Video Transcript: Lesson 1

I have a saying that I like to use that is fear attracts predators. Right? So especially when you're dealing with your women and dating situations when they're coming from a place of fear, they're not attracting the right type of guys, right? Okay, now, these statistics are fascinating, because there are more ways to meet people than there ever have been. And it's not just social media. We also have 2500 online dating websites in the US, we have 5000 online dating websites worldwide. In fact, last night, when we were at the dinner, it was really funny, I was talking to two gentlemen from the DeVos foundation that were there. And they're telling me about a co-worker who met her husband on farmers.com. Or farmers-only.com. Interestingly, neither one of them were farmers. But they liked a rural lifestyle. But there is a niche dating website out there for just about anything that you can imagine, right? Now, a lot of them have a smaller subscriber base. And we're going to talk about the challenges of that in the next session. But there are 25 major online dating sites who have a million members or more. In 2015, 50% of US adults were single. 40 million Americans use online dating. Now, of course, this has all had an effect on on marriage, there have been a lot of factors that have affected the declining marriage rate. But it's profound to look at the actual numbers to see how significant that decline has been. 68% of 20 somethings were married in 1960. But in 2008, that was only 26%. That is a substantial drop, right? 39% of people, according to Pew Research, are now saying that marriage is obsolete. That's a very big number, especially when you're talking about 40 million people, right? Thinking that marriage is obsolete. Okay? Now, there's a lot of talk in the news, “oh, the divorce rate's dropping” while the divorce rate is only dropping because the marriage rate is dropping. So in looking at some of these statistics, it can become very confusing, because there are different people with different agendas, whether they're political or cultural, that report the facts in a different way. So you really have to have discernment, when you're looking at the research that's out there on dating and relationships. So the divorce rate has not declined. It's just less people are getting married. In fact, the divorce rate among the poor is the same as it was in the 1980s. It is lower among the college educated, but they're also less likely to get married, right? It is lower among white and Asian populations, and its highest among the black population and high among the Hispanic population. The best estimate that I can give you, and weeding through the research on what is the divorce rate, is 45 to 60%. And now, we also have to take an average, of course of first, second and third marriages, because that's something that we're dealing with as a society as well. 41% of first marriages end in divorce, 60% of second marriages end in divorce, and 73% of third marriages are ending in divorce. So we're not getting it right the second and third time. And it was interesting. I was speaking to someone last night at the dinner who was talking about a friend of his who had gotten divorced. He was on a second marriage. And one of the things that he had shared with him 10 years out from that divorce is he wishes that he would have tried a little bit harder in his first marriage, and the effects on, financially, the effects on the children, right? The devastation that they went through, really would have been mitigated. So, I think that it's important to know when people are coming to you because people are not going to come to you as a matchmaker who are just single. When people find out that you're a matchmaker, they're gonna come to you for advice because they're dating someone and they're struggling or because they're married someone and they're struggling or because they're thinking about leaving their relationship or their marriage, and they're putting their feelers out to see what else could be out there.

And it reminds me a lot about the monkey bars. And when you're a kid, and you were on the playground on the monkey bars, you had to let go of one bar to be able to swing and grab on to the next one, right? People are afraid of change, and they're afraid of letting go. And they want to know that there's going to be something else there to hold on to. Right? So it's something to be really aware of, I think, as you're advising people that, you know, the likelihood is that you're not going to find something better, that you're going to repeat the same patterns. And you're gonna go through the same challenges, maybe in a different way. I call it same girl, different dress, right? So the average first marriage lasts eight years. Some of our cars are lasting more than our marriages, right? Now, what's interesting is that if you wreck your car, you're gonna go out and buy a new one. But when you wreck your marriage or your relationship, people become afraid to go out and engage in a new relationship. Right? We're gonna talk about that a little bit more later. But I think that we can all agree that it's interesting that if you want to get a driver's license, you've got to study, right, you've got to practice, you have to take a test and go through a whole process before they will give you a driver's license. Alternately, you can get a marriage license in about 20 seconds, right? No process to go through there. So there really is a preparation that is missing in our world and our culture, and the government doesn't feel responsible for that, nor should they, but we have to take that responsibility upon ourselves. And so really encouraging people, as a coach and a mentor and a matchmaker, to get knowledge, to study, to invest time. And understanding relationships is going to be one of your most important jobs. And of course, they're going to come to you and you can spend time with them, and mentor and coach them. But it's also really important to have resources to point them through, to point them to, so that they have books or YouTube videos, or things or homework assignments and things that they can do between sessions of meeting with you, right? Okay, we have some really interesting statistics about millennials. Where is the future going with all of this chaos that has ensued, we have 25% of millennials who will never marry. We have 25% of millennials who are co-habitating. And we have 25% who won't get married until the age of 40. Right? And so we also have to think about what impact does that have on having families and raising children? Right? Many millennials feel that marriage is out of reach for them. So what's interesting about that, what's interesting about that is the criteria that millennials are using to assess whether or not they're ready for marriage. So instead of assessing an emotional, or a spiritual readiness, their readiness is based on assessing their financial situation. So if they have student loans, they don't want to get married. Right? If they haven't reached the income level that they're trying to achieve, they don't want to get married, right? So it's very much a financial and economic decision for millennials. You know, if they're not done with college or graduate school, they're not going to get married. So many of them think that marriage is out of reach, it's not even a possibility for them. And as you know, there are many millennials who are faced with not being able to get a job and living at home with their parents well into their late 20s and their 30s. Right? So there's a real correlation. One of the things that's really fun and exciting and interesting about matchmaking is that once you are trained with a matchmaker, you are going to start to see in so many different disciplines, whether you're looking at politics, or science, or just various - history is another one - you're gonna see correlations of how those things are affecting relationships, right? Because our relationships are interacting with everything that's going on in the world. So it's really fun, when you have this information, you see the interaction with people's love lives and everything else that's going on in the world, right?

Now, interestingly enough, 67% of millennials say society is just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and children. And this is from Pew Research. Now let's talk about divorce and the people who are more likely to get divorced. People are more likely to get divorced if their parents are divorced, if they fight about money, if they didn't graduate from high school, if they marry before age 25, if one person smokes and the other person does not, and interestingly, if a friend is divorcing. So you really have to be careful who your friends are and what type of influence they have on you. Right? And who are the people who are less likely to get divorced? People who are religious, people who have a college degree, if their parents were happily married, and this was really interesting, this came from the Washington State Department of Health, people who watch romantic movies with their spouse. So, chick flicks for everyone! Okay, now, one of the other interesting phenomenons that, of course, comes out of co-habitating and some of the different we'll call alternative relationship styles of the secular world that we're experiencing, are having children. And the effect is very observable. And it's very different across the world and different countries and in different cultures. So, for example, in Latin America, 60% of births are to unwed mothers, okay? Now, this doesn't mean that the mothers are living separately, they might be co-habitating with the person over a period of time, right? But that 60% are not married. Belgium, Denmark, France and Sweden, the majority of births are to women who are not married. In the US, in Germany, in the UK, it's around 40%. And the way that that breaks down by race is that it's 29% white, 53% Hispanic, and the black community is affected by 71% of births being to women who are not married. In Greece, Israel, Turkey and South Korea, it's 10%. And in China, India, North Africa and southern Asia, it's 1%. So, we have some distinct differences. Now, of course, these are cultures that insist upon marriage where women can even be killed for having sex or children outside of marriage, right? Okay, now, according to secular social science, they have a definition of marriage. And this is what we are up against, this is what a lot of the people who come to you for help are kind of being told by our culture, is their definition of marriage, and it's looked at as antiquated and outdated. Right? So their definition is marriage is an economic partnership with a clear division of labor from which a relationship may develop, with the added sanction of religion, they had to put that in there, right? So the, you know, sanction sounds like it's mandated. Right? And this they say is most common in Amazonian rural Catholic, Southern Mexico and rural America. Okay, so this is kind of what the secular, how the secular world is looking at marriage right now in popular culture. And they also define marriage as something that's really based on biology, social needs and economics. Okay, totally different from our world view. Right? But this is what you're dealing with. And that comes from the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University.