OMG Chronicles

Is everything as hard as we say it is?

Jun 18th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

Two amazing things happened this weekend — I took part in the Women’s PowerStrategy Conference and it was my dad’s funeral. While those two events are seemingly disparate (while I celebrated my father’s life, I am still mourning my loss), I realized that something joyous happened at both events; a recognition that the stories we tell about our lives are incredibly powerful.

I had never met Rebecca Rosenberg before, but the co-founder of Sonoma Lavender and I were plopped together at the conference to talk about how the twists and turns in our lives had gotten us to where we are — happily — now; our conversation was appropriately called “Field of Dreams.” Our backgrounds couldn’t be more different; she owned a successful ad business and when it felt soulless, bought acreage without knowing what to do with them until it became clear — plant lavender. I, on the other hand, dropped out of college after a year and a half , followed a boyfriend to Colorado, married him and did a lot of silly stuff before landing on my feet as a journalist in my mid-20s, a divorce already behind me.

We shared our stories and what we learned, and after our talk numerous women came up to us to thank us and share where they are in their journey of living their dreams. Powerful stuff.

The next day, Father’s Day and my dad’s funeral, brought more illumination. Because my father lived in Florida and didn’t visit the Bay Area often, very few of my friends who showed up at his funeral actually met him. So the majority of those who came to the graveside service to support me “knew” him for the first time through the stories my kids, a good family friend, the rabbi and I told about him. They got a sense of who he was by hearing about his wonderfully quirky personality and humor, his love of poetry, books and talk radio.

I suppose I could have talked about all my dad’s failings (yes, he had them), just as I could have couched my “youthful indiscretions” as a warning for those who deviate from what society considers the track to “success.” I’m not sure what good, if any, that would have done. Yet, we want to share our stories, our experiences.

I think most of us are well aware that being a human is, well, complicated — how do we want to gain strength and insight from those who have been through what we’re about to experience, be it our first year of college, getting married, having a baby, getting divorced? Do we want to hear the horror stories? Do we want to hear the fairy tale? Do do we want to hear about lessons learned and challenges met?

While visiting a dear friend a few months ago, she observed, Why does everyone talk about how hard marriage is? Couldn’t we reframe it?

When we constantly talk about something in the negative, does it become a self-fulfilling prophesy?

I was reminded of an insightful post I read on Offbeat Bride, “Fear mongering & you’ll seeeee.” Why, blogger Ariel wonders, do we choose to tell the scary stories:

The wedding fear mongering is just one of the stories we tell. The expectations of marriage after the wedding are often heavily weighted. “Marriage is a lot of hard work,” people confide with furrowed brows. “You’ll never have sex again,” they wink. “You’ll stop hanging out with your single friends,” they sigh. “My stupid hubs!” they laugh. “YOU know how husbands are. Stupid, stupid husbands.” They whisper about cheating and boredom and bed death. And certainly these things can happen if you fall asleep on your life and just start going through the motions. But if you pay attention and go into with a lot of intent and questioning your own assumptions about why you’re supposed to do anything … it just doesn’t have to be that way.

She’s right; it really doesn’t have to be that way (and the idea of going into a marriage with “a lot of intent and questioning your own assumptions” is exactly what Susan Pease Gadoua and I are writing about in The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Cynics, Commitaphobes and Connubial DIYers). What we choose to say about ourselves, the stories we share, are powerful; they can inspire, illuminate, inform. So why do we so often go to the dark side, the snark and the sarcasm? Why do we frame the stories we tell in language that says how hard/crappy/scary things are instead of sharing how we overcame the challenges, especially when it comes to things like marriage, parenting and divorce?

I get it on a level — fear is a great motivator. I just have to wonder if it’s the healthiest motivator. (Actually, I’m pretty sure it isn’t). So why do we keep gravitating to the negative? (I know that’s what the brain does, but still …)

Again, I like what the Offbeat Bride has to say:

Recognize the challenges and meet them front on, but with compassion and intention and minimized drama. Stop telling stories about how awful it all is — it doesn’t help anyone. Don’t white wash the challenges, but stop projecting that the challenges you experienced will going to be everyone else’s challenges.

I’m all for kicking drama and whitewashing to the sidelines. I’m also all for rejecting the belief that our troubles will be everyone else’s troubles, too (something I’ve addressed before when it comes to divorce advice and getting past being a bitter divorcee).

The Internet is especially full of advice, often with a dose of snark. And every newlywed or new parent or new divorcee is suddenly a finger-wagging “expert” offering what we “should” do because this happened to him/her, thus contributing to making us feel bad, diminished or afraid. If we allow him/her to, that is.

When it comes to advice on life’s big events, what kind of stories do you gravitate to?
Whose writings/advice have been the most helpful?

Tags: "The New I Do" book, Advice, Divorce, Expectations, Happiness, Honesty, Life, Marriage, Parents, Society

Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Marriage, Parenting, Relationships, Stereotypes | 2 Comments »

No marriage license, no respect?

Jun 10th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

A few months ago, I asked, does getting married make you an adult?

It’s a question that came up when my The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Cynics, Commitaphobes and Connubial DIYers coauthor, Susan Pease Gadoua, and I met with two soon-to-be-married couples separately as we gathered research for our book.

“Marriage is just the next thing you do,” one bride-to- be said as her fiance nodded in agreement. “You graduate, you get a job, you get married.”

“Our married friends just seem more adult,” the other bride-to-be said, despite the fact that she and her fiance had been living together for five years and are well established in their careers.

Put the two comments together and what I heard is this: getting married is an essential part of the trajectory of being an adult — even in this age, when there are so many other options available.

Now comes Kristin Koch at Your Tango insisting that you’re not an adult until you tie the knot. Although she and her boyfriend were in a committed cohabiting relationship for six years, and although she insists they “didn’t need a piece of paper to affirm” their commitment, it’s pretty obvious that she actually did need a piece of paper, or at least ring on her finger:

I was far more likable, interesting and respectable now that I was engaged. … I’ll be the first to admit, that’s what I was going for. I still didn’t care about the wedding or even the ring (though I love it). Andy and I were already committed. I just wanted the title; the status change. If a piece of paper would afford me the ability to be a real player in my career and a respected adult, I figured, why not? … Had I known how quickly a rock on my finger would have made my life easier, I might have popped the question to Andy a long time ago.

The article bothered me ever since I read it. I kept wondering, well, what about people who don’t want to marry or can’t — are singles, gays and lesbians, and choice parents not adults?

Beyond that, the bigger message Ms. Koch is saying is that even if you are in a happy, loving and committed relationship, others treat you as “less than” if you’re just living together and therefore getting married is the only way to redeem yourself. (A recent book, Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation After the Sexual Revolution by Elizabeth H. Pleck basically confirms that; Pleck describes how cohabitation in America has long been “considered poor people’s marriage” and that even today, “cohabiters form a second tier of citizens.”)

Although we marry for many reasons, marrying because you feel “pressured by girlfriends who insisted, ‘Everyone wants to get married’ and, ‘You’re just saying you don’t care because you haven’t been proposed to yet’” shouldn’t be one of them.

Everyone does not want to get married, nor is marriage right for everyone. Pleasing friends, family and coworkers, and caving into societal pressure just aren’t good reasons to tie the knot.

But for those who see marriage as a dead institution, the 30-something Ms. Koch speaks to a deeper underlying societal expectation for young adults:

I’ve come to think of getting married as more akin to college or high school graduation than a romantic gesture or the real-life fairtyale we’re led to believe it will be. It’s a rite of passage that marks a person’s transition into adulthood. And although we may leave the nest and support ourselves long before we marry these days, whether we like it or not, society still sees marriage as the ultimate maturity gauge — for better or for worse.

It’s exactly what the two engaged couple Susan and I spoke with — “You graduate, you get a job, you get married.” It’s part of life’s trajectory.

While a few of my middle-aged divorced friends are now in cohabiting relationships, I don’t know many long-term couples who never married — just three, and of them only two have raised their children without “a piece of paper” or a ring on a finger. Unlike in Europe, where marriage isn’t as essential as it seems to be here and where cohabitation is more the norm, few American couples live together for the long term; most split or marry.

Yes, you can be an adult without being married. Yes, you can live together and raise a family together without getting married. So, why do we treat people who cohabit as “less than”?

Photo © Francois du Plessis/Fotolia.com

Tags: "The New I Do" book, Cohabitation, Emerging adulthood, Expectations, Honesty, Life, Marriage, Society

Posted in Cohabitation, Expectations, Family, Marriage, Relationships, Stereotypes | 3 Comments »

Is anyone paying attention to divorced dads?

Jun 4th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

We’re coming up on Father’s Day, and even though I’m not a fan of Hallmark holidays the day will be nonetheless hard for me this year. My father passed away May 26, just a few weeks shy of his 89th birthday, so his death will be very fresh on the day to honor him.

Although he was in a nursing home some 2,500 miles away from me for the past few years (not my choice but let’s just say it was complicated), I visited him frequently and spoke to him every other day. In a strange way, I’m not so sure we would have spent so much time together had he not been confined to a wheelchair and alone (my mother passed away in 2010); I’m incredibly thankful for our time together, talking walks, going out to eat and reminiscing.

Like many men of his generation, my father wasn’t a very hands-on dad and so for many children of my generation, our fathers were somewhat of a mystery.

Even now, we don’t focus as much on dads as we do on moms.

What’s up with dads? The married ones are as stressed out by work-life issues as moms, a new Pew study says. And divorced dads? It’s hard to know, says T. Lawrence Bottom of the psychology department at DePaul University, who looked into what research has appeared in peer-reviewed publications since 1990. There are hundreds of studies and books about the impact of divorce on children, and about as many studies on the impact of divorce on mothers. What he discovered is perhaps not so surprising: there just hasn’t been much written about the well-being of divorced dads.

That’s curious, considering divorce affects men and women differently.

The studies that have been done tend to focus on what happens with dads and their relationship with their kids post-divorce, and how it the loss of contact negatively impacts the children. But there hasn’t been much research on how the dads themselves are faring. A well-referenced 2003 study noted how divorced men were at much greater risk of suicide than were divorced women or single men. Other studies indicate that divorced men drink more booze than their married counterparts and divorced women (although women in general don’t drink as much as men).

And because men don’t often have the social networks women do, they are especially vulnerable post-divorce. As one therapist puts it:

Men starting over may be very frightened by the enormous responsibility of maintaining two households at a time when they’re feeling inadequate and insecure. … The newly divorced man has usually lost the structure and comfort of his home and daily routines, and may have been accustomed to his ex-wife handling responsibilities that are now on his very full plate. He may miss the special moments of spontaneously snuggling with his children or being privy to their daily confidences. The limited visits with his children may feel forced or awkward, and over time, the comfort and closeness they once felt may have become strained. Hopefully, as the children mature and gain insight, a closer bond can be re-established.

And a huge amount of men don’t see their children after divorce or see them rarely. That has lifelong impacts for the men and their kids.

In Florence Kraslow’s recent book Divorced Fathers and Their Families, she details the “long-term pain, sense of loss, and bereavement” divorced men experience and how difficult it was not to be part of their children’s daily life while growing up. And since two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women, “the sense of having been discarded, rejected, and thrown out was pervasive … and for most of the men this feeling lingered for years and is periodically re-experienced” at family or children’s celebrations.

Bottom’s analysis of the few studies from 1990 to 2011 that focused just on divorced father’s well-being indicate that divorced fathers who were more involved in their children’s lives and saw them more frequently, or who had sole custody were less depressed and had higher self esteem.

And fathers stepped up to the plate for their kids. Since many strongly believe that divorce is a negative experience for their children, they often attempt to create as stable and secure a home for their kids to overcome that. And they often rethink their priorities to try to maintain their connections to children, even if this means conflict with their former spouse.

Speaking of conflict, Bottom discovered that more men are upset by the lack of justice in “the system” than at their former wives. The upshot is that “many do not attempt to be awarded custody of their children for fear of fighting a losing battle, even when welfare professionals agree that children would be better placed in their primary care.”

The handful of studies that Bottom discovered are severely limited because they only look at white men who lacked post-secondary education and who were of low- to middle-class socioeconomic status; that excludes a lot of men. In general, the lack of studies on divorced dads worries Bottom, and rightly so:

By omitting divorced fathers from research, scholars could be neglecting important constructs for understanding family systems and how fathers might be affected by the construction of those specific systems. … This review also provided support for contentions that collaboration with (and participation of) divorced fathers in research has not yet been realized. … the results presented here nonetheless provide abundant evidence that very little research has been done specific to divorced fathers’ well-being. Additionally, published research overwhelmingly showed that divorced fathers’ well-being suffered during and after divorce, which must be addressed to help fathers parent more effectively.

It’s clear that we haven’t been focusing on fathers post-divorce. This must change if we are to help men in the future, especially ones who are willing to reverse traditional gender roles and stay home to raise the kids as more moms are becoming the breadwinners.

What do you think divorced dads need?

Want to stay married? Act like you’re divorced

May 28th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

I was at a party, the kind where bosoms, booze and mouths overflowed. There wasn’t much happening with my bosom, but my then-husband’s mouth was going for it.

“You know,” he said to my dearest friend, “I like being married but living like I’m single.”

When she shared that with me the next day we both laughed. Well, who wouldn’t want to have the best of both worlds — someone at home cooking and cleaning while you’re out having fun? It wasn’t until later, when I discovered his affair, that I realized he was living like that. Then I wasn’t so amused.

But now that I’ve been divorced a few years, I’m revisiting his comment. I think he may actually be on to something, except I’d tweak it ever so slightly. It isn’t all that great to live like you’re single when you’re hitched: single people have a lot of expectations — typically unrealistic — about marriage, and that does more damage than good. I don’t blame them, though; you can’t truly grasp what something’s like unless you experience it. That’s why married people should live like they’re divorced, with all the benefits of expectation-busting hindsight, but still be committed to each other.

It sounds weird, but here’s what it would look like:

Ask any person what’s the best part of being divorced and it pretty much boils down to this: Freedom. It’s the Lady Gaga of words for the divorced; everyone talks about it. You can eat chips and salsa for dinner, wear sweats all day, leave the cap off the toothpaste tube, have a boozy ESPN marathon with the guys and no one is going to give you crap about it. OK, you can’t quite do that in a marriage; marriage is about compromise, after all. And no one is really saying that a chips-and-salsa dinner is more important than waking up next to someone we love, someone we know has our back. It’s just that we want some wiggle room in our relationships — the coveted “space” — so we don’t feel like we’re losing too much of ourselves, which is easy to do in the day-to-day marital grind. We want to do what we want without having to be called on it all the time. Wouldn’t it be nice if loving partners encouraged and supported each other in some unapologetic “me” time?

Then there’s the odd thing that happens when a divorced person is ready to start dating again. Some Darwinian rules come into play. Gyms are joined, weight is lost, wardrobes are updated, new activities are found. We may not know how or where or even if we’ll meet someone, but we sure are glammed up just in case. Too bad we don’t do that when we’re cozy in a relationship. Many men complain about how their wives have packed on the pounds since their “I dos”; in fact, studies indicate both sexes gain weight after marriage but women tend to gain more. If we’re willing to work hard to be the best we can be to attract a new mate, why can’t we do it to keep attracting the one we have?

Sometimes that weight is a barrier to intimacy and sex, which tend to suffer anyway just by the fact that you’re living together day in and day out with few mysteries left to discover. Throw kids into the mix and sex often seems like an afterthought or even a burden. Parents are tired, resentful, disappointed and stressed out. Then there are the moms who, according to a Parenting magazine study, are plain “Mad at Dad.” Divorced people tend to think about sex; we’re either freaked out about how long it’s been since we had it or freaked out wondering if we’ll ever have it again. If you start thinking about sex as something you may never experience again, you might be more interested in slipping into something more comfortable and dimming the lights. Few things reconnect a couple better than sex and touch. From a divorced person’s viewpoint, it’s distressing to think that all that potential intimacy is being wasted on married couples who’d rather watch Conan.

Speaking of kids, divorce — if it’s done right, with mutual respect and shared custody — allows for a lot more equality in a relationship when it comes to parenting. Divorced dads often take on tasks they’ve never had to deal with before so they’re forced to become more hands-on. Some may not like it but at least they get to do things their way, which wives often don’t allow their husbands to do. Many divorcees notice how their former husbands become much better dads once they’ve split; why not help make it happen before some other woman wonders how anyone could divorce such a loving, devoted father?

Of course, a good divorce means good communication even if you’d rather have him disappear in Antarctica, never to be heard from again. When you’re divorced and have kids, you still have to talk to each other. But communication — or lack of it — is what often sends people to divorce lawyers in the first place. It’s a cliche to say, “My wife doesn’t understand me”; I cringe to think that my former husband may have used that line or something like it on his mistress. But I don’t doubt that by the time he uttered those words our conversations lacked honesty and meaning — unlike the talks we had when we were dating and newly married, when it was all about disclosure. However, if you’re going to throw out a line like that, you should probably ask yourself when was the last time you told your spouse something real and honest so that he or she could understand you.

All of which makes makes me think that we have things all wrong; we need to get divorced first and then get married — as long as we stay honest, committed and keep the mindset of a divorcee. Like anything else, there’s no guarantee that the marriage will survive but if it doesn’t, it won’t be such a shocking adjustment.

Did you learn more about yourself, love, commitment and marriage after your divorce?
Do you think living together offers the same insights?

Photo © Angelika Bentin/Fotolia.com

Tags: Children, Divorce, Freedom, Happiness, Honesty, Life, Marriage, Men, Monogamy, Parents, Weight

Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Fathers, Marriage, Men, Mothers, Parenting, Relationships, Sex, Singles | No Comments »

Why are so many people in an unhappy marriage?

May 20th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

Why are so many people unhappy in their relationship?

That’s a hard question to answer, although that doesn’t stop people from trying to figure it out.

According to Dana Adam Shapiro’s research for his book You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married), very few married people are happy — he says about 17 percent. What derails their marriage? A lack of communication, dishonesty and adultery are among the top problems, he notes.

One poll finds that about six in 10 of us are unhappily coupled, four out of 10 say they have considered leaving their partner and one in 10 don’t even trust their partner anymore.

Why?

The poll goes on to detail the most-mentioned problems, the top five being lack of spontaneity, lack of romance, terrible sex life, no time to give each other attention and lack of time to talk.

Instead of a poll, I thought I’d venture over to the Experience Project to read the real-person responses to a question — why are so many people unhappy in marriage?

Here are snippets of the 140 answers:

Finances and unmet expectations.
marriage isn’t natural. It isn’t really natural for a person to WANT to be permanently bonded to someone, with no real option of getting out (without a lot of trouble). Society and cultural norms and history have made marriage something that seems totally normal, when in reality, only certain types of people and certain types of personalities are going to be naturally able to make marriage work. Everyone else is going to have to work at it.
people getting married when they shouldn’t: too early, not compatible, etc. If you’re bored after a few years of marriage it’s definitely not gonna work. A real lifelong relationship should have many stages
I’ve been against marriage because I had the idea that my parents are suffering so much in it and I hated the idea of being so miserable. The funniest thing is that they actually get along really well, the problem was in the image movies and fairytales give about marriage — happily ever after, endless romance etc.
I suspect that a large chunk of the unhappiness can be traced back to dubious reasons for getting married in the first place. That is, the foundation of the troubled relationship is fragile and built on superficialities such as watching the same shows, loving the same favorite band, or even the theatrics of having a wedding itself.
if more marriages are failing right now, I’d say the number one cause is our lack of knowledge of how to built and maintain one — not that we aren’t suited for it.
Because people don’t want to accept that relationships are work
people just assume too much … they fill in the blanks with what they want to believe rather than having the hard conversations to find out for sure … or they don’t know themselves well enough to be able to answer truthfully if the right questions are asked
If they view a relationship as the end result goal in itself, rather than a beginning of new types of opportunity, then what?
People are unhappy in marriage because they do it for the wrong reasons. If you choose to be married, you have to maintain your own identity and be willing to communicate and make known what your needs and wants are and be willing to listen to those of your spouse. It isnt all about you, you need to compromise, but at the same time know what your boundaries are and be comfortable enough to be able to stay true to who you are while allowing someone else in. Its difficult, Its work.
not all people are cut out for marriage in the first place, even if they take the time to make things work. Some people seem to have this natural resilience, where they can remain faithful and loyal to one person without becoming extremely bored, so that their eyes aren’t wandering. Other people seem less resilient by nature and just give in to feelings of boredom and discontentment, as perhaps they need more than one person every few years. For these people, marriage just isn’t something for them. It’s a social construct which merely forces them to suppress their natural tendencies and feel socially inadequate.
It sounds cliche, but I think that if both people had great relationships with themselves before they got married, their would be a better chance the relationship would work out. If you depend on someone else to make you feel complete, when they don’t live up to your expectation, you will just end up resenting them, when really it is your own issue.
I find that communication is a huge factor in any relationship and I think the lack of communication along with finances, stress, infidelity and any sort of negativity can ruin a marriage in a heartbeat
There’s so much societal pressure to have a bf/gf as a means to validation and self-worth that it’s not hard to figure out how horrible marriages result.
A society that teaches independence instead of interdependence and also, teaches that emotional vulnerability is a weakness
if a couple told me they’re married I subconsciously question how much of the relationship was based on freewill versus societal and parental pressures/expectations
in a lot of cases, a person will try to alter their partner, who they see as kind of fitting the mold of their “ideal partner”, they just need a little bit of fixing and it will make them both happier.

You’ll find similar responses over at City-Data Forum, along with, “My spouse is more like a room-mate (friend, maybe, I’m not sure) than a lover these days. We just exist in the same house, and that’s it.

So, we have the whole shebang — unrealistic expectations, including a need for “romance,” communication issues, societal and internal pressures and the lack of knowledge of how to maintain a healthy marriage.

Which brings up the question of whether we are expecting our relationship to make us happy, or whether we are bringing our happiness into our relationship. I wish it were as simple as that, but it appears to be much more complex; even happy people with fulfilling lives can marry and find out that they made a mistake — and then feel trapped in a marriage that crushes their spirit.

What Susan Pease Gadoua and I are trying to do in our book, The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Cynics, Commitaphobes and Connubial DIYers, is get people to marry more consciously and avoid these problems, plus create marital models that set them up for success. As Shapiro says:

“I don’t think a marriage that ends in divorce is a failure. It could be good, loving, you raise kids together, and maybe 20 years down the line it’s not working, and that’s okay.”

We’re saying that, too.

Beyond that, I do think people need help understanding how to maintain a healthy relationship for the long haul. We are able to do that with friends — generally. Can we glean things from those relationships to make our romantic relationships work better? And that might be related to what someone notes above — our society encourages independence, and that creates conflict with intimacy (which Andrew Cherlin explores in his book, The Marriage-Go-Round).

Why do you think so many people are unhappily coupled?
How would you solve that dilemma, if it’s even able to be solved?

Photo © Iban Salvador/Fotolia.com

Tags: Divorce, Expectations, Freedom, Happiness, Honesty, Life, Marriage, Monogamy, Society

Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Marriage, Relationships | 2 Comments »

Should marriage be “work”?

May 13th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

Gwyneth Paltrow — the most beautiful woman in the world, according to People — confessed to what Ben Affleck admitted a few months ago — marriage is hard and it takes work.

“It’s hard being married. You go through great times, you go through terrible times. We’re the same as any couple,” Paltrow said of her nine-year marriage to Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin.

It isn’t much different from what Affleck said of wife Jennifer Garner while accepting his Oscar for Argo, “I want to thank you for working on our marriage for 10 Christmases. It’s good. It is work but the best kind of work and there’s no one I’d rather work with,” which caused a bit of a kerfuffle.

Why do so many believe marriage is “hard” and “work”? And why does the idea of marriage being “hard” or “work” cause so many to get incensed?

Marriage is only hard if it’s a bad marriage, someone Tweeted me.

Then, CafeMom Sasha Brown-Worsham wrote, no, marriage isn’t “hard” — it’s “challenging:”

Marriage is so many things at so many different times. It can be hilarious, wild, sexy, frustrating, boring, exciting, and productive and then suddenly turn on its head and be 15 other things all at once. But the one thing almost everyone tells brides-to-be and women in general is that marriage is “hard.” I am not sure I would agree, though.

I guess it really depends on your definition of “hard.” It can be challenging, but many good things are. Sometimes compromise can be a bummer and you would really rather do your own thing. Sometimes sharing the remote is depressing when you would rather watch your own show, but I would never say that marriage itself is “hard. … Saying it’s hard somehow implies that it isn’t worth it or that there are many parts of it that are bad. I disagree. Why would anyone stay in a marriage that feels like drudgery and makes you unhappy?

(If you want to know judgment, just try telling others you want to get out of a marriage because it “makes you unhappy”!)

But, really, “hard” or “challenging” — is it all about semantics?

Marriage never used to be considered work; marriage was considered a duty, which I’ve written about before. I’m not sure that’s any better, because duty implies there’s no choice and we certainly like choice in marriage nowadays. But along with the rise of marriage counseling came the idea that marriage is work — and that it’s mostly the wife’s job to do it — and the rise of “professionals” and “relationship experts” and an entire self-help industry to help us with that.

Which makes me re-examine my own two marriages — one in my early 20s that lasted under four years, and the second marriage that lasted for 14 years and that produced two wonderful boys, now young men.

I never saw either of my marriages as “work,” but I was unhappy in my short first marriage — we were wrong for each other — and while I thought I was doing all the right things in marriage No. 2, my former husband wasn’t happy for his own reasons (which included infidelity).

All of which makes me think if you’re a kind and loving person, you tend to be that way lifelong; that would seem to be helpful in a marriage. Is kindness and being loving enough to make married life somewhat easier?

If you marry with unrealistic expectations, it’s a recipe for disaster. At the same time, it just isn’t easy to live with anyone for decades on end, no matter how kind and loving you are and how much you genuinely like each other; there are going to be what Paltrow calls great times and terrible times.

A huge part of the problem is that we get habituated, according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, whose book, The Myths of Happiness, details actions and words to help keep love alive once infatuation and passion disappear (as they inevitably do). Gee, actions and words — does that sound like work to you, too? We’re being asked to do something for our marriage; does action = work?

But, you don’t have to be married to experience habituation, as Susan Saradon, who lived with partner Tim Robbins for 23 years, understands:

“The one thing that’s been really clear to me is that you have to think of your own life and your relationship and everything as a living organism. It’s constantly moving, changing, growing. I think long-term relationships need to be constantly re-evaluated and talked about.”

Do re-evaluation and conversation take work? If that’s how you chose to look at it, yes. If you see that as challenging, fine. If you accept it as part of what just is, great. It’s glass half empty, glass half full; what filter are you using?

Is marriage “work”?
Is marriage “hard”?
Would a long-term relationship outside of marriage require the same, more or less energy?

Photo © green308/ Fotolia.com

Tags: Cohabitation, Divorce, Expectations, Happiness, Honesty, Life, Marriage, Society, Women, Work

Posted in Cohabitation, Divorce, Expectations, Marriage, Stereotypes | 2 Comments »

He’s out, she’s deceived

May 6th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

Like many others, I applauded Jason Collins’ brave decision to come out as gay. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hide my true identity for 12 years, as the the NBA veteran did. As broad-minded and accepting as many of us have become, many are still not as accepting of LGBT people and so it still is a brave announcement,

Keeping his true identity secret forced Collins to be a liar — a good one at that:

“You get so used to wearing a mask. You get used to telling half-truths, telling lies, telling stories about making up fictitious girlfriends or whatever it is.”

But Collins had more than fictitious girlfriends; he had a real one, one to whom he had been engaged, as he mentioned in his Sports Illustrated article:

“I thought I had to live a certain way. I thought I needed to marry a woman and raise kids with her. I kept telling myself the sky was red, but I always knew it was blue.”

I appreciate that Collins felt conflicted; at the same time, I can’t help thinking about his former fiancee and girlfriend of seven years, former WNBA player Carolyn Moos. Moos says she had no idea he was gay and had no idea why he broke off their engagement in 2009, about a month before their planned wedding date. In fact, she only found out that he was gay just days before Collins announced it to the public.

She has handled his revelation quite gracefully. While she says she wishes him the best and seems to genuinely care for him, she’s understandably a bit shocked:

“It’s very emotional for me as a woman to have invested 8 years in my dream to have a husband, soul mate, and best friend in him. So this is all hard to understand.”

Moos is now 34, and age that can be complicated if a woman wishes to become a mother. And Moos has said she wants kids:

“I definitely want to have children and I definitely want to be married and that was the hardest part. I think as women, we do have goals and timetables, but I think when you’re writing a dream and a life-long script with somebody who you truly believed you’re going to wake up to for the rest of your life — that’s not easy to let go of. But I think with time and information, you can have a prospective on it. It’s all processing.”

She is now freezing her eggs.

Her situation reminds me of the recent HuffPost discussion with comedian and HuffPost blogger Juliet Jeske, who was unknowingly married for seven years to a gay man:

“My ex lied to me for years, and pretty much had a secret identity for years. The amount of broken trust there was, was so great that there’s no way that I could just say, ‘Oh well, we’ll have a messed-up hybrid marriage that doesn’t make sense, filled with lies, deception, broken promises.”

Like Collins, who thought he had to “live a certain way,” Jeske’s former husband married her because he wanted a traditional life. (If that alone isn’t an argument for marriage for same-sex couples, I don’t know what else is!)

There may be as many as 2 million lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who have married someone of the opposite sex; who knows how many came out before they married, like Collins and Moos.

It’s hard to not want to celebrate someone finding the strength to live an authentic life. But as Collins is being hailed by everyone from Oprah to Obama, what about Moos? She was basically blindsided by someone who lied to her (while also lying to himself and everyone else), leading the Straight Spouse Network to declare that they are proud of her. Her side of the now-celebrated coming-out story is more about dealing with deception:

“The script of the inspirational coming out story of struggle is somehow not so noble when there’s a character in that story who was deceived, and used – often for many years. We know it is complicated. We also know that our stories, our lives, make many people uncomfortable. Who cares, some say. You had to know, others say. Other reactions from friends, acquaintances, family, public might be less kind.”

How does that impact the betrayed person? Hugely, according to Kiri Blakeley, author of Can’t Think Straight: A Memoir of Mixed-Up Love who wrote about the coming out of J. Crew’s president and creative director Jenna Lyons:

“The gob-smacking emotional shock of your spouse announcing that he or she is gay (or discovering it in some way), can even result in post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety attacks, depression, sleep disorders, flashbacks, and difficulty trusting people are common symptoms of PTSD and of finding out a spouse is gay. Some straight spouses have spoken of deep changes to their personality or habits: Developing tastes for foods they never liked before or losing interest in formerly favorite activities. The brain, trying to deal with major emotional trauma, can alter its neural pathways, creating, essentially, a different person.”

Is there a lesson here? Should we be super-wary of anyone we date? Would it be true that we “had to know” if our boy/girlfriend, finance, spouses isn’t straight? Or should we come right out and ask, “Are you gay?” if we suspect someone might be gay, as I once did to a man I dated many years ago (He, of course, said no. I still don’t know but I believe I dodged a bullet)?

What has been your experience?

Photo © Keith Frith/Fotolia.com

Tags: Children, Divorce, Expectations, Freedom, Honesty, Life, Same-sex

Posted in Children, Dating, Divorce, Expectations | No Comments »

How much will you sacrifice for love?

Apr 29th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

I didn’t know much about Marco, the guy who kindly takes me to and from my mechanic and my job when my car needs servicing. I knew he is in the States legally, I knew he worked about 70 hours a week at two jobs, I knew he had a wife and a 9-year-old son in Mexico, I knew he shared an apartment and a few other men and, from our 10-minute conversations each way, I could tell he was a man with a good heart and a good moral compass.

Last week, when my car was making a funky sound and I brought it in for servicing, I wanted to know more. Without wanting to pry, I wanted to ask Marco about how he made his marriage work when he and his family were thousands of miles away from each other. The idea of living apart from a loved one isn’t foreign to me; my boyfriend and I have been doing it, happily for eight years. But we live 15 minutes apart from each other, we see each other a few nights a week. We’re very present in each other’s life.

How do you make a relationship work when you rarely see each other? How do maintain the intimacy? How do maintain the trust?

And so gently, respectfully, I asked him. He was happy to respond.

Marco and his wife have lived apart for three years. He figures they have four more years of living apart until he can save up enough money to move back to Mexico, build their dream house and live comfortably with his family. In the meantime, he sends money home to his wife (who lives with her parents), flies home two to three times a year, calls them twice and a day and, while here, stays mostly to himself. Some of the men in his situation, with families far away, like to go out drinking and catting around; he wants nothing to do with that, he says.

“What about your needs?” I asked him. “What about hers? How do you trust each other? How do you know?”

“I love this woman,” he said. “I trust her, and she trusts me.”

And that was that.

Marco’s story isn’t unique; there are many men and women who come to America, legally and illegally, leaving their spouses and children behind to create a better life for their family. Some are women who work as nannies, caring for other people’s kids while leaving their own in the care of relatives, and others are men like Marco, working two jobs to send money home (he also sent money to his mother until she passed away).

And that is how it has been for immigrants throughout the ages. But, this isn’t about the immigrant experience; it is about the incredible sacrifices some people seem to be able to make for their loved ones. Why are some people able to sacrifice better than others? And why do some couples who “have it all” — the house, the money, the spouse, the kids — not appreciate and treasure what they have?

Is it because living with someone for a long time is hard? That doesn’t seem harder than the sacrifices Marco and thousands of other people make every day.

I don’t have answers, just questions.

How much of a sacrifice are you willing to make for love?

Tags: Expectations, Freedom, Happiness, Life, Society, Work

Posted in Expectations, Family, Marriage, Stereotypes, Work | 1 Comment »

Is your marriage a ‘his’ and a ‘hers’ marriage?

Apr 15th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

There’s an image we have about marriage, about “two becoming one.”

Anyone who’s been married for length of time realizes that’s a bit of a lie. We’re still people with our own needs. In fact, many believe what we experience is a “his” and a “her” marriage.

Some 50 years ago, sociologist Jessie Bernard noted that marriage is not a single entity; how marriage was experienced depended a lot on whether you’re the wife or the husband. In general, she noted, marriage generally benefits the guys more than the gals.

True, marriage was a lot different in the early 1970s, when women had fewer options (although Bernard herself bucked a lot of trends back then). It’s now 2013, the age of stay-at-home dads and bread-winning moms, the age of equal partnerships.

Well, not quite.

Heterosexual marriage, especially among white, educated and well-off couples, is still a gendered social reality and a gendered institution, or so argue sociologists Karyn Loscocco and Susan Walzer in Gender and the Culture of Heterosexual Marriage in the United States. The two explore the work of Andrew Cherlin in his book The Marriage-Go-Round, which attempts to explain the high rate of divorce in the U.S. While he does not take gender into account, Loscocco and Walzer argue we must:

“The role expectations associated with being a husband or wife intersect with those to which men and women may more generally be accountable. … people tend to be accountable to dominant gender beliefs whether or not they act on them and to treat them as shared cultural knowledge whether or not they endorse them.”

Which means even in the most equal of marriages, there’s an incredible awareness of gender and how a wife and a husband “should” act. And that continues to drive “contemporary heterosexual marriage and its discontents.”

And boy, are we discontented.

What does that look like? They cite studies pointing out that:

Women are less happy in their marriages than men
Women are more likely than men to see problems in their marriages
Women are more likely to initiate divorce (women ask for divorce two-thirds of the time), and are more than three times as likely as their former husbands to have strongly desired the divorce
Once-married men are more likely to say that they want to marry again than are once-married women (and some women are just done with men, period)

So, what’s making women so miserable in their marriages? For one, women are still in charge of the emotional caretaking:

“Typical studies of the household division of labor do not begin to capture all the unpaid caring work — for friends, extended family, schools, and religious and other community organizations — that women disproportionately do. Nor do they capture wives’ planning, organizing, and structuring of family life”

It’s exhausting being the one who always has to be on top of the emotional temperature of a relationship, and keep the ties to family and community going. Plus, that kind of work often goes unnoticed or undervalued — and sometimes even resented — which, they note, “can lead to marital tension.”

What about in so-called equal marriages? Nope; the wives still “tended to be the ones who monitored their own and their partners’ contributions to their relationships.” Even when the imbalance was duly acknowledged, nothing changed, “leading to feelings of resentment and frustration.”

Of course, self-help books and relationship “experts” — from Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man) to John Gray (Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus) and others — tend to encourage women to “accept imbalances in their relationships with men to attract and keep them.”

The message is always the same; if a wife just worked hard enough she could save her marriage, if not from unhappiness than at least from divorce.

Yet studies show that when husbands take greater ownership of the emotional work — beyond just household chores and child care — wives are happier and healthier.

So by continuing to advise women to “act like ladies or girls and to accept their ‘cavemen’” sets couples up for “reproducing the very patterns that are implicated in marital stress.” There’s a bit of craziness to that!

Why can’t men and women have an “our marriage”? Clearly, there’s some huge disconnect in what a husband and wife know how each is experiencing the marriage. Can that change? Maybe; their paper cites studies that indicate ‘‘unrealistic expectations’’ and ‘‘inadequate preparation’’ for marriage are keeping many couples from having an “our” marriage (and these are just the sorts of things Susan Pease Gadoua and I are discussing in The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Cynics, Commitaphobes and Connubial DIYers.

Poet Jill Bialosky once wrote, ‘‘I had wanted to get married, but I realized now that I had never wanted to be ‘a wife.’’’ Do you feel that way, too?

Do you have a “his” and “her” marriage?
Who’s the main caregiver in your home?
Would your marriage be happier if your spouse took on more of the caregiving?

Tags: "The New I Do" book, Advice, Divorce, Expectations, Freedom, Happiness, Honesty, Life, Marriage, Men, Society, Women

Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Family, Marriage, Men, Women | 1 Comment »

What’s so bad about an open marriage?

Apr 8th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have been in the headlines a lot in recent years, and not because of their movies. They’re either on the verge of divorce or they have an open marriage; I’m not sure which horrifies people more.

I can understand why people might be concerned about them divorcing; they have two kids, Jaden, 14, and Willow, 12, and everyone worries about parents facing divorce (unlike childfree couples, for some reason). But I can’t understand the big deal being made about their alleged open marriage, which everyone is assuming is true because of what Jada told HuffPost Live:

“I’ve always told Will, ‘You can do whatever you want as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror and be OK.’ Because at the end of the day, Will is his own man. I’m here as his partner, but he is his own man. He has to decide who he wants to be and that’s not for me to do for him. Or vice versa.”

Are people upset, thinking perhaps that it’s morally wrong? Are they jealous? Are they curious in a “I’ve always wanted to do that but don’t know how to bring that up with my partner” kind of way? Are those who are in an open marriage pleased that there are more of their kind? Are there former pro-open marriage types who’ve been burned by it now shaking their heads while saying, “It will end soon, and ugly”?

I don’t know, but I have to imagine this — whether they work forever or not, open marriages are a lot more honest than many marriages in which one or both of the spouses are cheating.

So how many people are cheating? It’s really hard to know because it’s self-reported, so who really knows how many are being honest and how they’re defining cheating. If we’re to believe recent research, 33 percent of men and 19 percent of women admit to getting some on the side.

Many more might cheat if they knew they wouldn’t get busted; fewer than 2 percent of women said they’d be”very likely” to cheat on their partner (and in this survey, just 5 percent of women admitted to having cheated) while more than 5 percent of men would be “very likely” (and in this survey, fewer than 3 percent of men admitted to straying).

Why is the idea of an open marriage so threatening?

I’m guessing it’s not the kind of conversation people can easily bring up with a loved one. I don’t know how many people talk about monogamy before they get into a relationship or marriage. Being monogamous is an assumption we have once we get serious romantically; oh, we’re a couple now so we won’t sleep with anyone else.

I know I never talked about monogamy with my boyfriends or my husbands (yeah, husbands; I’ve been married twice). But since my second divorce, when I was willing to shake free of the “relationships look like this” pattern, I had an openish relationship or two. We were free to do whatever we wanted, no questions asked, as long as we were practicing safe sex.

Would I want to do that in my current relationship? Probably not.

But I wonder why more couples don’t talk openly about monogamy. Why aren’t we asking each other whether it’s been hard — or not — to be monogamous (even if he or she has never strayed) and why.

It’s a topic Susan Pease Gadoua and I bring up in The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Cynics, Commitaphobes and Connubial DIYers.

When I spoke with Eric Anderson, an American sociologist at England’s University of Winchester and author of the provocative book, The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating, he said people are afraid to be honest about things like their sexual needs and desires that monogamy doesn’t allow, and because of that they often start cheating:

monogamy is culturally compelled, so the decision has been made for us. For example, how much of a chance would a man stand to have a second date if on the first date he said that he was interested in an open relationship? But equally as important, at the point men enter into relationships they too think they want monogamy. It’s only after being in a relationship for months or years that they badly want sex with others. But by this point, they don’t want to break up with their partners because they have long standing love. Instead of chancing that love by asking for extradyadic sex, they cheat. If they don’t get caught (and most don’t) it’s a rational choice.

Since we know that’s what already is happening for many couples, is that better than what Will and Jada have, an open marriage — if they have it, that is? I don’t think so.

As Anderson says, it’s better to have “open and equitable sexual relationships. When both in the couple desire this, when both realize that extradyadic sex makes their partner happy, and they therefore want their partner to have that sex, a couple will have moved a long ways to ward facilitating emotional honesty, while simultaneously withering at jealousy scripts, which can be very damaging to a relationship.”

Jada is clear on what her marriage is based on — a deep friendship and a commitment to making it lifelong:

“I don’t think it’s easy to be married to anyone. I think that you have to go into a relationship knowing — especially when you’re dedicating yourself to someone for the rest of your life — this is a life partnership. He’s my best friend. He’s been by my side through some of the most difficult parts of my life. And so that’s something you can never take away.”

Why does being monogamous trump that?

Tags: "The New I Do" book, Divorce, Expectations, Freedom, Happiness, Honesty, Infidelity, Life, Marriage, Monogamy, Society