"There has been a realisation among college-educated Americans that marriage is actually a pretty good idea, even if they don't like to talk about it in public, " argues Bradford Wilcox.

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They say the marriage fair is a tradition that actually works, keeping communities and extended families intact for generations.

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Such civil union laws in most cases provide the same rights of marriage under state law, without actually calling it that.

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Any seeming nostalgia for a time when dating, courtship, matchmaking, marriage, and family formation was more scripted actually masks a deep sense of regret over how indeterminate the millennial cohort seems to be on the most personal, individual level.

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Alisa Bowman, author of Project Happily Ever After: Saving Your Marriage When the Fairy Tale Falters and the founder of a blog dedicated to improving marriages, has said that once she and her husband embarked on a project to save their marriage, which was chronicled in her book, they actually argued more.

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She says her sex drive has increased so much that it actually turned off her husband and broke up her marriage.

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Furthermore, although marriage has been weakened, nothing proves that expanding it would actually make it stronger or that gays would be less inclined than their heterosexual counterparts to divorce or cheat.

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Although most men say they support -- even welcome -- the idea of a dual income household and equality in marriage, evidence shows that men whose wives earn more may actually be suffering on a number of levels.

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No, I would say very firmly because marriage is a relationship between man and woman and I don't think it actually helps to confuse terms, I also believe very strongly in the importance of friendship and people can have a deep friendship and call it friendship but we don't have to muddy the waters in terms of calling, calling it marriage.

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