Survey Says!

I was watching Fox News (“watching” might be overstating the event), and they were discussing a survey in which people were asked about how they would characterize their job satisfaction if their job were a relationship. Among the choices for response were “marry” the job, “casually date” the job, and “break up” with the job. Toward the end of the segment, the reporter doing the piece informed the two anchors that according to the survey, married people were more likely to choose to “marry” their job, while single people were more likely to choose to “casually date” their job.

My first response was to try to formulate a rational explanation for such a trend. I naturally leaned toward the characteristics typically associated with the real life relationships of married and single people and compared them to the characteristics of their respective responses. My tentative conclusion was that maybe married couples were more inclined toward commitment, while singles were more inclined toward … well … shopping around. Or, maybe married couples looked at things from a planning and responsibility angle, while singles looked at it more from a personal satisfaction and personal freedom angle.

Anyway, the only thing the reporting crew had to offer about the findings were a derogatory statement about the quality of marriage sending people running for the safety of the office. Granted, the crew was joking, and I think they were all married, so I’m sure they wouldn’t set themselves up for failure intentionally, but the exchange struck me.

Has our culture so devalued and trivialized marriage that the characteristic of marriage we are most comfortable addressing in public is dissatisfaction? Or has political correctness so restricted our freedom of expression that we simply confine our jokes to those topics which the PC police have condoned for ridicule?

Honestly, there’s no need to be thin-skinned. There is no way of truly knowing why the results of the survey are what they are, and since levity played well and the safest joke was of “the old ball-&-chain” variety, there ya go. I wonder though; how many people watched the segment and were acquiescent to the idea that marriage was naturally an undesirable situation?

As for me, I locked up my office and went straight home to my wife and family.