Marriage links for the week
When I sit down to find news articles that celebrate marriage, I go to Google News and type in a search for "good marriage." After I have gleaned all I can from that, I type in another search for "happy marriage." Both searches return quite a few hits, few of them having anything to do with the union of a husband and wife. It seems that marriage exists in the news more as a metaphor than as a reality. I find articles about how Princeton and Edmonton, NJ, complement one another in their contributions to technology, how an on-air personality found the perfect venue for his talents, and how Apple's PowerBook and OS X work so well together. I also get hits on stories containing sentences such as: "The couple seemed to enjoy a good marriage until shortly before the shooting."
Were I a sociologist, I could probably draw an insightful conclusion from the fact that the news media seems to value marriage more as allegory and irony than as a social and spiritual institution. That is certainly the case this week, as Google has given me nothing that speaks positively about actual marriage.
Sometimes I find good material on other blogs, but the problem there is that most of the current conversation about marriage focuses on the gay marriage controversy. There are some exceptions (pretty much everyone in my Personal Blogs sidebar links), but the general lack of marriage celebration on the Internet can be a little disheartening.
If you have a link to an article that speaks positively about marriage, please leave it in the comments.
