Who Needs Marriage? is a scientific article written in 1988 by Gerald C. Lubenow. The article deals with different views on marriage and how the meaning of being married has changed

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Josefine Kjærsgaard        English assignment        Monday the 6th of February 2012

3.h - MfG

Who Needs Marriage?        

“Who Needs Marriage?” is a scientific article written in 1988 by Gerald C. Lubenow. The article deals with different views on marriage and how the meaning of being married has changed through time. Lubenow circles around the question “who needs marriage?” to figure out why marriage is so important to some people in one part of the world and completely different in another part and likewise less important to the younger generation. To figure out the question of the title he uses Scandinavian exemplifications to show the reader different reasons why people are getting married and furthermore how marriage is in a phrase of development. The use of interviews is to give some credibility to the article. Lubenow has interviewed real people with real problems. The use of quotations is to draw parallels between the receivers and the exemplifications. The fact that the article is posted in a scientific magazine narrow the receivers to be rather informative readers, who are interested in peoples conduct of life around the world. So Lubenow is using quotations of Scandinavia to illustrate other places in the world.

The article starts out by mentioning that an increasing number of Scandinavian young couples with children are avoiding marriage. Especially in Sweden are there signs of antipathy to marriage. But why is it that people are kind of afraid of marriage? Lubenow tries to find out it by interviewing several Scandinavian couples. First real life case is the career woman Anne Raneke who is alone of parenting her daughter Josefine and never wanted to get married. She doesn’t live together with the father of her child, but she receives child support from him each month. She has always determined to avoid marriage and is holding on to that. In continuation of Anne’s situation, do Klas Rudbaeck and Anne-Lie Sjoegren have a daughter too. They live together but have not been married until they by chance decided to be at their daughter’s baptism. They didn’t see marriage necessarily connected to their situation in life, until it just happened. In contradiction to this doesn’t Astrid Lindberg see any reason to get married. She and her partner Greger Eriksson have lived together for 11 years, and now have two daughters out of wedlock. They think that marriage can destroy a good relationship. They are perfectly happy without being married so why then take the risk of resorting to marriage? Beside these real life examples from regular people, the article uses statistics and other facts to emphasize the examples and the informative and serious style that is used around this topic. Freelance writer Louise Boije defends Swedish culture as non-marital, out from the fact that it is marriage that has become weakened as a social institution and not the Swedes’ moral that is decayed. Instead Borje Dernulf of Sweden’s central statistical office sees the development as a problem because the definition of being a family is also changing. It makes it difficult to say whether it’s live-in lovers or married couples that has the highest rank. So why bother getting married if you have the same equal rights and status as married couples? Perhaps it’s the answer to the new non-marital trend.

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The overall writing style of the article is informative. There are used statistics and quotes from the law of marriage, different cases and sociological research, which often define the meaning of a scientific article. This gives the article’s arguments reliability and makes the text clear. Even though the article is from 1988, is the reliability still connected to the topic that has not been outdated but still is current in 2012. Even though Lubenow doesn’t interpret his subjective position or opinion, it is still his intent to affect the reader. The article’s diction of formal language and the use of ...

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