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What do fathers want after divorce?

May 14th, 2012 by

I consider myself pretty lucky that when I divorced, my former spouse and I were civil enough — or maybe just to cheap! — to mediate and avoid lawyers and stay out of family court.  And, we agreed that we would coparent 50-50, one week on, one week off.

It hasn’t always been easy for any of us, but considering some of the horrible stories out there, our lives post-divorce seem like a breeze.

Except there’s one thing that I didn’t fully realize — just how entwined our lives would remain.

Most of us who are thinking about leaving our marriage imagine divorce will be like this: Freedom.

Not!

My first divorce was; I haven’t had contact with my first hubby in decades. But, we didn’t have kids and therein lies the rub — just because you’re not living together doesn’t mean that former spouses aren’t dealing with each other when they have kids. Thankfully, my kids’ dad and I are friendly — I know many divorced couples who aren’t. So, I eagerly devoured Patrick Parkinson’s book, “Family Law and the Indissolubility of Parenthood” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which came out a few months ago. 

As the University of Sydney professor of law says, “The experience of the last forty years has shown that whereas marriage may be freely dissoluble, parenthood is not.”

The family law model we’re still using dates back to the 1960s and ’70s, which assumed divorce was a clean break. He went his way, she went hers — with the kids — and all was (presumably) good.

But rarely has that been true, and family law reforms have radically changed that. Most divorcees learn relatively quickly — and perhaps shockingly — that a former spouse still has a say, and can nix our plans to move away for a new job or a new love. “The promise of personal autonomy and a new beginning that the divorce revolution offered has proven largely to be an illusion,” he writes. Divorce is no longer the end of a relationship; it’s a “restructuring of a continuing relationship.”

Which has made some of us post-divorce as miserable as we were in our marriage.

“People in unhappy marriages do not look to divorce as a way to restructure the relationship with their partners. They look to divorce to end that relationships, to set them free to start a new life, perhaps to move to a new location and to form new relationships,” he says.

There have more custody battles in recent years because — guess what? — dads, who were mostly absent in the old days, are now desiring more custody time. It’s a great thing, but, as he notes, “Because fathers demand a greater involvement in their children’s lives after separation, there has been increasing conflict both at a policy level and at the individual level of litigated cases.”

I was particularly interested in what he had to say about fathers. First, he cites a study that states, despite the rhetoric of father’s rights groups, more dads want to “assist in the parenting role after separation than take over as primary caregiver.” (That study dates back to 1993, however, and is limited to Canada; I’d love to see a more recent study).

And he notes although it has been increasing over time, many dads do “drop out” of their kids’ lives. Why? “(S)erious conflict in the relationship with the mother, leading to maternal gateclosing; repartnering and responsibilities to children in the new family; physical distance; feelings of disenfranchisement by the legal system; and limited financial resources. Most of these men would want a greater involvement in the children’s lives if their circumstances were different.”

I wish he broke that down by percentages — how many men get tired fighting a former wife’s gateclosing and give up versus, say, remarrying — but they come from several studies

Dads increasingly want more meaning and connection with their kids:

Separation motivates some fathers to rethink their priorities and to try to maintain their connections to children even if this means struggle and conflict. Because fathers demand a greater involvement in their children’s lives after separation, there has been increasing conflict both at a policy level and at the individual level of litigated cases.

The kids want it, too:

(Y)oung adults who lived in sole-custody arrangements expressed more feelings of loss and more often viewed their lives through the lens of divorce, compared to those young adults who grew up in more shared physical custody arrangements.

He then takes a look at who did the primary caregiving in the marriage, and questions if that should determine how much time the nonresident parent, typically Dad, has after divorce, so-called past-caretaking standard. There are many legal incentives and it’s just plain efficient to specialize in a marriage, and that works against dads, who are often the breadwinners and not the primary caretakers:

The argument that fathers should not have a greater role in parenting after separation than they had before separation ignores the significance of the change that separation can make to fathers’ attitudes to the parenting role.

He cites a study that found that dads often shift their priorities after divorce, such as leaving the workforce or cutting back on hours, to be with their kids more.

There is a big global push toward shared parenting, but, as he notes, that is often dangerous to children in high-conflict families. And even in no-conflict families, the kids reported it was most successful if they felt at home in both households, if there was enough flexibility to allow for changing needs and circumstances, and, most important, whether the arrangement was based on the needs and wishes of the parents or the kids. Meaning, the parents would have to act like adults and put their kids’ needs first, which many do not. And sometimes, the kids say they want that arrangement by trying to be fair to both their parents, not themselves.

In any event, he says “Coparenting after divorce, whatever form it takes, requires new patterns of parenting to be developed in the very different circumstances that exist for the enduring family.” I couldn’t agree more, and this important book, which I will refer to in future columns, is leading the way.

  • Do you have shared custody?
  • Do you see more dads wanting more time with their kids post-divorce?
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Do men prefer women who nurture?

May 7th, 2012 by

I enjoyed reading Barbara Risman’s take on the whole Mommy Wars thing, allegedly reignited by the Hilary Rosen-Ann Romney flap.

Risman, the head of the sociology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Council on Contemporary Families’ executive officer, called it a bunch of silliness, while acknowledging a truth (emphasis mine):

(T)here is a serious issue hidden in the silliness of the alleged mommy wars, and it is the contradictory, conflicting beliefs we have about the value of taking time to care for other people. Who should take care of young people and their grandparents, and how should they be rewarded? We claim to value families, but we don’t really value what it takes to care for them.

Anyone, male or female, who has stayed home to care for their kids or parents knows how true that is. 

Then she talks about gender equality and the research that led to her book, Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition:

(E)ven in the consciously feminist families I wrote about in my book, “Gender Vertigo,” men share the “work” of raising their children; I didn’t interview one man who described fatherhood as a career. And it took me a long time to find couples that really shared the work equally.

Her book came out in 1998  — have things changed? Yes and no, and I would say many women would say no, the work is not shared equally, while many men would say yes. But a big part of that, as I noted in Can same-sex couples teach heteros about equality?, is that we’re still mentally stuck in the “Mad Men” era of men as the providers and women dealing with the poopy diapers and dust bunnies — even if she’s CEO of a start-up. Marriage laws encourage specialization and even cohabiting couples gender up when it comes to chores and caretaking.

As Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law associate law professor Deborah A. Widiss says, maybe we should stop idealizing marriage as something that’s equal and realize it’s more efficient to specialize. Either that, or change our marriage laws.

Makes sense to me.

But there was something in Risman’s article that made me pause, her statement that, “All mothers work, nearly all of the time. And so do many fathers.”

So I emailed her, questioning: “All” women but only “many” fathers?  Wouldn’t a father working to support his family be working “all” of the time?

And she graciously wrote back: “Some men work all day, as do their wives, and expect to be waited on at night.“

That moved things from just Mommy Wars territory to Spousal Wars territory, which reminds me of two posts that address what I call the great gender divide: posts from Michael Noer and Elizabeth Corcoran in Forbes a few years ago, who debated the pros and cons of marrying a career woman, and from dating coach Evan Marc Katz, who addressed “What men really want from women.”

As Katz says (emphasis mine):

We are not nearly as concerned with your merits as much as how you make us FEEL. … Understand, men DO value intelligence, but they also want from their girlfriend what they CAN’T get from their business associates. Warmth, affection, nurturing, thoughtfulness. Lightness!

Did you see the “nurturing” part? OK, I will say it: From my experience with men, that fact that I have been successful in my career mattered less than the fact that I am nurturing (as well as warm, affectionate and thoughtful). Not quite a woman who “waits on” her partner, as Risman notes, and certainly not a woman who treats a guy like his mommy (men really don’t want that), but a woman doing what most women do very, very well — nurture.

We don’t seem to want to give a decent monetary value to those who nurture and caretake, but our children need someone to do that. Who will it be? But when it comes to romance, men still very much appreciate that trait in women — especially when it’s directed toward them.

According to a recent study, both men and woman say these traits are essential in a partner: Mutual attraction and love, dependable character, and emotional stability. But men added “good cook and housekeeper” as desirable. That’s part of a woman’s nurturing side (although I question that study’s total lack of a mention of sex).

Nurturing — it’s what women (well, many women) do well. It’s what Cosmo recommends (not that I’m promoting that mag as words of wisdom!), and what relationship expert Dr. Gail Saltz advises (ditto). It’s also what Risman notes above: We claim to value families, but we don’t really value what it takes to care for them.

If being nurturing toward our mate is part of caring for our family, shouldn’t we value that as well?


 

 

 

 

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Posted in Expectations, Family, Marriage, Men, Mothers, Parenting, Women | 2 Comments »

Can a childfree woman be a hero, too?

May 1st, 2012 by

Mothers are back in the news again, thanks to Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen whose comment about stay-at-home-mom of five Ann Romney, wife of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as a woman who “has actually never worked a day in her life” reignited the so-called Mommy Wars.

No one really knows what to do with the state of motherhood today, not even mothers ourselves. We are constantly hand-wringing and second-guessing ourselves even as we approach our big day — Mother’s Day. 

Still, whether we’re the “good mommy” that Ayelet Waldman wrote about in Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace — the mom who “remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children … and enjoys all their games” — or just a good-enough mommy, we all know what being a mom involves. Mothers are all about selflessness and sacrifice.

OK, fine, but does that make us heroes?

Many people think so. MSNBC TODAY Moms is soliciting essays to “celebrate mom heroes,” one of dozens of contests as we approach Mother’s Day this year offering spa treatments, getaways, jewelry and, ironically, an Xbox 360.

“Motherhood is a thing that can be terribly underappreciated,” actress Uma Thurman said a few years ago when the divorced mom of two was touting her movie “Motherhood.” “You don’t hear that much about the successes of mothers.”

That’s not to say that we moms don’t know of our own success on an individual basis; all I have to do is look at the fine young men my two sons have become to see the results (although I co-parent plus there’s that whole nature versus nurture thing). Yet, with all this hero talk, it’s hard not to want to puff up my Wonderbra-enhanced chest and declare, “Yes, damn it! I am a hero!”

Still, I’m uncomfortable calling myself a hero — I signed up for this, after all — just as I am uncomfortable in my post-divorced state being placed in the “single mother as hero” category. A few years ago, former White House and Pentagon official Douglas MacKinnon even suggested a Single Mother’s Day because “these true American heroes have nothing and will never have anything.”

That was nice of him I suppose, although anyone who has a kid or two certainly has a lot more than “nothing” and I’d hate to think I was doomed to “never have anything.” Plus, let’s not forget that a Pew survey last year indicated an overwhelming number of people still believe single motherhood is bad for society, so I’m guessing they’re not going to pinning hero badges on us any time soon.

But if mothers and singles mothers are considered to be heroes by at least some people, what are we to make of women who choose to be childfree? What do we call a woman like, say, “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert? Can a woman who doesn’t want kids be a hero?

Gilbert did not want kids, and she detailed the agonizing reality of that decision in the best-seller that catapulted her into near-goddess stature for legions of middle-aged divorcees. Gilbert described how she wept and prayed on the bathroom floor as her then-husband slept in the next room, blissfully unaware that she had no intention of ever having babies with him — or anyone else, for that matter. That’s how she ended up divorced, and we all know how people feel about divorce — it’s a “failure.” Can you be a failure and a hero?

It’s interesting that no one called her a hero for making that decision — a decision many women make and a certain percentage regret not making. Not everyone is cut out for motherhood, and that’s OK.

Nor is every man cut out for fatherhood, either. Can a man who doesn’t want kids be a hero? Yes; in fact, our idea of the classic American masculine hero is a man without any romantic or sexual notions, as Gilbert notes in The Last American Man, her brilliantly written biography of Eustace Conway, a self-styled man of destiny, a modern-day Jason of the Argonauts. The male heroes we celebrate tend to be loners although they sometimes have a sidekick — a male sidekick. Kids and wives just get in the way of men of destiny.

But mothers who choose whatever classic heroic journeys might be available to us are seen as selfish, especially if we choose ambition, career or passionate causes over our family.

By that logic, childfree women should have it easier, but they don’t — well, not unless they’re Mother Teresa. A woman who doesn’t have children is still seen as a suspect and somewhat tragic figure; something must be wrong with her if she doesn’t want kids. Women who don’t have kids are considered selfish, although how can those who choose to be mothers and those who choose to be childfree both be selfish? We really do need to make up our minds!

Being a mom (or a dad) isn’t an easy job; often it’s a thankless job. But does that make us heroes? Should there be a day set aside just for being a mother, should there be contests for being heroic — aka, just doing our job? Why should we be considered heroes when we’re just taking care of the babies we brought into the world? How do we honor those who chose not be a mother? Are they not worthy of our respect and admiration?

We all have the opportunity to become heroes, the late mythologist Joseph Campbell has said. Anyone who is willing to sacrifice, to go through life with courage and strength, anyone willing to slay personal dragons, can be a hero.

It takes a certain amount of sacrifice, courage and strength to be a mother, just as it takes a certain amount of sacrifice, courage and strength to be brave enough to admit that being a mom just isn’t your thing. But, like anything else, you have to earn the hero part.

  • Do you believe mothers are heroes?
  • Can childfree women be heroes, too?

 

A version of this column previously appeared on Mommy Tracked.

 

 

 

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Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Family, Men, Midlife, Mothers, Parenting, Stereotypes, Women | 2 Comments »

Will Alec Baldwin have a ‘real’ marriage?

Apr 24th, 2012 by

A few of us were talking about men — a favorite subject — when Alec Baldwin’s name came up. The 54-year-old “30 Rock” actor is engaged to Hilaria Thomas, who’s 28.

“It isn’t fair,” lamented one beautiful, brilliant 50-something friend who’s single and would love to find a partner.

“We all know what those marriages are about,” observed another beautiful, brilliant 50-something friend who’s also single and would love to find a partner.

It isn’t? We do?

I am always amused and surprised at how we believe it’s wrong when men chose to be with younger women, as this is something new. Some men do — so? I can certainly understand the attraction let alone the evolutionary biology, can’t you?  

As I’ve noted before, a Stanford study confirms what we already know: The older a man is when he marries after age 40, the greater the likelihood his wife will be a lot younger — whether he’s rich and educated or not. Men in their 40s tend to marry women about seven years younger, men in their 50s marry women 11 years younger, and men in their 60s marry women 13 years younger.

But what upsets my friend as well as a lot of other middle-aged women is this: If older men are only interested in dating and marrying much younger women, they are limiting the pool of available men in their own age group. I don’t think so, because if that trait — youth — is important to them, those men are no more truly available to women their own age than men who drink too much, gamble too much, smoke pot too much, are too heavy, etc., that we women are already overlooking.

We’re all free to pick and chose whatever traits we consider desirable or not, and youth and beauty are just as valid as any other trait — even though many want to call those men shallow. They’re not. That said, why would we want to be with someone for whom those are the most — or only — desirable traits? I wouldn’t; what makes a person truly attractive to me goes way beyond youth and handsomeness.

So I believe what that does is weed out people I wouldn’t be interested in anyway from the dating pool — now the men who are left are the true gems; go for it!

But it’s silly to think that May-December marriages aren’t “real” marriages. What is a “real” marriage? One between two people of the same age? Does age alone make a marriage would work, and if so, why?

The woman idolized by more middle-aged women than ever before, “Eat, Pray, Love’s” Elizabeth Gilbert, married a man 17 years older than she a few years ago, when she was 38. When I asked her recently how it’s going, she laughed (something she does often and genuinely) and said that she and her friend, author Ann Patchett, whose surgeon husband is 16 years older, always say that if they can’t make their marriages — a second for both — work with these men who so clearly adore them, then no one can make marriage work.

This, despite the fact that 60 percent of second marriage end in divorce (although I’d be curious to know what percentage of those marriages involve children).

May-December marriages can work, despite the constant stereotype that they can only be marriages between gold-seeking women and entitled wealthy men. Wrong, and that’s why Susan Pease Gadoua and I are working on a book about reshaping marriage, The New I Do (and check out our spiffy new website).

It’s time to embrace the fact that we shape the institution of marriage to fit our needs, and not the other way around. Marriage should no longer be one-size-fits-all — because it doesn’t.

  • Do men who only date younger bother you? Why?
  • Do marriages with wide age gaps bother you? Why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Does a mother’s advice ever stop?

Apr 16th, 2012 by

This Mother’s Day, I’m working with Clever Girls in support of Macy’s Heart of Haiti  to shine a light on the “trade, not aid” program, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans struggling to rebuild their lives and support their families after the 2010 earthquake.

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My mother liked to give advice. Well, it was more than that. She seemed to live to give advice. Just like she believed that there wasn’t a twist tie or plastic bag that didn’t need to be kept for some sort of an emergency, there wasn’t a topic in my life that didn’t need to be commented upon.

I loved my mother but this part of her I did not particularly love.

“Mom, if I want your advice, I’ll ask for it, OK?” 

“I’m entitled to my opinion,” she’d sniff.

“And I’m entitled to ask you to keep your opinion to yourself.”

“You’re still my child.”

“But I no longer am a child!”

“Just wait — when your kids get older you’ll do the same,” she responded somewhat smugly.

“No, I won’t because I’ll remember how it made me feel.”

“Trust me; you will.”

And so it went for years.

When I was younger, I rejected her commentary (with all the obligatory eye rolls and tongue clicks) mostly out of adolescent rebellion — “You can’t tell me what to do!” Anyway, I thought at the time, how could I take advice from a woman who set the table using paper napkins she’d split in half and then reused, thus always having a ready supply of somewhat soiled paper products? (Although, in truth, she said she was only doing her eco-part after listening to my hippie-driven teenaged “Save the Earth!” rants; was she blaming this odd behavior on me?)

When I became an adult, a wife and a mother myself, her advice seemed dated; she was from another generation, one in which women didn’t have many choices (even though my mother had a successful career and even became a marital renegade by turning her marriage into a LAT, live alone together).

Plus, every parenting book I read as my kids became adolescents themselves talked about the changing role of a parent — you become less of a manager and more of a consultant. Why didn’t she get that memo?!

When I divorced at midlife, my mother and I began to have conversations we’d never had before — not just mother to daughter, but woman to woman, wife to wife, mother to mother. We talked about her marriage, her own experience of motherhood, the dreams and hopes she gave up; we became closer than we had ever been. Her advice seemed somewhat more tolerable, perhaps because I began to feel great compassion for her. Still, I secretly hoped that she would just stop.

And then, in December 2010, she died. It was sudden — she had made it through her second heart surgery and we were preparing to bring her home to rehab and rebuild her strength. We all know our parents are going to leave us one day; we’re just never really quite prepared for it when it happens.

Years ago, I had been complaining to my dearest friend about my mother’s incessant advice. One day, after her own mother had passed away after living with dementia for many years, she looked at me and said, “I wish I still had a mother to give me advice.”

Now, I know what she means.

  • Does your mother still give you advice?
  • If so, is it wanted or not?

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Thank you to Macy’s Heart of Haiti for sponsoring my participation in this “Share Your Heart” promotion. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

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Can same-sex couples teach heteros about equality?

Apr 9th, 2012 by

It’s been a tumultuous weekend, to say the least. One of my kids is angry at me, my BF and I had a huge fight and when I went to go cry it all out at my mother’s grave, I discovered that the rocks and other things I’d left on her tombstone were gone — removed, no doubt by the sibling who’s been bullying me.

So, I had a lot more to cry about than I originally intended; good thing I brought an extra tissue.

But then I had a great two-hour rehearsal with two of my old bandmates — until my voice, which I’d lost two weeks ago thanks to a super-hot piece of vegan sausage (don’t ask!) that fried my mucous membranes, gave out on me. But I hadn’t seen then in a while and when I told them about the crappy mood I was in and why, they commiserated. They have both been in long-time relationships, and the basic agreement was this — relationships are hard.

I was somewhat surprised — both are lesbians and I was under the admittedly naive impression that same-sex couples might have a better deal of it. Women understand women and men understand men, so it would seem that that alone would lessen if not totally get rid of the whole Mars-Venus mishegas.

Well, maybe not. Because despite all the lovely intimacy that can come with it, living together for years — man and man, woman and woman or man and woman — is not easy! There, I said it. Are you arguing?  

But they do indeed have one thing on the ball that we heteros do not — equality. We different-sex types often say we want an equal partnership (which doesn’t sound all that sexy or romantic), but we don’t act that way and as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.

As my HuffPo piece today,”Why marriage isn’t an equal partnership,” illuminates, we still are stuck in the “Mad Men” era when men are the providers and women deal with the poopy diapers and dust bunnies, even if she’s CEO of a start-up. So why do gays and lesbians do it better, because “equal partnership” obviously isn’t an inherited trait. Blame marriage laws, because they encourage specialization.

Deborah A. Widiss, the associate law professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law I interviewed and whose paper is the basis of my article, says it just could be that when more same-sex couples are able to marry, they, too, might decide to specialize — and there goes our hoped-for equality model.

So, as Wildess says, maybe we should stop idealizing marriage as something that’s equal and realize it’s more efficient to specialize. Either that, or change our marriage laws.

(Speaking of marriage, Susan Pease Gadoua and I worked on The New I Do this weekend and she got quoted by Elizabeth Bernstein in the Wall Street Journal; check out her new Changing Marriage website, and the link to the not-quite-ready-for-primetime The New I Do page. It’s been beautifully redesigned by our good friend and amazing graphic artist Belinda of Studio B. All of which means, things are moving along …)

  • Is your marriage an equal partnership?
  • Do you prefer to specialize?

 

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Why do women lose themselves in love?

Apr 2nd, 2012 by

Because of the book project I’m working on The New I Do, I had heard from Melissa of The Long Haul Project, a young couple who, “on a journey to save our marriage,” have been meeting married couples around the globe and recording their secrets to marital happiness.

So I read through their blog and came upon an interesting post, in which Melissa describes a recent trip she took on her own (my emphasis):

We’ve fallen into gender stereotypes when we’re out together. He always pays at restaurants or the grocery store for some reason, even though we share a bank account and the money is coming from the same source. If anything breaks (electronic or otherwise) I don’t bother trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. I just call for Tom and he fixes it in seconds.

While it’s lovely to have such a smart, reliable husband who takes care of me, I worry that my independence has eroded. I come from a long line of not-so-independent women, and I feel like I’m fighting against a genetic “dependence default.” Traveling on my own reminds me that I’m capable and connects me to the importance of carving out time for myself.   

Yes, I know that woman all too well, the wife whose “independence has eroded.” Mine did, too, because I had given up so much of myself; I just didn’t realize it until my second marriage was in trouble. But, why? It certainly was never asked or expected of me. No one told me to stop doing many of the things I enjoyed, but I did anyway.

When it comes to losing themselves in relationships, women seem to do that best. There are literally dozens of self-help books on the topic. Psychoanalyst Beverly Engel, author of Loving Him Without Losing Yourself, calls it the Disappearing Woman — what happens when women lose track of what they believe in, what they stand for, what’s important to them and what makes them happy just because they happen to be in a relationship with someone they love. Writes Engel:

No matter how successful, assertive, or powerful some women are, the moment they become involved with a man they begin to give up part of themselves — their social life, their time alone, their spiritual practice, their beliefs and values. In time, these women find they have merged their lives with their partners’ to the point where they have no life to go back to when and if the relationship ends.

Maybe that’s why when many women divorce, it feels so freeing. Suddenly, they have time to return to the things they love or find new ones. There’s no one to tell them not to do that, even if it’s their own voice inside their head that’s been telling them. They don’t have to please anyone other than themselves. And, of course, that independence, vitality and renewed passions are exactly the things that make her attractive to someone new.

So why aren’t we doing that in the relationships we already have?

Because we think we’re being nice. Actually, we’re being anything but nice — to ourselves and to our partner.

By tossing away our own passions and interests, women lose their authenticity. “She’ll pretend to agree when she doesn’t really agree, she’ll go along with things she doesn’t really believe in, and if she does that long enough, she’ll no longer know what she feels,” Engel says.

There can be no truly happy outcome to that.

And, the more we give up of ourselves, the less we are the woman our sweetie was attracted to in the first place, says Sherry Argov in Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl — A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship. “The nice girl thinks she’s giving up something to get something better in return. She gives up control over her own life. When the time comes for her to get what she expected, she winds up disappointed. In addition to being empty-handed, she’s depleted.”

We find ourselves in this dilemma because many women have been brought up to see a romantic partnership as the main event of their life, or so argues author and critic bell hooks. How many women do you know who will break plans or give up a favorite activity for a guy? Not that it’s not OK to do that from time to time or for certain situations; it’s just that somehow in the togetherness of coupledom too many women forget to have a life of our own. Instead, we look to our partner to fulfill all our needs — and get frustrated and resentful when he doesn’t. Then we see the problem as something wrong with him, and not us.

Now, we’ve made him the heavy. “You feel unfulfilled because you’re not being yourself, and it’s a burden for a guy to feel like he’s the center of your life,” the late therapist Martha Baldwin Beveridge writes in Loving Your Partner Without Losing Your Self.

Can a divorce be far behind?

But perhaps times are changing; in a survey last year of 5,200 singles, more women than men in a committed relationship said they “need personal space” and want nights out solo.

I can only hope they actually act on it.

  • Have you lost yourself in a relationship? Why?
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Posted in Dating, Divorce, Expectations, Marriage, Men, Women | 12 Comments »

Bullying isn’t just for kids

Mar 29th, 2012 by

Bullies have been on my mind lately, and it has nothing to do with the flap over the rating of the movie “Bully,” which opens Friday.

Let me backtrack.

I lost my voice last week, right before I was to give a talk before the Women’s Power Strategy Conference in San Rafael, organized by the amazing Patricia V. Davis, and I had to cancel my talk. That was distressing to me (and probably more so to Patricia), but as so often happens there was a silver lining to my cloud. I called my friend and former co-worker Jennifer Gennari, who has a middle-school-age book coming out this spring, My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer, to fill in for me. Boy did she!

While I knew her book involved a girl who has two mothers, I didn’t know it was also about bullying and that it was based on a real-life experience Jennifer had in her own community. Needless to say, her talk was lively and timely, and I so appreciated the honesty of the teens who attended her talk when they were asked about their experiences about being bullied.

Then, I was reading the IJ and came upon a story that distressed me. A boy I had known since he and my son were in kindergarten together was arrested for robbery and drug possession. There was nothing bad about this boy, but he was big — much bigger than his classmates — throughout his life, and that made him a target of taunts and teasing.

In other words, bullying.

I can’t definitively connect the dots, but I can’t help but think that years of being ostracized and picked on led to some serious self-esteem issues he carried with him into young adulthood. How could they not? Indeed, Patricia McDougall’s article “What Happens Over Time to Those Who Bully and Those Who Are Victimized?” indicates that while many bullying victims said that their unhappiness and shame decreased over time, others who remembered bullying as intensely painful continued to show low self-esteem, depression, pathological perfection and greater neuroticism as adults — the kind of feelings that could lead one to get mixed up in a robbery and drug possession arrest.

There have been other kids my boys and I knew who were picked on for being different; two ended up killing themselves.

And I question why the parents of the bullies, why we as a school community and, most important, why I, didn’t do more to stop the bullying — just as the incident that Jennifer experienced made her wish she had done more. I am frustrated and angry at myself, but now it is too late.

That’s why I loved yesterday’s story about a teenager who wrote about being bullied on Reddit, leading to the bully’s arrest. As much as I have a love/hate with social media, in this instance it worked. Still, no one should even have to get to that point.

More needs to be done to stop bullying. As Jennifer said in her talk, it has to come from us — every one of us.

Of course, when we think about bullies we think about kids — they do most of the bullying, right? Not really. Adults bully, too. More than a third of adults have been bullied in their workplace, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute (and I never even knew that group existed).

But it happens outside the workplace, too, as I know all too well; for the past two-plus years, I have been bullied by my sibling, which I alluded to in my Mommy Tracked columns “It’s Not Fair!” and “Mom Loves You Best.” While a parent may come to the rescue of a bullied child, there is no one who can come to the rescue of a bullied adult — except the bullied adult herself. And that is what I have been trying to do.

It’s been exhausting and stressful nonetheless. There isn’t much that you can do to keep emotional bullying away except remove yourself from that person’s presence and perhaps block emails and phone calls and, if you can, get restraining orders but those are hard to get between siblings, especially for just emotional abuse. But if you have an aging parent in a nursing home — as I do — there are complications if you cut off all communication with family, too. All the nurses and doctors just want the family members to get along so you don’t complicate their lives. I get it.

But I also get how hard it is to try to get out of a bullying situation. And remain in it.

  • What’s your story about bullies?
  • What can we do better to stop bullying?

 

 

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Why do you want to get married?

Mar 26th, 2012 by

I’m back to thinking about marriage again.

I know; it’s like I have a one-track mind but in doing research for The New I Do, I pretty much have to (nice excuse, right?)

With all the negative things we hear about marriage — from sexless, loveless marriages to the high rate of infidelity to the stress of living 24/7 with the same person for decades — and with the high divorce rate, you have to ask (well, at least I do), why do you want to get married?

So why do you?

That’s when I stumbled upon a post by Psychology Today blogger (and New York City professor) Mark D. White, “The Wrong Reason to Get Married — and the Right Way to Think about It.”

He lists three ways singles think about marriage:

  • People who are happiest when single and don’t want to commit to any one person.
  • People who would like to be coupled, but who are content to stay single until The One comes along.
  • People who just want to be married — period — even if it’s not to someone who’s the best fit. They have the “urge to merge.”

He’s worried about the last group, as we all should. Hello, Kim?

As he writes, people like that (my emphasis) …

place the highest value on the end result — marriage — and as a result they wind up using the other person merely as a means to get it. It’s not about the other person and being with him or her — this other person is just a way to avoid being alone. …. I’m not saying marriages of convenience (which such nonideal couplings can be called) never work, but when they do, it’s often because the partners never imagine their relationship is anything more. But if you hope that your convenient match will turn into a loving, compassionate relationship, then your goals are inconsistent with your means of achieving them.

There’s a lot of truth in what he’s saying. Afraid of being alone is not a very good reason to marry, especially if you want to have kids.

That’s why the most important question to ask yourself is, Why do I want to get married? Not just, Who do I want to be married to?

And then, define what marriage means to you and what it looks like.

White goes on to say (again, my emphasis):

If you want to find someone, forget about what you’d want if you could design the perfect mate and think about what you need instead — chances are, the two categories will include very different things.

Ah, yes, needs. We marry because we are seeking to fulfill those needs; if we don’t identify what those needs are, we are entering into dangerous territory.

Most of us believe we marry for love, or at least we should marry for love. But as I’ve said before, love really isn’t all we marry for. We marry to fulfill certain needs, so let’s stop pretending it’s all about love.

Because most of us can’t even agree on what love is.

So, why do you (did you) want to get married?

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Posted in Expectations, Marriage, Singles | 2 Comments »

What makes people take each other for granted?

Mar 19th, 2012 by

Like many, I was surprised when Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins had split back in 2009. They seemed like a pretty solid couple, although they’re celebrities so who really knows. But I was more surprised by her recent statement that their parting made her “feel like a failure.”

We like to believe that relationships will last forever and some do, but for various reasons they often don’t; why does that mean we should feel like a failure when one ends?  

Granted, it was the second long-term relationship for the 65-year-old actress. She was married to actor Chris Sarandon, from 1968 to 1979. Of that split, she said:

“At the end of my first marriage, it was about the loss of ideal, about who you thought this person was. I thought love conquered all and I had to reevaluate everything. … Then you get another chance.”

Her second chance, which lasted 23 years and produced two children, Jack, 22, and Miles, 19, did not come in the form of marriage, however. She and Robbins cohabited and since just 10 percent of all cohabiting couples make it past five years (let alone that they’re a Hollywood couple), they were anything but a failure to me; they raised their boys to adulthood. That is something to celebrate, not find fault with.

But what really surprised me was Sarandon’s comment about her perceived difference between marriage and cohabitation: “I thought that if you didn’t get married you wouldn’t take each other for granted as easily. I don’t know if after twenty-something years that was still true.”

Which is an odd (and somewhat naive) thing to say. Marriage, the institution, doesn’t make someone do or not do anything; the people involved in the marriage do things in their marriage. Taking each other for granted is not part of a marriage vow as far as I know, thankfully. Living with someone for many years, however, whether married or not, might — might — just cause some people to take each other for granted.

As a now supposedly older and wiser Sarandon says, “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 reevaluated and talked about.”

I’m not sure if she means each person separately needs to reevaluate the relationship or whether the couple does it together. Either way, I think the bigger take-home message is to stop taking each other for granted — whether you’re married or just living together.

  • Do you think people are able to live together for decades and not take each other for granted?

 

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Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Marriage, Uncategorized | No Comments »

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