A journalist and author's musings on love, marriage, divorce and life
Posted in Children, Expectations, Sex, Stereotypes on Dec 24th, 2012
It’s Christmas and my friend’s child wants a pink bike. That’s not a problem — lots of companies make pink bikes. For girls. Her child is a boy. It’s hard being a boy who’s drawn to the color pink. Not that the kids see anything wrong with it – it’s just a color, after all. […]
Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Infidelity, Marriage, Sex on Dec 10th, 2012
It seems whenever anyone talks about divorce, the C word comes up — commitment. The problem with couples today, the typical comment goes, is that they just don’t know what commitment means. OK, so what does commitment in a marriage mean? If you think it means something like declaring, “I like this relationship and I’m […]
Posted in Cohabitation, Dating, Expectations, Marriage, Singles, Stereotypes on Nov 26th, 2012
We’re down one big family get-together with a few more to go for 2012, and I’m guessing many 20- and 30-somethings were asked something along the lines of this: “So, are you still single?” With more singles than ever, a 50 percent or so divorce rate, a tenfold increase in cohabitation and a growing number […]
Posted in Aging, Beauty, Expectations, Infidelity, Marriage, Men, Midlife, Sex, Stereotypes, Women on Nov 19th, 2012
The very married Gen. David Petraeus had an affair with a younger woman and the very married Gen. John Allen may have sent inappropriate emails to a younger woman. Whenever powerful men stray, we turn wonder, what’s going on at home? So we turn our attention to the wronged wives, and guess what — Holly […]
Posted in Cohabitation, Divorce, Expectations, Midlife, Singles on Oct 23rd, 2012
“Do you think you’d still be married if all the bad stuff hadn’t happened?” a friend asked me recently. “Uh, I don’t know,” I answered after a few minutes. It’s true, I don’t really know. I’d like to believe that in what would be 14 years into our marriage, we still would be. I certainly thought […]
Posted in Cohabitation, Divorce, Expectations, Marriage, Women, Work on Oct 15th, 2012
Reading Laura Doyle’s HuffPost post, “6 Reasons Marriage Counseling is BS,” I recalled my own experience with marriage counseling as my marriage imploded. It was or miss — three couples’ counselors (the first was clearly clueless, the second was good but he didn’t like her, the third came too late), and one solo therapist (I […]
Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Marriage on Oct 2nd, 2012
There was Big! Marriage! News! over the weekend — actress Anne Hathaway got married (and evidently “all we’ve been able to talk about today” is her look) and the New York Times took a crack at marriage contracts (which, as you may know, is among the ideas Susan Pease Gadoua and I are presenting in our […]
Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Marriage, Stereotypes on Sep 24th, 2012
I was married for 14 years. The marriage produced two amazing young men. Nine years ago, it ended in divorce, and their dad and I have co-parented well. Please don’t call my marriage a failed marriage. A friend recently called me to task on why I am so resistant to calling a marriage that ends […]
Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Family, Fathers, Infidelity, Marriage, Men, Mothers, Parenting, Stereotypes on Sep 11th, 2012
I knew it: Anytime you talk about men and infidelity, people want to remind you that men aren’t the only ones who cheat. And they’re right. So of course my HuffPo story this week, The downside of being a stay-at-home dad?, based on my article here last week, Do stay-at-home-dads cheat more than other dads?, […]
Posted in Divorce, Expectations, Family, Infidelity, Marriage, Men, Sex, Work on Sep 4th, 2012
When GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, touted mothers as the ones who “really hold the country together,” at the convention last week, she touched a nerve for a lot of us, and not in a good way. Not only did women who are choosing to be childfree wonder where they stand in mattering […]
