Early Rate Reprieve/ Honey, We're Killing the Kids/ Michigan CHMI / Women's Leisure - 5/06

[Smartmarriages]

- EARLY-RATE REPRIEVE
- HONEY, WE'RE KILLING THE KIDS
- MAKING MARRIAGES WORK
- WHY WOMEN DON'T RELAX

#######################
- EARLY-RATE REPRIEVE

Our registration processing company, AMEDCO in Minnesota, just called to
apologize that the tech guy that knows how to disable the on-line "early
bird" rate left early, so it won't be disabled until Monday morning "first
thing".  So, you still have the weekend and the wee hrs of Mon am to
register on-line at the early rate.  The FAX machine will be "accepting"
faxes all weekend and we agreed we'll accept anything that comes in over the
weekend On-line, by FAX or mail at the early rate.  Dave Harland, registrar,
said that's a good thing because the FAX machine has been running non-stop
all day and he's sure some people got a busy signal.  So, rate change goes
into effect Mon morning at open of business.

The amazing news is that we've already got registrations from all 50 states.
We do that every year, but it's never happened this early.  And, we've got
big showings from smaller states - like 14 from New Hampshire.  And, for
those of you keeping track, Georgia pulled ahead today, with Florida and
then Texas right on its heels.

Covey's Sunday afternoon seminar, #802 "7 Habits of Highly Effective
Families" now has the most registrations with two Sat afternoon sessions,
Hendrix and Hunt's "Imago Connects" and Haltman's "Secrets of Happily
Married Men" just a few paces behind.

- diane  

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

- HONEY, WE'RE KILLING THE KIDS

> Diane, 
> Are you aware of the new show, "Honey, we're killing the kids"?  It is a
> reality show which examines the lifestyle and diet of a family and then uses
> age progression software to show the parents how their children will look at
> age 40. After three weeks of making changes, the new behaviors are figured
> into the age progression software and a new (better) result is viewed.
>  
> The show predictably urges changes in diet and exercise, but I have been
> surprised and gratified to note that it also encourages couples to take care
> of their relationship for the benefit of their children.  The couple featured
> in the last show I watched were required to take salsa lessons and go out to
> dinner alone. 

> It's on The Learning Channel (TLC), Mondays at 9 ET.  It looks like it might
> be another one of those ideas we stole from the British.  There's a BBC
> version, too. The TLC version features Dr. Lisa Hark, PhD., RD.
>  
> Interesting.

> Jane Leingang 
> Evansvillle, IN 

##############################
- MAKING MARRIAGES WORK

Center contacting area churches, therapists, other organizations
By Andrea Blum, Heritage Newspapers (MICHIGAN)
May 4, 2006

(Julie Bock, featured here, will be in Atlanta and her CHMI will be featured
as part of the Chick-Fil-A/Marriage CoMission reception on Sat night. More
about that later - I can't talk about it now, I'm too hungry. ;) - diane )

Creating healthier, stronger unions is the goal of the state's first
marriage resource center.

A Web-based clearinghouse for marriage education and support groups around
the area, the Marriage Resource Center of Wayne County brings together
helpful sources for couples who want to improve their relationships.

"There are hundreds of solid, proven effective, skills-based marriage
education programs available to couples," Executive Director Julie Bock
said. "We want to organize all the groups that are doing this."

Maintaining a healthy marriage is a continuous process, according to Bock,
who set up the resource center about a year ago.

"Marriage goes through so many changes, from parenting to moving to
job-related changes," she said. "There's not one book to buy for all those
problems. You always need new skills and support."

Bock, of Huron Township, is contacting local churches, therapists and other
organizations offering marriage-related services to find out what's offered.

"Locating ongoing programs on a regular basis has been a problem," she said.
"Beyond premarital counseling, if you're not a member of a congregation
somewhere, it's hard to find those resources."

A certified marriage educator, Bock believes that more reasonable marriage
expectations should be presented to people from the start.

"Marriage education and enrichment starts as young as age 13 with
teenagers," she said.

"Our culture has taught people that they should look for a satisfying
marriage, but that the way to find that is to find your soul mate or perfect
match. That's not realistic.

"People get into marriage and find that it's not what they expected."

Training young people to have healthy expectations of marriage and giving
them the skills to achieve that is part of what the center is about.

"There are all different kinds of avenues for encouraging healthy
marriages," Bock said.

"I think some people don't know that the possibility of a more satisfying
marriage even exists."

But married couples aren't the only ones she hopes to reach.

"It starts with singles and teens," she said.

The center can link people with programs for teens and singles, engaged or
newly married couples, new parents, established marriages and struggling
marriages.

Classes such as "10 Great Dates" can teach couples how to inject excitement
back into their relationships, and "How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk" shows
people what to look for in a possible mate.

"We recognize that not every marriage can or should be saved," Bock said.

"Marriages that include addictions, abuse and repeated infidelity have
issues that are extremely difficult for couples to overcome."

But for those unions that can be fixed, Bock said it's worth putting in the
extra effort to stay together through the tough times.

"Going to a workshop only takes a weekend or even a day," she said. "One day
can re-energize a marriage."

The goal is to reduce divorces in Wayne County and create happier, healthier
families, Bock said.

"This isn't just about couples," she said. "It affects children, too."

Anyone offering a marriage-related workshop or program can list it on the
site free of charge.

The center also provides speakers for groups interested in learning more
about marriage education.

Bock works with two part-time community volunteers and a full-time volunteer
provided through an agreement with Ford Motor Co.

For more information, visit www.downrivermarriage.org.

( For step-by-step instructions on how to create a web-based, highly low
cost marriage resource center register for:

> 518 - Saturday afternoon, Atlanta
> Harness the Internet: Marriage Resource Centers
> Dennis Stoica, MBA
> Learn to build a website for your marriage project or Community Marriage
> Resource Center. Increase access to local marriage programs. Includes FREE
> templates and instructions.


###########################
- WHY WOMEN DON'T RELAX

(This reminds me of John Gray's classic sex advice to men - about women
having a bag full of "things they have to do" and how to approach
successfully....life changing foreplay advice.  Order tape #754-p-7 on DVD
or CD at 800-241-7785.  - diane )

Men fish, play golf, watch football, play computer games. Women shop. But
don't confuse that with having fun, says Germaine Greer - men may spend
their free time relaxing, but for women it's just another form of work

Thursday May 4, 2006
The Guardian, UK

Women either don't do leisure, or they do free leisure, or at best cheap
leisure, or they fail to perceive any difference between work and leisure.
Ask what a woman's leisure activity is and you're apt to be told,
"Shopping." Shopping is grinding toil that women mistake for play. Men stand
bemused as women trudge from shop to shop looking for something better or
cheaper than another thing that is virtually identical, wondering why they
didn't buy what they wanted at the first shop that had it in stock. Men
don't understand that if you haven't come close to dropping, then you
haven't shopped. Men buy; women shop.

Most women would say that they have very little time to themselves. The time
they don't spend working for the employer and the taxman they spend doing
something called "housework", to which, for most women between the ages of
25 and 50, may be added "childcare". There is also the onerous task of body
maintenance, keeping the otherwise disgusting female body clean, tidy,
deodorised, made up, not to mention toned and becomingly clad, plus the
exhausting, sometimes painful and expensive business of hair and hairiness
management. Work, all of it.

There are powerful historical reasons for women's imperviousness to the
demands of leisure. The typical world citizen - who is still female,
illiterate and an unpaid family worker - knows only too well that if she is
ever to be seen with her hands in her lap, a job will be found for her. In
traditional societies, the high days and holidays on which menfolk are
permitted to straighten their backs and put on clean clothes are the days on
which the women have to work the hardest, smartening up the house and
putting together giant meals. It is not so long ago that on Sundays, while
rest of the family frolicked, the woman of the house had to cook and serve a
three-course Sunday lunch and clean up after it.

Many women these days would like nothing better than the chance to serve
soup, roast and pudding to the assembled family once a week. If they don't
do it any more, it is less because they rebelled against such hard labour on
everybody else's day of rest than because nowadays there isn't anybody
around to eat the food they cook. Everybody else is out doing leisure. Has
the woman of the house grabbed a kitbag and followed their example?
Apparently not. Women don't go fishing. Women do play golf, but not many and
not much. Women don't buy sports equipment or season tickets. Women don't
buy sports cars, boats, jetskis, trailbikes, guns, crossbows ... Women don't
collect stamps, spot trains, buy music products. Women do use gyms, but not
for fun.

If leisure is what you do when you are not working for a livelihood, then
the women who were excluded from the paid workforce never had anything but
leisure, but their leisure, as Thorstein Veblen explained, was vicarious
leisure, its purpose to display for all to see the status of the man who
owned them and could afford to let them sit about all day every day. Ladies
of leisure were not permitted to enjoy their leisure. They couldn't go
rambling about or fishing or playing cricket on the green or burying
themselves in books. Instead, they had to fill their hours with useless,
pointless, unproductive, repetitive work: beadwork, shellwork, tatting,
making cut-paper patterns and silhouettes, japanning, plus what George Eliot
called "a little ladylike tinkling and smearing". For the affluent,
housework used to be done by servants. Boiling up shirts and sheets,
ironing, polishing floors and furniture, blacking grates and shining silver
used to be heavy work. The lady of the middle-class house wasn't expected to
break into a sweat. It was only when machines replaced maids that vicarious
leisure could take the form of housework.

Occasionally some foolhardy academic tries to suggest that housework is a
leisure pursuit, the paradigmatic "leisure industry", which is one way of
saying "keeping very busy doing nothing". Women will not accept this version
of their reality; they want us to believe that they hate and resent
housework, but that "someone has to do it". The people who make money out of
this kind of leisure industry are multinationals like Unilever and Procter &
Gamble, and by manipulating women's insecurities they make unimaginably huge
amounts of it. Currently, women are fighting a war on bacteria, nasty,
deformed aliens who hide under toilet seats and on work surfaces. Where lazy
boys play murderous videogames, diligent housewives deal out death and
destruction to an equally fictitious enemy. The boys know they are playing;
the women think they are working.

The men's leisure industry covets the trillions of dollars' profit made by
Unilever and Procter & Gamble. If it has seriously tried to entice women
away from the housework and win back the money they splurge on home-care,
there is no sign of its succeeding. Half of the population remains
inaccessible to the leisure industry because of the fantasy war against
filth, which requires the cleaning of a house already too clean. I have yet
to see any ad appearing in a women's magazine saying, "Your house is clean
enough. Come out and play!" In a current women's magazine, one advertisement
shows a bare-chested hunk on a sunset beach holding what appears at first
glance to be a boogie board. In fact it is an ironing board, and the
advertisement challenges its readers, "Still finding excuses to keep your
old ironing board?" The same magazine carries two advertisements for cars,
one of which begins, "Slip behind the wheel of a new Ford Territory and you
can relax in the knowledge that you're surrounded by a legion of safety
features" - and proceeds to list them all. No suggestion that driving a car
might be fun, in fact, nothing about the car's performance at all.

Women are not listening to the siren call of leisure. But it is also true
that the leisure industry does not address itself to women. This may be
simply because no female market exists, but an elderly market certainly
exists and the leisure industry ignores that too, even though older people
have more disposable income than younger people. The goods and services
older people use are never characterised as such. The explanation is not
simply that advertisers are ageist, but that senior citizens themselves are
ageist. The greyest of nomads would not buy an RV that was advertised as
ideal for grey nomads.

Older women, whether they play bingo or break out the camp stove, are
heavily involved in leisure, but theirs is cut-price leisure. They are not
in the market for recreational vehicles, or powerboats, or even motel
accommodation. They are the people who make possible literary festivals and
antique fairs, who support local art galleries and museums, who volunteer
for every community chore, and happily raise money for what they believe to
be good causes, giving, giving, giving of their time free. If we had a way
of quantifying the output of the leisure industry of older women, we would
probably see that it contributes vastly more to the GDP than the corporate
leisure industry.

· This article follows from Germaine Greer's speech at Permira Leisureland,
a panel debate on the future of the leisure industry in the UK.