Black Marriage Day: Take the Challenge | Love Lessons | Love Letters | Marriage Encounter | Divorce Costs Wives - 11/16/07

[Smartmarriages]

- BLACK MARRIAGE DAY: FREE KITS TO HELP YOU JOIN THE CHALLENGE
- LOVE LESSONS 
- OPRAH, LOVE LETTERS SEGMENT
- OPRAH SALUTES WORLDWIDE MARRIAGE ENCOUNTER COUPLE
- DIVORCE MORE FINANCIALLY DAMAGING TO WIVES THAN HUSBANDS

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- BLACK MARRIAGE DAY: FREE KITS TO HELP YOU JOIN THE CHALLENGE

Join Wedded Bliss as we organize churches, community groups, families and
couples to inspire 5,000 couples across the country renew their wedding vows
on Black Marriage Day 2008, March 30, 2008!

Our theme: "Getting Married is Good; Staying Married is Better; a Healthy
Marriage is Best."  To increase couples¹ chances of staying together we are
asking organizations to offer FREE marriage education classes during March
2008 to celebrate marriage in the Black community. 

To help promote Black Marriage Day 2008, and full participation in your
program, we are offering a FREE Black Marriage Day ŒHow to Kit¹ that
includes everything needed to host a successful Black Marriage Day program
in your local community.  The kit includes templates of flyers, posters,
save the date cards, fact sheets, Public Service Announcements for TV,
radio, and  much more.  We will provide 100 free kits on a first-come,
first-serve basis.

To get involved, and to order your free kit, email your contact¹s name,
organization, phone number and shipping address to:
BMD2008 at blackmarriageday.com by December 1. 

Nisa Muhammad
http://www.blackmarriageday.com

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- LOVE LESSONS 

Wow, check out this great Marriage Education plug in Tango.  I've heard from
quite a few new folks that saw this one.  Arthur Nielsen, who is featured,
will again present the "Teaching Marriage To Undergrads" workshop in San
Francisco. - diane
  
Tango Magazine
November 2007 

You want happily ever after? Go back to school!

We take courses to learn how to drive or ski or care for a newborn. Why,
then, shouldn¹t we study up when it comes to marriage‹especially when nearly
half of all unions in the U.S.fail?

It¹s this line of thinking that motivated Chicago-based psychiatrist Arthur
Nielsen eight years ago to start an undergraduate psychology course at
Northwestern University, called ³Marriage 101.²

³In any other chancy area of life,² reasons Nielsen, ³People will have
lessons.² With marriage, often, our only guidelines for the subject are what
we learn from our parents. And as anyone whose parents are divorced or
unhappily married can tell you, that can be a spotty education at
best‹hence, Marriage 101.

The increasingly popular course is both academic and experiential. Students
learn statistics and read studies about the institution, but they are also
charged with interviewing a volunteer couple and, if possible, their own
parents. 

One goal is to put preconceived notions about marriage into perspective,
including the idea that perfect, argument-free relationships exist.

³The best prediction of whether or not a marriage will last is how conflict
is handled,² Nielsen says. Self-knowledge, he stresses, is a key component
to successfully managing a tiff.  Without it, people often blame their
spouses for their own problems. So, how can the non-campus set get some
training?  For a list of marriage classes and retreats for couples across
the country, visit www.smartmarriages.com

Added bonus of attending such classes: several states, such as Oklahoma and
Florida, provide marriage license discounts to engaged couples enrolled in
pre-nuptials courses.

If you and your significant other aren¹t able to get into a class, let us
help you out with a useful tidbit from Nielsen¹s Marriage 101 course. As one
recent student reported, ³The professors mentioned over and over that you
should never expect that you can change a personŠ That¹s not going to
happen.²  A+ advice, in our book! -- Genevieve Lill, Tango Magazine

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- OPRAH, LOVE LETTERS SEGMENT

When I sent the alert so you could catch the Love Letters segment on Oprah
yesterday, I mentioned that "our very own Helen and Joe Hesketh" had also
maintained the daily-love-letter tradition for many years.  Here's a
follow-up note from them. I love Joe's comment about the note on his pillow
- a classic.  BTW, as soon as I saw the Oprah Love Letter segment I realized
the couple had learned the tool from Marriage Encounter, which luckily did
come out before the segment ended - but just barely. Marriage Encounter is a
great program and the letters are a great idea - a kind of Marriage
Insurance to have in place for the days, as the couple described, when you
aren't even speaking to each other. All that for only 15-20 mins a day.
See the follow-up Marriage Encounter press release w/ contact info, below
and be sure there is a chapter available in your community.  - diane

-------
> Hi Diane,
>  
> Thanks for the Headline spot on your listserv.
>  
> For the record we have been married for 53+ years but our Daily Love Letter
> writing started in 1974 so we only have 33+ years of letters piled up in our
> closet. We have never weighed them but the count of combined letters now
> exceeds 24,000 and we still have every one of them including the short one Joe
> wrote on the day of his open heart surgery.
>  
> Oprah gave us a 30 second spot, which they picked up from a local Seattle TV
> station, back on Valentines Day in 1998. Maybe we should try for a rerun next
> Valentines Day when we will have 34 years of letters.
>  
> Marriage requires commitment and that means keeping in touch and working to
> become one in relationship. For us, the daily letters have helped to overcome
> many obstacles and to be more in tune and more aware of each other. Learning
> to accept each others feelings, without questioning, has been a door opener in
> many ways.
>  
> There are 24 hours in every day and it only requires twenty minutes a day for
> us to write and share what we have written and discuss our feelings. Once I
> (Joe) was challenged- "if you do not have ten minutes a day to write to Helen
> then just leave a note on her pillow stating, "Honey I did not have ten
> minutes for you today". That impacted me so much that I make the time, and so
> does she, no matter what is happening in our lives.
>  
> By no means is our marriage "problem free" but we have the means to stay in
> touch and continue working to become "one".
>  
> Thanks,
>  
> Joe & Helen
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-  OPRAH SALUTES WORLDWIDE MARRIAGE ENCOUNTER COUPLE
> Nov. 15, 2007
> 
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
> 
> Chicago, IL -  When Oprah Winfrey hosted a Worldwide Marriage Encounter couple
> on her show this week she said, ³This is something you can do!² as she let her
> audience of millions see that couples can have great marriages and can
> communicate every day in a loving way.
> 
>     Alton and Patricia Hassell from Texas were guests on Oprah¹s show, whose
> theme was, Married Couples and Love Stories.  The couple explained that they
> have been writing love letters to each other every day for over 27 years.
> ³It¹s something we will always do,² said Patricia.
>    
>     Alton explained that they found the concept for the love letters when they
> attended a Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekend.  ³At first it was hard to
> write every day, but then it became more and more natural.² Alton said.
> 
>       So natural in fact that they have over 105 pounds of notebooks,
> containing their love letters, that they collected over the years.
>      
>       The Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekends start on a Friday evening and
> end on Sunday afternoon.  There is no group sharing and no couple is ever
> asked to share during the weekend.  Weekends are held in various locations,
> including hotels and retreat centers.
>      
>       There is a cost for the weekend, but in the 40 year history of Worldwide
> Marriage Encounter, no couple has ever been turned away from attending a
> weekend because of lack of money.
>      
>       Worldwide Marriage Encounter is a non-profit organization and all
> donations from the weekend are used to continue offering additional weekends
> throughout the country and the world.
>      
>       Married couples who want to learn more about making their ³good
> marriages, better² as Alton said on the Oprah show, can find Worldwide
> Marriage Encounter weekends that are presented all over the United States.
>      
>       To learn more about the Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekends you can
> call
> 1-800-795-LOVE or go online to www.wwme.org or call the national office at
> (909) 863-9963.
> 

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- DIVORCE MORE FINANCIALLY DAMAGING TO WIVES THAN HUSBANDS

Divorce 'costs wives'
InTheNews.co.UK
Thursday, 15 Nov 2007

Divorced women end up worse-off than men

The breakdown of a marriage has a bigger negative financial impact on women
than on men, a new report has claimed.

Large financial inequalities that exist within couples grow when
relationships are dissolved, according to the Fawcett Society.

The organisation, which campaigns for equality between women and men on a
range of issues, claims men are likely to have higher savings and greater
private pension provisions than their female partners.

It says such differences are magnified when relationships end, with men
financially recovering from the impact of a failed marriage more quickly
than women.

The study published by the Fawcett Society, based in part on a fresh
analysis of the British Household Panel Survey, finds unmarried men and
women both contribute an average of £100 a month to savings.

Within married couples women also contribute an average of £100 a month to
savings, but married men save £150 for a rainy day.

Married men are also reported to hold individual savings amounting to an
average of £8,000, compared to £5,000 for married women.

Among those whose relationships have broken down, the report found that 36
per cent of married men and 34 per cent married women were saving in the
year prior to their divorce.

But a year after their divorce, just 28 per cent of women were putting away
money ­ compared to 32 per cent of men. Five years on, 42 per cent of
divorced men were saving but the report claims that it took the women
studied ten years to reach a similar position.

In addition the gender savings gap, the difference between the average
amounts saved by men and women, was also found to greater among divorcees.
Married men save around 36 per cent more than their wives, according to the
report, but men who are separated from their partners save 87 per cent more
and divorced men save 41 per cent more than women in the same position.

The study also claims married men are more likely than their wives to pay
into a company pension scheme and the birth of a first child has more of an
impact on the savings of new mothers than fathers.

Commenting on the results of the report, Fawcett Society director Dr
Katherine Rake said: "Most couples would say that they want to be equal
partners and yet we have further evidence here that where money is
concerned, there is still a big divide."


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