Anti-Climacus

LINK: Sara Butler finds yet more reason to despair of youngish people's ideas of marriage and relationships:

"Goodness gracious, is this attitude towards marriage getting it completely backwards or what? Having a child with a man is a better way of getting him to commit than marriage is?... Despite making my head hurt, I think this raises a really interesting question: if marriage as a social institution came about historically as a way of binding men and women together and ensuring that they take care of whatever children they produce, as marriage has been weakened in our society, particularly through divorce, what kind of arrangements, if any, will spring up to do the binding-together that marriage used to be able to do? I wouldn't count on this baby-having one, as Julie does; that's just asking the very phenomenon marriage was supposed to regulate regulate itself. If a couple can't keep a marriage together for the sake of the children, why on earth does this woman think they'd be able to keep a cohabiting relationship together for the sake of the children? Still, it's just fascinating to see how completely disconnected marriage and commitment appear to be for these women."