Why Can’t Millennials Make Marriage Work?

This week, rather than speculate on the magnitude and direction of the stock market’s next inscrutable fit of hysteria, let’s ponder a troubling opinion piece about marriage that appeared recently in the Asbury Park Press. The author, one Anthony D’Ambrosio, is a 29-year-old millennial whose despairing ruminations bore the headline, Five Reasons We Can’t Handle Marriage Anymore. He would know. D’Ambrosio writes a regular column on relationships for the newspaper and was himself a married man until recently – to a woman he met in 2004 and whom he wed in 2012. So much for the supposed benefits of long courtships. Here are the reasons D’Ambrosio gives for the failure of millennials to forge lasting unions:

• Sex becomes almost non-existent.
• Finances cripple us.
• We’re more connected than ever – but also disconnected.
• Our desire for attention outweighs our desire to be loved.
• Social media just invited a few thousand people into bed with you.

Clearly, this is a guy who still has a lot of soul-searching to do — and maturing. One could also argue that he has missed the broad side of the barn by failing to consider why marriages used to work so much better. Men and woman shared a common sense of purpose and an unlimited vista of opportunities when the U.S. emerged from the Second World War. Today, it is just the opposite: Career options for young people are limited, if not to say bleak; and, men and women were not at war back then, nor were they burdened by a sexual revolution that has cast gender roles perhaps irretrievably into doubt.

What say you, readers?

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