A couple articles have come out about this lately, so here are the links...
WASHINGTON POST/ ECONOMY - MARRIAGE TOO EXPENSIVE by Michelle Singletary
(I wonder about her surname...)
EXCERPT: The researchers concluded that middle-income families can afford to spend the money to maintain the intimacy of their marriage or deal with troubled children while working-class people are priced out of the institution because they don’t have the money to pay for “therapy, horses, college, and gyms to stay happy together.”
and this one
SLATE - MARRIAGE ONLY MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS CAN AFFORD by Amanda Hess
EXCERPT: For their new paper "Intimate Inequalities: Love and Work in a Post-Industrial Landscape," University of Virginia sociologist Sarah Corse and Harvard sociologist Jennifer Silva interviewed 300 working- and middle-class Americans like Cindy, Megan, Earl, and Jan about their work and relationships. They found that as the American workforce and the American marriage have destabilized over the past half-century, marriage has become an increasingly inaccessible option for working-class Americans. While middle-class people like Earl and Jan are throwing money at their intimate relationships to keep them stable, working-class people like Cindy and Megan have been priced out of the institution.
4/24/17
THE LOBSTER : NEVER MARRIED NO KIDS FILM REVIEW
Watched this one on DVD and it was COMPELLING. It's called a wickedly funny comedy but I can't imagine laughing. I saw the film as a major commentary (or deconstruction, if you will) of the pressure to make people conform to couplehood. Even recently widowed people check in to what is an insane asylum. The clinics management and staff are simply absurd. Patients, willingly it seems, check themselves into the place and have 45 days to find a partner and give up being a "loner." Though some of them have been married before, there is no time for grieving. The awkwardness of the patients gives the impression that they are all seriously disturbed, beyond depression. There is an emotional coldness to everyone.
The staff performs odd plays to illustrate what happens to a man or woman who isn't coupled. And you learn to "go hunting," to kill single people.
What happens if you "don't make it," ? Well, you get turned into an animal of your choice, by surgery of some sort. It's set in the realizable future, but take heart - this surgery isn't available yet in the United States. The character Colin Farrel plays checks in with his brother - a dog. He wants to be a lobster for good reasons such as longevity and fertility. Maybe the fertility is a clue, because as the days go by, he sees that he cannot stay partnered up with the woman who slaughters his dog brother, and escapes into the woods.
Ah - the woods! The city versus country dichotomy. What's more natural than the woods? But since conformity is in question, no doubt that the loners who live in the woods also expect conformity. So darn if The Lobster does find love with another loner, a woman who is purposely blinded in the city by a doctor who must somehow be paid well by this rebel leader.
Of course you have to suspend disbelief, and it's all surreal, but if you're like me you'll love this movie for reasons well beyond humor!
C 2017 Never Married No Kids - BlogSpot
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