Cohabitation: A Test-Run for Marriage

I have been wanting to do a blog post on this specific topic, but did not know how to start it. I guess I will begin by talking a little bit about my family. The side of my family that I mainly grew up around believe strongly in living with someone before you get married to them, otherwise called cohabitation. It is not only common in my family, but in much of the United States as well. The common belief is that living with someone before you get married makes a better marriage down the road. There are more problems with cohabitation than people really realize. One of these is the fact that when you decide to live with someone before you get married that getting pregnant is a very high possibility. When you are married and have an unplanned pregnancy, it is much easier to deal with because you have made a promise to be with one another through anything that may come your way rather than someone you are just living and having sex with. An unplanned pregnancy can cause a lot of problems and change your life dramatically. My mother and father were unmarried and lived together while going to college. They had a sexual relationship and ended up with an unplanned pregnancy (me). Their relationship ended soon after they found out they were pregnant and my mother went home to Southern California while my father joined the United States Army. I do not know if they would have stayed together if I had not come into the picture, but it changed both of their lives forever. It not only affected them, but me as well. I get to live my life without knowing what it is to have my mother and father married. It never really bothered me too much when I was growing up because I grew up in an area where that was very common. As I have gotten older, I have noticed that it affected me a great deal. I have heard some success stories when it comes to cohabitation, but for the most part I have seen similar things happen to families like my parents and I. Another problem with cohabitation is that you get to experience marriage with someone without actually being married. Where this sounds like a positive thing, it isn't. It is like sharing your life with someone without having any commitment at all. In some cases cohabitation has worked, but when you look at the general view of how it affects families as a whole, the cons outweigh the pros. 

Are men and women equal in every way?

Throughout history men and women have been seen as complete opposites and women being inferior to men. Unfortunately many cultures still view women as inferior to men. Fortunately, in the "western world" this conception dramatically changed in the beginning of World War I. Since then we have had many feminist movements demanding that women have equal rights as men, trying to change hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of tradition of mankind. In the process of this huge change, some extreme feminists argued that men and women are equal in every way. Science today tells us that statement is false. Males and females are different in too many ways to count and these are some of their differences:

Women are generally:
- better at picking up non-verbal cues easier
- more skilled in maintaining quality interactions with others
- use more emotion to solve problems (expressive traits)
- relation oriented

Men are generally:
- more aggressive
- more spatially oriented
- use more logic to solve problems (instrumental traits)
- value independence more

Along with these social/psychological differences, there are biological differences as well. It has been found that men and women's brains actually develop differently in the womb. We can see the distinct differences at as early as 26 weeks into the pregnancy. In an Israeli study, they found that the corpus collosum, the bridge of nervous tissue between the left and right side of the brain, is thicker in females than in males. As many other tests have shown, this has resulted in women using both the left and the right hemispheres in connection with language while men generally use more of the left hemisphere in the brain. This is why women are generally better at communication with others as well as why they are more keen to picking up nonverbal cues from those around them. Where women are much better at language and fine motor skills from a young age, men are generally better at math and geometry. The reason why women are so much better at language skills is because the female brain has 9.5 times as much white matter, which connects various things in the brain, in their brains than males do. Also the frontal area of the cortex and the temporal area of the cortex are more developed and larger in females. Now where females are more developed in these skills, men are better at spacial tasks. The men use the left hippocampus to solve problems and the women use their cerebral cortex. This can also attribute to the fact that women have an easier time recognizing and dealing with certain emotions. (webmd.com)

You can clearly see in the paragraph above that there are biological reasons why men and women act a certain way, even as children. These differences play a huge role in families. Women are seen as better nurturers than men because they can pick up those non-verbal cues from their babies and children where the men are seen more as the masculine, disciplinary figure of the house. The reason why marriages and relationships between men and women are generally better than homosexual (men with men or women with women) relationships is because the differences in men and women complete each other's "gaps". The Family Proclamation to the World states that a mother and a father have the combined responsibility to "rear children in love and righteousness, provide for their physical and spiritual needs, and to teach them to love and serve one another, observe the commandments of God, and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live." This major role in not only a singular family unit, but in a societal unit, it is healthier to have those major differences in parents to give the child that sense of completeness.

Extreme feminists in the past as well as in today's society try to argue that men and women are the same in every aspect, we are not. We develop in very different ways. Where I do believe that if someone sets their mind to something, they can do it, that does not mean that they are naturally inclined to do the task. For example, women can be just as good at certain sports as men if that is what they love and men can be just as good at communicating with others, they just sometimes have to work harder at it due to the biological differences. For example, I love shooting, camping, hiking, etc (activities associated with males), but I also love nurturing children, cooking, talking a lot with others (activities associated with females), I just have to work harder at some of the physically demanding activities than the males around me. Individuality is so important and I do believe that our individual differences are more important than our gender differences. Now, to answer the question asked in heading, I do believe that men and women are equal in the sense that we do have the same opportunities, but we are just not identical in what we do or what we like. If we were all identical, it would be detrimental to our society as a whole.

Sources:
http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/how-male-female-brains-differ?page=1
https://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation

The Cultural Question That Nobody Asks

As America becomes more of the melting pot of the world, most children are taught from a young age to be accepting of those around us even if they are different than us. I am very supportive of this kind of parenting because this is exactly how I was raised, but there are two questions that nobody really asks. One of those questions is whether all cultures are equally valid. Before you jump up and say "Of course!", let me ask the question again. Are ALL cultures valid, past and present? Like I said before, my mother raised me to be accepting of those around and to be open minded about different cultures, races, religions, etc, but until this question popped up in my family relations class, I was one of those people who would fight until the ends of the earth to stand up for other cultures. I believe that our culture affects both our individuality and our connection to others, but does that make it valid? There are two simple definitions of the word valid that make me think twice about this topic. The first states that valid means fair or reasonable, and the second, acceptable and according to the law. When we think about culture, almost all of us immediately connect that with religion and race, and as much as both of those play huge roles in an individual's culture, there are many other things to take into consideration. There are many cultures that I could use as examples, but one that I am somewhat familiar with is the culture of gangs. Looking at a gang from a family perspective, you can clearly see a tight-knit, supportive unit, which a lot of individuals see as a good thing, but when you look closer, there are larger problems that come to play. I am from a bad area in Southern California and I have personally seen the kind of effect of being a member in a gang can have on both an individual and a community as a whole. I have seen children go from being innocent with their whole lives ahead of them into law-breaking citizens because they grew up in a family that are members of a specific gang. Gangs are very loyal and many consider them a good family unit, but the atmosphere is clearly not healthy for anyone a part of it. The culture of gangs is neither fair nor according to the law and can even be seen as a parasite to an individual and a community. This is just one example out of so many, but can you still tell me that ALL cultures are valid?