I ran across some statistics about the prevalence of marriage over the past 50+ years recently. The data indicated that women were delaying getting married by some pretty substantial margins. I wondered how many factors might be coming into play in this area, and started looking up statistics that might show how delaying traditional marriage might be related to other social factors.
I felt that the amount of text I generated on this topic was more than I wanted to burden my readers with here in the blog space, so I created a Google Doc. Here is the link. In the doc you should find the conversation I had with my favorite AI, and links to the sources of the statistics we/it brought to bear on this topic. Marriage in a traditional sense, for couples wanting to pool resources to raise children, for example. Commitments between senior couples that Live Apart Together as a way to be together without disrupting trusts, bequests, and other forms of previous family arrangements? Same sex marriages and how they impact child rearing? What impact has the advent of the internet made and to endless examples of marriage and the behavior of married couples on our own sense of marriage? And there are many more perspectives on this topic.
Big Questions covered marriage in the early 2000's and it evoked a lively discussion with the attendees at that time. I recall that it was centered more on traditional concepts of marriage. A lot has changed legally since then, and US society has also substantially changed.
Gemini Suggested this as the opening question for our discussion: If the internet has given us a front-row seat to every imaginable way to live and love, has it made traditional marriage an obsolete, rigid technology—or does it make a stable, exclusive marriage even more rare and valuable?
Please contact me if you have any issues with accessing the Google Doc.