Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family, and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the Left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children.
The only reason I got married in 2003 was for my children. I had a therapist who said marriage is really a container for a family, and that made sense to me.
Would we be a better society if we made marriage simply a private contract between two individuals, with no wider implications of kinship and family? I do not believe that we would.
But I don't think that it's a form of family that I would be comfortable in. I've found a way to this character and this family, but I still believe that a marriage is between two people and not seven or three.
Even if you plan a marriage and a family, you are never quite prepared for the reality versus how you imagined it. In a lot of ways it's better, and in a lot of ways it's worse. That's life, right?
My mother, brave woman, lost her whole family when she decided to marry a black man in the '60s. When the marriage fell apart, she had to come back to her family.
My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that - well, my father's family came as Puritans to Massachusetts.
We'll sort of get over the marriage first and then maybe look at the kids. But obviously we want a family so we'll have to start thinking about that.
The family is the first economy. If the family breaks down, well, government gets bigger because of the consequences of family breakdown. We see in the neighborhoods where there are no marriages and there are no two-parent families.
To try and stand outside the marriage, I'd say we have complementary capabilities. I do the hustling and the business. I do more script reading. I handle contracts.
Whether people choose to have same sex relationships or relationships outside the marriage - whatever happens between two consenting adults should be purely their business, not the state's or the society's.
In a way, fraud in business is no different from infidelity in marriage or plagiarism in scholarly work. Even people committed to high moral standards succumb.
How do you explain the bond between man and wife? Well, for one thing, it's private. What people do in their own marriage is their own business.
Where is the civil rights groundswell on behalf of stronger marriages that will allow more children to grow up in two-parent families and have a better chance of staying out of poverty?
It only took one text message to change my life. That's when I discovered my loving husband had been unfaithful. His infidelities ended our marriage.
I was in a marriage, and we didn't make it. So my hope is, through my music, I can help heal some relationships that may be headed in that direction.
You have to fight for your marriage, do whatever it takes. The commitment has to be there. And if you don't have a sense of humor, I don't know how anybody makes it.
Marriage is a core institution of societies throughout the world and throughout history. It's something that has provided permanence and stability for our very social structure.
My dad is from Japanese descent, my mom is from Swedish descent and, through marriages and divorces, a pretty multicultural family - a lot of Spanish speakers in the family.
The only day I remember of my parents' marriage was the day my dad walked out. As I stood there at five years old, with my older sister and younger brother, I knew that he was gone.
My mom and my dad were married 56 years, and the fact that I reconciled with my dad I think made their marriage a little bit better as well.
