Marriage Moats-Controvery Ahead
Published: Sat, 11/05/11
| Marriage Moats | Caring for Marriage |
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 Ever since my children have had teeth, and more specifically, cavities, I have had serious doubts about amalgam fillings. I am no scientist but I could not figure out why a substance like mercury is considered highly toxic even in minute amounts, yet we cheerfully implant it in out children's mouths. Recently I saw a video about the legal actions against the FDA by people who think this is a dangerous practice. They believe that the presence of mercury in such a sensitive part of a person's anatomy, leaking over time, causes irreparable harm. I agree.
This would not be our first mistake. When my father in law was a small boy, lead was considered harmless, and he poured his own soldiers. People have changed their collective minds about the safety of lead. Asbestos too, used to be considered a nifty insulation, but now the Herculean efforts to remove it from schools carries a gargantuan price.
I spend time trying to understand the shift in trends around marriage. Clearly something is different than it was in the fifties. We can track different possible causes for the increase in both cohabitation and children born to single mothers, as well as the divorce rate. The government has spent a king's ransom trying to both understand the repercussions and buoy up those fragile families. Yet in all the literally hundreds of workshops and presentations I have listened to, and all the stacks of books I have read there is silence around an influence that I consider corrosive.
The media.
When I was young, even married couples were clothed up to their necks, and in separate beds. And all they did was talk. Now it is hard to escape shows that are both lewd and explicit. Try as I have to shield my own kids, the tidal wave of television has permeated our house too, even though we have never subscribed to cable. When I suggest that seeing people hop into sexual relationships as casually as they do new clothes is a bad idea, I get blank stares.
"I just watch it. I would never do that." Really? There are statistics that suggest that if your own parents had an intact marriage, your odds for long marriage improve. But there are large numbers of people for whom those odds do not pan out. I want to know why.
I find it implausible that a steady diet of watching glamorous yet pathetically empty relationships can have no effect. To me it is like the mercury in the mouth, or the lead in the paint, or the asbestos in the attic all doing invisible damage over the years. Even a child who is fed healthy food three times a day is still impacted by the long term presence of mercury. Likewise a person who is lucky enough to have happily married parents is still greatly influenced by a diet of Sex in the City.
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Photo by Andy Sullivan
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