Here is a new interview with my Turkish publisher regarding marriage, coinciding with my new book being published in Istanbul this week.The full transcript of the interview is available in thisSee info on the forthcoming English language edition: The Case Against Marriage.5-page PDF File .
Excerpt of interview:
The world even fifty years ago was a much different one. The main change is birth control. Throughout most human history, having sex meant having babies, and a society had to have a mechanism to assure that young people didn't have sex or babies randomly. You needed this institution of marriage to assure, for example, that a man didn't abandon the woman he impregnated and that stable conditions were in place to raise the child. Marriage was a perfectly logical process in, say, medieval Europe. If you wanted to have sex you had to be prepared for the babies that followed and this meant a stable, socially sanctioned relationship with the blessings of the community.Today, marriage and childrearing are almost completely separate issues. . At least in America, if a mans father a child, his legal responsibilities for it are exactly the same regardless of whether the couple is married or not. Either you’re in the household helping to support the child or you are paying child support. Your marriage status has nothing to do with it. So the original purpose of marriage is now gone, yet people still get married. Why do they still do it? I think it’s delusion. People think that by joining this thousand-year-old tradition they are somehow improving their lives and improving the relationship, which simply isn't true.
