marriage today

It’s true, it’s true. Marco and I are getting married this summer. We’re doing a small wedding kind of thing, very DIY. And wouldn’t you know it, I just came across a site called IndieBride!

One of the site’s creators, Elise Mac Adams, published a book in February called Something New: Wedding Etiquette for Rule Breakers, Traditionalists, and Everyone in Between. I don’t think there’s a rule Marco and I aren’t in some way breaking, but hey. Of greater interest, there’s an interesting reading list posted over there. Thought I’d share highlights, with some additions of my own:

Marriage, A History by Stephanie Coontz

A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom

Wifework: What Marriage Really Means For Women by Susan Maushart

Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law by Nancy Polikoff

Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique by Jaclyn Geller

In spite of it all, I’m still game. Other titles readers would recommend? I’m taking suggestions!

So in addition to it being Jewish American Heritage Month and all, it’s also Older Americans Month. I told Marco this just now and he said, “Hey, a month for me!” (Note: he’s not really Jewish, just really likes my tribe. And he’s not truly old, just kind of.)

Anyway, here are three important facts about older Americans to start off your day, courtesy of Ashton Applewhite and CCF:

MORE MARRIAGE: Men and women over 65 are more likely to have partners than at any time in history. They are now more likely to be married (as opposed to widowed or divorced without remarriage) because both men and women are living longer and because the gap between sexes is narrowing. In addition, people are more likely to remarry at older ages, although unmarried elders are also much more likely to cohabit than in the past.

HOT SEX: There’s no association between menopause and reduced sexual desire, once we control for other factors. Nor are post-menopausal women less likely to be orgasmic, although some report their orgasms are less intense. And Americans in their sixties and beyond are certainly interested in sex: they’re fueling a booming Viagra market.

MORE POVERTY: Widowed and divorced women who took time off from work to raise children are especially vulnerable to poverty because almost all retirement income is based on work — theirs or theirs spouses’. And Social Security is the only source of income for more than 40 percent of older women living alone.

Ashton is currently working on a project about older Americans called So When Are You Going to Retire: Octogenarians in the Workforce. For much, much more on any of this, contact Ashton at applewhite@earthlink.net.

Nuf said.

My Progressive Women’s Voices colleague Sonia Osario is up to some amazing stuff as the head of NOW-NYC. Like this event, for instance:

The Girlfriend’s Guide To Marriage
April 17th, 2008, 6:30 pm

Don’t just plan your wedding, plan your marriage. Join NOW-NYC for The Girlfriend’s Guide to Marriage, and learn the top 10 things you should know before getting married. Speak with our relationship and legal experts, and tackle questions on every bride’s mind. His name or yours? Is it better to combine banking accounts or keep them separate? The first year of marriage can be the most difficult, but we can help you make a smooth transition. Featuring attorney, Sherri Donovan, matrimonial and family law expert.

Event will be held at NOW-NYC office | 150 West 28th Street (btw. 6th & 7th) | RSVP (212) 627-9895 | $7 donation for non-members.

All so very topical, of course, for this girl with a pen who is getting married this summer. And keeping her name. Or maybe hyphenating. But definitely not giving it up. My name, that is.

I find it heartening to wake up to this news bit sent to me by CCF this morning: Men have more and more stepped up to the plate in sharing housework and childcare. The longer a wife works, the more housework her husband does. Hallelujah amen.

According to a briefing paper prepared in advance of the 11th Annual Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, April 25-26, 2008 at the University of Illinois in Chicago, (“Men’s Changing Contribution to Housework and Child Care,” by researchers Oriel Sullivan and Scott Coltrane):

For thirty years, researchers studying the changes in family dynamics since the rise of the women’s movement have concluded that, despite gains in the world of education, work, and politics, women face a “stalled revolution” at home. According to many studies, men’s family work has barely budged in response to women’s increased employment. The typical punch line of many news stories has been that even though women are working longer hours on the job and cutting back their own housework, men are not picking up the slack.

But new research suggests that these studies were based on unrealistic hopes for instant transformation. Such studies, explain Sullivan and Coltrane, underestimated the amount of change going on behind the scenes and “the growing willingness of men to adapt to their wives’ new behaviors and values.”

In fact, it turns out, more couples are sharing family tasks than ever before. The movement toward sharing has been especially significant full-time dual-earner
couples.

Interestingly, whatever a man’s original resistance to sharing, men’s contributions to family work increase over time. In other words, the longer their female partners have been in paid employment, the more family work they are likely to do.

Bottom line is this: “American couples have made remarkable progress in working out mutually satisfying arrangements to share the responsibilities of breadwinning and family care. And polls continue to show increasing approval of such arrangements. So the revolution in gender aspirations and behaviors has not stalled.”

But lest we we women of the second and third shift get too excited, here’s where things are stalled: getting employers to accommodate workers’ desires. And high earners are forced to work ever longer hours. Less affluent earners face wage or benefit cuts and layoffs that often force them to work more than one job. Aside from winning paid parental leave laws in Washington and California (with similar bills being considered in Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York), families have made little headway in getting the kind of family friendly policies that are taken for granted in most other advanced industrial countries.

So even as American couples’ beliefs and desires about gender equity have grown to be among the highest in the world, America’s work policies and social support systems for working parents are among the lowest. Depressing, to say the least.

All in all, the “stalled revolution” in America is not taking place in families but in the highest circles of our economic and political elites.

For more information on this report, contact:

Scott Coltrane, Professor of Sociology, University of California
Riverside, (951) 827-2443; cell: (951) 858-1831 scott.coltrane@ucr.edu

Professor Oriel Sullivan, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ben
Gurion University sullivan@bgu.ac.il, +972 86472056

(Image cred)

GUEST BLOGGER: Elline Lipkin PhD was recently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Beatrice M. Bain Center for Research on Gender at UC Berkeley. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was published by Kore Press. She recently moved to Los Angeles and is in search of feminist community. I met Elline this summer at an NWSA conference and then again at Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, where we discovered we had a dear dear connection in common. If you are in LA and are connected to feministy activity at large, you should contact her because she is AMAZING! Here’s Elline! -GWP

Gottlieb and the Single Girl

For the past few days it’s been impossible to ignore the vitriol electrifying the e-waves over Lori Gottlieb’s article in the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Entitled “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” Gottlieb argues that a woman shouldn’t hold out for marriage based on a Big Romantic Connection, but instead should settle for Mr. Not So Bad, primarily so that she has a partner in the trenches, as she puts it, of homemaking and child-rearing. Instead of thinking of a partner as a soul mate or someone with whom to embark on a passionate adventure, she suggests, imagine him as a partner in a “small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit,” which is another way she characterizes running a household together. She gives more insight about her position in an Atlantic interview, this recent NPR piece, and on The Today Show.

Her evidence is anecdotal, her stress level as a new single mother sounds high, and her impatience with her friends’ complaints about husbands who don’t pull equal weight with parenting is worn out. There is much to take issue with in her argument, (as others who have done real research into these issues have), based as it is on her seemingly middle-class and often privileged friends. In my view, one of her serious missteps (and where she incurred the most wrath) is her first assumption that all women want to get married, as she writes, “To the outside world, of course, we call ourselves feminists and insist… that we’re independent and self-sufficient… but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.” The piece continues on in its belief that a woman is always better off with the financial and physical help of a husband (never mind walking sperm bank on tap!), no matter how bland, boring, or eventually bald she might find him. Gottlieb even says that since one of her married friends’ chief complaints is that they never see their spouses, likeability shouldn’t really even be an issue. In today’s issue of the LA Times, columnist Meghan Daum takes Gottlieb roundly to task over her assumption that all women want children.

Yet, (and this is the tricky part), I think Gottlieb has a point. What troubles me is how her poorly chosen rhetoric is allowing her argument to be twisted into anti-feminist backlash and sounds suspiciously close to a regressive longing for the all-holy strictures of the nuclear family. As a woman of the same age, I see Gottlieb’s argument borne out of a pragmatism which doesn’t disavow romance as much as it asks women to drop the Hollywood-ending scales from their eyes. As a self-proclaimed quirkyalone whose motto was always “Never settle!” as well as a recent newlywed I think the Atlantic deliberately framed her message as one that only inflames the stereotype of single-woman-as-desperate and then lights it on fire.

Retitled something far more pragmatic such as “Your Priorities Will Change as You Get Older” her article wouldn’t have incited the blogosphere, yet could have carried across what I see as her essential message. Don’t count out that shy five-foot-six guy with a heart of gold hanging out in the corner at a party when you always said you would only date men who are at least five ten seems to be one way to sum up her core advice. Think about the qualities that make for a great life partner on all fronts, including the unromantic day to day, and don’t confuse superficial romance novel notions about passion with character and qualities that will last for the long run. She references the “motherly advice” we’ve all heard and disdained now coming back to haunt her — think about “the bigger picture” a potential spouse represents rather than his short-term libidinous appeal. Gottlieb admits that it’s a fine line between “settling” and “compromising” and that every woman has to determine where this wavers, and surprisingly, at the article’s end confesses that she will probably never will settle, although she wishes she had. In all of this, I think she is absolutely right.

Last year I wrote in Salon about my own travails in the dating world, and I know how hard it is to meet someone with whom you can simply carry on a decent conversation for an hour, never mind a lifetime. I had spent far too long in a long-distance relationship that went nowhere (except gathering frequent flier miles) and I had sworn I’d never do that again. At age 38, when I first met my now-spouse, who lived a short plane ride away, I remember saying, “I’m too old and too picky to count out someone who seems this good.” If I had been ten years younger, or for that matter even five, would I have made the effort? Probably not. I see Gottlieb as coming from a place the dating-weary often reach: a far shore of loneliness when you think meeting someone of substance is just never going to happen. That her values have changed as she entered her fourth decade, altered with the birth of her son, and sobered up to the reality that the dating pool shrinks substantially the farther one goes into one’s thirties, doesn’t seem so wrong.

Yet a moment I think Gottlieb misses the mark is when she assumes men don’t suffer from the choices they’ve made, only women do. As I wrote in Salon, I was amazed at how many men regretted not marrying younger and awoke to wanting children later in life, only to realize it probably wasn’t going to happen for them. For many men it wasn’t biology that would limit them, but a ticking social clock that counted them out past a certain age as well. What seems sad is that Gottlieb can only celebrate for a scant moment the choices she had the privilege to make, namely to have a child on her own, despite its hardships. Her hindsight (and lack of sleep it sounds like) is what drives her rear view mirror exhortation to younger women to avoid her path and take on a partner, not just any old partner, but one seen through the tempered vision maturity brings.

You can contact Elline at elline.lipkin@yahoo.com

Most excellent rant this morning about unreconstructed dudes from Judith Warner, called “Like a Fish Needs a Donut.” Read it and weep. I’m just as ready as the next girl to spew donuts about it all, along with Judith. But I also wanted to share an article I wrote a few years ago for Psychology Today with lots of research-based evidence finding that highly-educated, high-achieving guys do seek high-achieving women as mates these days. The article was titled “The New Trophy Wife.” (Please note: It was not I who gave the article its title.)

Yesterday may have been Super Tuesday, but a week from tomorrow is Hallmark Thursday. And there’s some really interesting stuff out there right now on the love front.

Are you a twentysomething woman having trouble finding a twentysomething adult guy? Clearly, you’re not alone. Kay Hymowitz takes a look at “The Child-Man” in The Dallas Morning News, offering a nice roundup on how the average mid-twentysomething guy “lingers – happily – in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance,” leaving younger women who are already adults wanting.

Over at the WSJ, Sue Shellenbarger asks where’s the love and reports on college students who eschew romance. College life has become so competitive, and students so focused on careers, that many aren’t looking for spouses anymore, she says. Replacing college as the top marital hunting ground is the office. Which circles back to Helaine Olen’s new book, Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding–and Managing–Romance on the Job–a timely title if ever there was one.

Still, even at the office, it’s just plain hard to find that match, as John Tierney reports in the New York Times. Tierney notes that while online matchmakers compete for customers using algorithms in the search for love, the battle has intrigued academic researchers who study the mating game.

And finally, for the latest on the sociology of hooking up, Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at LaSalle University, analyzes college sexual activity in a book called – guess what – Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus.

Have at it folks!

(And thank you, CCF, for the summaries and links.)

OK, I promise not to bride out on you (I did that once, sort of, ahem, already), but the contemporary name game fascinates me to no end. Clearly, women my generation who marry are at a different starting point. In 1975, less than 4 percent of college-educated brides did NOT take their husband’s last name, compared to 20 percent in 2000. Most of my girlfriends have kept their last names; a few hyphenate. I may hyphenate officially, but for sure I’ll remain Deborah Siegel in print. But anyway, as it turns out, according to an article appearing in the Times’ Style section yesterday, there are actually consultants now who will help modern couples figure out what to do about merging their names. Interestingly, the article notes that only children (c’est moi) and family business owners may be among women perhaps most concerned with losing their lineage by tossing their name. BTW, I love the article’s title: “To Be Safe, Call the Bride by Her First Name.”