While the breakdown of marriage and the family has, I believe, long been blamed for many social ills, I really appreciate the particular approach you’ve taken here.
I’ve come across a couple people in the psychology field who postulate a connection between the increase in the divorce rate (in the US in particular) to the apparent (and actual - albeit often anecdotally since serious research on this topic is fairly new) rise in people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder. There’s certainly more sociopaths running amok than we might think (see Martha Stout’s book _The Sociopath Next Door_).
So, I don’t think it a stretch at all to say we can trace it farther back down the communal family tree to see that there’s also likely a cyclical and exponential component over time to the breeding of amorality, to which promoting marriage in the way this article describes is a viable antidote. I’ll venture to take that a bit farther however, and say that the proper formation of a marriage might need to be considered, lest one fall prey to a dangerous cycle; marriage can also be a hiding space for disordered people to appear not-so-threatening. Perhaps that serves as more support for your argument, since marriage itself would then still create a bit of a buffer to the larger society?
Even in the case of intact marriages where one parent is personality disordered (and as such, an emotionally immature child in an adult’s body) marriage itself cannot “right” that person, nor prevent the ill-effects it has on any children in the family system. So, I do believe the end result for that subset of marriages would be the same regardless.
While the breakdown of marriage and the family has, I believe, long been blamed for many social ills, I really appreciate the particular approach you’ve taken here.
I’ve come across a couple people in the psychology field who postulate a connection between the increase in the divorce rate (in the US in particular) to the apparent (and actual - albeit often anecdotally since serious research on this topic is fairly new) rise in people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder. There’s certainly more sociopaths running amok than we might think (see Martha Stout’s book _The Sociopath Next Door_).
So, I don’t think it a stretch at all to say we can trace it farther back down the communal family tree to see that there’s also likely a cyclical and exponential component over time to the breeding of amorality, to which promoting marriage in the way this article describes is a viable antidote. I’ll venture to take that a bit farther however, and say that the proper formation of a marriage might need to be considered, lest one fall prey to a dangerous cycle; marriage can also be a hiding space for disordered people to appear not-so-threatening. Perhaps that serves as more support for your argument, since marriage itself would then still create a bit of a buffer to the larger society?
Even in the case of intact marriages where one parent is personality disordered (and as such, an emotionally immature child in an adult’s body) marriage itself cannot “right” that person, nor prevent the ill-effects it has on any children in the family system. So, I do believe the end result for that subset of marriages would be the same regardless.