Honestly, Susan, for the majority of history, marriage has been the privilege (curse?) of the upper classes. Have you ever read "The Way We Never Were" by Stephanie Coontz. If not, please get to the bookstore with all due haste.

Here's a really good article I just found while searching for stuff about "how to keep a man happy." I know you and I have talked several times about what women can do besides sex to keep a man committed (and hopefully married), but honestly, the happiest men I know are the ones whose girlfriends/wives do at least three of the five things in this article:

http://www.cheatingways.com/alternatives-to-cheat...

Here's the gist of the article: All that shit in Cosmo about fulfilling men's fantasies? It's projection. Women care about giving hand jobs with panties and throwing rose petals all over the bed and bathing in chocolate syrup. Men want blowjobs and spontaneous sex. Here's his list, reduced to the essentials:

1. Unexpected, non-reciprocal oral sex. Often.
2. Thinking about you with another woman. Men love to hear about this in bed. It doesn't even have to be true. Just indulge in the fantasy with him.
3. Make him think you're constantly thinking about him sexually. Even if you're not feeling sexy, send sexy texts or naughty photos.
4. Roleplay "pickup" situations. Flirt with another guy at the bar, then ditch him for the "stranger" (who happens to be your husband). Take him into the bathroom, give him a blowjob.
5. Anal sex.

I'm not going to claim that this list is the end-all and be-all of making a man happy for the long term, but it's got the right spirit. The emphasis on blowjobs is important. All men like blowjobs, and they want more than they're getting. Even if they tell you otherwise. If they say they don't like it, either you really suck at... um... sucking, or they're lying.

Not all men are into anal sex, but a lot are. I know I can live without it in a relationship, but it's been a nice bonus whenever it's been an option.

The main idea, though, is that men want to feel like they are sexually desired, and that you really, really like pleasing them sexually. And the proof is in the pudding... or the putting... out.

Hmm... First, in the spirit of one blogger to another, I'm finding this comment system difficult to navigate. Especially in the threads with a hundred comments, I'm really having a tough time figuring out who's talking to who. It's kind of like reading a hundred random comments. Am I missing something about how these comments fit together? I mean, your response to someone is the top comment, and I had to scroll down to figure out what you were talking about. Also, it's got a nasty habit of telling me I'm not logged in when I'm clearly logged in.

And with that said, on to divorce and marriage. I think Matt's triangle is an appropriate illustration of just about everything in relationships. You can generally get one or two things you want, but you can never get everything you want. If you want to protect women as much as possible, you need to make it very easy for them to divorce. If you want otherwise good marriages to last through the bumps in the road, you have to make divorce very difficult to get. You don't get to have both.

And as you say, there's something to be said for protecting men. Prenups are nice, but courts can overturn them on a whim. High quality men are more and more wary of the financial obligations of divorce, and well they should be. It sucks that women still make 70 cents on the dollar compared to men in many industries, but it evens out in divorce court. In other words, a divorced man makes significantly less than a divorced woman in the workplace. It takes a little retroactive thinking, but maybe this will make it easier. Suppose I work for ten years at 50k a year. Suppose after living expenses, I have a net worth of 250k, or 50% of my earnings. Now, suppose I get married and divorced, and lose 125k of my net worth. That's the equivalent of 12.5k a year, which effectively drops my yearly earnings for ten years to 50-12.5 or 37.5K a year. 37.5K is 75% of 50K.

Now, consider a woman who has been working for ten years at 37.5K doing the same job as the man making 50K. She marries him and then divorces, netting herself 125K in the process. Now who's making more in the workplace?

Furthermore, if there are children, a man's income effectively goes down by as much as 33% in many states. Certainly children need to be taken care of, but let's not kid ourselves about this. Not all child support goes into the bellies of children. Many women treat child support as punishment for being a bad husband, and accept more money than they actually need. Of course there are a lot of women who really do need all of it, but we're talking about male perceptions here, right? What men believe about marriage? Men clearly believe that if they come out on the wrong end of a divorce, they'll lose their income both retroactively and going forward into the future. This is a strong disincentive to marry.

And of course, this conversation is a continuation of the value conversation. It seems there's a disparity between what women want, what men want, what men are offering, and what women are offering. It really comes back to the central question: If it isn't about children, why would a man get married? Taking common law divorce out of the equation, it's much simpler for a man to simply cohabit with a woman, keep separate bank accounts, and break the relationship off cleanly and without legal involvement if things go south. And since divorce is so common, there it is. Why marry?

Women and men both want relationships. It's tempting to think of men as sex machines who want nothing more than twenty holes to fill, but most men want the stability of a relationships, and the friendship that goes with it. But they can get that without marriage. So, we're back to the question. What can women offer that will get them what they want?

This post highlights a really common misconception about how brains work in general, and why Christianity fails before it even gets out of the starting gate. The simple fact of the matter is Free Will doesn't exist. We humans cannot help but believe what makes the most sense to us, and we can't help but perceive what we perceive.

This fact pretty much destroys Christian theology. If there is no free will, then nobody can *choose* to believe in Jesus. That being the case, either God was so stupid that he hinged his whole plan on an impossibility, or he is an evil, despicable being, or the whole thing is just made up bullshit.

If anyone's interested, I've spelled out the Free Will thing in much greater detail on my blog:

http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/free-...

"If one takes the varying populations of the different Christian denominations properly into account, the result is that only one in eight of all Christian marriages, 12.5 percent, end in divorce."

According to who and what? Source, please? Methodology please?

I always wonder where these atheists are. I've been to lots of conferences. Most of my friends are atheists. In over a decade of atheist activism, I've probably met a few thousand atheists. I've not once met an atheist whose dismissal of the existence of God was based on the evils committed in God's name. Not once.

Could you point me in the direction of a couple of these folks? Do they happen to all be 18? Seriously. I don't think you've talked to too many atheists, or maybe you're still in high school? I dunno.

I'm actually rooting for those folks. If enough people blatantly abuse church-state separation, we might have some luck in calling for a serious overhaul of the church's tax-exempt status. I wonder how many people have thought about just how much tax revenue the government would generate if it charged even a modest income tax on churches.

I wish I hadn't heard this story a hundred times before. Hell, it's part of my story, except I have been brutally honest with my family, and it didn't turn out very well. One thing that you didn't mention is the horrible dilemma a parent would feel even if they knew for certain what would happen in the future. I wonder, if my mother had known with certainty that religious indoctrination would eventually lead to a nearly complete split between the two of us, what would she have done? Would she have converted to atheism to save our relationship? I doubt it. Instead, she would have faced a hard, painful decision -- do what she herself was indoctrinated to do and knowingly lose a son, or go against her own indoctrination and feel guilty for "letting god down."

It's a horrible catch-22, and there's probably nothing that can be done for this generation of atheists who are facing their own horrible choices.

The more time I spend responding to theists, the more I realize that pretty much every theist argument against atheism or atheists is really just a projection of what's wrong with theism and theists. Billy Graham is a fantastic example.

As you say, it's not that BG is popular or that he promotes his own ideas. Hell, that's what it's about. If you've got something you want people to buy, you have to put it out there. It's just damn ironic that every charge he levels at atheism and atheists is at least as true of theists! Sure, Dawkins, et al, are trying to promote their books, but let's do a count at any Barnes and Noble, and see how many Christian books there are versus atheist. Yes, atheism has been around a long time -- much, much longer than Christianity, ironically. No, neither atheism nor theism is the same as it was even a hundred years ago. The thing is, every time science proves another tenet of religion wrong, theists have to adjust their conception of god.

Hmmm... I would say that it goes the other way too, but it doesn't. There hasn't been a single tenet of scientific materialism/atheism that has been disproven by theists. Not one.

Anyway, great rant. Damn, I wish I had more time to write these days. Keep up the good fight, Brother Richard.

James, isn't it awful that so many people don't know this? In all honesty (and this opens up a whole new line of discussion) you have to wonder how a nation full of journalists didn't bother to ask a single scientist what the pill actually does. Instead, they asked politicians.