At the Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street, divorce is following marriage, just as it does in life.

On Wednesday the Pavilion, which describes itself as one of New York’s premier special events locations, played host to a wedding expo, New York magazine’s “New York Weddings Event.” About 850 people paid $40 a ticket. Couples got in for $60. On hand were wedding planners, cake designers and representatives of bands that couples could hire.

On Friday, a different expo set up displays and booths, a $75-a-person-and-up divorce expo called Start Over Smart. It begins at 9 a.m. Saturday and continues on Sunday.

“We’re putting a positive face on divorce,” said Francine Baras, who organized the divorce expo with her daughter, Nicole Baras-Feuer, “because although it’s difficult and a big transition for most people, there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a post-divorce life.”

Labels: children, culture, dating, divorce, parenting, remarriage

VOTE

Lucie Elmer's life follows the familiar trajectory of her generation: marriage at a young age, divorce and remarriage. The second marriage lasted 28 years, and when it ended a couple of years ago, Elmer joined the legions of other baby boomers who are raising the divorce rate among those in their 50s and 60s.

"Even though I was a very independent person, when it came to being divorced at this age, now it's just you," said Elmer, 54, of Orlando. "It's frightening and exciting."

While the overall divorce rate in the United States has declined, divorce among those aged 50 to 64 has spiked. What once was considered unusual — older people getting divorced — is now becoming commonplace.

"Historically we thought, 'Older people, they don't get divorced,' " said Susan L. Brown, co-director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green University in Ohio. "Now one in four people getting divorced is over the age of 50. In 1990, it was less than one in 10." ...

And though many older men may be looking for wives to take care of them in their old age, some women don't want — or need — that responsibility. Elmer sees herself in a committed relationship in her future, but not as a wife.

"I see myself as single, but with a significant other, someone you can do things with," she said. "It could be dinner; it could be travel; it could be the arts festival."

That scenario — lots of old people, single or living together but not married — raises serious issues as to who will take care of them when they do become ill and infirm. Traditionally, care for the elderly has been the duty of the spouse.

Labels: aging, culture, divorce, Marriage, men, remarriage, women

VOTE

As a girl, Andrea Grimes assumed that she would take her husband's last name when she grew up and got married. But at 27 and newly engaged, the Dallas journalist and feminist blogger now has no interest in switching her surname.

But not everyone has caught up: Both Grimes' mother and her fiancé's stepmother have already referred to her with her fiancé's last name. Those assumptions aren't surprising, given that decades after the feminist revolution, most women still take their husband's last name upon marriage. While no national statistics exist, some recent studies suggest that women keeping their own name is actually becoming less popular. And a recent nationally representative survey found that half of Americans support women being legally required to take their husband's name upon marriage. These traditional attitudes persist even as divorce, remarriage, gay marriage and blended families make naming more complex. ...

Regardless of which side you come down on, the push and pull of identity is at the core of the naming debate, according to Powell. He and his colleagues surveyed a nationally representative sample of 815 Americans, asking them not only yes-and-no questions about name-change choices, but also why they felt the way they did.

The researchers found that more than two-thirds of Americans in the study said that it's best if a woman takes her husband's name upon marriage. The researchers expected that a majority of Americans would feel this way, Powell said, but they were more surprised to find that 50 percent supported a law requiring women to take their husband's name.

As for people's reasons for advocating that women change their names, family identity was a reoccurring theme, Powell said.

"One key theme was this idea that marriage is about shifting your identity from an individual identity to a collective or family identity," Powell said. "What they don't explain is why it is that women should change their names as opposed to men, or both the husband and wife shifting [to a new name]."

Some people cited the importance of having the same name for the couple's children, while others said tradition or convenience made women changing their names the best option. Several harkened back to the traditions of coverture, with one person responding, "Women should change their names so there's a connection there, just a connection to let you know that she belongs to him."

Among the 30 percent of people who didn't think that women should change their name, their reasoning was rooted in another type of identity: personal identity. Like Grimes, many people think of their name as core to their identity, Powell said, and associate name changes with a loss of identity. ...

When the researchers asked their participants how they felt about men changing their names, 50 percent said that a man taking his wife's name would be okay. But that response rate didn't seem to reflect much gender liberation based on how the participants answered the question, Powell said.

"They were incredulous," Powell said of the respondents' responses. "They would laugh at it. One quote was, 'Sure, if he wants to be a woman.'"

Labels: children, culture, divorce, gay couples, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, parenting, religion, remarriage, women

VOTE

JONATHAN TURLEY, a law professor at George Washington University, is representing the family featured on the reality show "Sister Wives" in their legal challenge to Utah's law against polygamy. It's a big, unusual family. Kody Brown is "married" to four women and father to 16 children. "One of the marriages is legal", Mr Turley writes, "and the others are what the family calls 'spiritual.' They are not asking for the state to recognise their marriages. They are simply asking for the state to leave them alone." Mr Turley goes on to make what I find to be a persuasive case. ...

Imagine the family of a twice-divorced, thrice-married woman with one child from each union. Let's say she's a stay-at-home mom who has custody of all the kids, and gets child-support payments from her first two husbands. So, children with three different fathers live together in a single household, supported by a portion of three different mens' income. How is this not de facto polyandry? How significant is it, really, that her first two husbands don't happen to live with their kids and her third husband? Suppose they move in. What then? Is it okay as long as they pay rent? As long as they no longer love the mother of their children, or vice versa? I say it's okay as long as everyone involved says it's okay. ...

But isn't polygamy, as it actually exists, a backward practice hostile to the interests of women? What about fundamentalist Mormon compounds in which children are raised in isolation, indoctrinated/brainwashed, teenage girls are married off to their uncles and impregnated, while surplus boys are ejected without the tools to cope with the outside world. Mr Turley replies:

Of course, the government should prosecute abuse wherever it is found. But there is nothing uniquely abusive about consenting polygamous relationships. It is no more fair to prosecute the Browns because of abuse in other polygamous families than it would be to hold a conventional family liable for the hundreds of thousands of domestic violence cases each year in monogamous families.

I think this is the right way to think about it. I would add that conventional monogamous marriage was in fact an abusive, exploitative, patriarchal arrangement until very recently. In 1993, North Carolina was the last state to recognise spousal rape as a crime.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, family structure, Marriage, polygamy, remarriage

VOTE

An Emirati man was being sued for 45 million dirhams ($12.25 million) for not having sex with his wife, who claimed that his failure to perform caused her mental anguish, a court heard. ...

But the woman is now seeking 45 million dirhams in compensation and claims that the defendant -- who has reportedly been married more than 12 times -- also forced her out of her employment and stripped her of her jewelery.

Labels: divorce, Marriage, remarriage, sex, United Arab Emirates

VOTE

...While the overall number of marriages slipped by 17 percent in Rhode Island between 1969 and 2009, the number of Catholic weddings in this most heavily Catholic state dropped far more severely. It plunged 71 percent — from 4,452 a year to just 1,300.

What happened?

The Rev. Joseph D. Santos Jr., pastor of Holy Name Church in Providence, contends that the falloff in Catholic weddings has its roots in the 1970s. That, he says, is when Catholic educators started revamping religious education and “basically destroyed or watered down” traditional teachings to the extent that increasing numbers of Catholics no longer understand what marriage and sexuality are about.

The church has traditionally taught that matrimony has two purposes: To allow the couple to love each other in a way that mirrors Christ’s love for his church, and to become partners with God in bringing new life into the world.

Unfortunately, says Father Santos, the failure to show the connection between those aspects has caused many Catholics to mistakenly think that sex can be primarily about pleasure and gratification and to believe that premarital sex, and even living together without marriage, are OK.

The Rev. Ronald E. Brassard, pastor of Immaculate Conception parish in Cranston, says there is no doubt that cohabitation has been the biggest factor in the decline in the number of Catholic weddings. ...

Admittedly, some clergy aren’t convinced the situation is as dire as the numbers suggest.

The Rev. Francis Santilli, who has worked in parishes from Westerly to Pawtucket and is now pastor of St. Philip Church in Smithfield, said many young people are not marrying in Rhode Island because they have moved out of state. ...

The numbers are nonetheless startling. In 1980, 43 percent of all marriages taking place in Rhode Island were under Catholic Church auspices. The share fell to 37 percent in the early 1990s, and dropped to about 27 percent by 2000. In the last five years, the share is down to about 21 percent, or one in five.

Labels: Catholic Church, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, religion, remarriage, Rhode Island, weddings

VOTE

More than 40 percent of American adults have at least one step relative, a new survey finds.

While people with step relatives are more likely to say their family life has turned out differently than they expected compared with people without step relatives, 70 percent say they're very satisfied with their family life, according to the Pew Research Center report.

Blood ties still bind, however: The survey found that people feel a greater sense of obligation to their biological relatives compared with their step relatives.

In parallel with these findings, marriage in general has undergone many changes over the last 50 years. A previous Pew study found that in 1960, 72 percent of American adults were married. In 2008, that number was 52 percent.

Changing family structure

The Pew Research Center surveyed 2,691 American adults via phone in October 2010. The data were then weighted to create a representative sampled of all adults in the continental United States.

Major demographic changes, including a rise in divorce and more babies born to single moms, have contributed to the rise of the stepfamily over the past decades, the survey found. Overall, 42 percent of American adults have a step relative. Thirty percent of Americans have a step or half-sibling, 18 percent have a living stepparent, and 13 percent have a stepchild. ...

The survey asked respondents how obligated they would feel to offer help (financial or otherwise) to step relatives and found that people are more likely to offer help to step relations than close friends. For example, of people with a parent and stepparent, 85 percent said they would feel very obligated to help out their biological parent, while 56 percent say they would feel similarly obligated to help a stepparent. In comparison, 39 percent said they'd feel obligated to help out a best friend.

The findings aren't a surprise, family psychologists say, given that stepfamilies in the report may not have been together for very long.

"This isn't a surprise really that some of them wouldn't be as close, because they may just be a few years old or relatively new compared to relationships with [biological] parents and kids," Larry Ganong, a University of Missouri professor who studies stepfamilies and family obligation, told LiveScience. ...

Despite "wicked stepmother" myths, 70 percent of stepfamilies were very satisfied with their family lives (as were 78 percent of families without step relatives). In fact, remarried couples were more likely than couples in their first marriage to say that their relationship was stronger than their parents' marriages. Some research suggests people on their second marriages have high standards for the relationship, Ganong said. The responses may reflect those standards.

Labels: culture, divorce, family structure, Marriage, remarriage, stepparents

VOTE

This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.

Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about 200 people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Md., apartment on Dec. 19. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.

The Friedman case has become emblematic of a torturous issue in which only a husband can “give” a get. While Jewish communities have historically pressured obstinate husbands to give gets, this was a very rare case of seeking to shame the husband in the secular world. ...

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.

Although the majority of men in Jewish divorces grant their wives a get with little fuss, the husbands who refuse — it is estimated there are several hundred agunot in the United States today — can provoke a clash between religious folkways and secular divorce law. ...

And the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington issued a statement saying that the parties had not yet exhausted the rabbinical courts, suggesting it was premature to blame Mr. Friedman for withholding the get.

But other rabbis have argued that it is Jewish custom to give a get once divorce terms have been settled, and with no possibility of reconciliation.

Labels: custody, divorce, Judaism, men, religion, remarriage, women

VOTE

WHAT happens when love comes at the wrong time?

Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses.

Part “Brady Bunch” and part “The Scarlet Letter,” their story has played out as fodder for neighborhood gossip. But from their perspective, the drama was as unlikely as it was unstoppable.

...In addition to strong condemnation from numerous bloggers and many of the paper’s own commenters, the article, as a first of sorts for the Times, invited a number of questions. Why were the ex-spouses of the newlyweds not mentioned by name in the story? Did the reporter call them for comment, as basic journalistic practice would dictate? Why did the Times open up the comment board when most Vows stories are off-limits? And above all, what were the couple thinking in telling their story in a space normally reserved for feel-good, soft-focus meet-cute tales?

“We did this because we just wanted one honest account of how this happened for our sakes and for our kids’ sakes,” Riddell told me. “We are really proud of our family and proud of the way we’ve handled this situation over the past year. There was nothing in the story we were ashamed of.” ...

Riddell declines to say whether she or her husband asked for their exes’ consent to tell their story in the Times, or at least notified them that it was in the works. “I really don’t want to wade into this any further than we already have,” she says. “It’s not helpful to anybody.”

...In a statement, the Times said, "The Vows feature gives a close-in account of a wedding every week . . . We don't attempt to pass judgment on the suitability of the match, the narrative of the romance, the quality of the ceremony or the flavor of the wedding cake."

Labels: children, culture, divorce, Marriage, parenting, remarriage

VOTE

Cohabitation is now an increasingly attractive option to many Americans — including middle-aged and older adults who have recently lost a spouse to divorce or death. We can debate about whether cohabitation is good for the adults involved, especially given the financial penalties often associated with marriage for low-income and older couples.

But a growing body of social scientific evidence strongly suggests that cohabitation and children don’t mix, even though more than 40 percent of American children will spend some time in a cohabiting household.

Compared with children in married step families, children in cohabiting homes are more likely to fail in school, run afoul of the law, suffer from depression, do drugs, and — most disturbingly — be abused. (Note that children in intact, married homes do best on all these outcomes.) In the words of a recent Urban Institute study, “cohabiting families are not simply an extension of traditional married biological or blended families.”

Indeed, a recent federal report [https://www.nis4.org/nishome.asp] on child abuse found that children in cohabiting stepfamilies were 98% more likely to be physically abused, 130% more likely to be sexually abused, and 64% more likely to be emotionally abused, compared to children in married step families.

Why is cohabitation so risky for children? There are at least three reasons....

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, remarriage, stepparents, W. Bradford Wilcox

VOTE

...Still, even in a time of changing attitudes about who can be a parent, the legal and social definition of a family still has certain rules — a family can be run by a single mom or a single dad and, increasingly, by two moms or two dads, but it can’t have three parents, or four. For a long, long time — going back to when the English common law first started codifying such things — the law has set the maximum number of parents a child can have as two. Only two people, in other words, can enjoy the unique set of rights to determine a child’s life — and the unique set of responsibilities for the child’s welfare — that legal parenthood entails. That matches how most people think about parenthood: Two people, after all, are how many it usually takes to make a baby in the first place.

Now a few family-law scholars have begun to argue that there is nothing special about the number two — if three or four or five adults have a parental relationship with a child, the law should recognize them all as parents. Going beyond two, these scholars argue, would better reflect the dynamics of the modern family, and also protect the children in such families. It would ensure that, even in the event of a split or major disagreement between the adults in question, the children would not be deprived of the affection, care, and financial resources of any of the people they have grown up regarding as their mothers and fathers.

“The law needs to adapt to the reality of children’s lives, and if children are being raised by three parents, the law should not arbitrarily select two of them and say these are the legal parents, this other person is a stranger,” says Nancy Polikoff, a family-law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.

In a few recent cases, courts seem to have agreed with the calls for multiple parents. But critics argue that tinkering with the definition of parenthood in this way threatens to dilute the sense of obligation that being a parent has always carried, and that increasing the number of legal parents only raises the likelihood that family disputes will arise and get messy and find their way into court. Not to mention that having judges routinely declare that Heather has two mommies and three daddies would represent a radical cultural shift, and one that, like gay marriage, many will find threatening.

Ultimately, the legal definition of parenthood is part of a broader philosophical question: What is a family? And what is it for? While some scholars have focused on expanding the number of parents, others argue that the law needs to do more to recognize the social context in which families exist, and the extent to which child care is actually performed by people who aren’t part of the nuclear family at all. ...

Today’s proponents of expanding the definition of parenthood argue that restricting the number of parents to two people also disadvantages children, at least those in certain nontraditional households. If a child grows up thinking of more than two people as parents, these lawyers and legal scholars argue, then the law should protect those relationships and the emotional connection and material support that come with them. Doing so may not be necessary as long as all of the parents get along and remain equally committed to the child — or children — but if the parents have a falling-out or if the custodial parents split up, then the people the law officially recognizes as parents hold all the cards, and can shut the others out of the child’s life.

In addition, in the eyes of the law, a child doesn’t have any claim on the financial resources of parental figures beyond the legally recognized two. The relationship is not unlike those of illegitimate children and their parents before 1968. With very few exceptions, it is today impossible for children to sue for child support, collect Social Security survivor benefits, or inherit by intestate succession from self-identified third or fourth parents, since the law doesn’t recognize the relationship.

To critics of the legal status quo, all of this means that, just as with illegitimacy laws, the courts are punishing children in the interest of preserving a traditional family structure, making their lives more uncertain by depriving them of emotional and financial support.

“I’m not saying all kids should have three [parents], or that two is good so why not three,” says Melanie Jacobs, a law professor at Michigan State University and author of a 2007 law review article entitled “Why Just Two?” “The law says someone is either a parent or a legal stranger, and in some cases that’s threatening to just take this person who has been a part of the child’s life out of the child’s life.”

Jacobs points to two recent decisions in particular that suggest how she would like courts to define parenthood in such families. In January 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeals granted full parental status to both members of a lesbian couple as well as their sperm donor, ruling that it was contrary to the child’s best interests to not recognize all three. In April of 2007, the Pennsylvania Superior Court was faced with a custody decision involving a child’s biological mother and her same-sex partner, who had split up, and a donor who had been a significant presence in the child’s life. The court ruled that all three should have custodial rights and that all three were responsible for child support. Additionally, in July of this year, the attorney general’s office in British Columbia proposed allowing for more than two parents in cases of sperm and egg donation.

Recognizing multiple fathers or multiple mothers, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that they all have the same rights. In the Pennsylvania case, the court did not decide that all three parents had equal custody or were responsible for the same amount of child support. Jacobs in particular has argued that expanding the number of legal parents a child has requires that courts begin to allow for degrees of legal parenthood, what she calls a scheme of “relative rights.” Whereas today the law tends to see someone as either a parent or a nonparent, she argues that it should instead recognize gradations. For example, she argues, a known sperm donor should perhaps have certain parental rights and responsibilities — visitation and the obligation to pay some child support — but not the right to demand custody.

For critics, “disaggregating” the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, as Jacobs suggests, exposes a larger problem with the idea of expanding beyond two in the first place. Traditional legal definitions of parenthood, though they may not exactly correspond with every family’s day-to-day reality, do lay out a set of hard and fast, inescapable obligations. If courts begin to experiment and innovate with what being a parent means, that may create uncertainty, and even a sense that parental obligations to children may be more negotiable than they once were.

Labels: child care, children, culture, de facto parenting, donor conception, Elizabeth Marquardt, family structure, June Carbone, more than two parents, Nancy Polikoff, parenting, remarriage

VOTE

CAIRO — Egypt's highest judiciary body on Wednesday overturned a ruling ordering the Coptic church to allow its faithful to remarry, the official MENA news agency said, in a move welcomed by the church.

The Supreme Constitutional Court overturned a May decision by the High Administrative Court that obliged the head of the church, Pope Shenuda III, to issue a second marriage permit to divorced Copts requesting one.

That ruling sparked demonstrations in Cairo, with angry protesters, saying it went against the Bible, charging state interference in religious affairs.

Copts forbid divorce except in proven cases of adultery, or if a spouse converts to another religion or branch of Christianity.

Civil marriage alone is not recognised in Egypt.

Wednesday's ruling "has relieved Coptic church leaders who trust and respect the Egyptian judiciary and believe in its justness and its ability to correct any contradictions in rulings," Hani Aziz Amin, a church representative, told MENA.

Labels: Christianity, divorce, Egypt, Marriage, religion, remarriage

VOTE

New Yorkers Laura Jackson and Gary Zaremba met on a dating website in 2005. Two years later, Mr. Zaremba, a 52-year-old real-estate developer, popped the question. Ms. Jackson accepted.

Then he popped another: "Will you sign a prenuptial agreement?"

He had been through a divorce, had a college-age son and several real-estate investments. She, a publicist and also 52, had never married.

"When he first mentioned it," Ms. Jackson, now Ms. Jackson-Zaremba, says, "I thought, 'Oh, my God.' It definitely took a little bit of the romance out."

Baby boomers looking to protect their assets are increasingly turning to prenuptial agreements—legal contracts drawn up before a marriage that dictate what happens to assets in the event a couple should part ways, either by divorce or death.

"They used to be for the rich and famous," says Marlene Eskind Moses, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and a lawyer in Nashville, Tenn. "It's become more commonplace in the market as an estate-planning opportunity for boomers."

Even before the financial crisis hit, prenuptial agreements were on the rise: Some 80% of matrimonial lawyers said they had seen an increase in couples signing them in recent years, according to a 2006 survey sponsored by the matrimonial lawyers group.

The financial crisis—which hit boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, especially hard—accelerated the trend. Many of them, just on the cusp of retirement, saw their investment portfolios pounded, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 53% from Oct. 9, 2007, to March 6, 2009. Home values, which represented significant chunks of boomer net worth, were down almost 31% as of March 31 from their peak in mid-2006, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller national index.

As a result, boomers have become more anxious to hold on to whatever they have left, says Gabriel Cheong, a divorce attorney with Infinity Law Group LLC in Quincy, Mass. Today, the majority of inquiries come from boomers "concerned about protecting their assets," he says. "Not just with the markets, but with protecting their spouses and children." And they often enter a marriage with substantial assets—and children from an earlier union.

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, remarriage

VOTE

Laura Spicer was sold away from her husband while they both were slaves. After the war and emancipation, the two considered reconciling, but the husband had remarried. Here is a letter to Spicer from her first husband....

Labels: Marriage, race, remarriage

VOTE

In response to today's ruling, Bishop Armiya, Secretary to Pope Shenouda, issued a statement stressing the respect of the Coptic Orthodox Church for the Egyptian judiciary and its rulings, but saying "there is no force on earth that can force the Church to violate the teachings of the Bible and Church laws, based on "What God has joined together let no man separate." He added that Islamic law allows the Copts to resort to their own laws, and the state respects the freedom of religion.

Egypt's highest court has ruled that the Coptic Orthodox Church must allow divorce and remarriage.

The Supreme Administrative Court, siding with a lower court decision, rejected an appeal by Coptic Pope Shenouda II. The court said that "the right to family formation is a constitutional right."

Labels: Christianity, divorce, Egypt, Marriage, Orthodox Christianity, religion, remarriage

VOTE

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.

Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”

While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.

Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married. For many years, studies like these have influenced both politics and policy, fueling national marriage-promotion efforts, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2006 to 2010, the program received $150 million annually to spend on projects like “divorce reduction” efforts and often cited the health benefits of marrying and staying married.

But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced. ...

Does marrying again benefit those who divorce, in terms of health? In the Chicago study, remarriage helped only a little. It seemed to heal emotional wounds: the remarried had about the same risk for depression as the continuously married. But a second marriage didn’t seem to be enough to repair the physical damage associated with marital loss. Compared with the continuously married, people in second marriages still had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more mobility problems. “I don’t think anyone would encourage people to stay in a marriage that is really making them miserable,” says Linda J. Waite, a University of Chicago sociologist and an author of the study. “But try harder to make it better.” Even if marital problems seem small, Waite says, the data suggest it’s wise to intervene early and try to resolve them. “If you learn to how to manage disagreement early,” she says, “then you can avoid the decline in marital happiness that follows from the drip, drip of negative interactions.”

Labels: divorce, gender differences, Marriage, mental health, remarriage

VOTE

In a recent newsletter, the National Organization for Marriage cites a new government study as evidence that gay marriage will hurt kids, because the research finds that kids suffer less abuse with married biological parents than with a single parent, a parent living with an unmarried partner, or a parent and step-parent.

They got it half right. Having two married biological parents is good for kids, and better than the alternatives the study examined. We here at IGF are all for it. But that doesn't make having, say, an unmarried mom and mom better than having a married mom and mom. As a correspondent points out:

Does NOM never, ever learn? These same figures indicate that for either two-adult family structure (both biological parents, or one biological and one step-parent) the chance of abuse to the child goes down drastically IF THE COUPLE GETS MARRIED. For the first kind of family, the risk drops 80 percent. For the second kind of family, the risk drops nearly 60 percent. Even for single biological parents, the child's risk drops by about 15 percent if that single parent finds and marries someone.

Labels: cohabitation, gay marriage, gay parenting, Jonathan Rauch, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, NOM, parenting, remarriage, single parenting

VOTE

A ground-breaking series of studies, published next month, show liberal attitudes towards the make-up of the family, religion and cultural integration among the modern generation of girls and young women.

The survey, which questioned a representative sample of 1,109 seven to 21 year-olds across the UK, found that a third of girls in the younger age group thought they would be "grown up" by the age of 15, while 90 per cent of 16 to 21-year-olds regarded themselves as "grown up".

Girls were generally positive about marriage but less than half thought it should come before parenthood. One in four thought it was "OK to get married several times", rising to a third in the 16 to 21 age range.

One finding suggested that some teenagers actively plan to become single mothers. Of the girls questioned who had left schools and were unemployed, almost half (45 per cent) expected to have a baby before they were 21.

Labels: adolescence, childhood, children, culture, family structure, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, remarriage, United Kingdom

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Labels: committed relationships, divorce, donor conception, family structure, gay marriage, parenting, remarriage

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...This column was to be entitled, “Why Priests Hate Weddings,” but I thought that might be a bit too strong. Nevertheless, ask any priest about his work and he will quickly share with you the challenge of dealing with the Sacrament of Matrimony today.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the real practice of weddings and marriage today is far different than the ideal of Holy Matrimony as instituted by Christ and taught by the Church.

It begins with the fact that so many couples (perhaps 40%) are living together before they are married. This cohabitation, along with the sexual activity that presumably accompanies it, reveals a lack of understanding about the sanctity of the marriage covenant. ...

Wedding liturgies themselves become parties rather than prayer, making it nearly impossible to maintain any sense of decorum, any sense of the sacred. Guests arrive late, the bride goes into hiding, the groomsmen have been sitting in the church parking lot drinking; flower girls and ring bearers are very cute but too young to walk up the aisle without crying; the music is chosen from the “top forty list” and the photographer scrambles over the pews to direct the action rather than record it.

It’s exceedingly difficult for the priest to stand in the pulpit with any degree of conviction; to speak about the permanence of marriage when guests are involved in their second or third marriage; about fidelity when spouses have been or will be unfaithful; about sanctity when the newlyweds process out of church never to be seen again; about children when so many brides and grooms carry a contraceptive mentality into their marriage.

Labels: Catholic Church, cohabitation, contraception, Marriage, religion, remarriage, weddings vs. marriage

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