Posted in Children, Divorce, Expectations, Family, Gender, LGBT, Love, Marriage, Parenting, Relationships, Stereotypes on Dec 15th, 2015
“Whatever, love is love,” actress Maria Bello’s 12-year-old son Jackson said to her when she told him that she had fallen in love with a longtime family friend — and a woman. In her Modern Love essay in 2013 and her book, Whatever … Love Is Love: Questioning The Labels We Give Ourselves, which came […]
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Does divorce really set a child’s life on the path to ruin? Is it better if parents stay “for the kids,” even if they no longer love each other? This has been much debated by academics, therapists and others. How do we know for sure how divorce impacts a child, if it even does at […]
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When I married for the first time in the ’70s, I was still young, not even 21, and admittedly clueless about what I was getting myself into. He was cute, I was cute, we loved each other, we had two dogs, a cat and a snake, and we were happy hippies living (barely, on my […]
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Nothing will make you think more about what marriage is about than a divorce. But there’s divorce and then there’s divorce. When I divorced in my 20s and we had nothing — no property, no savings, no kids — it was emotionally challenging, true, but that’s about it. If someone presented me a way to […]
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Whether or not you said “until death do us part” in your wedding vows, and an increasing number of couples don’t say it anymore, most of us believe marriage should be lifelong even if they don’t always end up that way. Of course when the words “until death” were added to the wedding vows, in […]
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Marriage is hard work but worth it. If you end up divorced, it means you didn’t try hard enough, you don’t know what commitment means and you’re putting you own happiness before your family’s — or all of the above — and that’s why you have a failed marriage. What divorced person hasn’t heard that […]
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I have been thinking about security lately, not in an Ashley Madison hack kind of way, but the way we seek security in romantic relations and what we gain — and give up — to have it. It was spurred by watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona again, the 2008 Woody Allen movie that explores the very […]
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Lena Dunham is in a bind. In March, the Girls creator boldly told Ellen DeGeneres that she and her boyfriend of three years, Jack Antonoff, would not be tying the knot until same-sex couples could, too — a noble gesture that Brad Pitt announced at one point, but then he and Angelina Jolie went ahead and […]
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A month or so ago, I offered to work with a newlywed couple to create a marital plan. I got a polite, thanks but we’re just too busy and [new husband] isn’t too interested anyway. My The New I Do co-author Susan posited a similar question her friend about to marry. “Oh, we’re good,” the […]
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I was talking to a GenX journalist friend, in the midst of a divorce, about marriage, divorce, etc., and we acknowledged that, unlike Boomers and Millennials, GenX men can be a bit confused about the massive change in gender roles and what women are looking for in a partner. As we continued our free-rambling conversation, […]
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