Ruth Institute Blog

Keep checking the podcast page for more lectures from “It Takes a Family.”  The most recent one up is Dr. Robert Gagnon’s talk, entitled “Jesus and Sex.”  He’s a professor from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and he discussed what Jesus taught about sex–including marriage, homosexuality, and divorce–and how His teachings related to the Mosaic law and the mores of the culture.

Jesus and Sex @ ITAF

It’s a great way to keep your head clear. But does anybody care, I wonder?

by Carolyn Moynihan

It is always gratifying when research coincides with common sense and everyday experience, as in the case of a new study showing that a relationship in which sexual intimacy is delayed is more likely to endure. Read more…

A reader posted my AOL New article on her facebookpage and got this response from a friend:

I see multiple problems with her argument,
1. She does not mention divorce, which has already ‘redefined marriage.’ Divorce rates in our nation have been hovering around 50% for quite some time, and divorce can be very detrimental to children involved.
2. There are some heterosexual couples who are physically unable to bear children. As far as reproduction is concerned, they are in the same category as homosexual couples. Both of theses couples can adopt children, yet no one questions the ‘parental status’ of heterosexual parents who adopt.
3. There are many married couples who choose not to have children, so saying that the ‘essential purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children’ is an exaggeration that remains unsupported by empirical evidence.
4. In some cultures and ethnic groups, marriage rates are decreasing and couples choose to cohabit instead. These groups have already ‘gotten rid of marriage’ and they are not seeing an adverse effects.
I’m more inclined to agree with the comment on the article from Ken, and I’m very glad prop 8 was overruled; however, I do appreciate this woman’s attempt to provide non-religious argument against gay marriage…

I had a limit of 650 words for that column, so obviously I cannot deal with every possible objection. So let me briefly amplify my remarks, mostly to say that I have dealt with many of these issues multiple times.
1. On divorce. I write about divorce regularly. In fact, divorce was one of the first issues that got me into the study of marriage and family. I have a couple of recent podcasts, here and here. My books, Love and Economics, and Smart Sex, both deal with the whole range of marital breakdowns, without ever once refering to same sex marriage. Read more…

I will be doing today’s broadcast on Issues Etc. on this revolting story from the NYT. It is revolting because:
1. it is about upper middle class New Yorkers, which seems to be the only kind of people that enters the collective mind of the NYT.
2. it takes divorce and separation for granted, and never asks why people end up in this place of separation and retreat from relationship.
having said that, I never really know what I’m going to say in these broadcasts until Todd Wilken starts asking me questions! Tune in!

Recently, I posted about Professor John Gottman.  He has a list of four things that predict divorce:  criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling.   He calls them the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Here’s a different sort of list.  It compiles various research studies and makes predictions about the likelihood of divorce given some more exotic variables such as occupation, the status of the children, hormonal levels and even facial expression in old photographs. Read more…

This is interesting. Yet another reason having kids is a good thing.

by Carolyn Moynihan

A study showing the contagious nature of divorce among social networks has been receiving a good bit of attention this week. Not only friends, siblings and people you work with, but also friends of friends are more likely to divorce if you do. Children can protect you from this contagion (although not, apparently, from more direct causes of divorce) — the more children the better. Read more…

Dr J’s latest podcast features her latest interview with Todd Wilken over at Issues, Etc, where they discuss cluster divorce.  The study they cite (spearheaded by Brown University’s Dr. Rose McDermott and available in entirety here) finds that when your friends divorce, you’re more likely to split from your spouse–75% more likely, to be specific (though children mitigate the effect somewhat).  Even friends of friends have an impact.  Check it out.

“Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too”

In my previous post, I discussed Fred Reed’s writings.  I quoted a heartbreaking scene which he wrote about the consequences of divorce and the pain of fathers being separated from their children.  Divorce is awful.

In the comments Wintery Knight appreciated our take on this subject.  His comments seem to show that he appreciates the dangers that our unfair divorce court system imposes upon men who want to get married. Read more…

Fred Reed writes some provocative stuff.  I often disagree with him, but he’s smart as a whip and always interesting.  In this article, he takes on hooking up.

I see where women, or college girls anyway, are honking and blowing most fierce about how they don’t like the way sex works nowadays. Yeah. It seems that the hook-up is in flower. Read more…

As part of its Newly Wed In America series, National Public Radio today aired a segment titled Kids First, Marriage Later — If Ever.

A couple of quotes:

“Many of these parents are children of divorce… Today, these parents say they’d rather raise a child alone or with multiple partners than risk putting that child through a divorce.”

“As to what kind of consequences this new concept of marriage will have for the next generation… Experts say it’s too soon to say what the effects will be. We’ll have to ask these children in 20 years.”

The newest podcast, Dr J’s interview with Sacred Heart radio, is now up here.    In it, she discusses how the quest for lifelong married love is hampered, not enabled, by the sexual revolution; there’s also a discussion of divorce’s effects on the current college-age student.

Smart Sex

Many of the discussions in the comments section of this site fall into a very familiar pattern.  Take, for instance, one issue that we here at the Ruth Institute support: lifelong marriage.  Lifelong marriage means that we are not particularly fond of divorce.  (I’m sure my opinion as a Jew differs from that of Dr. J who is Catholic, but I think we can agree that divorce is, generally speaking, a bad thing).

And these discussions are usually not very productive because they are addled with illusion.

So, we don’t like divorce.  How does this play out so predictably in the comments?  And how are the comments beset by illusion?

Read more…

by Pat Fagan of the Family Research Council

Women in always-intact marriages who worship at least weekly are more likely to have had fewer lifetime sexual partners than those in other family structures who never worship. According to the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), women in always-intact marriages who attend religious services at least weekly have had, on average, 2.42 lifetime sexual partners, followed by women in always-intact marriages who never worship (4.71), those in other family structures who worship at least weekly (5.51), and those in other family structures who never worship (9.07). Read more…

Life Coach Dr. Stuart Schneiderman offers some thoughts as to why the forty year marriage of Al and Tipper Gore might have ended.

I will speculate that the Gore marriage fell apart because Al Gore fell in love with something else. Not with another woman, not with another person, but with a cause. The Gore marriage failed because Al Gore was seduced by the cause of global warming.

Al Gore did not simply come to believe in its truth; he became its most prominent Read more…

An interesting study. More insight into factors that can break up marriages. Ruth Instute friend Brad Wilcox is quoted.

by Carolyn Moynihan

Happiness studies — you can’t get away from them, and marital happiness studies seem to be the flavour of the month. The latest shows that a certain kind of happiness gap between spouses increases the likelihood of divorce. Read more…

Our critics are fond of accusing us of wanting to “shackle” women permanently to men.  It’s funny how not one of them has said the reverse.  That we want to permanently shackle men to women.  After all, if you shackle person A to person B, then you invariably shackle person B to person A.

If we’re discussing shackles, why is the discussion so one sided?

Over at Dante Atkins’ Daily Kos post, some commenters have said that no-fault divorce is necessary; without it, women would be stuck in abusive marriages, unable to prove fault.  Everyone admits that there are some reasons why a woman (or man) might need to leave a marriage.  These include situations like:

• spousal abuse
• child abuse
• substance abuse
• addictive behaviors (addiction to gambling, pornography, spending, etc.)
• infidelity

But what I am wondering is this—how many divorces are the result of these situations?  And how many divorces are sought for much less threatening reasons?  Reasons such as these:  Read more…

I will be talking about this article this afternoon in my regular Issues Etc show. It will be running a bit earlier than usual: 1:45 Pacific Time, instead of my usual 2 PM slot.

BTW, to all my new friends in Dallas: I mentioned to some of you that Same Sex Marriage could be coming to you, even though your state banned it by a vote of 3 to 1. This particular divorce case may be the mechanism that brings it to you. Hear what a Texas judge had to say:

A judge in Austin granted the divorce, but Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is appealing the decision. He also is appealing a divorce granted to a gay couple in Dallas, saying protecting the “traditional definition of marriage” means doing the same for divorce….The Dallas men… had an amicable separation, with no disputes on separation of property and no children involved, said attorney Peter Schulte, who represents J.B. The couple, who married in 2006 in Massachusetts and separated two years later, simply want an official divorce. …Abbott disagrees with the judge in that case, who ruled in October that the same-sex marriage ban violates equal rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for the conservative Liberty Institute in Plano, called that decision “outrageous judicial activism.”

Indeed. Listen to my show this PM. If you miss the show, you can catch the podcast later this week.

Here is an article about Prof. Doug Allen’s talk at the BYU Symposium. Divorce is important to study, because no one fully anticipated how much changing divorce rules would change many other areas of society. I posted on this lecture, from the conference itself. see here.

Allen said, it’s safe to say between 10 percent and 20 percent of marriages ended as a direct result of no-fault divorce laws. Read more…

Lots of good stats in here.

by Carolyn Moynihan

When will young adults get the message that living together does not increase their chances of a lasting marriage? New analysis of US national data shows that, on average, cohabitation actually decreases by 6 percentage points the likelihood of marriage lasting 10 years or more. Read more…