Thanksgiving/Real/Remarriage Survey/Cosby/Tyler-11/04

[smartmarriages at lists101.his.com]

- THANKSGIVING MARRIAGE HUMOR
- REMARRIAGE/STEPFAMILY EXPECTATIONS SURVEY
- TERRY REAL FREE TELE-GATHERING
- COSBY SHOULD ADD MARRIAGE TO HIS VALUES CRUSADE
- FROM TYLER, A WISE NOVEL OF MARRIAGE

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- THANKSGIVING MARRIAGE HUMOR
(I've sent this to the list in past years, but since several of you sent it
this week, and since we're approaching the family holiday season, time to
send it again.  - diane)

An elderly man in Phoenix calls his son in New York and says, "I hate to
ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing;
forty-five years of misery is enough."

"Pop, what are you talking about?" the son screams. 

"We can't stand the sight of each other any longer," the old man says. 
"We're sick and tired of each other, and I'm sick of talking about this, so
you call your sister in Chicago and tell her."  And he hangs up.

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone.  "Like Heck
they're getting a divorce," she shouts.  "I'll take care of this."  She
calls Phoenix immediately, and screams at the old man, "You are NOT getting
divorced!  Don't do a single thing until I get there.  I'm calling my
brother back and we'll both be there tomorrow.  Until then don't do a thing,
DO YOU HEAR ME?"  And she hangs up.

The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife.  "They're coming for
Thanksgiving and paying their own way."
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- REMARRIAGE/STEPFAMILY EXPECTATIONS SURVEY

Take a 15 minute survey and receive a gift certificate to Amazon.com! With
holidays approaching, remarried-families are running into lots of
expectations about how to celebrate - who does what, with whom, spends what,
and how and why - which makes it a perfect time for this survey.  Hope you
can help, and if not you, please forward this to remarried families that
might participate.  Holiday time is also a great time to earn an amazon gift
certificate.  - diane
- - - - - - -
If you are remarried or living in a stepfamily, you are invited to
participate in the web-based research study on remarriage expectations being
conducted by Brian Higginbotham and Dr. Francesca Adler-Baeder from Auburn
University.  

Remarriage has its challenges and rewards.  While it has some things in
common with a first marriage, there are important ways in which a remarriage
is different.  Unfortunately we know a lot more about first marriages than
we do about remarriages.  We would like to change that, and we are asking
for your help. From this study we hope to learn about the specific
expectations held by adults in remarriages.   Your responses will help us to
identify and measure the effects of these remarriage expectations on
remarital quality. 

Your responses will assist therapists, researchers, and family life
educators in their efforts to strengthen stepfamilies and remarriages.  To
participate, please use the following link to complete the on-line
questionnaire: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=69848722521

#######################
- TERRY REAL FREE TELE-GATHERING
Nov 30th 7 - 8PM EST. Call 646-519-5883 enter pin 1130# at 7. If you cannot
get in, hang up and try again for at least for the first 5 minutes.
If you miss the call, it will be recorded and available for a month until
the next tele-gathering. For the recording, call 405-244-4000 and enter box
number 100.  Terry Real will present a full-day training institute at the
Dallas 2005 Smart Marriages Conference, June 27.  - diane
######################
- COSBY SHOULD ADD MARRIAGE TO HIS VALUES CRUSADE
BALTIMORE SUN 
By Cynthia Tucker
November 15, 2004

(Wouldn't we love a keynote by Bill Cosby on Marriage!  Who has
connections??  In the meantime, several have asked and, yes, the African
American Marriage DVD/CD package is still available at the outrageously low
price of $49.  For details: http://www.playbacknow.com/cmfce - or to go
directly to the package at:
http://www.playbacknow.com/search/index.cfm?CFID=3251869&CFTOKEN=29383516&Pa
gemode=SessionDetail&ProductID=2287261&LinkTo=Organization&OrgID=8920 )


ATLANTA - Bill Cosby has his own values crusade going, and it's catching on
in much of black America. When Mr. Cosby endorses academic achievement,
discipline and parental involvement, he's supporting the traditional values
to which many black Americans - in red states or blue - can relate.

You might be surprised to hear this, but there is little controversy over
Mr. Cosby's rhetoric. A few fringe academics and left-wing scribes have
attacked him, but he has drawn broad support, including from civil rights
activists such as NAACP President Kweisi Mfume. Perhaps that's because Mr.
Cosby's wisdom is self-evident.

Like so many others, I support Mr. Cosby's crusade. I'd just like to add one
small item to his agenda: marriage. I'd like to hear him - in the plain and
unadorned language for which he has become known - urging black men and
women to get married.

Having been married to Camille for 40 years, he obviously believes in the
institution. (The Cosbys are the parents of four daughters; their son,
Ennis, was murdered in an apparent carjacking in 1997.) And Mr. Cosby has
implicitly supported it in talks around the country - pointing out the
detriment of teen pregnancy and urging fathers to get involved in their
children's lives.

But I'm not sure that young black men and women are quite getting the
message. Over the last few years, many unmarried young black fathers have
begun attending parenting seminars to learn the basics of fatherhood. As a
result, some are going to PTA meetings, monitoring their kids' report cards
and even coaching their children's Little League teams. But too few are
getting married to the mother of their children. What is better for kids
than a law-abiding, hard-working dad who is present in the home?

The institution of marriage is in trouble throughout the Western world. High
rates of divorce and pregnancy outside of marriage have destabilized
traditional unions, not just here but in Western Europe, too. Even Japan,
long a traditional society, is experiencing divorce creep.

(Many critics of same-sex unions have promoted bans as a way to protect
traditional marriage. I understand their worries over the state of
heterosexual marriage, but its decline has nothing to do with gays and
lesbians. The women's movement, Hollywood's idealized portrayals of marriage
and old-fashioned adultery and betrayal have undermined heterosexual
marriage, but gay couples have not.)

Among black Americans (whom some civil rights leaders have long described as
"canaries in the coal mine") the problem has assumed alarming proportions.
Marriage is fast becoming all but obsolete. Using figures from the U.S.
Census, the following shows the percentage of men who are married, by age
group:

Among white men from 25 to 29 years old, 41 percent are married; from 30 to
34 years old, 59 percent are married; and from 35 to 39 years old, 66
percent are married. Among Hispanic men 25 to 29 years old, 36 percent are
married; from 30 to 24, 53 percent are married; and from 35 to 39, 64
percent are married. But the marriage rates among black men drop
precipitously: Among ages 25 to 29, 25 percent are married; from 30 to 34,
41 percent are married; and from 35 to 39, 43 percent are married - still
less than half.

The high rates of incarceration among black men are certainly a hindrance to
marriage. Joblessness is also a factor. But there is something else going on
- a certain cultural shift that is harder to articulate: Marriage has simply
become devalued.

That's bad news.

Marriage is not only a solid institution for rearing children, it also
encourages responsible behavior and civic participation (good reasons for
allowing gays and lesbians to marry, too).

Further, as the nation becomes increasingly mobile and young adults move
away from their relatives, their spouses become their support system. That
value increases as couples age.

The next time Bill Cosby begins reminding black listeners about the need to
return to self-respect and self-reliance, he ought to encourage marriage,
too. It may be too late to save the institution from the relentless forces
of modernism that threaten to crush it, but it's worth a try.

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. Her column appears Mondays in The Sun.

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- FROM TYLER, A WISE NOVEL OF MARRIAGE
Baltimore Sun 
November 14, 2004
BY DOLORES AND ROGER FLAHERTY

(Sounds interesting.  I wonder if any of you have read it and, if so, what
you think.  - diane)

For some forty years, Anne Tyler has revealed the inner workings of marriage
and families in her novels as have few other writers. In The Amateur
Marriage, her 16th novel (Ballantine, $14.95), Tyler nails the topic so well
you wonder if it wouldn't be better to retire all family counselors and
offer copies of her books instead.

Unlike characters in many of her other novels, Pauline and Michael Anton are
not given to the quirky deed, like Julia in The Ladder of Years, who
casually walks off from her family at the beach and stays away for more than
a year. Or Macon, the stodgy travel writer in The Accidental Tourist, who
hooks up with a devil-may-care dog groomer.

In those novels, Tyler created entertaining people learning important
lessons about themselves as they live out a fantasy. Pauline and Michael are
not quirky. Anyone of us may be them or know people like them. They are two
people who care about each other but never quite learn how to get it right.

Tyler tells their story by stepping in and out of their lives over several
decades, starting with the moment they met, a couple of days before the Dec.
7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. For Michael, the only living son of a
widowed grocer, it was love at first sight when some girls from his Polish
neighborhood in Baltimore brought Pauline into the family store for first
aid on a facial cut. Pauline, who lived in a nearby non-ethnic neighborhood,
wasn't quite so sure about Michael, although she liked his attention.

Michael at 20 is already staid -- except in his pursuit of Pauline. She is
adventuresome and combative, ready to argue about just anything. His
response to emotional confrontation is cold withdrawal. Even during their
courtship, the tensions seem enough to derail a marriage. But Michael and
Pauline go on -- decade after decade, arguing, withdrawing, falling back in
love -- to the point you begin to think somehow such marriages can work.

But, good people both, they never do learn. They don't know how to yield and
when to forgive, and ultimately are worn down by their failings. As their
oldest daughter, Lindy -- who runs away at 17 and returns in her forties,
after Pauline's death -- tells her father "You were ice and she was glass.
Two oddly similar substances, come to think of it -- and both of them hell
on your children."

He said, "Lindy, show some charity here. We did the best we could ... We
were just unskilled; we never quite got the hang of things. It wasn't for
lack of trying."

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