Is Marriage Obsolete?

By Heather Havrilesky

I recently watched Planet Earth II with my family, and the footage of various animals waiting not so patiently for their mates to return to the proper rendezvous point in order to make sweet marital bird love or regurgitate a little fish smoothie into crying-baby throats was enough to send a chill down my spine. This penguin dad is seriously inept at scaling wave-tossed rocks and at locating his lady in a million-strong crowd of other penguin ladies screeching at the moon together, I found myself thinking. Does her screeching have the faintest hint of burgeoning contempt to it, or am I just imagining that? Later, as a seabird’s baby mama took her sweet time showing up at their appointed meeting spot, I nervously wondered if she’d wandered off with a more dashing seabird and left her endearingly devoted mate in the dust. (Okay, he did have a bad habit of nodding and pecking in a faintly insecure, unattractive way.) You could see the enormous misunderstandings in play: “You do know that I almost got pulverized against the rocks diving for these fish?” the harried penguin seemed to say with his beady black eyes once he finally arrived.

Paragraph 1: Describe what this paragraph is doing (not saying).  For example: In this rather long paragraph, the author tells us an anecdote about her own life. It is funny and it introduces us to the topic. Now do this for every paragraph in the article  

• In this paragraph the writer is starting the article by comparing her marriage with how penguin mate or chose their partner. I think that this a funny way to start the article because it intrigues the reader to keep reading and figure out how the penguin “love life” is some what similar to peoples love life.  

My younger daughter often proclaims that she will never get married, no matter what. And why should she want to? As much as I prefer to believe that her father and I are setting a shining example of affectionate, radically open communication, the reality is that she’s had a lifelong, all-access pass to our own version of a penguin marriage: the tedious diplomacy of marital negotiations, the low-key squabbling, the mutual suspensions of disbelief, the subtle undermining, the ever-increasing co-dependence. After ten years of this graceless ballet, it’s not surprising that all my daughter wants when she grows up is a tiny house, a subcompact car, and a mini Australian Shepherd.

P2: Describe what this paragraph is doing (not saying): 

• In this Paragraph the writer brings her daughter as part of an interview like she asks her daughter her taughts on marriage in order for us to understand that different generations have different meanings to marriage. 

And honestly, there are days when the prospect of growing old next to a mini Aussie doesn’t sound so bad when compared to the slowly unfolding garden of horrors inherent to aging in sync with another human. My incredibly handsome and charming husband, who is a tenured professor and looks a solid ten years younger than his numerical age, also has a quick temper, zero depth perception, and a palsy that makes his right hand shake whenever he passes me, say, a porcelain creamer filled to the brim with liquid nitrogen. Even though he and I might’ve engaged in countless frank and illuminative discussions of our flaws, even though we might’ve laughed several times about both his palsy and the remarkable ability of liquid nitrogen to cause a searing burn when it comes into contact with living tissue, that doesn’t make the ensuing spillage and pain any less real. To be married is to have the words This is all your fault eternally poised on the tip of your tongue.

• The writer is bringing up her marriage to compare and give us a visual of how different marriages can be. 

Marriage can feel like a moral litmus test in this way: Your challenge is to maintain your composure as the staggering deficits of the highly ineffectual human by your side come into sharper and sharper focus. Somehow you have to keep your sense of humor (which studies suggest is crucial to a healthy marriage), minimize your contempt (a major predictor of marital dissatisfaction), and increase your joint take-home pay (currently the most accurate predictor of how long a marriage will last, according to some studies).

• The writer uses humor as a way of explaining that marriage is build in comfort and a sense of humor. And that, humor could be the answer to a long lasting relationship. 

In an upgradable, consumer-driven, instant-gratification world where the experiences of shopping for high-end cell phones, high-end mates, and high-end sperm cells are hauntingly similar to each other, isn’t it reasonable to question the value of a legal contract, written in ink, on paper, that involves disastrously punitive terms of dissolution? What kind of an old-fashioned mutant could crave such a primitive trap, particularly when it’s paired with an enormously expensive ceremony that often includes allusions to obedience and lifelong mutual suffering and death, of all things? And why do we arbitrarily marry one person instead of, say, two or three or 15? Doesn’t that place an inordinate amount of pressure on a single mate?

• In this paragraph the writer wants us to see that choosing the right partner is that same thing at picking a cell phone, you want the best one and that it could be difficult. 

These days, there are limited economic advantages to marriage, a planet’s worth of mates more easily perused and accessed now than ever before in human history, and a host of inconveniences to being married, along with untold drudgery, monotony, frustration, and regret. Add to that that 40 to 50 percent of all marriages in the United States end in divorce anyway. Considering all that, what could possibly be the point of this outdated charade?

• The writer is making a statement because she is bringing in facts and numbers. 

My daughter’s lack of interest in marriage is not exactly an anomaly: Forty-five percent of all Americans 18 and older are now single, and more than half of Americans surveyed said that getting married wasn’t an important part of becoming an adult, according to a 2017 Census Bureau report. Moreover, research suggests that single people are more involved in their communities than married people are, exercise more, are generally healthier, and have more friends than married people do. Even the idea that married people live longer than single people do has been thrown into question: It turns out married men live longer than single men, but married women don’t live as long as single women.

• She uses her daughter again as example. And used a source to justify her idea that the new generation does not want to get married. 

(get to at least this point by Thursday, March 11.  You will complete annotating the article by March 16) 

In this unit, I would like to talk about homelessness in NYC. But specifically what is being done about to reduce the amount of homeless people in the street, how is the state helping them and what more could be done to help them especially during the pandemic.

1. https://abc7ny.com/homeless-homelessness-state-of-coalition-for-the/5277629/
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/opinion/sunday/homeless-crisis-affordable-housing-cities.html

In the article ‘Marriage: An Investigation’, the writer talks about how the idea behind marriage has changed from the 18th Century to present day. While reading this article, I was realizing that in today’s society no one is really getting married and following the perfect life and family stereotype and that’s what I learned from the article. What helped me to understand her point of view was her rescreach, she brought up facts about marriage in the 18th century and mid-1960s so by doing this I could see what she means by the ideas of marriage has changed over the years. She also uses her personal life as in an example in the article. She used her daughter as an example of people not seeing marriage in their future. 

The reason I picked this article was the Title. When the word investigation is used, it’s usually not a good thing, it makes me think of crime. So what I found interesting was the word Marriage and investigation used in the same sentence and as a title. At the beginning of the article, I was wondering if I had chosen the wrong article but then the writer started asking questions to the reader and it had me thinking about my beliefs in marriage. So I would say it did live up to my expectations, because it made me aware of facts that now change my whole point of view, for example that single women live longer than married women make me want to stay single forever. And I liked the way she ended her article, it was a sweet way to end the article after all the facts she mentioned.