Our culture has developed such a cynicism toward marriage that it’s no wonder the majority of people I talk to in my peer group say that they no longer value marriage. Yet I have found that they don’t necessarily hate marriage or find it undesirable. If the truth be told, they have a secret fantasy to find a “happily ever after” kind of love, but they don’t know where to find it or how to keep it, and question if it really exists in the first place. A close friend of mine idolizes marriage yet lives with his significant other, lamenting that he’ll probably never find his soul mate. He says, “I’m not afraid of marriage. I’m just terrified of divorce.”

“For the first time in our nation’s history, marriage has become a minority status.” — U.S. Census American Community Survey⁵

I can understand why some of my peers may be gun-shy or resistant toward the concept, especially when the adults in their lives have had less than exemplary marriages. The majority of people my age and younger will be casualties of divorced parents or will be raised by a single parent who never married. I know that if I didn’t have my grandparents as role models, the only example of marriage I would have had would have been tired reruns of The Brady Bunch—and how real is that?

Next up … let’s take a look at why people choose living together over marriage, explore why cohabitating doesn’t work and consider the better alternative:  marriage.

1SamRoberts, “To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered,” New York Times, October 15, 2006.
²J.G. Bachman, L.D. Johnston and P.M. O’Malley, Monitoring the Future:  Questionnaire Responses from the Nation’s High School Seniors, 2000.
³Nock, 1996; Brown and Booth, 1996 and Linda J. Waite and Kara Joyner, “Emotional and Physical Satisfaction with Sex in Married, Cohabiting, and Dating Sexual Unions:  Do Men and Women Differ?” cited in Edward O. Laumann and Robert T. Michaels, eds., Sex, Love, and Health in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp.239-269, Judith Treas and Deirdre Giesen, “Sexual Infidelity Among Married and Cohabiting Americans,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 2000, 62, pp. 48-60.  Renate Forste and Koray Tanfer, “Sexual Exclusivity Among Dating, Cohabiting, and Married Women,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1996, 58, pp. 33-47. Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), Table 4-2, P. 258.
⁴Sam Roberts, "To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered," New York Times, October 15, 2006.
⁵Ibid.

From The Naked Truth, © 2007 by Lakita Garth. Published by Regal Books, www.regalbooks.com. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Lakita Garth is a social commentator, media consultant and professional entertainer in Los Angeles. As a highly sought-after abstinence speaker, she has talked with millions of teenagers through motivational assemblies across the United States and internationally. She has also testified before the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Senate on teen pregnancy prevention, and serves on the executive board of The National Abstinence Clearinghouse. Garth, a runner-up to Miss Black America, has appeared in numerous commercials and television shows, including MTV and BET.