relationships

With Tiger Woods in the news for this latest round of Very-Public-Infidelity, guest blogger Ebony A. Utley weighs in with her expertise on the issue. A research expert on marital infidelity, Utley confronts common stereotypes and raises questions about cheating, talking, silence, and power.

The proverbial cats are out of the bag as the tabloid media collect stories from Tiger Woods’ alleged mistresses. The mistresses are increasingly chatty — talking about “I was with Tiger here” and “he left me a voicemail there.” Woods is busy denying what he can and apologizing for what he can’t while Mrs. Woods remains silent.

None of this is unusual. With a slew of high-profile unfaithful men in the news lately, it’s hard not to notice a pattern. These men haven’t come out in public to say, “I had inappropriate sexual relations outside my relationship” without first facing an impeachment trial, sexual-assault accusations, blackmail threats, texts, sexts, voicemails … you get the picture.  Rarely have these men come clean without some sort of provocation.  Often, famous unfaithful men confess to their infidelity because the other woman beat him to it.

Mistresses are notorious for telling their side of the story because the world wants to hear it. The sex secrets of sexy women are titillating. Be honest with yourself. You wanted to know whether Tiger’s mistresses were prettier than his wife. Some of you readers out there also wanted to know whether she looked like she was better at sex than the wife. Admit it. Those are our society’s infidelity stereotypes. The other woman had to be offering something that the wife did not.

The wife wasn’t giving it up. Or if she was, her sex was boring.
The wife let herself go.
The wife was too invested in the kids.
The wife didn’t (emotionally) support her man.
The wife was emasculating.
The wife was never around.

Mistresses are quick to perpetuate these stereotypes, but the husbands are quick to offer their wives $4 million diamond rings and $80 million prenup revisions.  If the wives were such horrible people, why dish out all the cash to keep them? Since the husband can no longer keep the mistress quiet, is he buying his wife’s silence? I don’t think so. Men who cheat on their wives rarely want to leave them; usually they’re genuinely sorry. The silence on the wives part is not about his money. It’s about power.

A mistress has power because she is the secret. She is the one tasked with being discreet. Once the secret is out, the mistress loses her power. She scrambles to get it back with revealing details, but the more she talks, the more her power diminishes. People know who she is, where she was, what she did, how she did it, and who else she did it with. Once the prurient details are all out there, people are free to pass judgment on the mistress and she rapidly moves from sexy story to object of public scrutiny to obscurity.

But the wife who refuses to talk gains power. Now she is the one deciding to be discreet.  No one knows what she’s thinking and everyone wants to. Did she know?  Did she have a revenge affair? Why didn’t she leave him? Does she love him that much? How is she going to spend those millions? The quieter she remains, the more dignity that wife regains.  Long after we’ve forgotten the mistress’ name and the seedy motels and the racy voicemails, the silent wife is still standing in the spotlight with an air of mystery about her. We might not understand her, but her secrets are the ones that garner respect. The most understated gift a chatty mistress gives to the wife is power.

Ebony A. Utley, Ph.D. is an expert in infidelity. She is currently writing about her interviews with wives who have experienced infidelity during their marriages. See more of her research at http://www.theutleyexperience.com/

If I could think of a topic that travels around the conversations of most women I know, the choice to have a child, and when, often lives pretty near the top of the list.  Following it comes a litany of concerns: how to juggle career, partnerhood, personal and professional ambitions, and more.  Elizabeth Gregory, Director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Houston, as well as Full Professor of English, tackles the topic of timing in Ready: Why Women are Embracing the New Later Motherhood with results that bring relief — both in the sense that there is good news to uncover amid all the swirling anxiety, and relief as the strong, clear reasons why many women choose to delay motherhood stand out against a grey fog of cultural pressure that warns against it.

Over two and a half years, Gregory interviews 113 women of diverse backgrounds (gay and straight as well as single and coupled) and focuses on the choices of women who become first-time mothers at age 35 or older.  Recognizing that “later” motherhood is nothing new, Gregory articulates how the difference is that women are now choosing to have first children, rather than last, at what is labeled “advanced maternal age.”  The choices that spur this change swim the  currents of women’s lives: the advent of birth control, and correspondingly, advances with fertility treatment; access to education and the desire for a career; refusal to marry just to gain a spouse, with instead the desire to wait for a peer relationship; commitment to financial security that eschews dependence on a partner.  The best news is how often the women interviewed express deep contentment with their paths.

Gregory’s statistics are compelling: “One of every 12 babies born to first-time mothers in 2006 was born to a woman 35 or older. In 1970, the figure was one in 100.”  Her research reflects the financial as well as emotional rewards of this choice.  She points out that “among full-time workers between 40 and 45 with professional degrees, those who had their first child at 25 made an average of $46,000, while those who waited until 35 made $79,000. A woman’s average long-term salary increases by 3 percent for each year she delays children.” Her exploration of the politics surrounding labor (during birth and other maternal work) and childcare issues continues on her blog “Domestic Product” and in several thought pieces available online.

Ready rounds a spectrum of reasons why women choose to delay, with many citing better emotional preparedness at later ages, as well as not wanting to rush new relationships, or women’s own enjoyment of their 20s and 30s, alongside the desire to be more financially powerful and advanced in their careers, hence better able to leverage work/family balance.  Women who come later to motherhood are more likely to have higher levels of education, more stable partnerships, and be in “peer marriages,” with active partners who commit equally to childcare. Most cheering is the overall positive sense of choice.

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My latest Love in the Time of Layoff column is now up at Recessionwire.com. It’s titled “Back to Work”. Marco is freelancing again! Househusband, interrupted indeed. I’m happy, but I’m mixed…

There’s so much Father’s Day goodness out there today I don’t know where to start.

Former NYTimes blogger Marci Alboher asks “Are Dads the New Moms?” over at her new Yahoo blog, Working the New Economy.

Lisa Belkin conducts a two part interview with The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared ParentingAreTransforming the American Family author and Daddy Dialectic blogger Jeremy Adam Smith

Michelle Goldberg of ABCNews.com tells us What Laid-Off Dads Want

And I offer “Findings from from the Layoff Lab”— a Father’s Day assessment of recession-era dads — over at The Big Money! 

You can bet we’ll touch on many of these themes — and more, and from a fresh and feminist perspective — at the Brooklyn Museum tomorrow when the WomenGirlsLadies talk about “Dads, Dudes, and Doing It.” Event is free!  We’ll be giving books away!  I’ll be wearing straight-up maternity wear!  This is one you won’t want to miss 🙂

PS. Time Out New York just listed us as one of the “Ten Best Father’s Day events” in town!

My latest, up at Recessionwire.com today!  Today’s post questions whether laid off men’s (ok, Marco’s) values are changing, now that they’re spending more time at home.  Hint: It’s all about the eggs. I’d love your comments!

We’ll be at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, June 20 at 2pm for what promises to be one of our liveliest versions ever. There’s more over at the WomenGirlsLadies blog, and on a YouTube channel coming soon. Please spread the word!

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In the spirit of Father’s Day on June 21 — and in honor of fathers everywhere — this edition of The Man Files features a guest post by Dani Meier. Dani writes about his experience as both a custodial and non-custodial parent. This stuff doesn’t fit neatly on a Hallmark card, but it should! It comes from the heart and speaks to so many, whether we are fathers, have fathers, or watch our children’s relationships with their own dads unfold.

One in three children in America — 24 million kids — do not have their father in the home. Forty percent of them have not seen their dad during the past year. Half of them have never set foot in their father’s home. And then there are the fathers who live under the same roof, but are absent in other ways. Just plain MIA. Many dads leave.

I was one of them.

When my daughter was three, her mother and I separated. When she was six, though I’d shared equally in parenting till then, I moved out of state, 650 miles away.

In my case, however, I came back. Again and again, I came back.

I committed myself to staying in my daughter’s life. I got a second job to pay for flights and for the next twelve years, we alternated every other weekend, sometimes more, between my going to her and her coming to me — a schedule that she and I maintained till she graduated from high school. A unique father-daughter bond evolved between us, emotional closeness despite geographical distance. But two roundtrip flights a month for twelve years adds up to nearly 300 flights that she or I took back and forth to see each other. That’s a lot of goodbyes to start logging at age six.

She’s now 21. Totally legal. No fake IDs.

I recently visited her in Rome where she spent part of her junior year of college. More than the Eternal City’s sweeping arc of history and culture, however, small moments stand out: ambling around Piazza Navonna after midnight, sipping Limoncello, strolling aimlessly. We bar-hopped in Trastevere where, in one café, a phenomenal swing jazz trio accompanied us as we danced for the first time ever as two adults. On my last day, we took a train to the Umbria hillside village of Orvieto, a medieval town with winding alleyways and cobblestone streets, sitting on a chunk of volcanic rock overlooking a valley.

Hugging my daughter goodbye the next day was wrenching. It was as if all our goodbyes were distilled into this single hug: twelve years of goodbyes, hugs that bridged childhood, adolescence, and, now, adulthood.

I’m also father to a six-year-old son. As I look into his beautiful eyes today, I see the eyes of my daughter. My mind frequently jumps involuntarily to how confusing it would be for him if I moved away. Yet I know that’s what my daughter lived through at his age.

Goodbyes can cause a lot of heartache. The problem for many children, however, is that they don’t get to say goodbye to their fathers on a regular basis. That would imply that they actually see their dads in the first place. As a therapist, many of the youth and adults I work with have never met their fathers or they see them rarely if at all. Other fathers lived with their kids but were invisible, buried in their work or a bottle or some other distraction.

There’s a paradox of contradictory trends in Daddy Land. Lots of fathers are rewriting what it means to be a dad: They are more involved in their children’s lives than any fathers in American history. They not only play catch or coach Little League, they also change diapers, make meals, help with school work, and are emotionally open with their children. This coincides, however, with the fact that from 1947 to 2007, single-parent households — predominantly mother-headed homes — jumped from 12 percent to over 25 percent. And whether those fathers remarried or not, too many of them don’t maintain consistent ties to their biological children from previous relationships.

Some men claim that divorced mothers block access. But in my experience that’s the exception, not the rule. Fathers who aren’t involved with their children nowadays are usually disengaged by choice. Many don’t even meet their legal obligation for child support while others do so only under threat of legal sanction or garnished wages.

As a father and a husband — and as a therapist — I try to allow for the fact that shit happens. Divorce, breakups, new loves, new jobs, new opportunities. We each must sort through what makes sense as we move through life. And sometimes as we muddle through, we hurt others on our path. Hopefully, we learn, grow, and try to make it right.

My hope is that other fathers who’ve left can still learn, grow, and make it right. Perhaps by next Father’s Day, some of those fathers who’ve said goodbye will realize the importance of coming back. And then they’ll make it right, they’ll come back, and they’ll stay involved, being fathers their kids can count on, dads worthy of the Hallmark card.

Dani Meier, PhD, MSW, is a psychotherapist, school social worker, community activist, lecturer, and writer. He is a founder of The Real MEN’s Project: Men Embracing Non-Violence, which seeks to place men at the center of the battle against domestic violence and sexual assault. He’s one of a small handful of men who’ve been awarded the Susan B. Anthony Award for efforts on behalf of girls and women in his community, and he is a faculty advisor for his school’s gay-straight alliance. He’s lectured to a range of audiences, from mental health professionals to parent groups on raising strong and gentle sons. He is currently involved in state-wide suicide prevention and intervention initiatives. He is a proud father and a lucky husband.

Huh?  Recession and sex, in the same sentence?  Check out my latest at Recessionwire, a personal (well, not that personal) riff on a Forbes article that asks whether recession is good for sex.  And I forgot to link to last week’s post, about Marco coming back home…

Josh Coleman steps up to the mike and frames the conference by starting with how the women’s movement has made life better not only for women but for men.  Yet at the same time, and especially in this moment of recession, where men are being laid off in droves, women’s increased power is in some way a challenge to men’s identity.  The traditional markers of male identity–protector, provider–have been eroded.  As Michael Kimmel says, men are left with all of the empowerment and none of the power.  [??!!]  So there’s a crisis in masculinity out there.  (Ok, yes, reality check: women earn 80% what men do, etc etc.)

Questions the conference will ask:

How will recession affect relationships between men and women?

Will men express their masculinity by doing even less?

Is the gender revolution dead, or still evolving?

What’s going on with gender convergence in families and intimate relationships?

What’s going on with gender in the next generation?

Is our culture of individualism make marriages today more happy and resilient or more fragile?

What kind of work/family policies make families more resilient and what makes them more stressed?

What does the recent election tell about gender today?

Stay tuned….

So this just well may be my favorite annual report out there, and it’s just out now: Unconventional Wisdom: New Data, Trends, and Clinical Observations about Equality in American Family Life and Gender Roles

In it, experts from the Council on Contemporary Families review key recent research and clinical findings on gender and equality. In preparation for the Council on Contemporary Families’ Twelfth Anniversary Conference at the University of Chicago at Illinois, April 17-19, 2009, CCF surveyed its members about their “most important or surprising research results and clinical observations related to topics being considered at the conference.” The resulting report provides a snapshot of what some of the nation’s leading authorities are seeing in their research and clinical practice. Check it out:

1. Does marital quality decrease when couples need to negotiate the division of household chores and child-care?

Researchers and clinical psychologists Philip and Carolyn Cowan report that marriages suffer most when couples fail to talk through these thorny issues. On average, having a child leads to a long-term decline in marital satisfaction. But couples who have more egalitarian relationships can avoid these problems, first when they jointly plan for and welcome the birth of a child, and second, when they minimize the tendency to slip into more traditional gender roles after the child’s birth. Still, the closer couples move toward equality, report conference presenters Marc and Amy Vachon, the less likely they are to focus on quantifying who does which chores. Good to know, huh?!

2. Women feel more work-family conflict than men, right?

Not any longer. A just-released report from the Families and Work Institute, “Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home,” shows that as men have increased the amount of time they spend with young children over the past 15 years, they are now experiencing more work-family conflict than women.  Welcome to our world, dudes.

3. What’s happening to the traditional double standard?

It’s been to a great extent reversed in middle school, according to researcher Barbara Risman. Forty-five years ago, studies showed that the school culture was suppressing girls’ natural talents and aspirations by the time they entered middle school. At age 10 or 11, girls stopped speaking up in class and even started “playing dumb” to attract boys. They often chose not to compete in sports or to develop their bodies for fear of being teased as tomboys. Risman’s new study of middle-school children in the 21st Century shows a remarkable reversal of this pattern. Being a top-flight athlete is now considered part of the “ideal” girl package, and girls are very willing to compete with boys in the classroom. Today it is young boys who are afraid of showing off how smart they are and who feel they have to suppress their interest in certain activities for fear of being taunted as “gay.”

4. But the double standard is still alive and well in college, says Stanford University researcher Paula England.

While women have gained some sexual freedoms, they risk harsher judgments than men do if they proceed beyond “making out” in a hook up. And when activity does progress beyond making out, there is a striking “orgasm gap” between males and females-it is worse than the sex gap in pay! “Men get more than their share of the orgasms while women get more than their share of the bad reputations,” notes England, who is currently interviewing students across the country about changing sexual practices and norms.

5. In another finding, sexual health researcher Adina Nack discovered that women who are diagnosed with an STD ultimately develop improved sexual communication with their partners and are better able to discuss their own needs and wishes as well as insist on safe health practices.

In still more data-driven observations from family experts, you can learn about important and surprising research on family, gender, economics, and sexuality from the past year. The report is available here.

WANT MORE UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM? CHECK OUT CCF’s CONFERENCE “Relationships, Sexuality, and Equality” — I’ll be there! Here’s more:

The Council on Contemporary Families 12th Anniversary Conference,
“Relationships, Sexuality, and Equality: How Far Have We Come?” (April
17 and 18, 2009 at the University of Illinois, Chicago) includes the
following panels, presenting new research and best practice findings on
these timely topics:

*Work-Family Balance for Women and Men
*Gender Convergence in Families and Intimate Relationships
*Gender in the Next Generation
*The Marriage Go-Round – A Special preview of his forthcoming book with Andrew Cherlin
*Women, Men and Equality: What the Election Taught Us

You’ll hear Jeremy Adam Smith discuss his study on role-switching
between husbands and wives, including interviews with dads forced into this
position by lay-offs. At a time when men have experienced more than 80
percent of layoffs since 2007, we have a growing number of families with
stay-at-home dads and breadwinner moms. The entire work and family panel
offers fresh perspective on families in a time of recession.

In the “Next Generation” panel, noted psychologist Diane Ehrensaft will
discuss the growing phenomenon of children telling their parents
that they are not the gender stated on their birth certificate or are
not able or willing to play within the culturally defined binary boxes
of “girl,” “boy.” They might be transgender; they might be gender
fluid; they might be a “Prius”-a hybrid half boy-half girl; or they
might be a “gender smoothie”–a synthesized blend of male/female.
What do we know about how parents can best handle these situations?

For a detailed conference program, visit www.contemporaryfamilies.org.
Accredited journalists seeking complimentary registration should contact
Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, Council on
Contemporary Families: coontzs@msn.com. Phone: 360 556-9223.