Mark Regnerus is worried about America's young women... but not for the reasons you might expect a conservative news reporter to be worried, no, Mark is worried about America's women because statistics show we are now, like men, waiting longer to marry.

Many may argue that marrying in your late twenties or early thirties is actually a wise choice, giving a woman time to establish and independant carreer and finances amoung other things. Self-sufficiency is more and more important these days, especially since somwehere around 40 or 50% of marriages end in divorce - a self-sufficient woman would be much more able to care for herself post-divorce than one who married and reproduced before she had time to establish a career. However, Mark Regnerus does not care about these arguments, in fact, logic aside, he's only worried about one thing really - ovaries.

This article is quite obviously sexist from the start, because Mark unapolagetically admits that:

"If men weren't pulling women along with them on this upward swing, [he] wouldn't be complaining. But women are now taking that first plunge into matrimony at an older age as well."

Although Mark will concede that, "getting married at a young age remains the No. 1 predictor of divorce," he still pushes for young women to mrry early, argiung that since more 18 year old women will manage to keep their marriages together than 21 year old men women should marry earlier. (Forget about the fact that this data isn't even accurate, and the divorce rate only really significantly drops for BOTH men and women after 30.)

Aside from divorce rates, the crux of his argument lies, predictably, in fertility. According to the author of this piece:

"For women, age is (unfortunately) a debit, decreasing fertility. For men, age can be a credit, increasing their access to resources and improving their maturity, thus making them more attractive to women. We may all dislike this scenario, but we can't will it away. "

This argument is apalling in the sense that it firmly links women's value with ther fertility. At eighteen years old even I know that successful marriages are based on emotional connectivity, professional compatability, and so much more than just fertility. Why, why, why does this man not consider acess to resources, life experience, and maturity important qualities in a female spouse as well? What this statement implies is that women's personalities and other things they can bring to the table do not matter - so long as they have a healthy and ready-to-go uterus.

I wonder what Mark would say to a young, infertile woman... is it just as "important" that she get married ASAP?

Futhermore, with overpopulation quickly becoming a global environmental issue and plenty of children in America and abroad in need of good, loving homes why is fertility even an issue at all? Fostering and adoption are both perfectly achievable ways for a married couple who cannot reproduce, or doesn't want to reproduce, to build a family.

Even with these options, more and more couples are choosing to remain childless in these modern times. Marriage can be just as fulfilling of a partnership in the absence of children, as some couples choose to spend their marriages supporting eachother in fulfiling carreers and doing really great things for the world - regardless of when they marry I have to wonder, are these relationships any less valid to Mark Regnerus? Based on the logic he presented in his article, they are.

This article is, in addition to being horribly sexist, ridiculously heterosexist as well. For gay and lesbian couples, if marriage is even an option, reproduction is pretty much off the table - I wonder, does Mark still believe these couples should be marrying young?

Putting the fertility issue aside, I still have a problem with this article's implications. If women are encouraged to marry younger that means they will be spending years less time dating and searching for the right partner to eventually commit to; notice how Mark doesn't encourage men to shorten their search, just women. What this does is reinforce the idea that women who are selective in who they commit to are "difficult", "picky", and "needy" while men are simply discriminating and holding out for "the one". Mark may believe that:

"What really matters for making marriage happen and then making it good are not matches, but mentalities: such things as persistent and honest communication, conflict-resolution skills, the ability to handle the cyclical nature of so much of marriage, and a bedrock commitment to the very unity of the thing." 

I, however, disagree. You can have all of the communication skills in the world, if its not the right match then "handl[ing] the cyclical nature of so much of marriage" is simply synonomous with settling for the sake of settling down.

Finally, Mark also tries to paint marriage asap as a "noble" venture by buying into the "hippest" movement at the moment, the "green" movement. According to him, marriage is the "greenest" relationship choice because

"Michigan State ecologists estimate that the extra households created by divorce cost the nation 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and more than 600 billion gallons of water in a year."

Using this information, however, waiting for marriage is actually the "greenest" choice since if you hold out for the right relationship and don't divorce, you won't be creating those extra households. In the mean time single women living with roommates or a partner as just as green as married couples since they have two (or more) to a house, sharing amenities and so on. A marriage lisence will not make a couple, already cohabiting, any "greener". (In fact, if we really want to nitpick the paperwork involved with getting the lisence causes waste, making them less green!) This reads to me like a pathetic, barely concelead attempt to get women out of higher education and the workforce, and into domesticated relationships where they are reproducing. Mark failed to name one environmental or economic benefit to marriage that would effect society as a whole, making his article simply a sexist plea to get more young women back onto the "marriage market."

EDIT- Feministing and Bella DePaulo (over at Psychology Today) also covered this article and bring up some very interesting points that had not occured to me :)