I think that divorce is a vital escape hatch for people stuck in marriage and it is not a sentence of doom either for adults or children. The community should develop better support systems for saving or restoring potentially healthy marriages.But we should also help people who decide to divorce have healthier partings.

Increasingly, men are realizing exactly that - that having an educated, economically independent partner reduces the pressure on them to be the sole provider. Many men are also beginning to understand that participating in housework and childcare can be rewarding. Women with higher education and/or earnings are so much less likely than other women to divorce, that by age 40, they are more likely to be married than any other group of women.

There is no going back to a time when most women will feel compelled to enter or stay in a bad marriage just for economic security or social respectability. So today, the best way to get women once more interested in getting married and having children is for men to accept women's new insistence on equality. This is, I think, why educated women in America, are now more pro - marriage and more disapproving of divorce than other groups of women who have less experience with egalitarian partners or less clout in getting their needs met in relationships.

... what's been building since the 1980's is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family. That's what will last after this flurry on family values.

Singlehood is not longer a state to be overcome as soon as possible. It has its own rewards. Marriage is not the gateway to adulthood anymore. For most people it's the dessert - desirable, but no longer the main course.

There is one group of people - social conservatives, religious conservatives - who honestly feel that women's place is in the home and that wives should submit to their husbands.

Putting women's traditional needs at the center of social planning is not reverse sexism. It's the best way to reverse the increasing economic vulnerability of men and women alike.