FUNNY | AND, FRIGID - 9/19.07

[Smartmarriages]

- CARTOONS: FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE
- NEW DISMAL MARRIAGE SHOWS

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- CARTOONS: FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE

Pre marital inventories got a nod in today's For Better or For Worse
cartoon. If you don't get the strip in your paper you
can see it on their website:
    http://www.fborfw.com
>From the home page click on Newsbites and then on the left side
to The Latest FBorFW strip-Sunday April 19,2007

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- NEW DISMAL MARRIAGE SHOWS

We must take these lemons and make lemonade!

I want to remind you of lemonade BEFORE you read this article that says the
fall TV season will bring "a darkening mood" as it dissects  "marriage and
finds despair".  It opens with a discussion of a new series on HBO "Tell Me
You Love Me" described as a "sober, often quite depressing meditation on
Marriage, American Style".  However, there is not just one show, but as this
journalist tells us, a trend - away from premarital frolics (Friends,
Seinfeld, Sex in The City, etc) to a "renewed fascination with matrimony"
that presents "decidedly unromantic" . . . "tableaus of repression and
neurosis" . . . "lust-numbing domesticity". ."haven¹t had sex in a year". .
. And: "Loneliness more than anything else distinguishes these new shows".

Yes, that would be loneliness inside marriage. There's more.

"The dating antics of four successful women in New York [Sex and the City]
have been replaced by the predicament of four successful women in New York
who struggle to balance career, children, mates and infidelities (Cashmere
Mafia coming to ABC).  Also coming to ABC: ³Big Shots² is its more callous
male counterpart: 40ish C.E.O.¹s struggling surreptitiously to wriggle free
of the ball and chain."
 
Such cheer and sunshine.

To which we could just throw up our hands, throw in the towel, say, oi vey
and sit back and watch as the marriage rate takes another sharp dip.  But we
won't.  These shows must be seen as grist for our mill - as giving us
OPPORTUNITIES/openings to offer ideas about how people can proactively
improve their odds - build intimacy, avoid loneliness, and create satisfying
marital sexual styles.  GET READY for calls from journalists asking what we
think. If they don't call, call them. Write
commentaries/letters-to-the-editor/columns.  Send me your ideas about how to
use the shows to introduce our stuff - the three streams of marriage
education (1 Benefits of Marriage; 2 What to Expect in Marriage; 3 Behaviors
to Improve your Odds) and all the ways we can turn these lemons into
lemonade.  

I encourage you to listen to the recording of the Barry McCarthy's Denver
workshop, "Rekindling Desire".  Maybe it's that I just listened to this one
on my walk this morning, but it seems perfect in laying out the challenges
of reduced sexual desire in marriage, of describing what's normal and needed
in, and solutions.  Of course, that's true of most of the sessions -
workshops and keynotes at the conference.  - diane

> 602 - order on CD or download as an MP3 at
http://www.iplaybacksmartmarriages.com or at 800-241-7785
> Rekindling Desire
> Barry McCarthy, PhD
> One in five marriages is non-sexual, i.e., have sex less than 10 times a year.
> Specific exercises bridge the cycles of avoidance and self-consciousness and
> reestablish desire. Case illustrations.

The New York Times
August 19, 2007
Say, Darling, Is It Frigid in Here?
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Television, in a darkening mood, looks at marriage and finds despair.

THE next big thing is conjugal sex.

³Tell Me You Love Me,² an HBO drama that will begin in September, has
already gotten a lot of advance attention by paying a lot of attention to
the advances couples make ‹ and don¹t make ‹ in bed. It¹s more sexually
explicit than any show on television, but the series is also more clinical
than erotic, more analytical than dramatic: scenes from a few marriages that
hinge, or collapse, on sexual intercourse. (More, if you count the
white-haired therapist and her geri-priapic husband.)

Ingmar Bergman¹s ³Scenes from a Marriage² was first shown in Europe as a
mini-series before it was turned into a movie in 1973, and both versions
were scandalous and disturbing. HBO¹s tales of marital strife have less
Scandinavian gloom and intensity but some of the original¹s gravity and
voyeurism ‹ Bergman Lite.

The series can be considered groundbreaking, if only for its nudity and
graphic depictions of sex, but it is nevertheless quite chaste in its
intentions. Struggling to recapture its primacy in the post-²Sopranos² era,
HBO chose a sexually daring but sober, often quite depressing meditation on
Marriage, American Style.

HBO is not alone. There is a noticeable shift in emphasis this season, a
darkening of mood away from the premarital frolics of blind dates, Manolo
Blahniks and Central Perk hookups to closely watched midmarriage malaise.
Almost any television drama touches on connubial tension and sexual miscues;
it crops up all over, in family melodramas like ³Brothers and Sisters² on
ABC, police procedurals like ³Law & Order: SVU² on NBC and even courtroom
thrillers like ³Damages² on FX. But until now most series lacked either the
interest or the patience to probe those intimacies too closely. The last
time television took so unhurried and earnest a look at spousal relations
was 20 years ago, on ³Thirtysomething.²

Suddenly a renewed fascination with matrimony spans the spectrum from
premium cable networks like HBO and Showtime to even the flimsiest of
celebrity reality shows on VH1. Colder, unsentimental, almost cruel in their
gaze, these shows have replaced the solipsistic pillow talk between Hope and
Michael on ³Thirtysomething² with tableaus of repression and neurosis.

Despite its title ³Scott Baio Is 45 ... and Single² is not a beach
bachelor¹s romp; it¹s an intervention. A life coach takes charge of Mr.
Baio, a former teenage idol (³Happy Days²), and helps him interview past
lovers to discover why he has trouble sustaining a union. It¹s as hokily
choreographed as any of VH1¹s bio-reality shows, but it is dead serious
about Mr. Baio¹s commitment problem. ³Californication,² on Showtime, is a
dark comedy with the same bleak scenario: David Duchovny plays Hank, a
blocked writer in Hollywood who regrets not marrying Karen (Natascha
McElhone), his former girlfriend and mother of his child. He seeks fleeting
solace by californicating with a slew of young, attractive women.

The sex is not as hard-core as it is on ³Tell Me You Love Me,² but it is
still racy and decidedly unromantic. Mr. Duchovny plays the antihero as a
depressed, self-loathing misogynist, not a pleasure-loving rake.

Even some of the more frivolous new offerings from the networks have a
somber overlay. ³Cashmere Mafia,² an ABC series by Darren Star, who produced
³Sex and the City,² mixes rue with ribaldry: The dating antics of four
successful women in New York have been replaced by the predicament of four
successful women in New York who struggle to balance career, children, mates
and infidelities. ABC¹s ³Big Shots² is its more callous male counterpart:
40ish C.E.O.¹s struggling surreptitiously to wriggle free of the ball and
chain.

There is a reason so many shows are moving in this direction. Television has
so mined marital misunderstandings and work-family dilemmas that now the
only thing left to dissect is the institution itself.

Amid all these ruminations on modern-day matrimony, ³Mad Men² on basic
cable¹s AMC stands out as the control, a reminder of what marriage was like
for previous generations.

This Madison Avenue drama, set in the advertising business at the dawn of
the 1960s, recreates middle-class life in the pre-Friedan era, when
graduates of Wellesley and Bryn Mawr wore girdles and aprons as they raised
the children and waited for their husbands, who stayed in town late,
drinking and smoking and carousing with compliant secretaries. ³Mad Men² has
a satiric edge, but it is a stark reminder of what the battle of the sexes
looked like before women¹s lib, civil rights, the Pill and legalized
abortion.

The series also serves as a taunting rebuke to modern wedlock: Careful what
you wish for.

One couple on ³Tell Me You Love Me² has a happy, vigorous sex life that is
undermined by the wife¹s inability to get pregnant. Another has two children
and no sex at all, which is undermining the family bliss. Both end up slowly
and guardedly confiding in an older sex therapist, played by Jane Alexander.
She has an uninhibited sex life with her loving husband, Arthur (David
Selby), but even her time-weathered marriage has a few cobwebs.

Katie (Ally Walker) and David (Tim DeKay) haven¹t had sex in a year, but
nothing appears to be wrong. They are a loving if repressed couple deeply
and equally involved in raising their children, from grocery shopping to
Little League practice. David is not impotent; he masturbates with furtive
relish when his wife leaves the room. Yet neither seems able to summon
desire for intercourse or take the initiative. A clue to their problem
spills out during a therapy session, when the mild, buttoned-up David
unleashes a rant about the lust-numbing domesticity of his life.

³I guess, yeah, I should be in the mood every time I clean out the gecko
cage,² he hollers, his sarcasm turning to rage. ³Everybody else is, it
seems. I¹ll tell you what turns me on: Buying Cheerios is really hot, and
then of course getting shoelaces or fantasizing about minivans, that¹s sexy
too.²

Those intimations of emasculation stand as a cautionary tale next to Don
Draper (Jon Hamm) of ³Mad Men.² Don has a wife, two kids and a freethinking
mistress in Greenwich Village. He doesn¹t buy Cheerios or mop the floor.
He¹s barely ever home. But he has enough libido to sleep with two women and
chase a third.

Accordingly Don¹s wife, Betty (January Jones), is a poignant figure: young,
pretty, in awe of her handsome, successful husband and seemingly content to
mind the house and the children. But occasional, mysterious neurasthenic
symptoms send her to a psychiatrist¹s office (a strict Freudian).

In her circle women who can afford not to work stay home. Betty¹s neighbor,
a divorcée with a young son, is obliged to work to make ends meet, but she
is wracked with guilt about it.

Twenty years ago ³Thirtysomething² explored the angst of women who felt
guilty about putting aside their careers to raise families. Hope (Mel
Harris), that show¹s perfectionist heroine, was forever tormenting herself
for giving up her journalistic ambitions to raise her two small children.
(In one episode Hope is haunted by visions of her feminist Princeton
professor, who chastises her for not fulfilling her potential.)

In 2007 women still don¹t have it all, and their marriages are still
strained. The powerful female executives of ³Cashmere Mafia² are as
conflicted about their choices as their predecessors, and they are just as
worried about philandering husbands as the unfulfilled suburban housewives
of the Eisenhower years.

Postponing pregnancy is no solution. On ³Tell Me You Love Me² Carolyn (Sonya
Walger) is a gorgeous lawyer on partner track, in love with her handsome,
tender husband, who is a successful architect. But she spends her free time
in fertility clinics and the therapist¹s couch, buying pregnancy kits in the
drugstore and hoping to see ³the thin blue line.²

This series is more dire than most, partly because almost all the other
distractions that usually surround couples and provide subplots ‹
co-workers, in-laws, children, parents, financial reversals ‹ have been all
but airbrushed out. The show isolates each relationship from its daily
context, a little like the lovers who have an intense, secret affair in the
movie ³9 1Ž2 Weeks,² only with more chores and door slamming: 9 1Ž2 Years.

That ill-lighted isolation is so stylized that it is almost an aesthetic.
³Mad Men² has the stark, brooding look of film noir, and even the Scott Baio
show fades out with close-ups of Mr. Baio alone, uneasy and bewildered.
Loneliness more than anything else distinguishes these new shows from the
cheerful claustrophobia of ³Thirtysomething²; those people were confused,
angry, self-absorbed and even whiny, but they were never alone and rarely
silent.

You¹re born alone and die alone. Framed by silence, secrets and solitude,
these modern relationships suggest you also love alone. It¹s depressing to
look too closely at the inner workings of any marriage. Viewers are advised
to keep in mind that wedlock is a little like Churchill¹s definition of
democracy: an institution that is the worst, except for all the others.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/arts/index.html
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


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Pre-Conference Training Institutes June 30-July 2
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