Onely.Org

Some Like It Single: Marrying Millennial March 13, 2009

Welcome to the second installment in our new series, Some Like It Single, where we profile (relatively) small, independent blogs dedicated to exploring what it means to be “single” in American culture and, we hope, around the world. 

We like the blog Marrying Millenial because its author, Janelle Iwalani Maluenda, a twenty-one year old PR and advertising student at Chapman U in southern California, has taken on the entire whacked-out federally funded campaign to promote marriage with the vehemence of a verbal hurricane.  

She points out that the campaign’s narrow-mindedness and lack of innovation will actually turn young people away from marriage, that the campaign short-circuits young people’s attempts at exploration and self-expansion, and that believing in God and religion doesn’t mean that you have to think marriage is the magic cure for all social ills. In one of her most frightening posts, she shows the obscene amounts of money that the current director of the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC), Mary Myrick, once charged to the Oklahoma government when she was a consultant to their state marriage initiative in 2001 (Onely wants to see the breakdown of government expenditures toward the current federal initiative–if anyone has any information, please let us know!). 

But enough with the links (we could put in tons more)! Here’s how Janelle describes herself and why she blogs: 

My boyfriend and I of two years are giving birth to our first child this March 2009. We do not intend to get married because we do not believe that institutionalizing our love for each other through the state is a factor in being capable to raise a family.

I began the blog as a reaction to the announcement that the federal government was funding an advertising campaign aimed at my generation to encourage us to get married. When the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center claimed that married couples have better health, greater wealth, and more successful children and when David Popenoe wrote that married people are less of a drain on tax payers than single people, I became furious. 

I write to share with others the ins and outs of this new advertising campaign and why I feel it should not be happening. I write to encourage others to marry or not based upon their own decision and not because federal propoganda is being sent to their facebook inbox. I write because if nobody does, then the government and all other narrow minded conservative policy makers will continue to write the rule book that outlaws freedom to live whatever lifestyle one chooses.

Janelle, citing her age and relative inexperience, claims that in comparison to more experienced academics and advocates, she “doesn’t know shit.” Onely would argue that she does. 

Check out Marrying Millennial, everyone!

-Christina and Lisa

 PS. See here for a nice summary of the “dubious” scientific methods behind the stats saying marriage makes you healthy, wealthy, and happy.