You think a romantic relationship between two people is hard? Try polyamory.

A panel of experts at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Philadelphia last week said that open relationships between more than two people can work, but it requires a lot of talk about rules, boundaries, and time spent with various lovers.

William Slaughter, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who has been treating polyamorous patients for about five years, said they need to have very good communication skills and be especially good at “mentalizing” or understanding others’ emotional reactions. He and Richard Sprott, a psychologist at California State University East Bay, and Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who recently left Georgia State University, talked about what to expect from polyamorous patients. Such patients often complain that they have to spend too much time educating their therapists, Slaughter said. ...

Sheff and Sprott believe polyamory is increasing. Sprott said younger generations are less insistent on monogamy than their parents. He cited research that found that 29 percent of lesbian couples, 29 percent of cohabiting straight couples, and 47 percent of gay couples are not monogamous. Among married couples, 23 percent of men and 19 percent of women cheat at some point in the marriage. He said there is no way to know how common polyamory is. ...

Sheff has studied children in polyamorous families. In her small sample, the “kids tend to be in great shape.” These families often aren’t obvious to the mono world. They look like a couple whose good friends come over a lot or people who are good friends with their exes. Most are discreet about sex, so the kids aren’t confronted by it and neither are their friends.

Sheff said the children say they like having extra adults in their lives. There’s always someone to drive them somewhere or help with homework. “A number of them expressed pity for children who only have two parents,” she said.

Labels: adultery, children, cohabitation, gay/straight differences, lesbians, mental health, monogamy, more than two parents, parenting, polyamory, professional associations

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...Among a growing number of today's men with children, Mr. Wiemer's story is not unusual: Adrift as they may be in their role as mates, they are proving themselves to be rock-solid fathers. Even a casual observer of American family life knows that dads now drive kids to more doctors' appointments, preside over more homework assignments and chaperone more playdates. Research confirms the rise of co-parenting. A recent U.S. Census Bureau report found that 32% of fathers with working wives routinely care for their children under age 15, up from 26% in 2002. Popular culture has noted the trend, too. Involved regular-guy dads are now commonplace in commercials. In one AT&T ad, a dad diapers his baby while talking sports on his phone with a buddy.

Whether it is because today's men were raised amid the women's movement of the 1970s, or because they themselves experienced the costs of that era's absent fathers, there is little question that the age of dads as full partners in parenting has arrived. ...

The connection of marriage to parenthood also seems to be changing. Marriage rates are at historic lows, and a new report from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research shows a small but definite rise in the decoupling of fatherhood and marriage. According to the study, the proportion of men entering their first marriage with two or more children in the early 2000s nearly doubled over the previous decade.

"This indicates, at least for a growing minority of men, that marriage is a greater economic and cultural capstone than fatherhood," says Susan Brown, the center's co-director. "They're saying, 'I need to complete my education and find a stable job before I get married, but not before I have a child.' "

For children, this is not an encouraging trend: Fathers who are married to their children's mothers are, statistically, the most active caregivers. Still, it appears that today's dads often remain involved with their children even if they do not live with the children's mom or have a strong emotional connection to her.

In a 2010 report published by the Future of Children, a joint project of Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, researchers found that "involvement [with their children] is high even among fathers who are not in a romantic relationship with the mother." Even more striking, the study went on to highlight, "a high proportion of all unmarried fathers say that they want to be involved in raising their child, and the mothers say they want the father's involvement."

Labels: children, culture, economics, Fathers, Marriage, mental health, motherhood, parenting, unmarried parents, work/family policy

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Mother’s Day is to infertile women what Valentine’s Day is to singles: a day from hell. It’s not so great for children who’ve lost their mothers, either. But it may be most painful for a group of mothers who are among our most despised and stigmatized: addicted pregnant women.

Some people offer them payments to get sterilized, seeing their blood line—as well as their blood—as “dirty.” Politicians want to lock them up for “chemically endangering” their children, regardless of the fact that this may actually do more harm to the babies than the drugs. Still others demand that we take these mothers’ infants away at birth, seeing any drug use during pregnancy as a sign that future child abuse or neglect is inevitable.

None of the people who push these measures appears to understand the actual lives of alcoholic and addicted women who continue using during pregnancy. Indeed, the fact that these advocates of punishment pay virtually no attention to Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), which is the no. 1 known cause of congenital intellectual disability, suggests that public policy related to drug use during pregnancy isn’t truly concerned with child protection.

Labels: addiction, children, culture, mental health, motherhood, pregnancy

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The number of people living on their own has doubled, over the last three decades, to one in three in the UK and US. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Public Health shows that the risk of depression, measured by people taking antidepressants, is almost 80% higher for those living alone compared to people living in any kind of social or family group.

For women a third of this risk was attributable to sociodemographic factors, such as lack of education and low income. For men the biggest contributing factors included poor job climate, lack of support at the work place or in their private lives, and heavy drinking.

It is known that living alone can increase the risk of mental health problems for the elderly, and for single parents, but little is known about the effects of isolation on working-age people. Researchers in Finland followed 3500 working-aged men and women for seven years and compared their living arrangements with psychosocial, sociodemographic, and health risk factors, including smoking, heavy drinking and low physical activity, to antidepressant use. Information on antidepressant medication was taken from the National Prescription Register.

Labels: Finland, gender, gender differences, men, mental health, women

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Everything you know and have comes from your family. Even if you could somehow forget that fact, society continually hammers you with the idea that there are no limits to how much [s***] you should have to put up with when it comes to your blood relatives.

I disagree.

Growing up, you are in the most frightening, vulnerable position of your life, and I'm not just talking about relying on mom to throw some corndogs in the oven, or dad to show you which porn sites won't [****] up your computer. Because of my own abnormal upbringing, I believed for the longest time that my views on family were skewed -- influenced in a negative direction as a result of a lifetime of fear. It wasn't until I started writing for Cracked and collecting emails from readers expressing the same viewpoints that I realized I wasn't unique in disagreeing with statements like ...

Labels: adolescence, child abuse, childhood, children, culture, mental health, parenting

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The "ugly secret of global poverty" is basically that men prioritize alcohol and tobacco over their children, per Nicholas Kristof's Sunday New York Times column. He addresses the problematic way in which many in the developing world choose to spend their money, though this is also true of some of the poor in the United States.

The call to action, that we should give women more control over finances and assets, is one that humanitarian workers have known for years. Aid and development workers learned quickly in the field that distributing food and rations to women in refugee camps for example, ensure that the goods benefit children.

However, a parallel and integrated solution would include focusing on mental health instead of isolating or banishing men, who also play an integral role in families. Men have various of reasons for drinking. Part of it could be cultural, and part of it simply selfish and hedonistic.

But poverty and mental health are interwoven. Some men drink to self-medicate their depression or anxiety that are intolerable. Others drink to cope with stressful situations like unemployment, idleness, lack of upward mobility, failure at one's societal role, and failure to protect the family.

Labels: culture, Fathers, men, mental health, poverty, women

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Trying to make a big decision while you're also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to hold off on that. Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome. ...

The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in addictions, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. "The compulsion to get that reward comes stronger and they're less able to resist it," Mather says. So a person who's under stress might think only about the good feelings they'll get from a drug, while the downsides shrink into the distance.

Stress also increases the differences in how men and women think about risk. When men are under stress, they become even more willing to take risks; when women are stressed, they get more conservative about risk. Mather links this to other research that finds, at difficult times, men are inclined toward fight-or-flight responses, while women try to bond more and improve their relationships.

Labels: gender differences, men, mental health, women

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In 2009, Julea Ward, a teacher and an evangelical Christian, was studying for a master’s degree in counseling at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. As part of her training, she was required to treat clients, and she expressed her reluctance to work with any who were in same-sex relationships. A professor, heeding Ms. Ward’s wishes, referred a gay client to another counselor.

That seemingly simple request became a problem for Ms. Ward when the university expelled her for having made it. Ms. Ward sued, and her case raises the question of whether a counselor’s religious convictions can disqualify her from the profession. ...

The Sixth Circuit decision turns on how common it is to refer patients to other counselors. Ms. Ward argues that one’s religious beliefs are a reasonable reason to refer a client, while the university argues that it has to train students to work with all kinds of clients. The American Counseling Association filed a brief asserting that to habitually refer gay clients would violate its ethical canon.

Ms. Ward referred questions to her lawyer, Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advocacy organization. Mr. Tedesco said that “if referrals are acceptable, including for many nonreligious-based reasons, they can’t deny someone who has a religion-based need to refer.” He said that Ms. Ward was not singling out gay men and lesbians, and that she would also refuse to affirm heterosexuals who sought counseling about their adultery.

“Does it require a Jewish counselor to affirm the religious beliefs of a Muslim client?” Mr. Tedesco asked. He noted that the American Counseling Association allows its members to choose not to work with terminally ill patients considering end-of-life options. That proves, he said, that counselors are sometimes allowed to refuse to treat clients because of a fraught ethical question — so why not when the question is sexuality, and the counselor is Christian?

What many of the briefs fail to investigate is the role of the counselor or therapist. Is it to “affirm” the client’s beliefs, or to offer support and guidance, even to clients whose practices one may find distasteful or morally wrong?

Labels: culture, discrimination law, homosexuality, mental health, relationships, religion, religious liberty

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If you’ve been anywhere near an airport bookstore in the last five years, you’ve probably seen the face of Tucker Max leering out at you from one of his two uber-bestselling books. ...

The books recount Tucker’s endlessly repetitive nights throughout his twenties (he’s 35 now), drinking extreme amounts of alcohol, having utterly drunken, meaningless, uninspired (and uninspiring) sex with a parade of random strangers, acting in a cocky, testosterone-fueled, belligerent way to those who come across his drunken glare, and saying the most insulting, vile, vicious, mean, sexually-degrading things you could possibly imagine to everyone around him, both men and women.

The narrator seems to be doing everything possible to ensure that his photo appears not only in mugshots, but under the dictionary definition of the word “prick.”

But, love Tucker Max or hate him—it is very likely someone you know has paid money for his writing. His books have sold a staggering 2 million copies combined—around 1.6 million for the first one, and around 400,000 for the second. ...

Perhaps more interesting, Tucker is not just retiring from writing about his hard-drinking, hard-partying, and hard-womanizing, whose recounting made him famous and earned him millions. He is also retiring entirely from that lifestyle of his twenties.

Or, I should say, he already has. Unbeknownst to his legions of fans, his legions of critics, or the legions of publishing professionals who want a piece of him, this most public of “I-don’t-wanna-grow-up” males is in fact now in the midst of a serious, intentional and devoted period of cleaning up and growing up.

He is changing his ways of the past, and—gasp!—becoming a mature adult male, one is who seeking a committed, long-term relationship, leading to marriage, with an intelligent, substantive, accomplished woman.

What you are about to read is the most in-depth and personal profile of this bestselling and infamous author ever written, based on the most access he has ever given a fellow writer.

It should be abundantly clear from what follows that I’m not a fan of Tucker Max’s writing, nor of his behavior in his twenties.

So why am I writing this? I felt Tucker had an interesting story to tell here, and I wanted to help tell it (no, it’s not another drinking story.) I also have my own personal interest in this story, having to do with how I spent my own twenties. I’ll reveal that towards the end.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", childhood, culture, divorce, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, Marriage, men, mental health, parenting, premarital sex, sex, women

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U.S. married couples experience fewer advantages in psychological well-being and social ties than those who cohabit over time, researchers found.

Study co-authors Kelly Musick of Cornell University's College of Human Ecology and Larry Bumpass of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said earlier research compared marriage to being single, or compared marriages and cohabitation at a single point in time. This study focused on what changes occur when single men and women move into marriage or cohabitation, and the extent to which any effects of marriage and cohabitation persist over time.

The researchers used data from the National Survey of Families and Households, involving 2,737 single men and women, 896 of whom married or moved in with a partner during the course of six years. ...

"We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains -- likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans -- cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem," Musick and Bumpass said in a statement. "For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy and personal growth."

Labels: cohabitation, culture, Marriage, mental health

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Many religious and social conservatives believe that homosexuality is a mental illness caused exclusively by psychological or spiritual factors and that all homosexual persons could change their orientation if they simply tried hard enough. This view is widely pilloried (and rightly so) as both wrong on the facts and harmful in effect. But few who attack it are willing to acknowledge that today a wholly different, far more influential, and no less harmful set of falsehoods—each attributed to the findings of “science”—dominates the research literature and political discourse.

We are told that homosexual persons are just as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals, that sexual orientation is biologically determined at birth, that sexual orientation cannot be changed and that the attempt to change it is necessarily harmful, that homosexual relationships are equivalent to heterosexual ones in all important characteristics, and that personal identity is properly and legitimately constituted around sexual orientation. These claims are as misguided as the ridiculed beliefs of some social conservatives, as they spring from distorted or incomplete representations of the best findings from the science of same-sex attraction.

Labels: culture, gay/straight differences, homosexuality, mental health, monogamy, professional associations, religion

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...But for Susan, it turned out, everything wasn’t fine. While Jesus and the church were pulling her in one direction, the judicial system had made an unwelcome appearance and was pulling her in another. The entire time Susan was in prison, the state of Pennsylvania was running a tab on all the welfare dollars her mother received in her children’s names. Consequently, per state law, Susan was held responsible for the total amount upon her release, and soon the welfare department came calling to get its money back.

In our sessions, Susan showed me a raft of increasingly threatening official letters with eye-popping dollar figures that had her practically hyperventilating. The state wanted in excess of $25,000, and wanted it now.

A hearing was scheduled at the Bucks County Courthouse, where Susan was asked to provide documents proving that she had a job and could start paying her child support debt or face returning to jail in contempt of a court order. Obviously, on her janitor’s survival wages Susan had absolutely no capacity to both pay the state and keep a roof over her head. This Sophie's choice is a common dilemma for tens of thousands of single mothers returning to the community from prison who owe the state for the dollars their children depended on in their mother’s absence. ...

Susan protested the high amount of the monthly support payment, explaining that if she paid the debt she couldn’t afford a place to live. I will never forget how painful it was, watching this woman, who had never in her life caught a single break, have to stand before the American justice system and nearly beg for mercy. But for this black woman in this white judge's courtroom there was no mercy to be had. Her criminal record of violent crime, her drug addiction, her prostitution—all of her vices outweighed the spiritual transformation and personal rehabilitation she had experienced in prison, not to mention her clean-as-a-whistle record in her new life.

The judge merely mocked her, saying, “You’ve got a place to live now: Bucks County Correctional Facility for 90 days.” The public defender tried to interject but the judge was already calling for the next case.

Labels: child support, children, class, culture, mental health, motherhood, parenting, poverty, race, religion

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Lindsay Reynolds lives in Waterloo, Wis. Even before the recent economic downturn, Reynolds and her husband struggled to make ends meet. They quarreled, especially over money.

"We never had enough income to pay bills, to pay rent. We were constantly late on rent," Reynolds says. "He always wanted to go do things. He wanted to go buy things. And I said, 'No, we can't. We have to be fiscally responsible.' "

As unemployment rises, the divorce rate goes down: For every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, the divorce rate goes down by 1 percent.

Reynolds says that after her husband returned from serving in the Iraq War, he found it hard to find work. They kept moving. Each time, she had to uproot herself and start all over again. Increasingly, as the economy turned sour, it became impossible for her to find a decent job. She says the quarrels intensified.

"The last year of our marriage, it was basically two different people living in the same household," Reynolds says. She was in bad shape: losing weight, down from her usual 135 pounds.

"I got down to 90 pounds," she says. "It wasn't something I chose to do. It's not like I purposely starved myself. This was, 'I could not afford to buy food.' " She felt she had to get out of the marriage. There was only one problem: Filing the paperwork for even a basic divorce cost a few hundred dollars.

"I couldn't afford to get divorced. It wasn't an option because I didn't have the money," she says. ...

The NPR-Kaiser Family Foundation survey found the nation's high unemployment rate has caused rifts within many families: More than a fifth of all Americans who have been out of work for a year or more report that relationships with intimate partners have changed for the worse. More than a third say their economic situation has negatively affected their partners' health and well-being.

Simultaneously, a new paper in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy shows that as unemployment rises, the divorce rate goes down: For every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, the divorce rate goes down by 1 percent. ...

Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that multiple studies have found that the marital distress that comes from money problems and feeling trapped is strongly associated with an increased risk of domestic violence.

Labels: culture, divorce, domestic violence, economics, Marriage, mental health, Stephanie Coontz

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Gay men who live in states where same-sex marriage is legal are healthier, have less stress, make fewer doctor visits and have lower health-care costs, a new study finds.

It included more than 1,200 patients at a large Massachusetts health clinic that provides services for gay men and other sexual minorities.

During the 12 months after the 2003 legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, there was a significant decrease in medical care visits, mental health visits and mental health-care costs among gay and bisexual men, compared to the 12 months before the law changed.

This led to a 13 percent reduction in health-care visits and a 14 percent reduction in health-care costs. The health benefits were similar for single gay men and those with partners.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, Massachusetts, men, mental health

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...I accept that I'm not meant to be an egg donor. However, I can't help thinking that in a country with so many anti-depressants prescribed, where so many people live long enough to develop cancer (and survive), some women will lie to donate their eggs for guaranteed compensation. As the founders and directors of egg donation agencies I spoke with confirmed, there is no such thing as a donor with a perfect family history. But the agencies are aware of the times we live in, and their screening processes try to assure that huge ethical consequences don't arise because a woman happens to be financially strapped. ...

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) has a set of guiding principles for agencies to consider in donor selection. Red flags include a family history of psychiatric disorders or substance abuse, risk factors for HIV and other STIs, ongoing stress, and marital instability. Still, some variance exists among agencies. "The people who are usually screening potential donors do not have a medical background," explains Fusillo, a former fertility nurse. "For depression, I don't automatically reject someone," Fusillo adds, noting that about 20 to 30 percent of her donors have some depression in their families. Fusillo asks each applicant in-depth questions to ascertain if a person is describing chronic depression or "garden variety living in the United States."

"It would be a complete lie to say donors are not motivated by financial motivation," says Campbell. "But for the donor who gets through the process" -– medical screening, psychological screening, genetic testing, being matched with a couple, interfacing with the egg donation agency and the couple's fertility clinic, legal counseling, hormone injections, egg retrieval –- "their motivation is something bigger, they're doing something more meaningful than just trying to make a quick buck." Of the five donors I interviewed for this story, four of them said money was the catalyst but that they did not turn to egg donation as a "last resort" (the fifth donor waived her fee –- she donated her eggs to secure her brother-in-law and his wife a place at the front of the line to get matched with their own donor).

Labels: culture, donor conception, economics, mental health

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MANY mothers with a history of serious drug use are still capable of caring for their children, given the right support, a new study has found. But most mothers in the state's methadone programs were not getting the services they needed.

The study found a child was more at risk of abuse or neglect because of a mother's mental health problems and social isolation than from the drug problem itself. ''You can't say all drug-using parents are abusive; some are quite together,'' said the co-author of the study, Stephanie Taplin, a visiting fellow at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre.

Dr Taplin interviewed 171 mothers who attended methadone programs in Sydney over three years. Nearly all had been heroin users, and 37 were still using the drug. Many were caring for children but a third had at least one child under 16 removed by Community Services; about half had been given up at birth.

Dr Taplin found mothers, regardless of the severity of their drug problem, were less likely to have children removed if they were in daily contact with their own mothers, were not on medication for mental health problems such as depression and had fewer children. ...

The women, average age 37, came from deeply disadvantaged backgrounds, the study found. Two-thirds had experienced physical or sexual abuse, and more than a third an ''upsetting sexual experience with a relative or person in authority''. On average the abuse had occurred at age 10.

Labels: children, grandparents, mental health, motherhood, parenting, sexual assault

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Former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Sears (on the short list for Obama appointments to the Supreme Court) and family relations scholar Professor William Doherty have teamed up to produce with what they call, without irony, a modest proposal to reduce “unnecessary divorce”: the Second Chances Act.

The Second Chances Act is a brilliant piece of work by two of the nation’s leading pro-marriage liberals. (Full disclosure: The authors kindly give me far more credit than I am due by including me in a list of people to be thanked for “contributions,” which in my case consisted of attending one meeting in which an early draft of the report and the legislation was presented.)

The Second Chances Act proposes new model legislation that includes a one-year waiting period for divorce, along with a requirement that parents of minor children considering divorce take a short online divorced parenting education course, which would include information on reconciliation. Spouses could trigger the one-year waiting period without actually filing for divorce by sending their mates a formal letter of notice. These requirements would be waived in cases of domestic violence.

Now, some might ask, “Unnecessary divorce? What’s that?”

The genesis of the Second Chances Act was Minnesota Judge Bruce Peterson’s observation that at least some of the people he was seeing in his court looked like they needed a “rest stop” on the “divorce superhighway.” “When Judge Peterson looked at his own court system, widely acknowledged as a progressive one,” Sears and Doherty write, “he saw attempts to meet nearly every need of divorcing couples—legal and financial assistance, protection orders, parenting education, and more—except for reconciliation.”

The assumption of the entire legal system is that by the time a person files for divorce, the marriage is already dead. Amazingly, no one really even asked how many people filing for divorce would be interested in reconciliation.

So Doherty teamed up with colleagues to do some groundbreaking and original research, testing that assumption.

What they found shocked the family law community: “New research shows that about 40 percent of U.S. couples already well into the divorce process say that one or both of them are interested in the possibility of reconciliation.” In about 10 percent of divorces, both the husband and the wife are interested in reconciliation (likely unbeknownst to either of them).

Labels: children, divorce, divorce reform, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage counseling, mental health, Second Chances Act

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Focusing too heavily on the "for richer" part of the nuptial vows could spell disaster for a marriage, according to research published today by Brigham Young University.

In a survey of 1,700 married couples, researchers found that couples in which one or both partners placed a high priority on getting or spending money were much less likely to have satisfying and stable marriages. ...

Researchers gauged materialism using self-report surveys that asked questions such as to what extent do you agree with these statements? "I like to own things to impress people" or "money can buy happiness." Spouses were then surveyed on aspects of their marriage. ...

Study authors and marriage experts noted that the findings probably have to do with the personality traits that go along with materialism. They will be published today in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy.

"The finding does not necessarily mean that it is the materialism itself that damages their relationships. ... A materialistic orientation may be associated with other unidentified factors, such as childhood deprivation or neglect, which might play a more pivotal role in adult marital satisfaction," said Don Catherall, professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University in Chicago. "Of course, it may also simply mean that people who are more focused on making money have less energy and interest left to invest in their marriages."

Other studies have shown that materialism is correlated with a host of personality traits and interpersonal skills that might hinder a marriage.

"People who are materialistic tend to be narcissistic and concerned with impressing people," said Susan Heitler, a Denver-based clinical psychologist and creator of marriage resource site Poweroftwomarriage.com. "They have a tendency to be anxious, depressed, have relatively poor relationship skills and have low self-esteem. These qualities in turn can cause marital problems."

Labels: culture, Marriage, mental health

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The world's largest organization of psychologists took its strongest stand to date supporting full marriage equity, a move that observers say will have a far-reaching impact on the national debate.

The policymaking body of the American Psychological Association (APA) unanimously approved the resolution 157-0 on the eve of the group's annual convention, which opens here today. ...

The resolution points to numerous recent studies, including findings that "many gay men and lesbians, like their heterosexual counterparts, desire to form stable, long-lasting and committed intimate relationships and are successful in doing so."

It adds that "emerging evidence suggests that statewide campaigns to deny same-sex couples legal access to civil marriage are a significant source of stress to the lesbian, gay and bisexual residents of those states and may have negative effects on their psychological well-being."

Labels: culture, gay marriage, mental health, professional associations

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Want a successful marriage? Make sure you have sex when you're ready.

According to a new study, women who are sexually active early in their adolescence--specifically, before age 16--are more likely to divorce.

Researchers at the University of Iowa used the responses of 3,793 women who are married or have been married at some point in their lives from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to examine the relationship between the age at which they had their first sexual experience, and the success of their first marriage.

At first glance, the findings seemed alarming: multiple outlets (including this one), reported that up to 47 percent of women who lost their virginity during their teen years divorced within 10 years of getting married--implying that women who lose their virginity during adolescence will inevitably face conflict in their later adult relationships.

In fact, while the age at which sex first occurred was significant in determining women’s likelihood to divorce, more important was whether that sex qualified as “wanted." That's because the earlier women had their first sexual experience, the less frequently the sex was actually wanted. In short, the study's conclusions were less about the correlation between when a girl loses her virginity and her risk of divorce than it was about how the nature of the first sexual experience affects later romantic relationships.

While some of the initial reports about the study alluded to this point, they often did not explore it completely, so we decided to go to the source--lead researcher Anthony Paik--to shed more light on this surprisingly complicated study. ...

HP: How is “unwanted” sex defined?

AP: The survey [results are culled from] the CDC’s 2002 Survey of Family Growth. It has a couple of questions that ask for the context of first intercourse—that it “caused mixed feelings,” that it “wasn’t completely wanted,” or that it “was completely wanted.” It’s not clear from the survey what the womens' experience was specifically. ...

HP: Why would unwanted sexual experiences be associated with divorce?

AP: There are two arguments: one is that it’s a PTSD process, which is a psychological model of a post-traumatic stress syndrome process [stemming from] childhood sex abuse. This model emphasizes that these experiences, particularly with adults, are traumatic, [and] lead to high levels of sexualization [which] makes individuals susceptible to relationship difficulties.

In the second argument, unwanted sexual experiences lead to early sexualization, which is associated with subsequent life-course events that are key divorce determinants, such as having more sex partners, premarital conceptions, and premarital births.

Labels: adolescence, culture, divorce, girls, Marriage, mental health, out-of-wedlock births, sex, sexual assault

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