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Actually…

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…if it’s ice cream versus Sonia Sotomayor for pressing summertime concerns, I’m more worried about the latter.

The U. S. Senate confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s first nominee to the U. S. Supreme Court, are a million miles away. You’re more worried — and rightly so — about whether to have a caramel fudge ripple cone this evening on your walk beside the lake or a fudge brownie chunk one. (Get a double scoop — one of each –it’s vacation after all.)

I read about Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. I expect the same exacting standards to be applied to Sotomayor. What are the chances?

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Brigitte applies her mighty calculating brain to the task and comes up with: Oh, about as much chance as not gaining weight from eating one scoop each of caramel fudge ripple and fudge brownie chunk.

What’s love got to do with it?

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OK, married people, go ahead and roll your eyes. An Australian study found that it takes a lot more than just love to keep a marriage together. Still, the study came up with a few interesting tidbits, such as:

Children also influence the longevity of a marriage or relationship, with one-fifth of couples who have kids before marriage — either from a previous relationship or in the same relationship — having separated compared to just nine percent of couples without children born before marriage.

That’s a big difference, and I’m tempted to go read more to see if they have a theory that explains it, even though I’m not fluent in Social Scientese (what on earth are “time-varying covariates” anyway?). Anyone wants to indulge my inner lazy person and tackle this for me?

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Andrea adds: Then there’s this, showing once again (there’s a consensus on this in the science already) that couples who live together before marriage fare worse in marriage. Thought this was interesting:

Cohabiting to test a relationship turns out to be associated with the most problems in relationships,” Rhoades says. “Perhaps if a person is feeling a need to test the relationship, he or she already knows some important information about how a relationship may go over time.”

Don’t know if that helps, Brigitte.

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Brigitte thinks: That was more or less my guess about co-habitating, but I’m still puzzled a bit about the kids part. I understand that bringing kids from a previous relationship into a new one creates its own set of challenges, but I didn’t think couples who have kids together before getting married would get similar separation rates. I rather thought having kids together was kind of a step up from “testing”, no? And it still doesn’t work? That’s one important piece of paper, marriage is…

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Tanya hates to play Devil’s advocate: however, nearly everyone I know who does not live together before marriage does so because either culturally or religiously, it’s a standard they had set for their lives.  These same cultures/religions also have in common an understanding of enduring through difficulties in marriage.  So I wouldn’t say that cohabitation is the primary earmark for a higher likelihood of  divorce.  I’d venture to suggest that most of those who live together only once married have been given lifelong examples by family/culture/religious community of how to make marriage work.  These individuals are basically far better equipped to face marriage.

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Andrea doesn’t want to nitpick: but does your point Tanya actually detract from the evidence, or merely help explain what we know to be true? Sure, cohabiting couples do so precisely because they don’t have the same cultural/religious standards as those who don’t live together before marriage. That doesn’t change the fact that in most cases, couples live together with an eye to seeing if they could get married, considering it an important step on that road. Would they do so if they knew it decreased their chances of marital success?

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Tanya responds: See, that’s the thing.  It’s not necessarily the cohabitation that decreases their chances of success in subsequent marriage.  I think the cohabitation is a symptom, not a cause, of a generation that increasingly places less value upon marital vows.

There’s this cute song by The Proclaimers that goes: “But I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more, just to be the man who walked 1,000 miles to fall down at your door.” But, really, no one ever walks a thousand miles to fall down at his lover’s door. They’re just words used to express how one feels at that moment.  And it’s how so many our day view wedding vows. “For better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…until death parts us.” Great lyrics are a dime a dozen.

Simply NOT living with someone before entering into a marriage you are otherwise as unprepared for as the next guy will ensure nothing (I dare suggest).

A get out of jail free card

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Apparently, you can say the most appalling things, so long as you are pro-choice. A few days ago, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had this to say:

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out… Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

And those ‘excuse-me-what-did-she-just-say?’ words only help underscore the recent release of the documentary film Mafaa 21.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLnNi_qb7nY]

As a sidebar, if you’re a minority woman in the US, you’re five times more likely than a white woman to terminate your pregnancy. (In Canada, we simply prefer not to keep statistics.)

An interesting international perspective

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Especially for those (hi, Vicki!) who are always so quick to complain that access to abortion is still difficult in this here country… Have a look at the Spanish debate:

MADRID – Spain’s Socialist prime minister has irked his natural enemies on the right and in the Catholic church by legalizing gay marriage and instituting fast-track divorce. Now he has hit a raw nerve even among his supporters with a proposal to let 16-year-olds get abortions without parental consent.

Left-wing peacenik European socialists are upset! There’s hope, yet.

Talk about baggage

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First comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes an array of strange divorce-related options including but not limited to living in the same house with your ex, your (former) husband and father of your children cooking with a microwave and sleeping on an air mattress in the basement.

Nothing to see here, move on. Except when it comes to potential new suitors:

Both have resumed dating and have even given each other advice on how to get back into the singles world. Ms. Brewster took the photograph of her husband that he put on match.com, the online dating Web site. On some Saturday nights, she says, they hire a baby sitter so they can both go out, and they share their plans so they won’t run into each other. Their living situation has scared away some potential suitors. “It freaks a lot of them out,” says Ms. Brewster. “I tell them upfront: Here’s my situation. Eventually I will move on, but I’m not going to do something to mess myself up financially.”

Um, ya. So your ex-wife and kids just live right upstairs? No, no, that’s great. So pleased you were able to work that out. Oh, she cooks for you from time to time too? And I could potentially have the honour of joining into this happy, modern fray?

What’s to be scared of there?

What noble sentiment is this?

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Last night I watched the Sex and the City movie with friends. I believe the whole movie, the central theme, can be summed up in this one line of dialogue: 

I still love you, but I love me more.

I love you, but I love me more. Seriously? Does anyone else ever wonder why our divorce rate isn’t higher?

Sex, marriage and Meatloaf

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At first I saw this headline (“Why do pro-life activists oppose sex education?”) and thought–here we go: Another tirade on how pro-lifers are repressed and want to repress others.

But here the author actually spoke to Jill Stanek in attempting to answer this question. (BTW, I didn’t realize pro-lifers oppose sex education. But that’s a different post.) He doesn’t agree, but he reports. Groundbreaking.

After a discussion of sex, sin and how to decrease the number of abortions, the author asks pro-lifers this:

Question for my pro-life readers. Let’s posit that that more sex education leads to more premarital sex. Let’s assume for the moment that it also led to fewer unintended pregnancies and abortions. Would you accept more premarital sex if it meant fewer abortions?

That’s one heck of a mammoth and unsubstantiated “if”–but I’ll make the leap and say this. Yes, I would accept more premarital sex if it meant fewer abortions. There is a connection between sex and pregnancy, and if you are aware of this and willing to take on the responsibilities that come with sex, then be my guest. (Er, not literal.) If this sex-pregnancy link were firmly established in our culture it would inevitably lead to a whole lot less premarital sex anyway.

Very tangentially–I am reminded of Meatloaf. Yes, Meatloaf. When I spent summers up north Paradise by the Dashboard Light was played weekly at The Friday Night Dance. Funny song. Girl makes boy promise he will love her forever, even make her his wife (“wife”–what’s that?)  before they “go all the way tonight (tonight)”. In the end he swears on his mother’s grave he’ll love her to “the end of time.” (And then starts “praying for the end of time so he can end his time with her,” but I digress.)

So I’ll end this post with another thought experiment–would we have as much casual sex if girls made guys promise they would marry them and love them til the end of time (“I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow” sings the boy in the song…) beforehand?

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ns8t9iQck]

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Brigitte adds: Strikes me as a big IF as well, but OK, let’s play along. This particular anti-abortion activist wants fewer abortions, and that’s pretty much it. I believe too much uncommitted sex is bad for young women, but otherwise I don’t really have a reason to meddle with what consenting adults do. If we could demonstrate that more premarital sex leads to fewer abortions, I’d be in favour of it. Mind you, if we could demonstrate that less sex leads to fewer abortions, I’d be in favour of that, too.

It’s called “peer orientation”, and it’s not good

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Gabor Maté, in the Ottawa Citizen, on why we shouldn’t rush into “full-day learning”:

The child’s brain is programmed by nature to attach, to connect — but it will connect to anyone, whoever is around. And who is around for our kids from an early age? Other kids. In the absence of the nurturing adult, our children connect with one another, a process psychologist Gordon Neufeld has termed “peer orientation.” The result is developmental disaster.

For the first time in history, we have the mass phenomenon of many children being more influenced by their peers than by mature, caring adults. The Ontario day care proposals, which in many cases will extend the time children are away from their primary caregivers, raise the risk of accelerating the destructive processes of peer orientation. Full day early schooling is, potentially, a recipe for peer orientation and its attendant negative consequences.

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