6 benefits of marriage 2

Married people produce more so they have more. But, and this is a really important point in my view, the specialization does not have to be a traditional, gender-traditional, specialization. I'm not saying that women should only work in the home and men should only work in the market, and that men should never diaper a baby and that women should never earn any money. How you specialize is not so important. You pick some things and the other person picks some things and you

I haven't talked about sex-the sex part of my book is work that I did using a large study of sexual behavior done at the University of Chicago; it was on the cover of Time magazine in about 1994. I looked at sexual satisfaction for married, cohabiting, and sexually active single couples. I took into account their other characteristics, attitudes, sexual practices, how long they had been together, health, whether they had kids, education, and how religious they were.

What I found was that both married men and married women reported higher emotional satisfaction with sex than otherwise comparable cohabiting men and women. Among the sexually active singles, the only people who reported the same high levels of satisfaction were people who expected to be with their partner for the rest of their lives-the engaged singles. Something about being married, especially for women, increased their emotional satisfaction with sex. I would argue that marriage changes women's sexual behavior for the better-certainly toward more sexual exclusivity.

Assume that you accept my argument, that you buy my case for marriage, that married people are healthier, they live longer lives, and they're happier. But popular culture or American society believes these erroneous myths, which are unsupported by research-what do we do? What I did was write this book to get the evidence out to the general public. But I think we need to start a conversation about marriage. In Washington, D.C., people in the marriage movement talk about marriage as the "M word." Listen to politicians talk about marriage. They say family values. They rarely-I would say never-say, "We need to support marriage." I think we have to talk about marriage. It's not the same as any other family arrangement. It doesn't bring the same benefits. Pretending that it does is not doing anyone a service. I'm not making a moral argument; I'm making a public health argument-what's good for you. It's not the only argument you can make, but it's a powerful argument. We have to talk about marriage. We have to talk about it as an important institution, and hope that as a result of that conversation people will become more aware of the benefits of marriage. So, can I count on you to spread the message? Thank you.