Traffic? What traffic?

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Andy: ?I had a similar experience to Tim Stafford's son Silas when I worked with students at Harvard: very few indeed had parents who had divorced. Some of this is almost certainly due to the selection effect of admission to Harvard (or Stanford): when you are competing with dozens of other applicants for a space in the freshman class, it sure helps not to have been battling emotional trauma along the way. My colleagues in campus ministry at equally expensive, but slightly less selective, schools dealt with much more divorce in the families of their students. But the broader trend Stafford reports has become indisputably important for our culture's understanding, and misunderstanding, of marriage and divorce.?

My son Silas related a startling experience at Stanford. His dorm of about 100 residents had a “get to know you” session. At one point they asked students to divide themselves according to a series of questions—how many played a musical instrument, how many had acted in a play, how many had three or more siblings, that sort of thing. One question was whether their parents were divorced. Almost everybody in the room—all but a handful—rushed to the side of “intact family.” Silas was amazed. He expected a very high divorce rate among the families of these liberal-minded students.

College graduates may think and talk very liberally, but they don’t act like all choices are equal. Most college educated people are quite careful and determined when it comes to marriage, as with most things in life.

These statistics help explain, by the way, why the intelligentsia don’t treat divorce like the plague it is. Intellectually they may know that divorce is a very common thing and a very bad thing. But in their daily experience, among their friends and colleagues, the problem is not severe. It involves significant failures and deep wounds, but only among less than one fifth of the families they know well. College-educated opinion leaders are like people who read about bad traffic, but who find that whenever they get on the freeway, traffic is light.

from "The Champions of Marriage - Part 1," by Tim Stafford, Timstafford's Blog, 22 July 2009

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Traffic? What traffic?