Single Men Don't Fear Marriage

There is a common assumption in modern American culture about single men. They're all immature boy-men who flee from commitment like Japanese extras from Godzilla. But a new study appears to put the lie to this sterotype, showing American men want families just as much as their female counterparts.

Single men are, on the whole, as likely to want to get married as single women, the survey found. They are more likely than women to be open to dating people of a different race or religion, more prone to falling in love at first sight, more eager to combine bank accounts sooner and more likely to want children. (That distant choking sound you hear is thousands of women finding this news hard to swallow.)

...Men's greater inclination toward parenthood, however, seems to hold across every age group. While more than half the single men ages 21 to 35 wanted kids, only 46% of the women did. After that, the difference widens further, and not just out of biological reality. Only 16% of childless women in the still fertile years from 35 to 44 wanted kids; 27% of the men did. Plus, more women than men were prepared to say definitively that they were skipping parenthood.

Hat tip to CRChair for this article. It makes this single man feel better that he is not alone.

Surprise! You're on a dating site!

Online dating is more popular than ever before, and is becoming big business, but there are plenty of people happy to keep their social interactions "in real life" only. One website is ready to change all of that and create profiles for everyone scraped from publicly available databases.

Jordan said the site would soon host some 340 million profiles after scraping information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites to create new dating profiles.

Gotham Dating Partners hoped to position itself as a dating service as well as a "public information source" for individuals and corporations needing accurate information on US citizens, Jordan said.

The site announced that the changes would "in no way affect our international clients". But Jordan said any online, public information - including information about Australians - would be used.

Jordan did not expect to face any privacy issues by aggregating publicly available information, stating: "If the information is public, there are no privacy issues."

This concept has "bad idea" written all over it. It would instantly make stalking an effortless activity. Can you imagine the terror for victims of rape, when their attackers can find all about them so easily?

Here's hoping the CEO comes to his senses soon. If not, now is the time to go thru ALL of your privacy settings on ALL social networking sites and LOCK THEM DOWN. This is a good place to start.

Sadly True

A priest's advice on finding a spouse

It is funny how UNcommon it is to find COMMON sense in the world. But here is advice from a celibate, unmarried priest on what to look for in a spouse. It comes not from direct experience, but from watching happy and miserable parishioners. Funny how simple and logical it all is.

“Don’t marry a problem character thinking you will change him. He’s a heavy drinker, or some other kind of addict, but if he marries a good woman, he’ll settle down. People are the same after marriage as before, only more so.

“Take a good, unsentimental look at his family — you’ll learn a lot about him and his attitude towards women. ...I remember counseling a pious Catholic woman that it might not be prudent to marry a pious Muslim, whose attitude about women was very different. Love trumped prudence; the annulment process was instigated by her six months later.

What do our married (and formerly married) readers think? Good advice? Do you have any more for we singletons?

Is Happiness a lack of options?

Time Magazine has up an interesting article on a recent study about happiness. The cusp of the story is that people are HORRIBLE at predicting what will make them happy, and that happier people are those who do not dwell upon the "what-ifs" of what could have been.

Envisioning what life would have been like with an alternate spouse becomes difficult and increasingly irrelevant as you settle into the life you've selected. "Once you make a choice in life, the unchosen alternatives evaporate," he says. According to Gilbert's earlier research, which he featured in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness, when faced with an irrevocable decision, people are happier with the outcome than when they have the opportunity to change their minds. "It's a very powerful phenomenon," he says. "This is really the difference between dating and marriage."

I have a number of friends who are against the concept of "dating" because they feel it encourages lack of commitment. They prefer "courting" where you only "date" one person at a time, and only begin if you believe the process will end in marriage. This study may be an argument in their favor.