Love And Marriage

Remember the 1955 song "Love and Marriage?" It was written by Sammy Cahn and sung by Frank Sinatra. I remember this ditty from radio and television, it was very popular.

Love and marriage, love and marriage

Go together like a horse and carriage

This I tell you brother

You can't have one without the other

Love and marriage, love and marriage

It's an institute you can't disparage

Ask the local gentry

And they will say it's elementary

No more.

Men have fled the institution of marriage and now a work by a US researcher, Dr Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist at the University of Tennessee and author of "Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood And The American Dream" sheds some welcome light on this trend.

‘Ultimately, men know there’s a good chance they’ll lose their friends, their respect, their space, their sex life, their money and — if it all goes wrong — their family...'

‘They don’t want to enter into a legal contract with someone who could effectively take half their savings, pension and property when the honeymoon period is over.

‘Men aren’t wimping out by staying unmarried or being commitment phobes. They’re being smart.’

Story here.

The following is from her book blurb on Amazon:

... men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century. Men are starting to fight back against the backlash.

Dr. Smith also has a blog.