June 10th, 2014
As I mentioned yesterday, the paperback of What to Expect ships today, and luckily there’s lots of demographic stuff in the news. But my favorite tidbit, sent along by Galley Friend B.F. is a London Review of Books essay by Zoe Heller trashing Jennifer Senior’s very good book All Joy and No Fun. Heller’s chief complaint seems to be that Senior takes it as given that being married is a good thing, and then mounts an argument that having children can also be a good thing. Here then, is part of Heller’s brief on behalf of non-nuclear families:
Even readers who agree with Senior about the loveliness of this maxim may wonder why warm cuddles and hot sex are being pitched as an either/or proposition. This is a place where Senior’s cursory treatment of single parents is particularly keenly felt. Single parents, as she repeatedly points out, have all sorts of problems, but they do tend to date, fall in love and have unmarried sex more frequently than their married peers. In fact, freed from having to ‘work on their marriages’ in the same cuddly, anaphrodisiac setting in which they are nurturing their children, they are quite likely to conclude that nuclear family life, not parenthood, is the true enemy of heat.
Single parents “have unmarried sex more frequently than their married peers”?
You don’t say!
What’s interesting about this review–besides the simple idiocy, of course–is that normally the Venn diagram of people who are anti-marriage and anti-child is pretty much a circle. The LRB seems to have found a reviewer who occupies one of those tiny segments that’s against marriage, but not completely opposed to kids.
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I don’t know about single parents, but married couples have more sex than singles:
66 times a year! “Honey, we need to talk…”
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Actually, sometimes four kids DO happen by accident (or at least one or two of them do). 🙂
SkinsFanPG June 13, 2014 at 11:38 am
“married couples have no sex” is one of the Great American Lies of the past 2-3 decades. It defies all common sense. Can we please find the root of this nonsense?
I have this argument from time to time — (Insert unmarried friend here) insists that he is more sexually experienced than I am. This friend will usually cite a high number of sexual partners (usually in the 10-50 range over the course of the past 20 years), compared to my 1 sexual partner (my wife of 15 years). I then point out that aside from 1 or 2 relationships, the overwhelming majority of their sexual experiences are one-time events (hookups). So let’s say he had 25 hookups and perhaps 2 separate year-long relationships, and they did not live together during those relationships. Do the math and you find that this person had sex maybe a total of 100-150 times over the course of the past 20 years, or roughly the equivalent to an average year for me and my wife (4 kids don’t happen by accident). I end up winning this argument every single time, and usually to the embarrassment of a friend who thinks staying single and going from hookup to hookup makes him a sexual god.
When people ask me why they should get married I give the same answer every time: for the sex 😉