Generally, the desire to have some.
It also allows you to make permanent a romantic relationship, and (frankly), it helps to make you a better person and prepare you to be a better parent - learning how to honestly put someone else first is a difficult lesson for those of us raised to believe that we were all stars of the show, special snowflakes, and worthy of a trophy because we showed up. Successful marriage doesn't create the foundation for solid society, it creates the foundation for a solid family and a more solid you.
:shrug: then you will never marry. Marriage isn't something that you do because now you're stable, one of the few constants in your first decades is generally change. Marriage helps
give us stability. Waiting for stability to marry is like waiting to have children until you can afford to pay for college, or waiting until you already know everything to go to school.
:shrug: that is incorrect, and, ironically, your attempted use of the studies of gay parents works in precisely the opposite direction of that which you think.
1. Most studies that show that children of gay parents perform equally to norm use "convenience samples" - samples of self-selected gay couples. The problem is that your non-representative sample is pre-selected to give you a false positive. Tests that focus on the
kids, and take measurements across the populace, demonstrate that children raised by gay parents actually suffer in relation to those raised by a mother and a father.
2. Ironically, one of the leftist critiques of that point
is that gays have historically been denied marriage, which has been consistently shown to provide healthy and necessary stability for children.
It was - I admitted at the time and still will point out - one of their best arguments.
3. Virtually ALL studies show that children of married parents do better than their otherwise-raised peers in virtually every measurable category of success possible. The reason for that is because they do.
In a report last year entitled “Saving Horatio Alger,” which focused on social mobility and class in America, Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution discovered that the likelihood of a child raised by parents born into the lowest income quintile moving to the top quintile by the age 40 was a disastrous 3 percent. Worse, 50 percent of those children stay stuck in the bottom quintile. And the outlook for the children of those marriage-less children is equally stark. That’s bad news for the country, and the American dream, such numbers.
But Reeves discovered a silver lining while crunching the data: Those children born in the lowest quintile to parents who were married and stayed married had only a 19 percent chance of remaining in the bottom income group. Reeve’s study revealed that this social-mobility advantage applied not just to the lower class: The middle class was impacted, too. The study revealed that children born into the middle class have a mere 11 percent chance of ending up in the bottom economic quintile with married parents, but that number rises to 38 percent if their parents are never married....
Given the topic of this thread, it's worth pointing out:
Finally, mobility is significantly lower in areas with weaker family structures, as measured e.g. by the fraction of single parents. As with race, parents’ marital status does not matter purely through its effects at the individual level. Children of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility in communities with fewer single parents.
Interestingly, we find no correlation between racial shares and upward mobility once we control for the fraction of single parents in an area...