Fox News reported on a non-scientific survey of 3,000 women done by Women's Day magazine and AOL. Half of the women responding reported that if they had to do it again they wouldn't marry their husband and one third said they definitely wouldn't marry them again. 39% of those 3,000 married women reported "constantly flirting" and a third reported fantasizing about other men. I don't know what the demographics are of the women who read Women's Day and I can't say that I'm familiar with the magazine other than seeing it at the checkout stand. I also don't know what the the religous beliefs were of those women but would be curious to find out. I do believe that this surveys relates to what Ilona wrote of in Taking It to the Culture.
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If I Had to Do it Again, I Wouldn't
Comments
Interesting statistics.
I think it is part of a whole. I feel we are two generations down on a degraded idea of what marriage and family life consists of. This affect our view of masculinity and feminity.
I remember being a flirt prior to marriage was considered a good characteristic- it garnered me friends of both sexes was considered a sign of being "fun-loving" , sociable. But that quickly became a detriment in marriage, even with a fairly open kind of guy. You don't take you wife out and sit and watch her have conversation with the guy sitting next to her in the bar. ( pre-saved says, ok?). It wasn't anything more than "innocent" conversation, but it eroded the expectations of marriage relating. It took hurting someones feelings to wake up to the fact that flirtations were a type of "romancing".
And in fantasizing- this has a big connection with the problem of p0rn generally. We are lured into thinking that it isn't hurtful to replace a person who wants to be special to us with some impossible-to-replicate persona that we would rather be with.
And then people wonder why it is so easy to become alienated in marriage. We love the airbrushed paste board people - but can't stand the real life of intimacy . Knowing a person thoroughly and learning to love them as whole persons, warts and all.
Sometimes that is hard work, sometimes easy, but the interventions of society's false promises and playmates don't help anyone. There are too many realities surfacing in broken relationships and damaged marriages for the p0rn apologists to continue to make their tired case.
Society is taking the punches on this, and as long as we are lulled into live and let die attitudes it will continue to suffer losses and hurts to its humanity.
We can't have things both ways, either. We can't live with our soft core p0rn and mirroring the "ho" mentality of the world and produce wholesome integral living in relationship with each other. Exploitation begets inequity. Just because we exploit ourselves doesn't make it OK either. It costs someone somewhere something. Usually our family.
Posted by: ilona at January 4, 2007 12:03 PMIf you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.
