Category: Marriage

Good Advice

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“Dost thou love life? then do not squander time; for that is the stuff life is made of.”
— Benjamin Franklin

Time is most often squandered when we are young by postponing adulthood in favor of the irresponsibility of extended adolescence. Laura Triggs doesn’t think postponing adulthood is wise:

Take it from someone who spent all of her twenties dating. Finding lasting love is the best. If you’re in your twenties today and want true love someday, why wait? Start dating like a grown-up now and you are more likely to end up with one when the time is right.

Read the whole thing. Hat tip: Maggie’s Farm.

 

The Tragedy of Lesbian Divorce

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Whatever happened to old-fashioned lesbian family values?

Rosie O’Donnell and her wife, Michelle Rounds, have split, and O’Donnell will leave “The View” next week to concentrate on her family’s well-being, Page Six can exclusively reveal.
Sources close to O’Donnell told us that she and Rounds, her wife of three years, have been living apart for months, and that O’Donnell feels she must leave the ABC daytime show to focus on her five kids.
Rosie’s rep, Cindi Berger, confirmed the marital split, as well O’Donnell’s departure from “The View,” in a statement Friday night: “I can confirm that Rosie and her wife Michelle split in November. Rosie has teens and an infant at home that need her attention. This has been a very stressful situation. She is putting her personal health and family first. ABC has been wonderfully understanding and supportive of her personal decision to leave ‘The View.’ Next week will be her last.”
O’Donnell, 52, married her second wife Rounds in private in June 2012. In 2013, they adopted a baby girl, Dakota. She has four other older kids.

Notice that this is O’Donnell’s second lesbian wife. Her first marriage to longtime girlfriend Kelli Carpenter ended in 2007. Carpenter now has her own second wife, and the four O’Donnell-Carpenter children seem closer to Kelli than to Rosie. Nobody in the world of media is allowed to say a word about the unnatural weirdness of all this — two boys and three girls without fathers, one of them (Kelli’s youngest) conceived by artificial insemination — because equality!

This is the Feminist Dream Life™ of women free from the heteronormative oppression of male supremacy, and we are all required to believe that it’s a utopia of undimmed bliss. Nor are we permitted to point out that some women who once lived as lesbians are now happily married to men, because this contradicts everything we are supposed to “know,” about both (a) the alleged permanence of homosexual identity and (b) traditional marriage as patriarchal slavery for women.

Meanwhile, we learn that angry lesbians are not ratings gold:

The collapse of Rosie O’Donnell’s two-year marriage had nothing to do with her quitting the troubled daytime chat show, The View, show insiders have disclosed.
In fact, her sudden departure was prompted by rows with producers and other staff, who are said to be delighted she is leaving.
O’Donnell is being seen as the key reason for the show’s collapsing ratings, which had led to serious concerns over falling advertising revenue. . . .
ABC insiders now acknowledge it was a disastrous error to bring O’Donnell back to the show.
They say that far from her suggestion that her marriage had become troubled recently, it was already on the rocks when she was signed for The View.

Anyone who has observed Rosie O’Donnell over the years recognizes that she is the source of her own problems. Her “humor” (such as it is) emerges from a bitter and resentful heart. She hates happy people, envying them for experiencing a joy that she can never feel, and she refuses to accept that she is responsible for her own unhappiness.

In celebrating such unhappy people as role models for youth, the media elite have helped promote a Culture of Despair.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . .”





 

Replicating Failure

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The other day, we encountered Jillian Dunham, the 37-year-old who had her eggs frozen because she can’t find a husband.

Who is to blame for men’s unwillingness to become husbands and fathers? Could it be the phenomenon of “frivorce”? This portmanteau of “frivolous” and “divorce” was coined by Men’s Rights bloggers to describe situations in which a woman leaves a marriage that is not objectively bad, but which she perceives as failing to satisfy her emotional needs. The Douchebag Credo: “I gotta be me.”

One of the best books about the disastrous decline of the American family is Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture. To summarize briefly a very complex argument, marriages are falling apart because people have forgotten what marriage is about, replacing traditional beliefs with what Whitehead calls the “love family ideology.” The decline of marriage is also part of what Christopher Lasch analyzed in The Culture of Narcissism as “a society that has lost interest in the future.” How does this manifest itself in everyday life? At Jenny Chancey’s Ladies Against Feminism blog, a commenter named “David J.” explains:

Ladies, here’s one of the biggest reasons, if not THE biggest reason, that Christian young men are leery of marriage: the behavior of their mothers — your Christian sisters.
My wife and I were married at age 21, two days after graduating from a conservative Christian college. We have three sons, ages 23, 20, and 16. The oldest graduated from a Christian college last year and is a 6th grade teacher. He is tall, good-looking, brilliant, fun, heavily involved in a very good church, and has many friends of both genders. But he is not even dating, let alone looking for marriage. My second son is a junior at a Christian college and will be going into law enforcement. He is also tall, good-looking, smart, hard-working, and very popular. He is playing the field, not dating seriously. The youngest is obviously not of marrying age, but he is seriously estranged from his mother.
The reason? Their Christian mother filed for divorce, without biblical grounds and contrary to our pastor’s and Christian marriage counselor’s advice, 4.5 years ago, after 26 years of marriage. She later withdrew that filing but then re-filed two years later. The divorce was final a little over a year ago. She immediately began dating online, then met, “fell in love” with, and married a twice-divorced man who lives 400 miles away — all within a span of 13 months. She has now relocated, taking our 18-year old special needs daughter with her.
My sons are shell-shocked, both by the unbiblical divorce (commonly referred to in the “manosphere” as a frivolous divorce, or a “frivorce”) and by the rush into an unbiblical remarriage. They are asking themselves why they should even contemplate marriage when their primary example of Christian womanhood and wifehood has demonstrated that nothing protects them from a unilateral, frivolous divorce at any time — not the law, not the woman’s profession of faith, not the input of Christian counselors, not the church (which is afraid to step in or “take sides”), not the length of the marriage, not even the interests of the children. Perhaps most importantly for this audience, my sons also saw that other Christian women will do nothing to protect them from a frivolous divorce.
I’ve learned that mine is not at all an isolated situation. In fact, two-thirds of all divorces today are initiated by wives, and only rarely for non-frivolous/biblical reasons.
So, if you really want to raise the level of interest in marriage for Christian young men and/or increase the number of potential suitors for your daughters, (1) don’t divorce their fathers and (2) don’t sit silently by while your Christian sisters initiate frivolous divorces.

Parental behavior communicates a powerful message to children, and how parents treat each other is part of that message. Bail out after four kids and 26 years of marriage? Why? Do you really think you’ll be happier as someone else’s third wife? You think he’s Mister Perfect, but his first two wives just weren’t good enough for him?

Failure replicates:

Many people see remarriage as a fresh new chance at happiness with a partner whom they should have chosen in the first place.  But the statistics reveal that second or later marriages are much more likely to end in divorce.

Not only does marital failure replicate in this way — people who have divorced once are more likely to divorce again — but it also replicates in the subsequent generations:

The National Opinion Research Council conducted a survey of adult children of divorce that spanned more than 20 years. Here’s what they found: In 1973, adult children of divorce were 172% more likely to get divorced than adult children from intact homes. In 1999, adult children of divorce were only 50% more likely to get divorced than adult children from intact homes . . . which sounds like good news.
However, the bad news is that the survey also found a 26% lower rate of marrying in the first place among adult children of divorced parents. . . .
Children of divorce often experience expectations of failure, fear of loss or abandonment and fear of conflict throughout their lives. These anxieties are reflected in their romantic relationships by poor partner or behavior choices, giving up too quickly when problems arise or avoidance of any perceived level of commitment.

People see statistics like that and say to themselves, “Well, my choices won’t follow the trend,” but exactly where the hell do you think  trends come from? Trends don’t cause human behavior, human behavior causes trends. Your choices, your decisions, your actions inevitably have far-reaching ripple effects on others, and yet narrow-minded selfishness causes people to think they can live according to the Douchebag Credo — “I gotta be me!” — without consequences. These are the same people, of course, who blame “society” for their problems without pausing to look in the mirror and realize they are part of “society,” too.

You can’t outsource personal responsibility. And failure replicates.

 

Sudden Onset Lesbian Syndrome

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“Men who rule, and male leftists who seek to rule, try to depoliticize sex . . . in order to prevent us from acting to end our oppression and challenging their power. As the question of homosexuality has become public, reformists define it as a private question of who you sleep with in order to sidetrack our understanding of the politics of sex. For the Lesbian-Feminist, it is not private; it is a political matter of oppression, domination, and power. . . . The only way oppressed people end their oppression is by seizing power: People whose rule depends on the subordination of others do not voluntarily stop oppressing others. Our subordination is the basis of male power.”
— Charlotte Bunch, “Lesbians in Revolt,” 1972

“Lesbianism is the greatest threat that exists to male supremacy.”
— Rita Mae Brown, A Plain Brown Rapper, 1976

“Central to radical feminism is the belief that the patriarchy (not capitalism or sex roles or socialization or individual sexist men) is the root of all forms of oppression; that all men benefit from and maintain it and are, therefore, our political enemies. Within this framework, heterosexuality, far from existing as a ‘natural state,’ ‘personal choice’ or ‘sexual orientation,’ is described as a socially constructed and institutionalized structure which is instrumental in the perpetuation of male supremacy.”
— Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism, 1987

When feminists say “the personal is political” and declare that women are oppressed by “patriarchy” and “male supremacy,” they mean what they say and — because Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver warned — the impact of these radical ideas on the lives of individuals is never really coincidental. Steve Basilone‘s personal tragedy is not really a comedy, nor is it actually personal, according to feminist theory. He is the patriarchal oppressor, and his ex-wife is therefore now liberated:

One of the head writers for “Orange is the New Black” has filed for divorce … the logical step since she’s now realized she’s a lesbian and is dating one of the female stars.
Lauren Morelli just filed divorce docs — obtained by TMZ — from her husband of 2 years, Steve Basilone. It’s actually a joint petition … probably because Steve realizes that ship has sailed.
The story is amazing. Lauren began writing for OITNB 5 months after she got hitched. Lauren says as she started writing for the main character — who had once been in a lesbian relationship — she saw herself in the character. Lauren says she began to feel like a fraud … married to a man but clearly gay.
According to Lauren … as she began writing about Piper’s blossoming relationship with the very hot Alex … “I found a mouthpiece for my own desires and a glimmer of what my future could look like.”

Ms. Morelli’s future looks like sex with OITNB actress Samira Wiley:

We are asked to believe that before Ms. Morelli had this revelation at age 30 — having never previously imagined she was gay — her life was an inauthentic charade, a phony pretense of heterosexuality.

This phenomenon of Sudden Onset Lesbian Syndrome has become more common in recent years, and we have examined it before: “How to Become a Lesbian, Step One: Watch Cable TV While Depressed,” wherein a married mother of two discovered her gayness by watching The L Word on Showtime. We imagine her ex-husband telling his buddies, “Yeah, I should have known better than to subscribe to those premium channels. Whatever you do, guys, stick to the basic cable package or your wife will turn into a dyke and then you’ll have to fix your own sandwiches.”

Sarcasm comes easy to those of us who can’t afford premium cable, and who imagine that our families could never become victims of the Cultural Revolution. Yet the revolutionaries have limitless ambitions, and there is nothing funny about Steve Basilone’s discovery that his wife’s wedding vows included a hidden clause:

“Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live? Unless, of course, you subsequently figure out you’re actually a lesbian?”

What we are supposed to believe is that the Meaning of Life is the pursuit of your True Self. Any promise can broken, any prior commitment discarded, any vow is automatically invalidated, the moment you realize your True Self is gay. And if you are a woman, those hateful homophobes who would stand between you and your gay True Self are also oppressive agents of male supremacy. Continue reading Sudden Onset Lesbian Syndrome →

Facts Are the New Hate

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The #YesAllWomen hashtag has been going crazy all day because of a Washington Post column by Brad Wilcox and Robin Wilson which demonstrates — as a matter of social science — what all social scientists already know: Marriage is highly correlated with good outcomes for women and children. This isn’t really controversial, if you have paid attention to the research, but feminists don’t give a damn about research if the facts contradict their theories, and feminist theory has been implacably hostile to marriage for more than 40 years. Here are two charts from the Wilcox/Wilson article:

As you can see, (a) rates of domestic violence against women are highest for single mothers and (b) child abuse rates are lowest for children living with married biological parents.

The very worst environment for children, in terms of abuse, is to live with an unmarried parent and that parent’s live-in boyfriend or girlfriend. You’ll also notice, interestingly, that rates of domestic abuse are slightly higher for married women who have children, as opposed to childless married women; however, the rates are still far lower for married moms than for single mothers.

Of course, correlation is not causation, and all such social-science data require analysis and contextualization. However, the data clearly contradict the feminist dogma which blames “patriarchy” — i.e., the social norms of the traditional family — for abuse. But the influence of feminism in academia and in the media is now so powerful that when social scientists try to call attention to research that shows the traditional family in a favorable light, the denunciations are loud, emotional and deliberately vituperative:

WaPo Editorial Page Goes Neanderthal
For Second Time In A Week
— Caitlin McNeal, Talking Points Memo

Being pro-marriage is now “Neanderthal,” no matter how much research data you produce in support of your argument.

Feminist theory is utterly impervious to evidence. If there is anything feminists hate more than they hate men, it’s facts and logic.

 

Gay Bishop’s Gay Divorce

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Oh, the heartache of homosexual matrimony on the rocks!

Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson, now retired, nearly prompted a schism in the Anglican Communion in 2003 when the New Hampshire diocese consecrated him as their bishop, despite his open relationship with partner Mark Andrew. Robinson and Andrew were joined in civil union in 2008, then wed two years later, after New Hampshire approved same-sex marriage. On Sunday, Robinson announced that, after 25 years together, he and Andrew are getting a divorce.
This is Robinson’s second divorce — he was married to his wife from 1972 until 1986, when he came out as gay. . . . “My belief in marriage is undiminished by the reality of divorcing someone I have loved for a very long time, and will continue to love even as we separate,” Robinson wrote Sunday in The Daily Beast. “Love can endure, even if a marriage cannot.”

So, after he spent a dozen years deceiving some pathetic woman in a dishonest sham of a marriage, Bishop Robinson then spent two dozen years with his “true love,” until that went stale and became tedious. What next? Will Robinson declare that he has been living a lie, as a woman bishop trapped in a gay male bishop’s body?

Tune in for the next episode of Days of Our Gay Episcoplian Lives.

 

Thank God for the ‘Pay Gap’!

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Ladies, if you think inequality is bad, guess what happens when women make more than their husbands?

When she makes more, marriage difficulties jump and divorce rates rise by 50%. Economists at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the National University of Singapore found that traditional views of gender identity, particularly the perception that it’s a man’s job to make more money than his wife, affect whether or not women marry, whom they marry, how much they decide to work, and even whether couples choose to stay married.
Cheating, too, becomes a greater problem. A 2010 Cornell University study examined 18- to 28-year-old married couples and couples living together for more than a year. Men who were completely dependent on their female partner’s salary were five times more likely to cheat than men who made an equal amount of money. . . .
A study from the University of Florida and the University of Virginia discovered that a man’s self-esteem and ego take a hit when his female partner prospers, and it can negatively impact his outlook on their relationship. . . .
The study suggests that “having a partner who experiences a success might hurt men’s implicit self-esteem because ambition and success are qualities that are generally important to women when selecting a mate.”
A separate body of research by Lamar Pierce, professor of strategy at Washington University’s Olin Business School in St. Louis, found that many men still believe it’s important for them to earn more than their wives.
In his study, published in early 2013, Pierce found that in relationships where women make a little bit more than their partners, men are about 10% more likely to require prescription pills to combat erectile dysfunction (ED), insomnia, and anxiety.

Read the whole thing. Congratulations on your success, ladies. Enjoy life after you divorce your cheating, demoralized, impotent husband.

 

25 Years, Sexy Lady!

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My beautiful wife and I got married 25 years ago today. Our wedding was at the Gordon County Courthouse in Calhoun, Georgia, with Probate Judge Johnny Parker presiding. I was making $275 a week as sports editor at the Calhoun Times and Lou Ann was working at Hardee’s.

Two of my colleagues at the newspaper, Jim and Dawn McFadden, were witnesses at the ceremony. Afterwards, Dawn was kind enough to provide a wedding cake for a very small reception at our tiny rental A-frame house out off Dews Pond Road.

When I first met Lou Ann, I was living in a one-bedroom apartment south of town on U.S. 41, and the living room walls were decorated with posters for James Bond movies. The first time I had her over for dinner — I cooked hamburger steak, pinto beans and turnip greens with biscuits — we got into a conversation (which is to say, I was lecturing) about how soap operas and romance novels mislead women with totally unrealistic expectations of what love is like. Lou Ann responded by referring to the James Bond posters: “So, that’s realistic?” And I was like, “Hey, you don’t understand. That stuff totally happens. James Bond is a super spy!”

So that’s how I became “Super Spy,” while an old Isley Brothers tune inspired me to nickname Lou Ann “Sexy Lady”:

Who’s that lady? (Who’s that lady?)
Sexy lady! (Who’s that lady?)
Beautiful lady! (Who’s that lady?)
Real fine lady! (Who’s that lady?)

I would dance upon a string,
Any gift she’d want, I’d bring.
I would give her anything,
If she would just do what I say.

That song is about the pursuit of an elusive object of desire and, while the specific circumstances of our romance might not have been in every way ideal, there was a direct relationship between the elusiveness of the object and the romance of the pursuit.

Suffice it to say that, in the 10 years before I met my wife in the fall of 1987, any shortages of female companionship I’d experienced were temporary and of brief duration. It wasn’t like I was desperate or lonely, but the very first time I met Lou Ann, sparks flew and it was just a matter of whether I could get her. The getting was not easy.

She wasn’t “playing hard to get.” She was hard to get.

“Always negotiate from a position of strength” is excellent advice for young ladies. Men respond to challenges, and if you want to be loved insanely, you’ve got to drive him crazy. You want a man who’s willing to crawl through broken glass and climb over a 10-foot fence topped with razor wire to be with you? Keep the gate locked.

On Feb. 14, 1989, I placed an ad in the special Valentine’s Day section of the Calhoun Times. Addressed to “Sexy Lady,” the ad asked her to marry me and was signed, “Super Spy.”

That was a Tuesday, and I covering a basketball game at Calhoun High School that night. By the time the game was over, with deadline looming, that Valentine’s Day ad had slipped my mind, but when I got to my car, I found that the windshield was covered with a message in red lipstick: “Yes! I love you, Super Spy! — Sexy Lady.”

We got married on a Friday six weeks later.

My wife is quite literally an answer to prayer. When God gives you a good wife, you have an obligation to deserve her love, and I am embarrassed when this obligation occasionally slips my mind. Have I been a good husband? Not always, but I’ve never forgotten the moment when, at the Gordon County courthouse that day 25 years ago, Judge Parker asked me to pledge that part of the wedding vow about “forsaking all others . . . till death do you part.”
Wow. That’s some serious stuff, if you think about it.

Charles Murray recently wrote in favor of “start-up marriages.” Rather than waiting until you have established your financial independence to the point where a marriage becomes a “merger,” Murray argues, there is something to be said for marrying and starting a family while you’re still young and struggling to get ahead. Being young and poor together is a shared experience — certainly not always a pleasant experience — which, if you can make it through, becomes a special bond between a couple.

It’s weird to hear young people say they “can’t afford to get married yet.” Nonsense. No law which requires an expensive wedding — all that catering and stuff — and two can live as cheaply as one.

Call me sentimental, but I think there’s something romantic about starting off as cheaply as possible. Furthermore, as my father once told me, “If you wait to have children until you can afford to have children, you’ll never have children.” Making babies is kind of fun, you know, and figuring out how to pay the bills? Hey, that’s just part of the crawl-through-broken-glass challenge.

Left to right: Emerson, 13; me; Lou Ann; Reagan, 11 (plaid skirt); daughter-in-law Danielle; grandson James Jr. held by his father James, 21; Kennedy, 24; Bob, 21; son-in-law Martin; Jefferson, 15.

We have been blessed, and whatever hardships we endured together have only made me love her more. Love you, Sexy Lady!

— Super Spy