“Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary
In a short, amusing TED talk video, journalist Jenna McCarthy offers some fun facts from studies conducted on predictors of long-term marriage. One of the quirky items is the smile in childhood photos as indicator of propensity to lasting marriage. How do these researchers even imagine examining that connection?
In the gaze of the other 
I don’t know what to say about this. It’s humorously interesting though not worthy of a Ted Talk, in my opinion. And I wonder about the researchers’ sample size. It’s curious that there were no black couples, or any blacks at all for that matter, depicted in the slides.
Did they really need to spend billions of our tax dollars to conclude, essentially, that happy people make happy marriages?
In my opinion the ‘institution’ of marriage is outdated. The fact that divorce rates keep rising and now happen to half of all marriages indicates to me that a radical paradigm shift in the thinking about this shackling – I mean, coupling – of couples will become part of our cultural and societal consciousness within the next 100 years.
I hope so. I would like to want to marry again.
I don’t know. Shackles have their place, and not just in prisons 😉
I thought the talk amusing more than anything, but, yes, the simple fact of all matters is happy, secure people, unafraid, uninhibited, intelligent and healthy people tend to get more out of marriage and life, in general, is my guess.
So much of what we read and see on the Internet and in print for popular consumption is basic tenets of common sense that are re-packaged and presented with new colors. These recognizable principles resonate with us and make us feel confirmed in what we know as “true.”
The piece was light fare with odd little facts, regardless of the weight of the studies. My amusement was in how the questions were framed to even come up with the facts: who thought of looking at childhood pictures in correlation with marriage longevity. huh?