American marriage statistics tell a sad and increasingly grim story of the health of the marital institution that is at the heart of any healthy society and the national dialogue is currently unable to address the real roots of the unraveling of these unions because of the obsession of whether gay marriages are legal or legitimate. USA Today recently reported that forty percent of all American women are single. Something in the region of seventy percent of African-American births, sixty percent of Latino births, and forty percent of white births, are out of wedlock. And as is well known, about one out of two marriages end in divorce.
As we ruminate on this detail, we lose the bigger picture that we need to focus on healing these unions, prevent families from breaking apart, and address the impotence of romantic love in our time.
Written in memory of Machla Dabakarov, the mother of a dear friend of Rabbi Shmuley, who passed away last year.
