Haha, I knew this was your mistake. Your original assumption was on the independence of marriage age, and whether one has sex before marriage. But here you are making an entirely different independence assumption, namely that the age of first sex is independent of the age at which one gets married. You have chosen an entirely different variable. And of course in this scenario, the age of first marriage would then be very much dependent on whether one does or does not abstain from premarital sex.

We would have avoided much back and forth if you had told me your incorrect view the first time I asked.

"Shotgun marriage."Indeed, this is precisely the (possible) sociological factor I identified, but you didn't answer the relevancy question. As in, if you are just making a statistical point, why are you now talking about sociological explanations for things? Especially since you rejected a sociological explanation when I made it in favour of a statistical point.

*Facepalm*

If we take a random pairing of persons to be married to each other with each other without controlling for age and without asking whether the person has had sex (ie, the age of marriage and sex before marriage are independent variables), and then take a large sampling of such pairings, the average age skews younger for those who marry who have not had sex relative to those who have.

The fact that the probability of a person having had sex at age X is an increasing function of X is a logical necessity.

I guess this means you still haven't realized that there are two logically independent arguments being made.

"Pressure for sex leads to marriage is obvious" is an unverified sociological explanation. Shotgun marriages are a verifiable reality.

Oh lordy. First of all, what is it you think is independent. Age of marriage is independent of AGE of first sex? Or Age of marriage is independent of the binary variable "does/does not have premarital sex? Stop going back and forth between them. I certainly agree that if you are assuming the former of these two, that there is a younger marriage age amongst those that abstain, but you originally told me it was the later of these two that you were assuming. Further, in the case of the former, then age of marriage becomes VERY dependent on the binary "does/does not have premarital sex", precisely the opposite of your claim that they are independent.

Finally, saying "take a random sample of X without controlling for Y and Z" does not imply that Y and Z are independent so you i.e is nonsensical. For instance I can take a random sample of people without asking if they have ovaries or vaginas. But that doesn't mean having ovaries and having vaginas are independent.

You did get two parts right, however, which is better than nothing:

You guys are acting like children, arguing only to yell at each other.

There is no confirmable causal relationship between an increase in more women having premairtal sex from 1900 on and the average age of their first marriage.

The post I made above showed that from 1900 till the mid '50s the average marriage age went down and then steadily went up and didnt surpass the 1900 mark until 1979. This shows that the increased rate in premarital sex has no significant influence on first time marriage age of women.

You might as well be arguing over Coke and Pepsi because both of you are using just as much fact.

We know sex or lust for sex does not cause marriage. A priest will not magically appear and tie the know between you and your sexual partner or between you and your person of your desire.

Any relationship between these are by mediating variables.

We know such mediating variables exist. We also know they vary in strength and prevalence as our culture changes. Culture is a complex phenomena - such mediating variables can be linked by mediating variables of their own; any of these variables can be linked to eachother.

For example average age of marriage and commonality of premarital sex can be linked by usage of contraceptives (which also varies with age), younger debut age, (which also links to contraceptives), sexual education (which links to contraceptives), religion (which links to both debut age and contraceptives), higher education rates (which links to higher average age of marriage and religion), higher employment rates for women (which also links to higher average age, higher education rates, higher income and more divorces), higher income (which links to increased chance of kids gaining higher income), divorce rates (which lead to more marriages and more single individuals)....

And so forth.

There is little doubt that Aaron is less interested in the topic at hand than he is in getting involved in yet another argument with uke (and by a large margin imo). Who really knows why...might just be a crush, but it makes reading these threads unbearably tedious. How about once they reach 50 posts going at it non-stop in any single thread, they would consider moving their "discussion" to their own special containment thread?!

I don't understand the grounds for annulling a marriage.

I've discussed this with them before, but they REALLY enjoy tarding up threads in the interest of scoring imaginary points off each other.

It starts off looking interesting but rapidly becomes 'gratingly shallow'; I end up having to scroll over the posts or risk lapsing into catatonia. Glad it's not just me, I thought I was maybe missing out on something.

There is an amazing invention called the scroll wheel. On a tablet/phone? It's even easier! Flick to scroll. If that doesn't work out for you, there are very useful "ignore" features on the forum.

Yeah! Save that thoughtful and polite stuff for the RL n00b! This is the internet and we dont have to be held accountable to you or anyone! sh-t damn hell Barbra Streisand!!

http://www.usmarriagelaws.com/search...nnulment_laws/

"7. One of them agreed to be married based on fraudulent statements or actions by the other spouse;"

AFAIK the woman in question claimed fraud in her first marriage. Obviously the tribunals did not agree.

Thanks, that I guess forces the Catholic church to accept annulments agreed by the court in the case. I thought the application was to the Church hence my confusion.

That's pretty much the point that I was waiting for Uke to discover. People who really want to have sex simply end up having sex. People who exhibit enough self-control to not have sex before they get married don't get married just so that they can have sex. There's a self-selection process which negates the effect of this "sexual pressure."

I don't think this follows, unless I missed something in the link. Even if the government declares an annulment, I do not think that the Catholic church (or any church) needs to recognize it since those records hold no legal status (at least in the US).

The Mormons keep their own marriage records and I'm pretty sure that they don't really listen to what the government says about things. (They do all sorts of things internally against the wishes of other entities. An interesting case is the posthumous baptism of Holocaust victims -- it got so bad that the Jewish groups have basically given up trying to work with the Mormons to cease the practice.)

So somehow one of the most dominant influencers on human behaviour - sexual pressure - just magically gets self selected away such that the ONLY way the pressure to have can manifest is in premarital sex and could not possibly be in providing a pressure to get married earlier.

But I care much less about this than your ridiculous statistical claim. Disagree on vague sociological claims sure, but your inability to make this basic statistical claim is just hilarious, given your education.

If this is the case it goes back to my original question of what the churches grounds for annulling a marriage. It doesn't seem to be a practice that's common either here in Ireland or or the UK but the suggestion was it's easier to get a marriage annulment from the church there.

All that is of interest to me in this case is another concrete example of how religion can cause real harm in people's personal lives.

+1. Last Word Syndrome, I guess.

I can't really comment on Ireland or the UK.

Even though the Roman Catholic Church is formally linked from top to bottom, you should think of it like any other large organization. If you really wanted, the formal language of marriage is contained in Book 4, Part 1, Title 7 of the code of canon:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P3V.HTM

But that's somewhat like pointing to a statement in a the corporate office's 20-year strategic plan to make a decision about whether to hire someone. In practice, it runs much more like any other type of paperwork processing bureaucracy. The output often depends on the specific person or persons processing the paperwork, and not necessarily the information contained on the paperwork itself.

This is what I found from the Archdiocese of New York:

http://www.archny.org/pastoral/faq---annulments/

As you can see, it's kind of like an audit. You bring in a bunch of papers, they look at it, and they'll tell you what they decide. And you can also see how there will be plenty of opportunities for differences between evaluations by different persons.

Spoken with the eloquence of someone who understands as much about the social sciences as Satoshi Kanazawa knows about evolutionary psychology.

I've never claimed that it could not possibly influence marriage age. I can quote myself explicitly not saying that, and repeat my precise criticism of your position:

The simple fact of the matter is that you are attempting to make a social science argument in the complete absence of any of the tools and argumentation of the social sciences. You are trying to isolate a particular influence on human behavior ("sexual pressure") and apply it to an extremely complex social structure ("marriage") and claim a necessary casual link that leads to a particular empirical result.

But you can produce no data for this, and your argument boils down to you simply telling yourself that it's obvious. Furthermore, you seem completely undeterred by the fact that there exist specific historical instances which move in the opposite direction to what you say should happen.

My criticisms of your position from all the way back in Post #25 stand:

I'm often reminded of my friends who teach things like sociology and anthropology when I read arguments like yours. Some people have no clue what they're talking about, but will never realize it because they're too intent on believing they're correct. That's all there is left for me to say about this one. You're wrong, and you're wrong for the stupidest of reasons.

Not really any particular influence, what is arguably the biggest influence of human behavior. Sexual pressures are incredibly powerful and pervasive influencers of human behaviour and sure while it possible that magically this doesn't apply to marriage and magically such a dominant force doesn't actually pressure people to have younger marriages if their religion refuses to allow them to have sex any other way, you have not offered any suggestion or provided any robust thesis worthy sociological evidence yourself as to why this would magically not happen.

However I am much more amused at your hilarious statistical point that you have now dropped. Presumably you now realize just how wrong - and how embarrassing it must be for you as a mathematician - your statistical point is and feel much more comfortable droning on that I have not met a sociology professors standard (something I made no attempt or had desire to do.)

"I cannot possibly be wrong. See? I've asserted my assumption more forcefully. That makes me right!"

are you...uh...disagreeing with the quoted claim? Even knowing how ridiculous you usually are, I did not anticipate having to defend the idea of how powerful the pressure to have sex is on influencing human behaviour!

I take your tacit refusal to even acknowledge that you have entirely abandoned your ridiculous statistical claim as a complete capitulation on this point.

Your ability to understand a very basic argument structure is surprising expected.

Whether I accept or reject the claim is irrelevant to the criticism. I'm disagreeing with the application. Merely stating that pressure for sex can influence human behavior is not the same as saying that it necessarily influences any particular behavior in any particular way. And saying that's it's a BIG influencing factor on human behavior STILL doesn't say any of that.

That's the argument you need to make. And that's the argument that you've needed to make, and have failed to make. Repeatedly. You can't just wave a magic wand and say "Everything is about sex" and pretend like you've actually made an argument.

Again, if you had even the slightest clue about how social science arguments actually work, you would realize that you're doing it completely wrong. Your non impediti ratione cogitationis approach to the topic is representative of an astoundingly unsurprising level of ignorance. Go learn more about what you're trying to argue about, and perhaps you would be less of a failure at it.

The vows to the prior husband has already been abandoned. Returning to him does not change the past. However, the vows to the second husband have not yet been abandoned.

This is not what I was thinking of (I was just remembering remarks by a professor in a psych class), but here is an article that is relevant to the subject. Essentially, it tests two hypotheses to explain why children that have unstable family structures are more likely to have developmental problems (so, not necessarily single-parent vs. two-parent, but the criticism would still apply in this case). Either one of the proposed hypotheses would apply here as a reason to not change.

Also, you seem to be making more assumptions here than I am. Yes, the mother could still be responsible for the financial and emotional well-being of her children when she leaves. That doesn't mean that her carrying out of that responsibility will be as well done if she leaves. Just on a personal level, I would also be suspicious of someone who contemplates leaving her husband for this kind of reason as well.