Today’s first installment of lunchtime news chum all has to do with relationships:
- From the “Buying vs. Renting” Department: USA Today has an interesting article on a generational change: people are waiting longer and longer to get married. This is not to say they aren’t in long term committed relationships or not having children. They just aren’t having the ceremony and the legal change of status. I think this is the long term result of what started in the 1970s when the stigma of “living together” disappeared.
- From the “Buying vs. Renting, Take II” Department: Here’s another generational shift, this time in China. The LA Times is reporting that women in China now only want to marry husbands that already own a house. This is a generational change: Less that 50 years ago, women came with dowries from their family and men went for the best dowry. Now the women are picky, and the emphasis is more on the financial wherewithall of the husband.
- From the “If You Can’t Beat It” Department: Yet another generational shift. In olden days, violence in intimate relationships tended to be physical. Nowadays? According to the LA Times, cyberstaking and cyberbullying are on the rise as a new form of partner violence. Further, as we all know from our social networking, flareups happen fast and furious, often over things that wouldn’t be a problem face-to-face.
