Posted on 06/17/2017 6:57:33 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Editors Note: The following is excerpted from Diane Medveds Dont Divorce, and reprinted here with permission. On June 21, the author and her husband, radio host Michael Medved, will join NR senior editor Jay Nordlinger for a public conversation at Seattles Town Hall, hosted by the Discovery Institute. Space is limited, so please pre-register here.
Even the best marriages are subject to forces in our pro-divorce culture that exert pressure toward dissatisfaction. Theyre magnets that tug spouses apart in their moments of ennui, frustration, or anger, and the inertia of their pull can ultimately propel them to a receptive Divorce Industry awaiting customers.
Awareness of these lures can help couples recognize and combat them.
Divorce Magnet Number One: Sympathy, Not Stigma for Divorce
When wedding vows were iron-clad commitments, divorce was considered a failure, inviting responses we now deem shaming, followed by long-term stigma. Now its usually harder to get out of a business deal than a marriage.
We care what other people think about our looks, our accomplishments, and our associations, crafting sterling online personae, but we worry little that well be tarnished by the failure of our marriages. In fact, acknowledging that youre going through a divorce wins a comforting embrace, a caring reassurance of your value, in a striking cultural flip that took just a single generation.
In fact, youll get a lot more sympathy by splitting than by announcing that youre working to mend your marriage. Friends assume a divorce leaves you shattered and bereft, requiring their piteous hugs, while restoring your marriage implies that youre bold and hardy. Most people in a difficult marital moment prefer the warm embrace of sympathy, especially when the alternative is a difficult process with an angry or hurt spouse.
Going through a divorce is also a nifty excuse for slacking, fudging on promises, and behaving badly. If you miss a deadline or take a long lunch while going through a divorce, your excuse is obvious. The assumption is youre emotionally strained, and since heartache supersedes duty, your hugely emotional event occasions unlimited forbearance. The over-the-top accommodations we make for divorce makes it a no-lose option.
Divorce Magnet Number Two: Sex Is Everywhere (Except in Marriage)
When you dont like your spouse, when youre angry or betrayed or verbally abused, sex in marriage is either completely selfish or manipulative. And when a couple perches on the verge of divorce, usually there is no sex.
In that case, intimacy is available everywhere except in the one place it should be. Just the existence of the phone app Tinder keeps non-marital sex and physicality a constant possibility. Business Insider reports that 12 percent of those using the app are in a relationship.
Unsuspecting workers, drivers, TV viewers, Internet users everyone constantly encounter invitations to stray. Come-ons span the continuum from subtle to screaming, but most importantly, theyre ubiquitous. Motor down a thoroughfare and billboards splashed with T & A vie for your attention. Buy a few groceries and those tabloids at eye level show you the before-and-after of some voluptuous starlet in a revealing evening gown or bikini.
When a couple perches on the verge of divorce, usually there is no sex.
While a myriad of websites and apps offer contact with a live person, pornography offers the thrills without the bother of a close encounter. Younger men routinely access porn despite evidence that private viewing hurts relationships. A representative study in 2014 by the Barna Group for a Christian organization found that eight out of ten men [in the general U.S. population] between the ages of 18 and 30 view pornography at least monthly, as do two-thirds of men between the ages of 31 and 49 and half of men between 50 and 68.
Three out of ten men view pornography daily, the study found, even though many realize its a problem. Asked if theyre addicted to porn, a third of younger men either think that they are addicted or are unsure if they are addicted, and 18% of all men think theyre addicted or are unsure, which equates to 21 million men.
Pornography undermines commitment to an existing relationship in both the short and long term, according to a series of five studies by Brigham Young University researchers. And the more porn the subjects consumed, especially men, the less commitment they demonstrated.
Divorce Magnet Number Three: Workplace Priority and Proximity
When we teach young adults to fulfill their potentials through successful careers but fail to balance that with any mention of successful marriages, priorities become skewed, and marriage falls into second place. Earning a baccalaureate ostensibly prepares graduates to achieve, but no collegiate institution teaches students that their most meaningful accomplishments will pertain to their families and marriages, even though plenty of academic research shows this.
For example, a 2012 study of 25,000 graduates of Harvard Business School whose education puts them in immediate demand for top-notch positions found that recent graduates defined success as career ascent, but 20 to 40 years later, definitions centered around family and personal fulfillment. For me, at age twenty-five, success meant career, responded a woman in her forties. Now I think of success much differently: Raising happy, productive children, contributing to the world around me, and pursuing work that is meaningful to me. The researchers noted, When we asked respondents to rate the importance of nine career and life dimensions, nearly 100%, regardless of gender, said that quality of personal and family relationships was very or extremely important.
If thats the case, why cant colleges report the truth, that family-building deserves as much preparation and attention as individual career fame and academic supremacy? Why do we celebrate those who strive for professional success but ignore failure or lack of tenacity in marriage? The difference in the way we treat work and marriage excuses neglect of relationships and ultimately foments divorce.
Our competitive workplace has become so demanding that those seeking professional ranks must devote a huge proportion of their waking hours to their jobs stealing time, communication, and concern away from their families. Priority of career over family introduces emotional distance between spouses, exacerbated by daily physical proximity to colleagues of the opposite sex.
Of course, this can pose serious temptations. Wouldnt it be great if every worker focused on the tasks at hand and maintained only professional relationships with co-workers and superiors? If every encounter with a new colleague was task-focused, and physical appearance were irrelevant?
Combine these vulnerabilities with trends toward casual fraternization, and the result is more marital infidelity. The blatant truth is that propriety is passé. Standards of familiarity and formality that once defined boundaries have slipped so far that addressing a customer as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So is often received as snotty or rude. Hello, Diane, Im Sam. Hows your day going? breezily asks the operator for an online retailer who got my order wrong. Well, I dont really want to tell you, Sam.
A survey of 31,000 persons on office sex and romance commissioned by Elle Magazine found plenty of threats to monogamy in the workplace:
92 percent of respondents said a co-worker they found attractive had flirted with them;
62 percent admitted at least one office affair (while 14 percent said they would never date someone from work);
42 percent were married or in a relationship at the time of an office affair;
41 percent had sex on the job, and 16 percent used a bosss office. Seven percent got caught in the act, but 87 percent got away with no consequence;
19 percent had serious employment consequences from an office affair, but just 3 percent lost their jobs;
9 percent of married philanderers said their affair led to divorce or separation, while half reported no marital consequences.
Lax marital boundaries and attitudes, a sex-permeated culture, porn, career-achievement emphasis, and workplace chemistry combine to bring even the most devoted couples challenges to their satisfaction. The first defense is to discuss these influences with your spouse where and when they occur. Voicing disapproval to your partner cements your connection, and allows you to prepare together for their impact when these factors inevitably enter your sphere. Vice President Pence was chided for his rule to avoid after-hours dinners with women alone, but with it he avoids any whiff of impropriety and sends the message that hes dedicated to his work agenda. By increasing communication with your mate, with or without policies you jointly decide, you can create a barrier around your relationship that allows it to remain sanctified and strong.
READ MORE:
Are Millennials Following the Success Sequence
What the NYT Gets Wrong about Marriage, Health, and Well-Being
Hey Guys, Put a Ring on It
Of course not. Before marriage she was wild, exciting, and unpredictable.
My first wife used to punch me often, but never cheated on me. The second wife never hit me, but cheated on me all the time. I have learned from experience that I way too often made poor choices in women, so I have QUIT.
Then by all means, take my wife please!! I take my wife everywhere. The problem is, she keeps finding her way back.
My wife says to me the other day, “I want to go somewhere I have never been before.” “Ok,” I said, “what about the kitchen?”
Separate bath and bedrooms have saved our marriage!
Sibyl nods
The second part becomes a fantasy after she either passes 40 or she gains enough weight that she no longer has an hourglass figure (if she ever did).
What is increasingly happening these days is women spend their hot 20's jumping from bed to bed, then hit 30 and decide they need to find somebody to marry them before their expiration date. Naturally, the kind of guy willing to actually marry them is not as exciting as the kind of guys who bedded them in her 20's, she becomes increasingly unhappy and resentful as she thinks about her old boyfriends and how her husband negatively compares against them.
One part of the solution would be to encourage women to get married in their early 20's, when their "marriage market value" is at peak, and they are more likely to snag a high-value guy.
The other part of the solution would be to change divorce laws so that they do not provide an incentive for the woman to divorce.
Don't forget women's porn (alias "romance novels") which women endlessly consume, and which feed the female fantasy of some hot barbarian/pirate captain/aristocrat/billionaire coming into their lives and sweeping them off their feet.
Spending her days in such fantasies is just as damaging to her ability to be satisfied in a real relationship with a real guy, as men's porn is.
Flip tells Henny Youngman jokes?!
Western civilization is built around restrictions to the above. The social contract had been that the "alpha male" was allowed to select ONE high-quality woman to be his wife, leaving the rest of the women to the rest of the men.
Civilization happens when common men can have confidence that if they work hard, they can attract a woman of their own, who will have sex with them and bear their children. Once common men lose hope of having that future, they lose the incentive to work hard enough to sustain the civilization, which collapses back into barbarism.
People who lie about stuff before you get married to them. Both my exes lied about some pretty substantial things. Like their financial situation or their serious mental illness.
Should have said prince.
Why should he care? Because he vowed to care in every situation. Maybe she is depressed? Care. You as her friend and h= as her husband. Please care.
Put God at the center of your family, dont abuse each other, dont commit adultery, dont be selfish, show love and affection for each other and always put your family first.
Should have said prince. Why should he care? Because he vowed to care in every situation. ?aybe she is depressed? Care. You as her friend and h= as her husband.
I’m not quitting with men, I’m just quitting with marriage, joining lives. I am the kind of person to stay way too long and try everything in my heart and soul to make something work that isn’t going to because the other side won’t put forth even an 8th of that effort. In marriage, I’m Atlas and I have shrugged.
So are you arguing that when a male is frustrated that his seed is not resulting in offspring, barbarism ensues? There very well be a protean detrimental subtle but very real, psychological effect on men that despite successful copulation, due to modern birth control and widespread abortion, there are no offspring to be seen. Or simply put Darwinian law dictates that a woman’s body is not hers alone but has a role beyond her perceived self interest vital to procreation and the well being of the species. If she positions herself to refuse, prevents conception or willfully aborts, she violates Darwinian law. The death knell of the West was when men ceded their dominance, accepted “women’s rights” and the birthrate dropped to non sustainable levels. The future has always belonged to the fertile.
It’s usually the problem is not about what you’re not getting out of a marriage, the problem is usually what YOU are not putting IN to a marriage.
If both can appreciate this they will last.
The three magnets of divorce v. the three rings of marriage: the engagement ring, the wedding ring, the suffering.
A man who desires companionship can hang out with his male buddies.
A man who desires sex can rent more cheaply (over the long run) than buying.
Marriage is for the man who desires heirs of his own genetics.
Traditionally, women who wanted children had to marry, because only a husband of her own could provide her with the stable home to raise children in. Welfare and government-mandated child support payments now allows a woman to have her children without the bother of sharing her home with a husband.
BTW,today is Father’s day. Not the favorite holiday of feminists and the Left.
Amazing how no one on this thread admits their culpability in a marriage gone sour! Not one. It’s always the other party.
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