Compassion/Health Effects/Cohabitation/Shakespeare -7/04

[Smart Marriages ®]

subject: Compassion/Health Effects/Cohabitation/Shakespeare -7/04



- STOSNY'S COMPASSION POWER TRAINING: VIOLENCE & ABUSE PROOF YOUR PROGRAMS
- OVER TIME, BICKERING SPOUSES TAKE A TOLL ON WELL-BEING
- COUPLES LIVE TOGETHER FOR CONVENIENCE, NOT TO TEST MARRIAGE
- SHAKESPEARE WRESTLES WITH THE MADDENING MYSTERIES OF MARRIAGE

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- STOSNY'S COMPASSION POWER TRAINING: VIOLENCE & ABUSE PROOF YOUR PROGRAMS
The Compassion Power program by Steven Stosny is always one of the highest
rated training sessions at the Smart Marriages Conference. If you weren't
able to fit in this training at the conference, you can take the training
Sept 9-12, Gaithersburg, MD (near Washington DC). The training, taught by
founder and 2004 Impact Award recipient, Steven Stosny, certifies you to
teach all the CompassonPower programs, including the new add-ons, Love
without Hurt, to make your marriage programs violence and abuse-proof and
Power Love, to make your program male-friendly. The Compassion Programs are
highly successful in reducing anger, hostility and anxiety and increasing
coping strategies, well being, and self-esteem. For complete info:
301-921-2010 or www.CompassionPower.com/training.htm

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- OVER TIME, BICKERING SPOUSES TAKE A TOLL ON WELL-BEING
Study finds partner's hostility leads to chronic health problems
By Marilyn Elias
USA TODAY
August 2, 2004

HONOLULU -- A critical, argumentative spouse can inflict major health damage
on aging adults, a study released Sunday suggests.

Most marriage research has focused on couples younger than 50. But longer
life spans and the boomer bulge headed toward 60 are sparking new interest
in how marriage affects health in later years, says psychologist Jamila
Bookwala of Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. She reported at the American
Psychological Association meeting here.

Using a nationally representative database survey, she explored the link
between health and marriage quality in 729 adults ages 50 to 74. All were in
first marriages for an average of 38 years.

Helpful, supportive spouses didn't significantly improve adults' health.
Especially in long marriages, ''if your spouse is there for you all the
time, you may come to take it for granted, to expect it, and after a while
it doesn't do much to enhance your health,'' Bookwala says.

But older adults who said they had hostile, demanding spouses were in
significantly worse shape for it. The more miserable the marriage, the more
chronic and serious health problems they had ---- high blood pressure,
arthritis ---- and the more painful physical symptoms and disability they
reported.

After Bookwala took account of depression, which often goes along with
illness, the tie to poor marriages remained. So bad health couldn't be
chalked up to depression in married people with unkind spouses.

Of course, marriage to an ill partner could make a spouse cranky and mean.
But past studies show marriage quality remains stable, even when partners
are under the extreme stress of acting as caregivers for their mates,
Bookwala says.

''Irrespective of the spouse's health, people tend to report the same
feelings about their marriage,'' she says. So she believes the nasty
treatment impairs health rather than poor health creating irritated spouses.

Studies with younger couples have found that snide put-downs and hostility
from a spouse can weaken the immune system, leading to more colds and flu.

Women with unfaithful husbands often endure frequent criticism, says Debbie
Then, a Palo Alto, Calif., psychologist and author of Women Who Stay With
Men Who Stray. ''It's a pattern,'' she says. ''It's as though the men have
to justify affairs, so there's this barrage of put-downs.''

Even for such women who consider their marriages happy, ''it does end up
eating away at their health,'' Then says. ''I saw lots of headaches and
stomachaches and alcohol problems in these women.''

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- COUPLES LIVE TOGETHER FOR CONVENIENCE, NOT TO TEST MARRIAGE

Source: Ohio State University? ??
Released:?28-Jul-2004

Description
Many couples who move in together don?t do it with marriage in mind, a small
study of New York City residents suggests. Nearly all of the people
interviewed who lived with a boyfriend or girlfriend said the major impetus
was finances, convenience or housing needs.

Newswise x Many couples who move in together don?t do it with marriage in
mind, a small study of New York City residents suggests.

Nearly all of the people interviewed who lived with a boyfriend or
girlfriend said the major impetus was finances, convenience or housing
needs.

?The common wisdom seems to be that people live together because they?re
testing the water before marriage. But we didn?t have a single person in
this study who said that was the reason they moved in together,? said Sharon
Sassler, author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Ohio
State University.

?Couples may have discussed marriage, or thought about it, but that wasn?t
the major reason for living together.?

Sassler?s study was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Marriage
and Family.

For the study, Sassler conducted open-ended interviews with 25 New York City
residents between the ages of 20 and 33 who lived with a boyfriend or
girlfriend for at least three months. The sample included 19 women and six
men, all of whom had at least some college experience. As an exploratory
study, the sample size is small, but it offers an initial glimpse into the
factors that lead people to move in together.

While there have been many large-scale, quantitative studies of couples who
lived together, none of them focused on the reasons that prompted the
decision to cohabit, Sassler said.

In one such study that Sassler and colleagues published last year, they
found that only about 40 percent of cohabiting couples ended up marrying
within four to seven years. But the data from that study, and others like
it, don?t answer the question of what couples are thinking when they decide
to live together.

This new study helps to begin answering that question.

?Some couples may eventually decide to marry, but that doesn?t happen until
they?ve been together a while,? she said. ?What we?re finding is that people
don?t move in together thinking that they?re preparing for marriage.?

The cohabiters fell into three groups, based on how rapidly their
relationship progressed. The largest group, which Sassler dubbed the
?accelerated cohabiters,? said they went from the beginning of a romantic
relationship to living together in less than six months. More than half (13)
of the respondents fell into this group. For most of them, the main reasons
for moving in were convenience and attraction.

A second group, the ?tentative cohabiters,? were involved with their
partners for a longer period x seven months to a year. None of the five
people in this group had lived with a romantic partner before, and expressed
at least some reservations about moving in together. Most of them said they
moved in because of some outside forces, such as one of their previous
roommates moving out, or difficulty affording housing.

The last group, the ?purposeful delayers,? took more than a year to decide
to move in together. The seven people in this group tended to cite
convenience as the main reason for cohabiting.

?They could have moved in together earlier, but for whatever reason, they
weren?t comfortable,? Sassler said. ?They waited until they felt the time
was right.?

But all three groups were the same in not mentioning marriage as the prime
reason for living together.

?We didn?t interview couples, so we only heard one side of the story,? she
said. ?But it was clear that if marriage was brought up, it wasn?t the main
consideration.?

Sassler is continuing the study in Columbus. But here she is interviewing
couples, so she hears both side of the story. Early results suggest that the
findings in New York are not unique, Sassler said. Couples in Columbus are
no more likely to mention marriage as the top reason for cohabiting.

The interviews in Columbus also suggest that, as her previous work showed,
there is a lot of disagreement among couples about the status of their
relationship, and whether they have plans to get married.

Overall, Sassler said the results of her studies suggest there needs to be
new thinking about why couples decide to live together.

?Couples tend to move in together relatively quickly, and it doesn?t seem
they?ve talked a lot about it beforehand,? she said. ?A lot of the decision
has to do with living situations and not necessarily plans for the future.?

#################################

- SHAKESPEARE WRESTLES WITH THE MADDENING MYSTERIES OF MARRIAGE
Santa Cruz Sentinel (California)
August 1, 2004

"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder," Matthew
19:6

By WALLACE BAINE

Sentinel staff writer

When future historians look back at 2004 and the effort to encode marriage
into the U.S. Constitution, maybe they?ll assume that Americans were engaged
in a meaningful civic conversation about the nature of contemporary
marriage.

Of course, those of us enduring the political alley fight of ?04 know
differently. Even supporters of the proposed constitutional amendment
championed by President Bush must agree that the effort to preserve
traditional marriage is more about the form x what a marriage looks like
from the outside x than the content x how two people engaged in marriage
define their relationship.

Be they earnest literalists or maverick opportunists, the folks at
Shakespeare Santa Cruz are picking up the banner and doing exactly what
those future historians might hope: With marriage suddenly a pertinent
political topic, SSC is turning over the rock and examining what it means to
be married by staging three provocative plays, each of which give the
marriage contract a thorough working-over.

Edward Albee?s "Who?s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," one of the most searing
portrayals of the dangerous undercurrents of marriage, opens this weekend,
playing alongside two Elizabethan classics, William Shakespeare?s "The
Taming of the Shrew" and John Fletcher?s "The Tamer Tamed," a
turning-of-the-tables follow-up to "Shrew" written 20 year later. Also
scheduled are two "fringe" performances of Aristophanes?s "Lysistrata," in
which the wives of two competing armies band together to withhold sex from
their husbands in order to stop the war.

Paul Whitworth, SSC?s newly reinstated artistic director, called marriage
the "smallest possible political unit," and Whitworth?s season unfolds in
that spirit. Each of the featured plays deals in power relationships between
husband and wife that often use the same adversarial, thrust-and-parry
tactics used in the political arena.

"(Marriage) is where the public and the private intersect," said Whitworth.
"It?s full of private emotions, but it has strong political ramifications as
well."

"It?s a heated cultural moment to be doing a play like this," said Michael
Edwards, the director of "Who?s Afraid," which features Whitworth in the
lead role. "We are being handed down a lot of cliches about marriage that
aren?t really being examined at all. There?s this notion that marriage is
the fundamental institution on which society is built. Yet here?s a play
that says all we hold dear in our notions of marriage is really quite
illusory."

"Pansies! Rosemary! Violence! My wedding bouquet!"
x Martha in "Who?s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

"Who?s Afraid," generally considered Albee?s masterpiece, opened on Broadway
on Oct. 13, 1962, the day before U.S. spy planes first saw evidence of
Soviet missiles based in Cuba, a revelation that led to the Cuban Missile
Crisis the following week.

The play, which was a hit with audiences, was part of a changing cultural
milieu, according to Edwards. "Kennedy had just come into office," he said.
"The Pill had just come out. There was something audiences were feeling
about the play, that it was putting its finger on something fundamental
about what was happening at the time."

Three years later, the play was made into a Mike Nichols film starring
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead role.

The play centers on one very long night in the lives of two married couples:
an older couple, George and Martha, who have been married for 23 years; and
a younger couple, Nick and Honey, just starting on their marriage. Both men
are professors at a New England college. The action begins in the aftermath
of a campus party. Martha has invited the younger couple to the home she
shares with George for a nightcap.

Over copious amounts of alcohol, George and Martha turn up the heat on their
ongoing verbal domestic skirmish in front of the confused Nick and Honey.
But when Martha brings up a forbidden subject, long active fault lines in
the couple?s marriage shift dramatically.

"People don?t really understand that it?s a love story," said Kate Skinner
who plays Martha in the SSC production. "It?s interesting in that it?s done
in a Shakespeare season, because like the Shakespeare tragedies, at the end
some order is restored and there?s some promise that these people can now
move on in a positive way."

Vicki Van Tassel, who plays the young Honey in "Woolf," said that the play
has historical elements that aren?t as central to today?s experience. "A lot
of women at that time were without a lot of power. They lived through their
husbands and were very concerned about appearances."

Though some audiences have historically been intimidated by the vigorous
sparring between husband and wife in "Woolf," director Edwards said that the
play transcends bickering and one-upmanship and teaches its characters new
ways to see themselves and their marriage.

"That existential moment when all the constructs fall away and you see
things as they really are for the first time is a thrilling moment."


"Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant, of a
teacher and a learner."
x John Updike, "Couples"

Actors Blaire Chandler and Robertson Dean are doing something unusual, maybe
even unique in the history of theater. They are playing lead roles opposite
each other in two plays, each a bookend to the other. Dean, in fact, is
playing the very same character in each play.

The Southern-bred Chandler gets the role of Kate in Shakespeare?s "The
Taming of the Shrew," one of most controversial plays in the English canon.
On the surface, the comedy suggests that brawling and suspicious Kate is
"tamed" and turned into a grinning and obedient Stepford Wife by Petruchio,
her manipulative husband.

For generations, feminists have cringed at the idea of a wife finding
happiness in her submission to her husband, but supporters of the play say
that reading is much too simplistic.

The play turns on one word traditionally found in the marriage vow but
dropped in recent years: obedience. Does such a notion have a place in
contemporary relationships?

"In our production," said Chandler, "Kate is an angry, bitter woman because
she does not know love. She starts out broken and ends up whole. She ends up
giving a part of herself, and it doesn?t feel like a sacrifice.

"This is always going to be statement play, no matter how you want to make
it (non-political). But it asks, can you be abused into happiness? It sounds
like a laugh line until you really think about it. Think of the metaphor of
?tough love.? In therapy, you can?t really get past something until you?ve
really had to look at it."

"I married beneath me. All women do."
x Viscountess Nancy Astor, 1951

In John Fletcher?s "The Tamer Tamed," Petruchio, having "tamed" Kate, is
back looking for another wife (Fletcher turned Kate?s "happy" ending into a
tragic one by killing her off).

This time, he meets and weds Maria, Kate?s temperamental opposite. Bubbly
and feminine where Kate was severe and embittered, Maria turns the tables on
Petruchio, and the power relationship of "Shrew" is thrown into reverse.

"Both of these characters love each other very much," said Chandler who
plays Maria as well. "That?s never a question. But just as Petruchio wanted
to take this broken and angry thing and make a woman out of Kate, Maria
wants to take this broken and angry thing and make a man out of Petruchio."

George and Martha. Petruchio and Kate. Petruchio and Maria. In each case,
husband and wife struggle in an effort to establish a balance of power. In
"Lysistrata," the fourth play in the Shakespeare Santa Cruz season,
imbalance of power between the sexes is an explicit theme.

"It?s the farthest removed from us in time," said the production?s director
Bonnie Leigh Mill, "but it really addresses a contemporary issue in what
goes on between men and women. And it?s really about that imbalance of
power. As men have the power to wage war, women are becoming more and more
in touch with their power as sexual beings."


"The most dangerous food is wedding cake"
x James Thurber

The artists at work on Shakespeare Santa Cruz?s new seasons must, of course,
bring their own personal experience to bear in their work. Kate Skinner, who
as Martha has to portray a woman smothered by years of suffocation in her
marriage, is a newlywed at 51. Part of George and Martha?s pain, common
among many couples these days, is the fact that they were married young and
have evolved into different people, said Skinner.

"There?s something very different about falling in love when you really know
who you are," she said.

"When you think of those terms: to love, to honor, to cherish. I can?t
believe people say this at 25 and actually know what those words really
mean. Do you really know what is entailed in loving someone and honoring
someone?"

Blaire Chandler is not married, but she?s been in a committed relationship
for 81?2 years, though she?ll often call her partner her "husband" for the
sake of convenience. She sees marriage mostly as a legal distinction that
has little to do with emotional commitment. She also sees an undercurrent of
arrogance in the contemporary debate on marriage.

"Anytime finger-wagging starts, it?s devolved into bad taste," she said. "I
don?t know what ever happened to ?Everything?s fine and if I haven?t told
you, it?s none of your business.?

"If you love somebody, if you know what that feeling is, isn?t that the
closest thing to knowing God you may come across in your lifetime. If you?re
fortunate enough to wake up in the morning and see someone who fills your
heart with joy, that?s blessed by God."


"...George who is out somewhere there in the dark ... George who is good to
me, and whom I revile; who understands me, and whom I push off; who can make
me laugh, and I choke it back in my throat; who can hold me, at night, so
that it?s warm, and whom I will bite so there?s blood; who keeps learning
the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me
happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy."
x Martha in ?Who?s Afraid of Virginia Woolf??

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