wat. If you don't have sex, there are sexual pressures and the causal outcome is earlier marriage dates, exactly as suggested. If you DO have premarital sex, the pressure vanishes and other factors take over which, today, means later marrying dates, exactly as suggested. You misinterpreted the original statement to mean something I didn't not intend, and then despite me repeatedly telling you what I have consistenly meant the entire time you refuse to accept it. This is a troubling pattern for you, and I would suggest that if you are going to continue being so horrific at interpreting people's comments, that you just accept at face value when they correct your interpretation and repeatedly tell you what your position is.


Lol. Present your data to the contrary. I take the fact that the pressure to sex leads to people having sex in whatever way they can as obvious and care not one iota to look up data for it. Now if you think you can actually refute that position, go ahead and try. But we both know you can't.



So you agree that the pressure to have sex causes people to have sex. But you don't agree that the pressure to have sex - in the case where marriage is the only way to have sex - does not cause people to have sex - in the only way possible: marriage? Do you see how...gratingly shallow....your position is?

Or... people have sex.

LOL -- That's not how one makes an affirmative argument. But since you insist...

PEOPLE HAVE SEX.

Do you realize that your inability to prove casual necessity completely undermines your position? Of course not. Otherwise, you wouldn't be trying to argue this. Actually, I take that back. Even if you realized it, you would still argue this because you can't admit your error. Admitting error is silly.

My goodness. We are talking about people that - for anachronistic religious reasons - believe they cannot have sex before marriage. To THOSE people, the pressures to have sex will be more likely to manifest in earlier marriage. For those that choose to have premarital sex, obviously this becomes irrelevant.

Seeing your edit, perhaps it is best to think about it like this. The sexual pressures increase the likelihood of having sex, as you have agreed. There are two ways that occurs, either premarital or post maritally. They can either break their covenant with god. Or they can get married, on average, earlier. You are essentially suggesting that it is 100% the former and 0% the later.

I literally phrased it as a special case of the general proposition you already accepted. I don't see what is not completely obvious or interesting about this. Surely we all agree that sexual pressures are huge determiners of human behaviour, yet you are taking the remarkable and audacious claim that for those who insist on sex before marriage, that miraculous and contradictorly to everything else, the sexual pressures does NOT provide any impetus to get married earlier (and thus have sex). And of course you are entirely unable to refute the claim and the last time you tried to provide "data" it was for an entirely separate claim that you had misinterpreted.

What's hilarious is that you still think you're right. You can plainly see that you've made an empirical observation. But you can't see that your utter inability to produce empirical evidence for your position is problematic for you.

LOL.

I'll give you a hint: People in the early-mid 1900s got married younger BECAUSE of premarital sex. I'll let you figure out why.

Edit: There's actually a relatively straightforward explanation for why you're wrong. But I want to let you put the pieces together yourself. The problem that you're having is that your framing a complex phenomenon in overly simplistic terms, causing you to overlook some fairly obvious casual connections.

Edit^2: And just in case you try to pull something silly, I'm not making any affirmative claims that people marry older/younger if they don't have sex before marriage. I'm claiming that your assertion of a casual connection is highly questionable.

A couple of points. First, while it is certainly possible for her to leave her second husband without abandoning her children or her responsibility to care for them, I don't see how you think she isn't abandoning her (second) husband if she does so. They got married, she presumably made vows to him, she is now forsaking those vows. That seems wrong to me in the absence of an overriding good reason.

Second, while it is true that she can leave her second husband without abandoning her children, the empirical research does show single-parent homes are generally speaking a worse environment for children to grow up in. Thus, it would not seem to be in the best interests of the children for her to break up the home unless there was an overriding good reason. What is that reason?

This would seem to be a classic moral dilemma in which both decisions result in a violation of vows, right? So why is the present-tense husband's vows more un-abandonable than the past-tense husband's vows?

I would ask you first to cite the specific data that you're referring to. For example, in many single-parent homes, children are in a worse environment as a result of parental irresponsibility (deadbeat dads and whatnot). Here, we're asserting that the mother will remain emotionally and financially responsible for the children. So citing broad claims about single-parent homes is not sufficient on its own to drive the decision here. If you had more specific data which shows that single-parent households when both parents are actively engaged in the support of the children are worse off [by a meaningful margin] than two-parent households, you could make your case. But as it stands, I don't think your data speaks sufficiently meaningfully to the question here.

This is awful.
I recently went through this silly process with my wife (who only did it to avoid bs with her mom). While I learned about my my own faith, I became completely disgusted with the man-made concept of annulment.

The woman needs to refile her petition in a different diocese. She needs to make sure she understands the process fully (which her advocate should have done), because if one just "checks the right boxes", the annulment will be granted.

I'm an attorney, and I am half inclined to start offering petition prep services to good Catholics going through an annulment. Just crazy!

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using 2+2 Forums

It isn't an empirical observation, it was a listing of what the logical possibilities are. If you accept YOUR proposition that sexual pressures cause increases in the likelihood of sex, then for someone who doesn't believe in premartial sex that increased sex can either happen in the form of breaking their religious conviction and having premarital sex anyways, or getting married earlier. These are the only two options I can see for this increased likelihood of sex to manifest. You seem to be of the rather audacious belief that it is 100% the former and 0% the later, a claim you cannot defend in the least.

Uh, we are talking about people who DO NOT have premarital sex today. I don't care what people who have premarital sex do. And I don't care what happened in the early 1900s. The question is whether people who do not have premarital sex today have some form of impetus to get married in order so that they can have sex when they believe in some anachronistic religious belief so they feel that having premarital sex is wrong.

Although I do have to lol at your previous lecture about all the different factors going into marrying age that seem to have been conveniently forgotten in this last comment that focuses on but a single factor.

I think the idea that there would NOT be a causal relationship between the incredibly strong sex drive we observe all around us and people getting married so they can have sex is far more questionable. I have no idea why you seem to think that marriage is the one human behavior that suddenly becomes immune to this urge.

So my quick googling failed to find an answer to the related empirical question. Namely, is it true that today people who abstain from premarital sex have a younger first marrying age? Probably hard to find just because it is so rare (for instance I have but a single example I know personally, and that case I know they did get married earlier due to wanting sex). Clearly if that is not true my claim that this phenomenon is at least partially caused by the desire to have sex could not be true. Likewise, the truth of the phenomenon doesn't assert the truth of the cause. Anyways, the empirical question is suspected, but not known.

I dont want to argue biblical interpretation. But for the same reason many Christians believe that. Jesus words in the bible.

Again, you are are allegedly arguing for the superiority of this option 1. I think you have shown that option 1 might not be worse than option 2 with respect to kids. But you have not demonstrated that option 1 is better than option 2 with respect to the kids, or anything else.

I think OrP makes a mistake in trying to identify the problems of option 1, namely he looked at the consequences to the kids. I think you are right, the kids MIGHT be equally well off in that scenario if everything worked out perfectly and the parents remained exactly as devoted as before. The real loss is to the husband (and wife, if you want to include her). Namely, the husband is now deprived of the potential lifetime of happiness and fullfillment that he looked forward to - and had reason to expect - when he married her. It would be very reasonable to presume that both husband and wife living in this scenario would be extremely negatively affected by this and even if that did not rub off on the kids one iota, it would be bad. All this for an anachronistic religious practice.

LOL -- Desperation. Listing "logical possibility" isn't even CLOSE to what you did.

I don't reject that there are only two options that YOU can see. It's too bad that there are clearly other options, and that the myopia which is you trying your best to protect yourself from the realization of your obvious error is quite entertaining.

You should. It negates the casual necessity which you require in order for your argument to be successful.

Maybe it's because I actually think about things carefully, and do not take positions on a purely reactive basis. I suspect if you had actually taken the time to think your position through, you would never have made the claim that you made. But since you did, you've now lashed yourself to this sinking ship.

But alas, you've done what you've done. And you're going to stick to your guns, by golly!

That's a shame. If you had, you would have stepped right into the bear trap of a statistical fallacy. Your inner mathematician should feel relieved that you avoided the error.

Uh...what other possibility could there possibly be? Sex can only occur premaritally or post. There isn't any other options. So the increased sex you agree occurs can only happened in one of these two ways.

As per usual, you don't offer any justification for why you think my claim is not true. You say there are more options, but don't list them. You are pretty good at furiously typing out insult after insult; however, but your lack of an ability to actually articulate a point somewhere in the middle of all those insults makes it all rather gratingly shallow.

Ya know I explicitly typed out a sentence to make it clear I was not attempting said statistical fallacy. Ironically, I added the line because I predicted you would try to make this accusation. Yet you are so fundamentally dishonest you quote my entire post except the one line and then act as if I would have fallen into a trap I explicitly identified and rejected.

Right. But the link between the variables is nowhere close to what you think it is.

Except that I did. I've pointed out the existence of historical circumstances in which the opposite effect occurs. Therefore, the casual link is not what you've presented it to be.

It's because I enjoy the fact that you're so caught up in simple-mindedness that it's entertaining for me. If you actually spent some time thinking about it, you could probably figure it out on your own.

That's fine with me. The fact that you've got such a laser focus on a singular cause-effect model, and can't even see over the edge of your intellectual rut to realize that you've fundamentally mischaracterized the entire scenario is amusing.

The fact that you looked was good enough for me. I know you're not going to find any data out there that shows anything significant that sounds like "I wanted sex, so I got married." I'm also fairly certain that the age of people who marry prior to ever having sex in their lives is going to be younger than the age of people who marry at some point after having sex. It's fairly obvious that we should expect this to be the case.

This is pretty telling. Even when I explicitly typed out, predicting your reaction, that I was not suggesting such data would demonstrate causation you completely ignore this - edit it out of your quote - and take this as good enough to presume I would make the exact mistake I had just explicitly made clear I would not make. This is grossly dishonest.

Given the lack of evidence of the (necessary but not sufficient for my claim) phenomenon that earlier marriages occur for those that abstain, and the fact that we both take it as fairly obvious, let us presume this phenomenon is indeed true. I submit it is obvious because the pressure to have sex leads to earlier marrying dates amongst those who fervently believe they cannot have sex until marriage. You take it as obvious as well. Why? If not this reason, what is your reason for why it is obvious? We agree on the phenomenon, yet you have yet to offer a shred of rationale for why my cause is wrong, or what the alternate cause that you believe even is, let alone why it is true.

As to your other post, I have no interest in trying to guess whatever inane points you think you have. Just cleary state them. Instead of presenting an argument you resort to insults. Combined with the above mentioned tact of assuming the absolute worst thing about my arguments when I have explicitly contradicted your assumption, it makes your entire debating MO almost entirey vacuous.

Not the most statistically sound but this is what Ive found while procrastinating over doing my lesson plans for today.



US Census Median age of First Marriage
Year --- Men --- Women
2012 --- 28.6 --- 26.6
2011 --- 28.7 --- 26.5
2010 --- 28.2 --- 26.1

2009 --- 28.1 --- 25.9
2008 --- 27.6 --- 25.9
2007 --- 27.5 --- 25.6
2006 --- 27.5 --- 25.5
2005 --- 27.1 --- 25.3
2004 --- 27.4 --- 25.3
2003 --- 27.1 --- 25.3
2002 --- 26.9 --- 25.3
2001 --- 26.9 --- 25.1
2000 --- 26.8 --- 25.1

1999 --- 26.9 --- 25.1
1998 --- 26.7 --- 25.0
1997 --- 26.8 --- 25.0
1996 --- 27.1 --- 24.8
1995 --- 26.9 --- 24.5
1994 --- 26.7 --- 24.5
1993 --- 26.5 --- 24.5
1992 --- 26.5 --- 24.4
1991 --- 26.3 --- 24.1Where the graph ends
1990 --- 26.1 --- 23.9
1989 --- 26.2 --- 23.8

1988 --- 25.9 --- 23.6
1987 --- 25.8 --- 23.6
1986 --- 25.7 --- 23.1
1985 --- 25.5 --- 23.3
1984 --- 25.4 --- 23.0
1983 --- 25.4 --- 22.8
1982 --- 25.2 --- 22.5
1981 --- 24.8 --- 22.3
1980 --- 24.7 --- 22.0
1979 --- 24.4 --- 22.1

1978 --- 24.2 --- 21.8
1977 --- 24.0 --- 21.6
1976 --- 23.8 --- 21.3
1975 --- 23.5 --- 21.1
1974 --- 23.1 --- 21.1
1973 --- 23.2 --- 21.0
1972 --- 23.3 --- 20.9
1971 --- 23.1 --- 20.9
1970 --- 23.2 --- 20.8
1969 --- 23.2 --- 20.8

1968 --- 23.1 --- 20.8
1967 --- 23.1 --- 20.6
1966 --- 22.8 --- 20.5
1965 --- 22.8 --- 20.6
1964 --- 23.1 --- 20.5
1963 --- 22.8 --- 20.5
1962 --- 22.7 --- 20.3
1961 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1960 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1959 --- 22.5 --- 20.2

1958 --- 22.6 --- 20.2
1957 --- 22.6 --- 20.3
1956 --- 22.5 --- 20.1 Lowest Median Age. @ ~22% according to graph above
1955 --- 22.6 --- 20.2
1954 --- 23.0 --- 20.3
1953 --- 22.8 --- 20.2
1952 --- 23.0 --- 20.2
1951 --- 22.9 --- 20.4
1950 --- 22.8 --- 20.3
1949 --- 22.7 --- 20.3

1948 --- 23.3 --- 20.4
1947 --- 23.7 --- 20.5
1940 --- 24.3 --- 21.5

1930 --- 24.3 --- 21.3

1920 --- 24.6 --- 21.2

1910 --- 25.1 --- 21.6

1900 --- 25.9 --- 21.9 Where the graph starts.

1890 --- 26.1 --- 22.0


As you can see, first marriage ages have both gone down AND up as we have been increasing in the amount of people engaging in premarital sex. As you saw the increase from 20-71% in the rate of teen white girls having premarital sex, you only saw an increase of 2.5 years in their average age of marriage. This age wasn't surpassed until 1979 when the average rate was at ~60% and nearly 80 years later.

You need to pause here and make clear in your mind that the "phenomenon" would be observed through putting those who get married before having sex into one pile and those who get married after having sex into another pile, and that if you take the average age of marriage of both of those categories, then those who get married before sex are younger than those who get married after sex. The "phenomenon" is a statistical one.

I think that we should "expect" it to be the case if the two variables are independent of each other. It's obvious why that would be the case (though I'm not sure you actually understand why). But I've noted an explicit historical time period in which there WAS an observable effect, so that there exist circumstances in which there is a causative effect (that happens to move in the opposite direction that you need it to).

No, I don't. "Obvious" is not an argument. Read the paragraph above a few times and consider what the null hypothesis is.

I offer no rationale because you should be able to figure it out yourself. You're a mathematician on a poker site. Surely you have some experience with statistics. Why is it obvious that one should expect that if age of marriage and sex before marriage are independent variables, that the age of marriage for those before sex should be lower than the age of marriage of those after sex?

So far, all you've done is state that it's "obvious." That's sooooooo much better than presenting a historical example in which the exact opposite effect that you claim can be observed.

Correct (and my previous comments should make it obvious that I think this is correct). We are both conjecturing the statistical phenomenon that we have not verified yet that the average marrying age of the "have premarital sex" cohort is older than the average marrying age of the "do not have premarital sex" cohort. In principle, either cohort could have the later average marrying age. I have offered a causal explanation for WHY I think this statistical fact is true. I have no idea what your explanation for this statistical fact is, you merely told me you think it is true, not why you think it is true.

No, I have no idea why you think this is true. Please say why. Nor do I know why you would think they are independent in the first place.

Guessing your ridiculous opinions on things is about as productive as guessing what number is about to be drawn from a hat. If you have a point, just clearly state it and stop with the nonsensical guesswork. Especially after I explicitly ask you to clearly state it because I don't know why you think something is true. One of the consequences of thinking that most of your opinions are incredibly illogical and nonsensical, is that I can't actually reliably guess what they are so unfortunately you have to do what normal people do in a conversation: say what you think and why you think it.

You still don't see it. That's too bad. I've made it very clear that if we ASSUME the independence of the two variables (marriage age/sex) that we should expect the average age to be lower for non-sex relative to sex.

I suggest that you run yourself a small simulated sample and see it in action. It's really not complicated.

I never claimed that I think that they're independent. You're a mathematician. Parse the sentence like a mathematician. And then think about the problem like an upper division statistics problem.

Well, the main point is that you're just dead wrong. Your grotesquely oversimplified model of human behavior simply has no bearing on reality. But the mathematical point is something that you OUGHT to be able to see for yourself.

I think you should think more. Pretend like a good friend of yours came up to you and said "I think that people who had sex before marriage might have married younger in the early 1900s relative to those who abstained. Can you help me think of a reason why that might be the case?" I'm quite certain that you would be able to think of the answer within a couple minutes. Think about the times and the culture, and think about the consequences. What could *possibly* happen that would drive people who had sex to get married sooner?

I have now repeatedly asked you to explain this point, can you for once just ****ing do it and dispense with your games? Must you really always do precisely the opposite of what I ask?

The bolded comment was very clearly made without this assumption. This is why I say that, in principle, either cohort could have the earlier date. I have a reason why I think the one has the earlier date. You have this statistical reasons on the assumption of independence that I want you to explain because I don't see it.

I don't see why you would be asking about social or cultural reasons (like lack of birthcontrol leading to pregancies or whatever of a number of possible contributing factors you might be thinking of) is relevant to a question you are saying is a basic statistical point.

Really, I had hoped you would take the time to think about it, because it's a simple observation.

Assuming that the age at which one has sex for the first time is independent of the age at which one get married, we simply look at the distribution of people who marry without having sex, and see that it skews young because as one gets older since there are fewer people of the same age who marry without having first had sex.

"Shotgun marriage."