A Blogged Life

“If someone wants a sex schedule, two times a week, or three times a week, I can’t take that agreement into a courtroom and ask that it be enforced,” Carrozza explained.

The agreements are not not legally binding, according to experts, but serve as a symbolic way to bind couples.

Not sure what the point is then.

[A]nalysis of wedded couples’ likelihood of getting divorced or remaining married… Once again, the single biggest determinant is the ratio of positive to negative comments the partners make to one another. And the optimal ratio is amazingly similar — five positive comments for every negative one. (For those who ended up divorced, the ratio was 0.77 to 1 — or something like three positive comments for every four negative ones.)

Modern studies conducted by the Family Research Council now indicate that about half of American kids won’t reach adulthood without seeing the breakup of their parents. To be precise, only 45.8 percent of American children reach the age of 17 with both their biological parents married.

Recently I wrote a post about how to pick a husband if you want to have kids. A lot of people asked that I write the male corollary to that post. So, here it is.

This post is about identity. How to see yourself. How to figure out if you can remake yourself. How to make a life that is true to yourself. And, put more bluntly, how to get the best deal in a wife given who you are.

Shaidle compares McMillian’s book to other advice books of the past, one of which I devoured in my 20‘s, Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress. I am struck by the differences in the advice. The old advice focused on how to be a good woman. The new advice, however, focuses on how not to be a bad person.

The really short summary of Advice to a Young Wife: have a life and don’t nag. More eloquently, Advice to a Young Wife maintains, “One is born female, but being a woman is a personal accomplishment.”

How did it come to pass that the generation of women who have more opportunity than any generation of women in history have to be reminded not to be bitchy, selfish, shallow, or a liar?

Just across the northern border, in Quebec, couples have long enjoyed rules permitting “de facto” spouse status — all two people need do are live together more than a year and check a box on their income tax statement. When the relationship ends — whether it’s a matter of years or decades — there is no legal support obligation.

Sounds like your libertarian bachelor cousin’s dream, doesn’t it?

This summer, the Supreme Court of Canada is expected to rule on a case that could change all that, according to Slate. The case involves a de facto couple that ended their relationship ten years ago — after living together for a decade — and have three kids together. Oh, and he’s a billionaire. The woman challenged Quebec’s law and sought everything to which a married woman would be entitled, claiming that the law discriminates against unmarried couples.

if divorce rates are higher in a society, women have a higher incentive to obtain work experience in case they find themselves alone in the future. The reason the incentive is higher is because in our data, women happen to be the second earner in the household more often than men. European women anticipate not getting divorced as often and hence find less reason to insure themselves by working as much as American women.

In June of 1971, just days before his 26-year-old son, Michael, got married, future-U.S. President Ronald Reagan sent him the following letter of advice. It really is quite stunning.

More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook, according to a U.K. survey by Divorce Online, a legal services firm. And over 80% of U.S. divorce attorneys say they’ve seen a rise in the number of cases using social networking, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. 

“Affairs happen with a lightning speed on Facebook,” says K. Jason Krafsky, who authored the book “Facebook and Your Marriage” with his wife Kelli. In the real world, he says, office romances and out-of-town trysts can take months or even years to develop. “On Facebook,” he says, “they happen in just a few clicks.” The social network is different from most social networks or dating sites in that it both re-connects old flames and allows people to “friend” someone they may only met once in passing. “It puts temptation in the path of people who would never in a million years risk having an affair,” he says. 

And many marriages that might have ended in divorce are not occurring in the first place. Nearly 90 percent of men born from 1940 to 1944 got married by age 35; that rate fell 14 percentage points for the group born between 1965 and 1969.

I’m dangerously close to becoming just another statistic.