in the American family from 1940, just before entry into World War II, to 2013. This is a charting of the change in American culture over time, from one of significant belonging within the family to a culture of significant levels of rejection within the family.

You can analyze these trends by
•   The nation or by any particular state;
•   By total population or broken down by ethnic group;
•   By male or female or both combined;
•   By adult or children or both combined;
•   By outcome: family structure; education (but this not for children), poverty and welfare.

There are a total of 500 charts in the tool. All the data is from the Office of the Census, drawing on decennial census data and annual survey data.

To pull up the charts that are of interest, you click on the appropriate tabs on the dashboard. When you click on a button it will turn either blue or gold. Gold indicates the variable you are picking. Blue indicates a tab is turned off. Gold is on; blue is off. Thus if I wanted education outcomes for all adult males (only) in the state of Utah, the tabs for Utah, adults, males and education would be in gold, everything else would be in blue.

By playing around with the dashboard and you will quickly see how it works. It may take a second or two to function as the tool is “in the cloud” not in your computer.

Occasionally you will find blanks where we do not have data for a cluster of variables, e.g. on education attained for children.

Enjoy the tool, and spread the word, particularly to students!

Pat Fagan

February 3, 2017

Monogamy and Chastity

divorce, pre-marital sex, sexuality, social science No comments

By now, regular readers of Faith and Family Findings are familiar with the data on family structure and its impact on everything important to a functioning society. On every outcome measured, for adults and children, those in an intact family do best on all the positive outcomes we desire for ourselves and our children (education, income, savings, health, longevity, happiness, sexual enjoyment, intergenerational support) and have the least incidence of all the negatives we hope never afflict our children (crime, addictions, abuse both physical and sexual, poverty, illiteracy, exclusion, ill health, unhappiness, mental illness, lack of sexual fulfillment).

Thus family structure is exceedingly important to society and a return to intact marriage is a sine qua non for a nation or for families set on rebuilding themselves.

Given that, consider the implications of the following chart on the intactness of marriage at the end of the first five years of marriage:

What this chart shows is the probability of intactness of family after the first five years of marriage– given the number of sexual partners of the spouses have had in their lifetime. Using rounded numbers: 95% of those who are monogamous, that is only one sexual partner in their life time —i.e. only their spouse–95% are still in an intact marriage after the first five years. But for the woman (national average) who has had one extra sexual partner other than her husband (almost always prior to marriage) the percent drops to 62% and with two extra partners it drops almost to 50%. Thereafter it plateaus. For men it takes five sexual partners to reach the same level of breakup.

When I first saw this phenomenon in the 1995 data (the above is 2006-2010 data) my immediate reaction was “Those Mediterranean cultures that had chaperoning during courtship knew something about human nature, family life and intergenerational stability.” They ensured Mediterranean family was on the three-love diet.

Chastity and monogamy are foundational to the intact married family, and thus to the prosperity and success of a nation. Hence my conclusion that this chart is the most important chart in all of the social sciences.

A culture of monogamy is critical to a thriving nation or a thriving culture.

A culture of chastity is foundational to a culture of monogamy.

Thus the cultivation of chastity is central to a robust nation and a robust culture. Chastity is an old term but now out of favor even among Christians, given the impact of political correctness i.e. cultural Marxism. However it is the accurate label for the virtue or strength behind the data.

For the impact of monogamy at a more causative level check out the work of JD Teachman on Google Scholar or his CV and you will be able to thread the impact of monogamy in an admirable corpus of cumulative scholarship that is one of the great contributions to research on the family.

Though the above chart is purely correlational – it is demographically descriptive of America, of what is happening between our couples who get married. One chart cannot prove chastity is causative (go to Teachman and others to tease that out) but it sure indicates where causal strength (or weakness) can be found.

Pat Fagan

January 20, 2017

Scripts for Sexuality

rights of children, sexuality No comments

All children have the right to the marriage of their biological parents because without it they will not become the persons they could have become. This however is more honored in the breach than the observance. There are exceptions but they are few; and that paucity proves the rule.

Many today disagree with this statement of this universal natural right of the child. Not because it is not true, but because they claim their own adult rights trump the rights of their biological children. Such ‘rights claims’ make for different communities–communities that differ in their “baby-making life scripts”–and the induction of their children into these scripts. That induction, though it starts in infancy, becomes very serious at puberty. It is then that sexual signals and what they convey regarding “baby-making” life scripts becomes an intense topic of discussion for all: for the teenagers, their parents, their pastors and their teachers.

Different cultures have different life-script sexual signals but all have signals. And different sexual signals indicate different cultures and the need for boundary marking and honoring of those borders. The response to such signals is one of two: “I am part of your community” or “I am of a differing baby-making life script community”. When the response indicates a difference then the respondent in turn expects “OK, and I respect the difference.” Should that happen there is comity, should it not we have the beginning of tyranny at an interpersonal level.

Today more flash points between modern communities or subcultures are arising. Radical individualism is not only forming its own very different culture and baby-making communities, but increasingly is adopting a non-accepting attitude to differing life script communities.

This totalitarian attitude is even more dangerous because the social science data repeatedly demonstrate that the intact (monogamous) family that worships weekly is the most socially productive on all measures, and the further one moves away from that “best model” the weaker the children produced. Thus the radical individualism turned totalitarian is in danger of destroying the best, that which is most deserving of protection. And the first duty of government is to protect the good and the innocent, which clearly includes the intact married family that worships weekly — in community. It has very clear and different sexual signals.

America protects the radical individualist communities and cultures. The issue of the day is whether it can it protect its older communities and cultures as well as the new immigrant communities who have many of the same “baby-making scripts”.

Pat Fagan

May 29, 2015

Robots and Sex

economy, family, pornography, robots, sexuality 2 comments

The dystopia in Huxley’s Brave New World is quickly morphing into a terrifying reality. According to the Wall Street Journal, within the next 10-15 years people will have the ability to customize lifelike robots to fulfill their sexual demands. Far from sexual liberation, intercourse with robots will inevitably yield a hedonistic cult of emotionless humans enslaved to their lustful passions and devoid of love or reason. Emotionally and economically, it will radically expedite the crumble of western civilization.

Sexual intercourse with customizable robots is akin to pornography on steroids—it will emotionally destroy human-human relationships and consequently eliminate the very basis of society: marriage. As “The Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Family, and Community” shows, social scientists, clinical psychologists, biologists, and neurologists have all found that pornography distorts sexual relations. Men who habitually look at porn have a higher tolerance for sexual aggression and rape, tend to view women as “sex objects,” and generally experience sexual dissatisfaction. Because pornography is highly addictive, many users fall into sexually compulsive behaviors that render them unable to carry out a meaningful social and work life. Actually having sexual intercourse with a robot will exacerbate the consequences of pornography. Fewer human-human relationships will form because humans are not customizable like robots, and will simply be sexually unfulfilling. At the same time robots will not be sufficient because they lack any emotional connections. The human-human relationships that do form will be unstable because they do not provide the “perfect” physical sexual satisfaction that the robot once provided. Fewer children will be born since a robot cannot beget a child. And children who are artificially conceived will only have one parent (or perhaps one human parent one robotic stepparent?). The days of intellectual and spiritual conversations with your loved one, laughing to the point of tears, or cuddling while watching a movie will be over. Humans will be reduced to an animalistic state of solely fulfilling their appetitive soul. Nay, humans will fare worse—even animals cuddle.

Although it’s not too difficult to understand the emotional deprivations of having sexual intercourse with a robot, the negative economic implications are less apparent. But they are there, and they are extreme. First and foremost, intercourse with robots will deplete stable intact families because it will distort the basis of the family unit: a healthy sexual relationship between a married man and woman. MARRI research repeatedly proves that the intact married family (with a human mother and a human father) is the basis of economic security. “Marriage and Economic Well-Being: The Economy of the Family Rises or Falls with Marriage” shows that the intact married family produces the best economic outcomes of all family structures. On average, married-couple families generate the most income and have the greatest net worth. Poverty rates are significantly higher among cohabiting families and single-parent families than among married families. “The Divorce Revolution Perpetually Reduces U.S. Economic Growth” shows that marriage is a causal agent of economic growth. Specifically, it constitutes one third to one fourth of the human capital that household heads contribute to macroeconomic growth. “Non-Marriage Reduces U.S. Labor Participation: The Abandonment of Marriage Puts America at Risk of a Depression” and “Our Fiscal Crisis: We Cannot Tax, Spend, and Borrow Enough to Substitute for Marriage” explain how marriage protects the economy. Married men have a higher employment rate than unmarried men, and married families produce more children who are equipped with the essential skills to compete in the modern economy. The population shift towards non-marriage causally determines a large share of the decline of the adult male labor participation. Less Labor force participation plus less human capital equals a slowdown of economic growth. A slowdown of economic growth plus an increasing dependency on welfare equals an increasing budget deficit. As sexual intercourse with robots intended for lust replaces sexual relationships with humans intended for building families, economic decline will accelerate.

Simply put, sexual intercourse with robots will emotionally destroy stable human-human relationships that produce intact families; a shortage of intact families will divest the economy of its greatest contributors. Sexual intercourse with robots will corrupt because it will violate the laws of nature and nature’s God; it will dehumanize because it will defy the rational and intellectual capacities of man; it will pervert because it will eliminate love from relationships. Ultimately, sexual intercourse with robots will be fatal because it will destroy the emotional and economic functioning of civilization.

Pat Fagan

March 6, 2014

Marital Decline

cohabitation, family, intentions, MARRI, marriage, sexuality No comments

By: Patrick Fagan, MARRI Senior Fellow
Avery Pettway, MARRI Intern

Jonathan Vespa’s study, “Historical Trends in the Marital Intentions of One-Time and Serial Cohabitors,” just published in February’s Journal of Marriage and Family, confirms what many sense: that among current child-bearing aged women attitudes towards marriage have shifted downwards, mainly through the influence of cohabitation, which is increasingly serial.

Vespa finds two compounding associations within present cohabitation trends.

The downward trend in marital intentions holds steady and is significant even when controlling for serial cohabitation.
There is an additional negative association between serial cohabitation and decreased marital intentions. Serial cohabitants (a rising percentage of ever-cohabited women) are less likely to enter a cohabiting relationship with plans to marry (to varying degrees, dependent on whether it is the first, second, or third union) than are one-time cohabitants.

In short, a woman in today’s world entering a cohabiting relationship is less likely to have marital intent, and she is even still more less-likely to have marital intent if she is a serial cohabitant.

Cohabitation used to be an intentional (though relatively uncommon) stepping stone to marriage for women who engaged in it but that switched with women who were born between 1963 and 1967, and the pattern has continued unwaveringly since then.

Bottom line: There is more of a disconnect between sexual intercourse, cohabitation and marriage. Cohabitation is increasingly accepted as an independent entity, and choosing it has nothing to do with expecting marriage or choosing marriage.

Vespa’s study reveals that compared to women in the youngest cohort (born between 1978 and 1982), women in the oldest cohort (born between 1958 and 1962) had odds of having marital intentions that were 1.40 times higher. Such data suggests that America’s cultural assumption that marriage is sexuality’s end goal is dwindling more and more.

This obviously threatens the health (and rate) of marriage and the institution of the family’s person-forming power. As serial cohabitation rises, marital intentions decrease, and the two compound to push marriage even further into the recesses of the American mind, the stable familial space in which children have been consistently and healthily formed for generations will continue to weaken and with it the future America will be similarly weakened. As we are seeing (and as, I predict, we will continue to see), what plagues the family plagues the other foundational social institutions of Church, School, Marketplace, and Government. As marriage becomes more of a mental side note to our sexual practices, relational instability will continue to increase first in the family, followed later by relational instability in the other institutions (as the child grows into them as an adult).

Vespa isolated the increasing disconnect between sexual union and marriage. The country has yet to feel anxious about its effects on the children, their education, the economy and the capacity of our country to govern itself.