Signs of the times - The New Alone | Internet | Vows - 1/27/08

[Smartmarriages]

- THE NEW ALONE 
- THE INTERNET: BROKEN MARRIAGES
- A FAMILY WEDDING: ONE OF OUR OWN!

###########################
- THE NEW ALONE 

Elizabeth Marquardt who will present at the San Francisco Smart Marriages
conference made the front page of the Washington Post Outlook section with
this must read, clip and save article.  The nuance around the aspect of
losing the comfort of "shared grief" is a powerful new insight.  Many of us
are aware of the research that shows that there is a looming "crisis of
care" as parents age and estranged adult children are less likely to step up
to the plate for their own divorced parents or for stepparents, but hadn't
thought of this "grieving alone" aspect:

> When parents are married, there is the possibility of shared grief. A father
> loses a wife at the same time that a grown child loses a mother. Shared grief
> offers comfort and can draw remaining members of the family into a new kind of
> closeness. By contrast, adults from divorced families grieve the death of a
> parent alone. Even if the surviving parent is kind and loving, that grief
> cannot be shared in the way it could be if he or she had still been married to
> the deceased.

Another reason to try to prevent unnecessary divorces.

> 416 - FRIDAY, San Francisco Smart Marriages
> Between Two Worlds
> Elizabeth Marquardt, MDiv
> Even in the best divorces, kids live divided lives in which they struggle to
> understand their parents' behavior, negotiate tangled family systems, and
> develop values and beliefs.

- diane  


The New Alone
The Washington Post
By Elizabeth Marquardt
Sunday, January 27, 2008
    
Not long ago, I had dinner with a friend whose mother had recently
remarried, to a man who had never had any children. Though she was happy for
her mother, my friend also found herself bothered by a thought she couldn't
shake. If her mother were to die before the new husband, she wondered, would
she herself be expected to care for this man she barely knew?

My friend isn't alone in her uncertainty. Because of profound changes in how
Americans organize and sustain -- and often break up -- our families, our
nation will soon confront a never-before-seen shift in how we die and whom
we'll have around us when we do. And the likelihood is that on every level,
we will be dying much more alone.

Reduced birth rates, widespread divorce, single-parent childbearing,
remarriage and what we might call "re-divorce" are poised to usher in an era
of uncertain obligation and complicated grief for the many adults
confronting the aging and dying of their divorced parents, stepparents and
ex-stepparents. And compared with the generations before them, these dying
parents and parent figures will be far less likely to find comfort and help
in the nearby presence of grown daughters and sons.

"Children of Divorce Care for Parents Less" read the headline of a UPI
article last September that reported the results of a study revealing that
divorce predicts a significantly lower level of involvement among adult
children in caring for their aging parents. The study's lead author,
developmental psychologist Adam Davey of Temple University, contended that
it wasn't the divorce itself that led to this estrangement but rather "what
happens afterwards, such as geographical separation."

But in a study of grown children of divorce that I conducted with sociology
professor Norval Glenn at the University of Texas at Austin, we found that
the divorce itself has a lot to do with how parents and children get along.
The grown children of divorce in our study were far less likely to report
that they had gone to either or both parents for comfort when they were
younger. When they grew up, they were more likely to have strained
relationships with their fathers and mothers. Most of the 18- to
35-year-olds in our study still had relatively young parents, but some had
already confronted the illness and death of one or the other of their
divorced parents. They struggled especially with whether and how to care for
estranged fathers who were ill and often living alone, men who had done
little for them but who now badly needed help from, well, someone.

It's hard when a divorced parent you weren't close to dies. But it's even
harder when the sole parent you were extremely close to passes away. In the
course of the study, I met two young adults whose mothers, who had raised
them alone after divorcing, had recently died. They were consumed with anger
-- at God, at their fathers, at fate. They were full of questions: Why did
my "good parent" have to die while my "bad parent" lives on? Am I an orphan
now, even though my father is still alive?

It became clear to me that in a divorced family, the parent who has recently
died may have symbolically "died" a long time ago for the surviving parent,
while for their child, both parents have been very much alive. When parents
are married, there is the possibility of shared grief. A father loses a wife
at the same time that a grown child loses a mother. Shared grief offers
comfort and can draw remaining members of the family into a new kind of
closeness. By contrast, adults from divorced families grieve the death of a
parent alone. Even if the surviving parent is kind and loving, that grief
cannot be shared in the way it could be if he or she had still been married
to the deceased.

When a divorced parent dies while the child is young, the pain of
divorce-plus-death is compounded further. After the terrorist attacks on
Sept. 11, 2001, a significant number of children of divorced or single
parents lost the person who was essentially their only parent, while others
lost a parent they had already lost once to divorce. A New York Times
article reported the story of Hector Tirado Jr., a New York firefighter with
five children ranging in age from 6 to 11. Tirado had separated from his
wife three years earlier, so for his children, their uncle said, his death
was like "losing their father twice."

The situation with stepparents is even more complex. In his study, Temple
University's Davey found that aging stepparents were only half as likely as
biological parents to receive care from grown children. "Society does not
yet have a clear set of expectations for stepchildren's responsibility," he
observed.

You can say that again. All stepchildren and stepparents forge a
relationship in their own way. Some become deeply attached, some are
virtually strangers, many fall somewhere in between. Even when stepchildren
and stepparents are close, the deep ambiguity of the relationship can make
losing a stepparent to death or divorce a profoundly lonely experience for
the child. A friend told me about a colleague who had recently nursed her
beloved stepmother, a woman she had grown up with, during a long illness.
Even as she mourned her stepmother's death, the woman was mystified and hurt
by the lack of support she had received from many friends and co-workers,
who'd wondered why she would go out of her way to provide long-term,
hands-on care to someone who was "only" a stepmother.

Her story was all too familiar to me. When I was 13, my beloved stepfather
took his own life. He and my mother had been divorced for several years, but
from the time I was 3 years old until they separated when I was 9, he had
been my in-the-home father, a man I'd fallen in love with not long after my
mother had. His death was devastating for all of us, but my immense grief,
which stretched through my teenage years and into my 20s, was made all the
more lonely and isolating because almost no one around me -- friends,
teachers, many members of my extended family -- recognized that I'd lost
anyone of importance at all.

As the generation that ushered in widespread divorce ages, an epidemic of
such lonely grief may well sweep in behind it. Much of the expert literature
on death and dying implicitly assumes an intact family experience. It
assumes that people grow up with their mothers and fathers, who are married
to each other when one of them dies. Some scholars are beginning to
investigate aging and dying in families already visited by divorce. But most
scholars and the public still give scant attention to the loss of other
parent figures or to the deeply complicating, long-lasting effects of family
fragmentation.

Nearly 40 percent of today's adults have experienced their parents' divorce.
Increasing numbers of younger adults were born to parents who never married
each other at all. I am certain, because I'm one of those living it, that
the painful contours of the new American way of death will be discovered and
defined by my own generation for years to come.

Elizabeth Marquardt, a vice president of the Institute for American Values,
a nonprofit pro-family organization, is author of "Between Two Worlds: The
Inner Lives of Children of Divorce."

############################
- THE INTERNET: BROKEN MARRIAGES

COMPUTER: Surfing for love
Today's dating scene is undergoing a sea of change
The Richmond Times Dispatch
Jan 27, 2008 

>  there are a lot of broken lives and marriages from the Internet. ...
 
By KARIN KAPSIDELIS
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

While online matchmakers are bringing some couples together, others are
finding the Internet is letting a new sort of digital divide into their
homes.

No one's quite ready to name a computer as a corespondent in a divorce case,
but family therapists say they are seeing more cases in which online
obsessions result in alienation of affection.

It can come in the form of emotional detachment, stemming from one spouse
simply spending too much time on e-mail or eBay. Or it can be far more
destructive to a relationship: Internet infidelity, addiction to sexually
explicit sites or even an adulterous avatar.

"What's insidious about the Internet is that it's less visible," said Dr.
Joan Winter, director of the Family Institute of Virginia. "People have this
illusion that it's private, but it's not."

The Internet "allows them to act out fantasies that they would not do in
person," she said. But while they think they're acting anonymously, a
suspicious spouse is often shadowing them online.

Sometimes it starts as lonely hearts correspondence in a chat room that
escalates into "an Internet affair. It may not be physical, but it's
emotional," Winter said.

"They think they aren't violating their marriage vows, but it can be even
more potentially damaging than a real affair, and harder to stop."

Keeping the family computer in a well-traveled place in the home -- a common
recommendation to protect children from cyber predators -- might also help
deter a straying spouse.

But not always. The Rev. Joe Ellison Jr., executive director of Pastors for
Family Values, said he recently counseled a woman who found her husband was
getting up in the middle of the night to visit porn sites.

"She thought her husband was working online," he said, until the bills from
these sites proved otherwise.

Ellison said pop-up ads make sexually explicit sites too accessible to
vulnerable men. Where at one time these men might have had to go out in
public to stop by a strip club or buy pornographic material, "the Internet
has brought it to the 21st century" and into their homes.

"It opens the door for mistrust to come in," he said. "It damages the family
unit."

And it's not just guys who are straying on the Internet, says the Rev.
Travis Collins, senior pastor for Bon Air Baptist Church. While he finds men
are "more likely to look, the ladies are more likely to interact" with men
they meet in chat rooms.

"It begins so innocently," he said.

He sees such online activities as exacerbating weaknesses that already exist
in families and in character.

Despite the problems it presents, Collins says he wouldn't want to do
without the Internet any more than he'd like to go back to pre-automobile
days.

"But there are a lot of broken lives and bodies from the automobile, and
there are a lot of broken lives and marriages from the Internet."

Three-dimensional gaming worlds such as Second Life -- where people can
assume a fantasy identity called an avatar -- also can present problems in
marriages. Digital relations between the animated avatars are not uncommon,
leaving the real spouse to wonder whether cartoon sex counts.

But Gail Miller, an attorney specializing in family issues, points out that
marriages break up for many reasons.

"I definitely have that issue come up," she said of the Internet. "There's
no doubt about that."

She thinks it might be harder to make a relationship work now because
expectations are higher than they were in years past. People have
"expectations of being happy all the time."

"Relationships are tough. Marriages are tough to make succeed," she said.
And the Internet is just one factor in troubles that may develop when one
spouse starts looking for a diversion.

"People spend time on the Internet," she said. "People spend time on the
golf course."

##########################
- A FAMILY WEDDING

One of our own. And it shows! Susan and Jim Vogt made it into today's Sunday
New York Times Vows section.  I recognized Susan's photo in the wedding
photo and, sure enough, it's her!  This VOWS feature is refreshingly,
encouragingly different than their - dare we hope, a sign of the times....
As it says in the piece, the groom, Brian Vogt was raised in Kentucky where
his parents ran the premarital counseling program at their Diocese.  Brian
explains that "He needed to find a partner who would be certain to share his
values" and that "It's [marriage] really the most important decision of your
life, this is much more permanent than any other decision."  But it was the
bride who came up with a "handwritten list of topics she had developed.  It
consisted of eight discussion points, including family, spirituality  and
sexuality" that she hoped might eliminate some of his uncertainty.  For the
full article and photos:
http://tinyurl.com/32bcad


Send submissions and comments for the listserv to: diane at smartmarriages.com
Do NOT hit "reply". If you hit reply your email will go into cyberspace and
NO ONE will see your email.

This is a moderated list. Submissions and comments are read by Diane Sollee,
editor. Please indicate if your comment is NOT to be shared with the list.
PLEASE include your email address and/or url as part of your signature.

Please also understand that with thousands of subscribers, not all comments
can be shared. Also realize that opinions expressed are not necessarily
shared by members of the Coalition.

To SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE, or Change your subscription address,
use the form at: http://www.smartmarriages.com. Click Newsletter/Listserv -
in the left column under the puzzle piece.

To read past posts to the listserv, visit the Archive at:
http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/smartmarriages/

12th Annual Smart Marriages® Conference, Hilton San Francisco Hotel,
July 2 - 5, 2008  
Pre-Conference Training Institutes June 30-July 2
Post-Conference Training Institutes July 6

List your program and resources on the Directory of Classes at
http://www.smartmarriages.com/directory_browse.html

Order conference audio & video CD/DVD/MP3s: 800-241-7785 or
http://www.iPlaybackSmartMarriages.com

Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, LLC (CMFCE)
Diane Sollee, Director
5310 Belt Rd NW, Washington, DC 20015-1961
http://www.smartmarriages.com
202-362-3332

FAIR USE NOTICE: This e-newsletter/site contains copyrighted material the
use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. We make such material available in our efforts to advance
understanding of marriage, family, couples, divorce, legislation, family
breakdown, etc. We understand this constitutes a 'fair use' of such material
as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes. For more
information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you
wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own
that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner.