Here’s how we imagine it will be: We stand before our beloved the people who matter to us — parents, relatives, friends — and we vow to love, honor and cherish our beloved “until death do us part.” Except, many of us have decided to replace “until death do us part” with “for as long […]
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Posted in Children, Divorce, Marriage, Parenting on Nov 13th, 2014
Say what you will about Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s “conscious uncoupling” or Jewel and Ty Murray’s “thoughtful and tender undoing,” but if they lived in Oklahoma, they’d be forced to kowtow to legislators who think they know what’s better for couples than the couples themselves. As of Nov. 1, Oklahoma’s married couples with children […]
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Across the globe, it’s a similar story — fewer people are choosing to marry and more are divorcing. Except, maybe I shouldn’t say people. Maybe I should say women. While it’s true that more men than women aged 30 to 50 say they’re not interested in tying the knot — 27 percent versus 8 percent […]
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Despite the belief that marriage is “until death do us part,” the truth is many of us are serial marriers. How many? Well, a recent study indicates that about 30 percent of newlyweds have been married before — almost a third of those tying the knot — and it’s more than 40 percent in places […]
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People talk about good divorces and bad divorces, but what most of us consider a bad divorce typically has to do with money or nastiness and manipulations. I’ll agree that those can be pretty ugly, but there are some divorces that are beyond bad divorces, the “who would do that?” divorces, the Mother of All […]
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Posted in Children, Divorce, Expectations, Family, Infidelity, Love, Marriage, Parenting, Relationships, Sex on Oct 14th, 2014
Look at any website or magazine geared toward women and you’ll most likely see advice from “experts” — everything from “9 Ways to Save Your Marriage” to “10 Marriage Rules You Should Break” to “21 Secrets to a Happy Marriage” — to prevent a marriage from sliding into complacency and perhaps divorce. The secrets, tips, […]
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Susan Pease Gadoua and I had a fantastic book launch Oct. 5 at the wonderful Book Passage in Corte Madera for The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels, with more than 70 people in the audience, bubbly, petits fours by Dragonfly Cakes and two flower bouquets made by Bloomingayles. We were […]
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Susan Pease Gadoua’s and my book is finally out (yay!), and for those of you who are curious what we’re talking about, her’s a nifty flowchart that our publisher Seal Press put together. There are many more arrows that could connect the dots (or bubbles, as it were), such as a Parenting Marriage connecting to […]
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Posted in Children, Cohabitation, Expectations, Family, Fathers, Marriage, Mothers, Parenting, Relationships, Sex, Single parents, Women on Sep 22nd, 2014
Recently, the Brookings Institute published “The Marriage Effect: Money or Parenting?” — a report that looks into what matters more for children’s well-being — having married parents, being in a financially stable family or parents with good parenting skills. While the report acknowledges that marriage promotion efforts haven’t worked, marriage does seem to offer some […]
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I don’t know how anyone can make a love triangle feel good for everyone, but there are some love triangles that just appear downright, I dunno, weird. Take the Mark Sanford-Jenn Sanford-Maria Belen Chapur saga. The Sanfords’ bitter divorce drags on — five years after the married South Carolina Representative mysteriously disappeared only to be […]
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