Not race or class, but...

Steve Gilliard has this up…

Now I ain't saying she a gold digger ...

Thanks to Broadsheet reader Paola Scommegna, posting in letters, for pointing out this interesting demographic study about Americans' marriage habits over the past 60 years.

Marrying up or down is growing rarer among Americans, according to the study by two researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles published in the peer-reviewed journal Demography last month. In sum, between 1940 and 1970 Americans became much less likely to marry outside their own educational level, and since then the trend has only become more pronounced. From the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s, the study documented a sharp increase among newlyweds with the same educational backgrounds, suggesting this trend will continue.

Education level and income are tightly correlated, so, Christine Schwartz, one of the authors of the study said: "As women's earnings have increased, men may have begun to compete for high-earning, highly educated women as women have traditionally competed for high-earning men."

Gee, is it finally time to bury that old slur "gold digger?" Or, at least apply it gender neutrally?

-- Katharine Mieszkowski

What this means is that interracial marriage will become increasingly common as education becomes the determining social factor in who marries whom. While race and class will still play, some, if decreasing role, the best determinate for who your spouse might be will be their level of education above all else

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No disagreement -- age, education, race, etc. mean a lot when it comes to the pond in which you're going to swim -- but it's not sufficient. And to round this out I'm going to go shockingly old-fashioned and invoke love.

Love matters.

Love matters like crazy but it does not conquer all -- at least not every time – and you’re fated to get your ass lopped off if you believe it does. (OTOH, I absolutely guarantee you you’re gonna painfully lose a couple of cubic miles of ass in this life anyway, so don’t sweat it if you got yours flensed behind being a romantic. There are worse things in this world to be, and I also absolutely guarantee that every moment you spend in pain over loving and losing and staying a believer in love lessens your stay in Purgatory by a thousand years. Offer is null and void, however, if you believe “love” and “doormat” are synonyms.)

But love does not conquer all, which is why who you've been conditioned to believe is fully human and who is not matters. Who you're trained love and who you’re told you're supposed to hate and fear matters.

Which is why, if this were 1952, I’d sure as shit be a Republican.

Which is why, if your political party deliberately sows, cultivates and harvests something as primally evil and culturally and pan-generationally toxic as racism for partisan, political gain, you are my enemy and always will be.

And which, conversely, is why I can't buy into the paeans of the hopelessness and doom that some on my side are always singing.

Why I can’t look at the ugly places we've been as a nation, and then look at where we are – as imperfect and heartbreaking as it is -- and remain anything other that unconquerably optimistic.

Because love abides.

And despite setbacks, each generation it get better and smarter and more generous at slipping in and healing our crippled souls.