We are what we celebrate | Marriage Trends | Children of Divorce Study - 7/ 15/ 07

[Smartmarriages]

- MARRIAGE MATTERS: AN INVITATION TO JOY
- MEET. MARRY. MOVE ON.
- PARENTAL DIVORCE EXPLAINS 66% OF INCREASED RISK OF DIVORCE IN THEIR KIDS

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- MARRIAGE MATTERS: AN INVITATION TO JOY

> We are what we eat, we're told. We think that to some extent, we also are what
> we celebrate.

Marriage Matters: An invitation to joy
By James and Audora Burg
Sturgis Journal (Indiana)
July 13, 2007 

We read a most beautiful phrase this week - "And no one could resist the
invitation to joy."

The full context is even sweeter. Fr. Stephen Freeman, an Orthodox Christian
priest in Tennessee, reflected in his blog about his son's imminent
nuptials: "We were created for such communion - for the joys of others to be
the joys of our own...Three years ago when my second daughter was to be
married, she pounced gleefully on her younger sister's bed (a quiet sleepy
bed it was, too) first thing in the morning with the greeting, 'I'm getting
married today!' And no one could resist the invitation to joy."

What a vivid image of delight incarnate, of the highest and purest of human
emotions in anticipating the joyful state of and the corresponding desire to
draw others into that bliss.

Joy begets joy, to where the words "I'm happy for you" becomes "I'm happy
along with you." Isn't that why we invite others to celebrate with us when
life brings a joyful event - a marriage, the birth of a baby - times when
our cup of joy runs so abundantly over that we bid others to come taste of
its sublime bounty?

We are what we eat, we're told. We think that to some extent, we also are
what we celebrate.

Diane Sollee, founder of Smart Marriages, has long advocated that people
celebrate wedding anniversaries of family, friends, and even colleagues,
with even more fanfare than birthdays.

She wrote, "Before antibiotics and by-pass, birthdays were something to
celebrate. Now, after no-fault divorce, wedding anniversaries should get the
big hurrah. They're the big achievement ­ against the odds. There are so
many ways we can create this marriage supporting culture."

We think "culture" is the key word, with its implications that culture is
far more than what you do, it's who you are. How you are.

One practical (and all-too-obvious) way to create a marriage supporting
culture is to support marriages. Celebrate marriages.

Celebrate doesn't necessarily mean a celebration, as in a party. It means to
recognize and honor and share the joy of the birthday of these marriages, of
these families, of these little civilizations.

Don't wait for the "biggies," like the 25th or 50th anniversaries, because
every year is a biggie on its own.

In celebrating what's good, we not only invest in but also draw from these
community-sustaining relationships. By tending the underlying emotional
foundations of our lives, we give ourselves not only security and safety to
soar to blissful heights, but the very means by which we may.

It's an invitation to joy. How will you answer it?

James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue,
Fort Wayne, and executive director of the Healthy Marriages Sturgis program.
His wife, Audora, is a homemaker and free lance writer. They are parents of
three children and reside in Sturgis.

FOR SAMPLES OF MARRIAGE AND ANNIVERSARY GIFT CERTIFICATES see:
http://www.smartmarriages.com/giftcertificates.html

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- MEET. MARRY. MOVE ON.

[The stark realities of marriage trends in today's Boston Goble. "Today,
emotional fulfillment may be the only reason to marry - and the lack of it
can mean the end of a marriage." Here are clips from the full article. -
diane]  

Meet. Marry. Move On.
When you're looking for a soul mate, why let a spouse slow you down? There's
a new emphasis in marriages on emotional togetherness, a standard some
relationships just cannot meet. Good thing nobody bats an eye anymore when
young, childless couples divorce.

By Alison Lobron  |  July 15, 2007

 

> What the intention of marriage is has been a matter of national debate,
> especially since Massachusetts became the first state to offer marriage
> licenses to same-sex couples. But now the reasons that male-female couples
> marry are in flux - especially among Murphy's peers. Academics, therapists,
> and divorce attorneys say that for young, childless couples where both parties
> are educated, employed, and capable of financial independence, emotional
> fulfillment tends to outrank other reasons to get married to a degree that
> would have been almost unimaginable for their parents or grandparents. Today,
> emotional fulfillment may be the only reason to marry - and the lack of it can
> mean the end of a marriage.
> 
> Divorce at 20 or 30 isn't new, and the numbers of failed first marriages have
> remained fairly constant for the last 30 years; about one in five couples will
> experience separation or divorce within five years of marriage. And true love,
> of course, has always been the ideal - think Jane Austen or Romeo and Juliet.
> But Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who
> studies marriage and family life, says that changing domestic economics -
> specifically, the rise of two-income families - is causing a shift in what
> couples are looking for when they enter a marriage. "Three or four decades
> ago, you had to be married to make it" both financially and emotionally, he
> says. Now, the choice is "a matter of personal happiness," Cherlin says. It
> used to be that a union was judged by how well it fulfilled both parties'
> economic and social needs, while today, young people judge the success of a
> marriage by how well it fulfills their emotional needs.
> 
> What has also changed in the last 30 or 40 years is that many of the
> traditional perquisites of marriage - shared household expenses, children, sex
> - are no longer tied to a marriage license. So when young people, often
> already living together, decide to get that piece of paper, they expect it to
> transport them to a higher emotional plane. And when that doesn't happen, they
> leave - facing little stigma and with few regrets.
> 
> A HAPPY, EMOTIONALLY FULFILLING MARRIAGE IS, OF COURSE, A good thing for
> society and for the individuals involved. But therapists and divorce lawyers
> who work with young couples (and young former couples) see downsides to this
> narrowing in marriage's focus. The most obvious one is that almost no one is
> happy all the time, and people who expect instant, permanent bliss will be
> disappointed. "We have a society that tells us that things need to be perfect
> in order to be acceptable," says Stephen Howard. A divorce attorney at K&L
> Gates in Boston, he estimates that about a third of his clients are childless
> couples in their 20s and 30s. "You have to have the perfect car, the perfect
> house, the perfect job, the perfect husband or wife," Howard says. "If people
> perceive that some aspect of their life is not perfect, they get into
> self-doubt." The doubting person's marriage, he explains, "unwinds from
> there."
> 
> The second hazard is missing the difference between having a happy marriage
> and looking to that marriage as the primary source of one's happiness. Jeffrey
> McIntyre, a couples therapist in Cambridge, believes that young couples often
> run into difficulty because they don't cultivate enough community involvement
> or friendships outside their marriages. "As our culture has become more
> fragmented and isolated in the last 20 years," McIntyre says, "we've loaded up
> all of our intimate relationships and partnerships with huge expectations that
> this person is going to take care of everything." . . .

> . . . "When everyone had to marry, it wasn't special," says Cherlin, the Johns
> Hopkins sociologist. "Today, it distinguishes you more. It sets you apart more
> from everybody else." Marriage, in other words, has become a luxury rather
> than a necessity - the lifestyle equivalent of a Jaguar convertible - and the
> desire to marry is closely linked to the desire for achievement. "Marriage,"
> says Cherlin, "is a symbol of the good life." Former Massachusetts governor
> Mitt Romney is highlighting his long marriage as part of his presidential
> campaign. Getting hitched gets celebrities onto the covers of magazines. . .

> . . . The idea that marriage will be transformative and a source of
> unparalleled emotional fulfillment is attractive in a Holy Grail kind of way.
> Last summer, I attended a lovely wedding in which the groom made a speech to
> the bride in front of guests. He told her he'd spent his single days trying to
> find someone perfect, only to eventually find someone "better than perfect."
> The moment spoke to something I've noticed at other friends' weddings. Instead
> of a brief exchange of vows, many couples are also delivering testimonials
> about the quality of their relationship. Wedding websites that tell the story
> of the marriage proposal, often in intimate detail, have become commonplace.
> 
> "People want to show off when they get married," says Cherlin. "They want to
> display their marriage to their friends." Increasingly, the theme of the
> display seems to be the quality of the romantic connection. . . .
> 
> It seems that as happiness has become the central goal of marriage, the taint
> surrounding divorce has waned. "If marriage is based on personal fulfillment,
> it's hard to argue that an unfulfilled person should stay married," says
> Cherlin. "There's much less reason for other people to tell you to stay
> married."
> 
> Certainly, a space alien who looked at our magazine racks might assume women
> are supposed to don bridal veils every year or two, rather than once in a
> lifetime. Reese Witherspoon splits with her husband at 30, then shows up at
> the Oscars looking better than ever. A divorced Brad Pitt is embraced not just
> by Angelina and her brood, but by the world. Perhaps more significant,
> according to a February poll by the Pew Research Center, only 9 percent of
> voters would be less likely to vote for a divorced presidential candidate,
> whereas 39 percent would be less likely to vote for a candidate who admitted
> to an extramarital affair. If our expectations for our leaders mirror our
> hopes for ourselves, we prefer the honesty of divorce to a marriage held
> together at any cost.
> 
> In some social circles, divorce may even be an asset. Friends tell me that on
> the Internet, divorced men in their 30s or 40s without children often have
> better luck than their never-married peers because they've proved that they
> aren't afraid of commitment - never mind that they've also proved that they
> aren't afraid of ending a commitment. One of my friends prefers dating
> divorced men, because, as she puts it, "they've been broken in." She imagines
> such men have learned from their mistakes and have figured out how to have
> relationships.
> 
> There are no data to indicate whether an early divorce has any effect on
> either happiness or longevity in later marriages, but some of those who
> divorce young do feel an added pressure to get it right the second time
> around. I spent several years dating a man who had been married and divorced
> by his mid-20s. He used to joke that if you get divorced once, everybody will
> sympathize, but if you get divorced twice, the only person who will talk to
> you is Jerry Springer.
> 
> It is, perhaps, a peculiar distinction: If there's no stigma surrounding a
> first divorce, why should there be a stigma surrounding a second? Perhaps it's
> related to the desire for marriage to produce fulfillment: We can accept that
> people misjudge their own happiness once, but misjudging twice calls into
> question the efficacy of the new definition itself. And a generation that
> continues to strive toward marriage, and that knows it can have all the old
> trappings without that piece of paper, wants very much to believe in the happy
> ending.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/07/15/meet_marry_mov
e_on?mode=PF

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- PARENTAL DIVORCE EXPLAINS 66% OF INCREASED RISK OF DIVORCE IN THEIR KIDS

Divorce, not genetics is reason behind break-ups
July 11, 2007 

Newswise ‹ The first study to examine genetics as a culprit in the
higher-than-usual divorce rate among children of divorced parents found that
the parents' divorce itself, not genes or even problems such as parental
substance abuse or delinquency, played a key role in the failed unions.

Children of divorced parents are roughly twice as likely to see their
relationships end in divorce compared to their peers from intact families.

Brian D'Onofrio, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and
Brain Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, said that when a host of
variables are taken into consideration, such as genetic risks and
socioeconomic factors, the actual divorce still accounts for around 66
percent of the increased risk of divorce faced by children of divorced
parents.

"This means the transmission is not due to psychological or substance abuse
problems that are passed from parents to the offspring," he said. "It's
something very unique about the separation of one's parents. The societal
implications are very important because divorce is such a painful experience
for both adults and children. This further suggests that interventions
specifically targeted at the consequences of divorce are important for our
society."

Many communities across the United States have formal and informal programs
geared toward helping families cope with divorce. Some courts, for example,
require parents to take classes that discuss the impact of divorce on
children, D'Onofrio said.

D'Onofrio's findings appear in the August issue of Journal of Marriage and
Family. . . . . . 

For a copy of the study, "A genetically informed study of the
intergenerational transmission of marital instability," contact Sean Wagner
at swagner at bos.blackwellpublishing.com.

The researchers used a novel research design--the study of the children of
twins--to test assumptions in traditional family studies. The design helps
investigate the role that genetic and environmental factors play when
studying how parents influence their offspring. Scientists are able to take
into consideration a host of genetic and environmental variables, both those
already measured by other researchers and those yet unmeasured, because the
offspring of twins have more genetic risk and environmental factors in
common than unrelated people.

D'Onofrio said the findings are important in light of the national debate
about the meaning of marriage.

"This study, because it tested a lot of the assumptions of previous
research, further supports the conclusion that if we reduce parental divorce
or its impact on children, that we can reduce the number of divorces in our
society in future generations."

D'Onofrio's study tests assumptions and rules out potential causes, but it
does not identify why children of divorced parents experience the increased
risk. Previous studies, he said, point to a lack of commitment among these
offspring. But he cautioned that not all children of divorced parents should
be painted with the same brush.

The research is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the W.
T. Grant Foundation, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism,
and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.

D'Onofrio is the co-author of a study appearing in the July issue of the
Archives of General Psychiatry. The article, "Intergenerational transmission
of childhood conduct problems," explores why parents with a history of
conduct problems are more likely to have children with more conduct
problems. The study can be found at http://pubs.ama-assn.org/media/ or by
contacting 312-464-JAMA or mediarelations at jama-archives.org.

D'Onofrio also is co-author of "A children of twins study of parental
divorce and offspring psychopathology," appearing in the Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry this month. For a copy of this article, contact
Wagner at swagner at bos.blackwellpublishing.com. Both articles study the
children of twins.*

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