The Married-vs-Single Debate continues, and I stay out
My friend The Yeti seems to have taken exception with Deb, who had taken exception with Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times, who took exception to people responding to a column written by Richard Roeper, in response to other people's response to a University of Chicago study that says the average American adult, in an urban setting, will spend the majority of his or her life unmarried.

If you think that was a difficult chain to follow, try typing the web links for it.

So let me see if I have this straight.

Mr. Roeper thinks married people should get off the collective back of their single friends, because being single, in his environment, is the social norm.

Mr. Steinberg thinks that single people that are over the age of 30 are desperate, lonely people that have deluded themselves into believing that they have to wait around for someone that is far closer to perfect than they will ever be, and yet will marry them anyway.

Deb thinks Steinberg is a jerk, because frequently single people are not married because they have fulfilled lives just the way they are, and don't need to "settle" just so they can "settle down", and that a reasonable person could attribute the current high divorce rate to people who thought they could "settle" and realised they were dissatisfied with their choices.

Yeti thinks that Deb should have read the article more carefully, because there is a large difference between "settling" and accepting someone, in spite of their flaws, and making a life with them, and that married people do make the majority of contribution to society in general (althought this isn't really his major point).

To add to the mix, each of these commentators, all of whom I enjoyed reading, have various comments from readers at each of their sites (or, in the case of the Sun-Times, letters to the Editor) in which their views are supported or refuted.

And people wonder why I love the internet.

This is a great example of the kind of interaction that society has been missing for a few decades. It may not be the kind of face-to-face animated discussions our grandparents had at the ice-cream social on Saturday afternoon at Esterhauzy Memorial Park, sponsored by the Optomistic Veteran Ruritanial Rotary Lions of the Order of the Mystic Coffee Table, but it is a step toward the kind of social interaction that we once enjoyed as a society. And I believe, as technology advances, we will break the divisions down even further.

Feel free to argue the point with me, or among yourselves. Of course, that would prove my point all the more.