{"id":8951,"date":"2009-07-18T18:01:51","date_gmt":"2009-07-18T23:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=8951"},"modified":"2009-07-26T18:25:19","modified_gmt":"2009-07-26T23:25:19","slug":"marriage-and-gender-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2009\/07\/marriage-and-gender-roles\/","title":{"rendered":"Marriage and gender roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I suppose we have Mark Sanford to thank for the recent frenzy of articles about marriage (or was it Jon and Kate?). There\u2019s Caitlin Flanagan\u2019s piece in <\/a>Time<\/a><\/em><\/span>, Aaron Traister at <\/a>Salon.com<\/a><\/em><\/span>, the Women\u2019s Day\/AOL living<\/a><\/em><\/span> survey, Amanda Fortini<\/a> wondering \u201cwhy would anyone submit to the doomed delusion that is marriage?\u201d No surprise then that last week, the Church\u2019s Mormon Message was Elder Oaks on divorce.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

I just read (and re-read) Sandra Tsing Loh\u2019s much-discussed piece<\/a> in the July issue of The Atlantic Monthly<\/em><\/span>. Loh, in the middle of her own divorce, suggests that marriage itself is outdated. \u201cSure it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn\u2019t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

While I\u2019m sure I\u2019d missed her point entirely, since I had been thinking about gender already, I noticed that in subtle and not-so subtle ways, she rejects traditional gender roles.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last week, Marc Wilson wrote an interesting piece <\/a>on gender roles where he noted that for him at least, \u201cmarriage has eliminated some of the gender\/sexual tension inherent in dating and has even made me more interested in developing a more \u2018manly\u2019 role.\u201d It had me wondering if traditional gender roles make marriage easier.
\n<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

Towards the end of Loh’s article,\u00a0she quotes Helen Fisher as saying that \u201cmost of the world\u2019s fifty-year marriages are made by Builders who marry other Builders.\u201d What is Fisher\u2019s definition of a Builder? \u201c<\/em>The much calmer person who has traditional values.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

And so though I don\u2019t know how to flesh it out yet, I do wonder if traditional gender roles make marriage easier. Do they also make it better? And if so, what does that mean for those who don\u2019t feel like the traditional gender roles come naturally to them?<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suppose we have Mark Sanford to thank for the recent frenzy of articles about marriage (or was it Jon and Kate?). There\u2019s Caitlin Flanagan\u2019s piece in Time, Aaron Traister at Salon.com, the Women\u2019s Day\/AOL living survey, Amanda Fortini wondering \u201cwhy would anyone submit to the doomed delusion that is marriage?\u201d No surprise then that last week, the Church\u2019s Mormon Message was Elder Oaks on divorce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1058],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-bloggers"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9005,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951\/revisions\/9005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}