Do they think that marriage doesn matter in communities like the South and West Side of Chicago?
The reports that we have show that young people think that marriage is important. They think that marriage is important for them. They think that marriage is important for their children. Marriage is an ideal. In fact, that’s one of the problems. They hold marriage as sacred. For them, a divorce is no small matter. The worst thing they can do is to marry someone and have that marriage fail. So what they’re trying to do is stack up a whole lot of qualifications to make sure that their marriages can be sustained. So in some sense, we’ve over-idealized marriage to the extent that people are unwilling to take the baby steps that we all know are required in order to have a marriage be sustained. I think the question is not only to make marriage more popular, but to give people the skills that they need. That includes job skills, and it also includes relationship skills. Is there a kind of moralistic side to a conservative argument about that though? There’s a definite moral argument in the
