Millennials, in staggering numbers, are choosing to start their married lives under high eaves and exposed beams, looking out over long, stripped-down wooden benches and lines of mason jars.

According to an annual survey from The Knot, an online wedding-planning platform and magazine, 15 percent of couples chose a barn, farm, or ranch for their wedding reception in 2017, up from just 2 percent in 2009.

Meanwhile, more traditional wedding locales are losing their appeal. (The number of couples choosing to celebrate in banquet halls dropped from 27 percent in 2009 to 17 percent in 2017; similarly, hotel receptions dropped from 18 to 12 percent.)

Even if a couple isn't actually getting married in a barn, there's a good chance they'll make their venue look like one, said Gabrielle Stone, a wedding planner based in Boston, Massachusetts.

"There is this term that people use now: rustic chic." Typically, that means couples will fill the space with homemade chalkboard signs and distressed, vintage furniture.

"And wooden water barrels," Stone said. "Lots of water barrels."

When I asked my first question—are barns popular because they're cheap?—Gwen Helbush, a wedding planner from San Francisco, laughed. "Don't we wish it were so," she said.

While there are, surely, many relatively inexpensive barn weddings thrown in actual barns, by couples who actually live in rural areas with easy actual-barn access, anecdotal evidence suggests those probably aren't what's driving this trend.

Over the last few years, a wave of faux-barns, designed exclusively to host weddings, have popped up across the country.

Venues like Virginia's Pippin Hill Farm, built in 2011, offer an experience that its owner Lynn Easton Andrews called "expensively understated."

"We're not seeing bales of hay in the middle of the barn," Stone said.

"No one is wearing overalls, per se."

The tarnished brass lamps and faded couches are generally hauled in from boutique vintage rental companies—another business booming with the barn-wedding industry—more akin to props than random, left-over farming accoutrements.

Like earlier generations of Americans, Millennials want a beautiful (read: expensive) wedding. According to one widely-cited set of statistics, the average wedding cost has been steadily increasing, from US$27,021 in 2011 to US$33,391 in 2017.

But, despite these price tags, many young couples today don't want to be showy about it.

Happier at a brewery than a fancy restaurant, accustomed to wearing jeans to work, many Millennials are proudly casual. Continue reading

• Caroline Kitchener is an associate editor at The Atlantic. She graduated from Princeton in 2014 with a degree in History and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
• Image: Yale

Research has generally told us that the older, the better (younger couples lack the maturity), and that your thirties are as good a time as any.

But according to research collected in 2006-2010 (as analysed by Nicholas Wolfinger), these days the odds of divorce increase by 5% per year for each year after age 32 - across a variety of demographic and social differences. So what's changed?

Wolfinger suggests a few potential reasons - that the experience of staying unmarried past 30, with all its probable relationship history, could work to make someone less fit for or less desiring of marriage.

Or perhaps the pool of people left to marry at this age does not represent the cream of the crop.

I'm not sure though - because wouldn't these factors have been at play 20 years ago, when the stats showed no difference for people getting married that late?

My first inclination would be to think that the thirty-somethings of this generation, more often than not, are perhaps just as immature as today's teens when it comes to understanding what marriage is and what is involved.

One of my favourite Ted Talks is called "Why 30 is Not the New 20," by clinical psychologist Meg Jay.

The main gist is that contrary to popular belief today, the twenties is not a decade to throw away - but rather a formative time which is crucial in the preparation for all those "grown-up things" like marriage, career and children.

Maybe if more twenty-somethings realised this, they'd be more open to and ready for marriage when it does happen.

Because if you've spent a lifetime not caring for the future, it's hard to switch your brain into anything different - and different is what's needed to be ready for marriage. Continue reading

• Tamara Rajakariar lives in Australia and is a Journalism graduate from the University of Technology, Sydney.

A University of Chicago survey found the most enjoyable and most frequent sex occurring among married people, those who attended church weekly and people who had the fewest number of sexual partners.

"Those who worship God weekly have the best sex," said Patrick Fagan, a senior fellow at the council. "I want to see this on the cover of Playboy sometime."

Continue reading

There is only one problem with the dour and dismal portrait of heterosexual marriage painted by Liza Mundy in this month's Atlantic cover story. It's wrong.

In her bleak rendering, contemporary marriage comes across as unequal, unfair, and unhappy to today's wives. Wives are burdened with an unequal and unfair "second shift" of housework and childcare, husbands enjoy "free time" while their wives toil away at home, lingering gender inequalities in family life leave many wives banging "their heads on their desks in despair," and one poor woman cannot even have a second child because she does "everything" and her husband does nothing. Mundy also suggests that recent declines in women's happiness can be laid at the feet of "lingering inequity in male-female marriage."

Of course, it's true that some marriages are unequal and unfair, leaving a minority of wives (and husbands) unhappy. And most husbands and wives experience moments or even periods of frustration with their work-family arrangements. Nevertheless, the big picture for marriage in America—for those Americans fortunate enough to have tied the knot—is markedly more rosy than Mundy's portrait would suggest. Most husbands and wives make about equal total contributions to the paid and unpaid work needed to sustain a family, judge their marriages to be fair, and are happily married.

Take family work. When you combine paid work, housework, and childcare, today's married parents both put in about 55 hours, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center. It's true that married mothers do more of the housework and childcare, but in most households this doesn't amount to an onerous burden for them. That's because most married mothers do not work full-time (43 percent work full-time) and do not wish to work full-time (just 23 percent wish to work full-time, a fact rarely mentioned in media accounts of work and family life). Continue reading

Sources

• The Atlantic
• Image: beliefnet

I became aware of his addiction early in our marriage. I found the 'girlie' magazines hidden under the bed, read, he said, for the articles. I wanted to believe him. Every time I found them, I felt nauseous, violated. Intuitively, I knew that this was a distortion: a violence against himself; against me and against the women portrayed.

It explained some of his behaviours - real human intimacy was never sufficient nor satisfying for him. I blamed myself. In my naivety and desire to please, I complied with his requests. I wish I had known better.

His idea of a holiday with his new bride was to visit a city where he could prowl the peep shows and strip clubs. He argued that it was 'harmless'. I could never bring myself to join him. So what should have been a sacramental sign of love became a wedge.

His addiction to pornography seemed to anaesthetise any feelings he had for women as human beings. They were objects to be used, discarded, discussed, passed around, used, abused. He delighted in passing me around to other men to hold or to kiss. My discomfort merely increased his excitement and pleasure.

As his addiction to pornography evolved, it grew into a search for power and domination. He controlled with fear, interspersed with protestations of love and devotion.

Child bearing shattered his world. My body changed. The family dynamic changed. No longer was he the centre around which the world spun. His son he tried to raise to denigrate women (and other races, cultures, religions and body shapes). I still catch a glimpse of this residual dross. His daughters did not fit the centrefold profile. He ignored them. And me.

Now his secret 'other life' blossomed. Serial affairs, internet chat rooms, strip clubs, X-rated DVDs - always looking for the next erotic fix. The more pornography he saw, the more he desired. He immersed himself in this dark underworld: increasingly disturbing pornographic images on his computer, hard drive and TV, none of which gratified him for long. All night he surfed the net for sex. He divorced the need for sexual intimacy from its human context.

Increasingly, he became distant, remote. He communicated less and less with me. He created new 'life stories' with each successive sexual partner.

He used emotional and psychological weapons to keep me shackled. He relied on my Catholic faith to keep me from divorce, for he needed a respectable family face to cover his addiction to pornography and sex.

Eventually his house of cards collapsed. He had a nervous breakdown. He fled.

Why stay?

You may ask why I stayed.

Firstly, out of ignorance. I did not understand my gut reactions, nor how to act wisely upon them. Secondly, I valued a stable family life. Thirdly, I could not envision life as a single parent.

But here we are, here I am. Free of the perversions that corrupted my world view; delighting in the inherent goodness of the people around me; and embracing the challenges and gifts ahead. I am grateful. I am blessed.

- Reprinted from the Marist Messenger, with permission.

Image: Asia One