FamilyLife Culture Watch

Colleges Offering Mixed Pairings

Another trend or an isolated situation? It turns out that a handful of colleges are now experimenting with coed dorm rooms.

Not dorms. Dorm rooms.

A couple dozen or more colleges are offering students the option of rooming with someone of the opposite sex. It should be noted that the coed assignments are by request only, and that most colleges still discourage romantically involved couples from rooming together. This Associated Press article generally takes the favorable perspective of the few students who see it as practical, platonic and perfectly normal.

It's a far cry from when I started my freshman semester back in the late 1970s. The dorms at my alma mater (a public university in the Deep South) were not only segregated by sex, but coeds weren't even allowed past the lobby. Soon after, they began to allow limited visitation by students of the opposite sex, and even that modest change opened some big doors to problems.

Back then, a few colleges around the country were beginning to experiment with idea of co-ed dorms, mostly dividing the students by floors. My alma mater didn't follow suit until a generation later. So I'm not sure whether this newest trend toward coed roommates is about the sweep the country or just a foreshadowing of what some college campuses may look like in 2030.

Apparently at least one education research and marketing group noted the trend as early as 2006.

In reading up on the "gender blind" housing phenomenon, here are some of the reasons I've seen from proponents:

• Choosing a close trusted friend or sibling as a roommate
• Homosexual students wanting to avoid same-sex rooming situations
• Women wanting male students around for safety reasons
• No different from a lot of off-campus arrangements, where co-eds share houses to save money
• Existing open visitation rules already result in de facto coed dorm rooms

And the obvious objections:

• It opens the door to more immorality
• Privacy/modesty issues within the dorm room
• With constant close contact, platonic relationships don't always stay platonic
• The problem of community bathrooms
• Colleges are condoning cohabitation by offering these arrangements

Do you have a take on the whole situation? Do you have any personal experience with co-ed dorming/rooming, or do you have children who are facing this in college?

Staying On Top of Laptops

by Scott Williams

(Photo by Julia Freeman-Woolpert)

It's great living in a wired generation. If we wonder about something, we Google for quick answers. We can personalize our music to fit our tastes and sensitivities. We can communicate with friends without much regard to distance or time.

But with all these technological advances adding value to life, it's adding headaches to parents. Especially now that technology is getting more portable.

It used to be much easier to monitor a son's or daughter's communication with the outside world in an effort to protect from negative influences. The phone was in one place in the house, the computer in another, television in another. Now, technology has brought all three together, and placed them in the form of a laptop or cellphone that the child can carry with him or her anywhere. And it's no longer just the Christian family advocates who are concerned, as evidenced by this recent New York Times article.

Virtual parenting was never easy, but the ease with which laptops travel to bedrooms, basements and even bathrooms makes it especially challenging for adults to monitor children’s cyber antics. As laptops proliferate in their children’s everyday lives, parents are wrestling with how best to regulate their use.

The Times article mentions a 2006 Parents and Teens Survey by Pew Research revealing that one quarter of all teens had laptop access. That number is almost guaranteed to be increasing rapidly each year. The article also mentions another survey in the same year revealing that one in three teens had received unwanted sexually explicit images by computer, and one in seven had been sexually propositioned.

More and more, family advocates and mental health professionals are speaking with one voice in calling for stricter parental monitoring of Internet use by their teens.

“Parents are pulling their hair out,” said Dr. Tami Amiri, a Westport psychiatrist specializing in adolescents, who has seen computer-related issues rise with laptop use at area private schools, although the behaviors are not exclusive to laptop users. For a certain type of child, because of biology or genetics, unrestricted laptop use “is the conduit to trouble,” she said.

She isn’t surprised to hear of a boy obsessively downloading pornography, teenagers getting hooked on social networking sites to the exclusion of other activities or girls sending boyfriends pictures of themselves naked, sometimes as birthday presents.

“Then they are devastated when he sends them on to his friends and cousins,” Dr. Amiri said.

Like many other child care professionals, Dr. Amiri advocates keeping all computers on the dining room table or other public spot, with the screen in view of an adult, and limiting time spent on nonacademic subjects. But some parents living in busy households said that was unrealistic, especially with laptops, which are designed for mobility.

As a father of seven, including three teens currently, my wife and I have taken lots of precautions to protect our kids: no Internet access by cellphone; computer use only in a public room and only with password-protected access; at least one content filter on every computer. Still, we find ourselves fighting to stay on top of things.

If you're a parent, what do you do to balance protection and freedom for your teens in an increasingly wired and mobile culture? What issues are you facing, and how are you dealing with them?

HT: Thanks to Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch blog for the heads up on the NYT story.

Around the World in 80 Words #24

SWITZERLAND: Couples are returning to the church… to get divorced. A Zurich church has developed a liturgy to help couples end their marriages where they started.

YEMEN: Eight-year-old Nojoud Nasser may be the world's youngest divorcee, drawing attention to abuses of the arranged marriage culture that characterizes many Middle East countries.

INDIA: Couples are increasingly seeking divorce on "silly" grounds such as "refusal to stay with in-laws, no desire to experiment with lovemaking or unwillingness to do household chores."

Covering the Wheaton Divorce Debate

Wheaton College has been in the news this week after one of its professors resigned his post after divorcing his wife. This has sparked some debate—both on and off campus—about whether it is appropriate for an evangelical Christian college to be concerned about the personal lives of its faculty. In reading, an ABC News online article about these events, I found two very interesting sections:

The first was a quote from Emma Van Hoozer, a junior at Wheaton:

"In our culture divorce doesn't seem serious because we're so used to seeing it, but when you read scripture, you realize we should be much more shocked. We should stop and realize its seriousness," she said. "To be a Christian community, everything needs be public so we can be accountable to each other."

This seemed a very perceptive comment from a college student.

The second interesting section was at the end of the article, where the writer raises the question,

"If the school is free to impose its beliefs on divorced family members where does the law draw the line? Could the school just as easily impose arranged marriages?"

Then he quotes a Cornell labor law professor to back up this incredible statement.

Do you get the feeling that the ABC reporter is just a bit uninformed about American evangelical culture? I can't think of a time when I've ever seen an evangelical pastor or leader promote arranged marriages. Can you?

Splitsville

If you want to see some proof of why God says "I hate divorce" (Malachi 2:16), just look at a website called Postcards from Splitsville.

We've mentioned this site before in Culture Watch, but it's worth visiting again. There you will find cards that children have created to express their thoughts and feelings about the divorce of their parents. The site's creators wanted a forum where "children can share their divorce-related feelings anonymously and parents can get a new perspective on how this life-changing experience impacts their children's lives."

It's very powerful, and very sad. Some of the words on the postcards are so profound that you almost find it hard to believe they come from children:

"It used to be a good thing that I look just like my mom. Not anymore. It just makes my dad sad."

"No child should be called a traitor simply for loving the 'other' parent."

"Who are you?
when your parents wish they never met?"

The messages at Postcards from Splitsville provide a brief glimpse at the tremendous pain felt by children when their world is broken-when the two people they love the most are unable to keep their vows of staying together "until death do us part." Another glimpse can be found in a recent Newsweek cover story. One of the magazine's reporters interviewed members of his high school class of 1982 to learn what impact their parents' divorce has had on them through the years.

A Fuzzy View of Marriage

A few days ago, Drew Dixon over at Elect Exiles blog did something I’ve been thinking of doing for some time. He spent two weeks collecting news items about the current marriage culture and put them all in one blog post. To say that the post is eclectic would be an understatement. Consider:

• Homosexual couples who marry in one state are finding it hard to divorce in others
• The average wedding costs more than $25,000
• The success of cohabitation as “trial marriage”
• A renaissance of the practice of betrothal among some Christian circles

Taken all together, the items bring into clearer focus our how blurry our culture’s vision is when it comes to marriage. A great post (including commentary and links) for readers who enjoy Culture Watch.

Around the World in 80 Words - #23

CANADA: Hundreds of Ontario schools may close for lack of students. The province has 90,000 fewer than six years ago.

INDIA: There is no word in the Hindu language for divorce. But with significant social and economic transformation in the culture, including greater independence for women making divorce more common, there may need to be.

CAMBODIA has stopped processing documents for marriage to foreigners to combat human trafficking. There is a recent surge of Cambodian women marrying South Korean men.

Outside Looking In

A lot of the posts here on Culture Watch highlight surveys and polls that give a current glimpse into the culture of marriage, family, sexuality and gender roles. It’s our effort to try to quantify the enigmatic, to take loosely connected pieces of a puzzle and fit them together to show a big cultural picture.

Right now, I’m reading through a series of books that take a similar approach. However in this case, the authors (Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn and Lisa and Eric Rice) are seeking to explain, not cultural trends, but something much more foundational: how men and women and teens think. What can be more mysterious to a man than the mind of a woman, and vice versa. And what can be more inexplicable to parents than the mind of their teens.

I’ve found these books not only fascinating, but very helpful in making sense of what seems senseless. For example, why do women always ask their husbands “Does this dress make me look fat?” Why are men (even single men) so focused on work? Why do kids who seemed well adjusted as children develop such attitudes as teens?

Some of these survey results are shocking, and the implications pretty profound. I don’t want to give away too much but, in true Culture Watch fashion, I’ll bullet point a of the few survey results, offering a representation of several of the books.

     How Men Think

• 74% of men would rather feel “alone and unloved” rather than “inadequate and disrespected”
• 78% of men would still feel compelled to provide for their family, even if their wife earned enough to support them
• 74% of men said they would be unfulfilled if their wife offered all the sex they wanted, but did so with a reluctant attitude

     How Women Think

• 82% who desired sex less than their husband said they would change that if they could
• 89% thrive when they hear their husband say that they’re beautiful
• 93% say they deeply need, respect and desire their husband

     How Teens Think

• 77% would rather their parents have tough standards than to be their buddies
• 94% say it’s important to know that their parents will always be there for them
• 74% have things they’d like to share with their parents, but are afraid they’ll “freak out”

As a husband of a wonderful wife of nearly 23 years and the father of seven (five who are or have been teens), I find that these books go well beyond statistics to help me glimpse into the heart of my wife and children. And believe it or not, For Women Only helped me immensely to pinpoint and validate things I’ve been feeling about myself for a long time.

And one of the most important things to me is that the conclusions that the Feldhahns and Rices reach in these books confirm truths of God’s unique design for both women and men, and reveal how sin impacts that design. Mind you, the authors don’t go into great biblical detail, but the foundations upon which they build are clearly in line with what Scripture tells us.

The books are all relative quick reads. Here are the links to each:

• For Women Only: What you need to know about the inner lives of men
• For Men Only: A straightforward guide to the inner lives of women 
• For Parents Only: Getting inside the head of your kid 
• For Young Women Only: What you need to know about how guys think
• For Young Men Only (Available soon)

Marriage Off the Endangered List?

With research continuing to show plummeting marriage rates in both the U.S. and abroad, the tendency is to put the institution on the endangered species list. According to a recent survey, however, a revival of sorts may be on the way.

J. Walter Thompson, the nation's largest advertising agency, found that the "millenials" had very traditional views on marriage and family. A survey of 1,250 adults between the ages of 20 and 30 found:

• 94 percent respect monogamy and parenthood
• 88 percent revere marriage
• 43 percent live with a spouse or spouse and children; only 15 percent still live with parents.

The findings were a shock to the advertising firm.

"We were completely surprised. There has been a faulty portrayal of millennials by the media — television, films, news, blogs, everything. These people are not the self-entitled, coddled slackers they're made out to be. Misnomers and myths about them are all over the place," said Ann Mack, who directed the survey and is the official "director of trend-spotting" at the agency.

"Their opinions of monogamy and marriage are products of the era they grew up in, a reaction against a reality-TV world or their unstable childhoods. They are more traditional in their views because they want something better for their own families," Ms. Mack said.

HT: Focus on the Family Citizen Link

"The Talk": More is Better

Last week, we had a post about the increasing difficulty that parents have discussing sex with their children in a world that obsesses over, if not twists, sexuality. But a study published in this month's issue of the journal Pediatrics shows the importance of parents not just talking to their children about sex, but doing it often.

The day of the one-time-only "Birds and Bees" talk apparently is far less effective than an ongoing conversation about a wide range of topics involving sex.

The study, which polled over 300 teens in sixth through twelfth grads, found:

• Children whose parents discussed sex more frequently and more in depth were more likely to delay sexual activity until later
• Those children also reported feeling closer to their parents and were more likely to come to them with questions
• The comfort that the children felt was in direct relation to the depth of the parents' discussions about sex
• Parents who deal with "The Talk" in a checklist fashion were less successful than parents who introduced new topics and followed up with repeated discussions.

This is a point that the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families has been stressing for years according to president Rick Schatz.

"We always encourage parents to engage in continuous, wide-ranging conversations with their kids about sex. Parents must remember they are the number one influence in their children's life," added Schatz. "If they talk about sex, their kids are more likely to make healthy decisions when faced with whether to have sex."

Around the World in 80 Words - #22

LUXEMBOURG: The European Union Court of Justice recently ruled that member countries recognizing same-sex marriages must grant surviving partners the same pension rights as traditional couples.

INDIA: The High Court has upheld that the mandatory one-year waiting period for divorce cannot be shortened for any circumstances

SOUTH KOREA: Marriage registrations soared to an eight-year high last year, and a record number of babies were born. Many credit it to the 2006 Year of the Dog and 2007 Year of the Pig.

A Woman's Place: On Campus

Earlier this month, Time magazine ran an opinion piece that revealed a curious statistic. Of the undergraduate students in the United States, women outnumber men nearly 60% to 40%.

The article didn't go into much explanation why. Nor did I find much help surfing the web for insight. I did find that The Line blog had a post about this very subject that elicited a bevy of comments and conjectures as to why women so outnumber men on the college campus. Between those 150 comments and my own social and cultural observations I've compiled a list of possible reasons.

We welcome you to add your view, and to back it up with any research you are aware of on the subject.

• Unlike the past where the community or the church were the center point of social activity, the college campus is the most likely place to find those of marrying age.
• Today's economy is such that fewer families are able to make it on one income. Therefore, even women whose goal is to be married and have children often plan to provide for some of the family's income.
• Our culture encourages women to be independent and to achieve their potential, encouraging women to get at least an undergraduate degree.
• Cultural roles for men today, on the other hand, are much more blurred than in past generations. In fact, many people complain that boys are not really encouraged to grow up and assume responsibility like they once were.
• The average age of first marriage in the U.S. continues to increase. It is likely that a woman will not marry until her mid- to late-20s or beyond, so having a degree that provides opportunity to make a living in those years is an important part of this transition period.
• As businesses make more opportunities for working from home, the thought to a woman of having to choose between a career and staying home with children is less of a dilemma.
• The likelihood of divorce in today's society weighs heavily on many women, who feel they need to have something to fall back on in case they end up splitting from their husbands
• Men have more job opportunities that lean on physical labor. So while women pursue career fields through college, many men may take a career route that leads through trade school.
• Industrious men are also more likely to feel the need to begin working in a career. As skilled professions increasingly require graduate school training, many man are more inclined to begin working right away or after a short trade skill route rather than delaying their career with seven years of higher education.
• Women innately desire security. Many come from broken homes, or see a large percentage of men their age who are still too immature to raise and provide for a family. As a result, many of these women seek their own security through education and, eventually, a career.

The Bloodless Martyrdom

"Married love is difficult: full of confusion and doubt. Because it is a bloodless martyrdom, designed to purge us of selfishness and show us real love it is difficult. Because it is, for most, a nursery for the next generation, it is of great civic consequence. Because it begins, at least, in love, it is of eternal consequence."

—Dr. John Mark Reynolds, Professor, BIOLA University

Good News, Bad News

A mixed bag of statistics on non-marital pregnancy this month. According to the Centers for Disease Control:

• Teen pregnancy is at an all-time low
• Abortion continues to dramatically decline

HOWEVER

• Out-of-wedlock births are on the rise.

From 1990 to 2004 (the latest year for which these statistics are available) the teen pregnancy rate has dropped 38 percent, while the number of pregnancies to women 30 or older continues to rise. All this as the marriage rate maintains a downward slide.

The latest numbers indicate that fewer unmarried women are opting for abortion, and more are choosing to carry their unwed pregnancies to full term, particularly women over age 30.

"The Talk" in a Tawdry World

My wife and I have had "The Talk" in one form or another with five of our seven children. Any parent will admit that "The Talk" is never easy...

...not easy for the parent to talk about it
...not easy for the child to hear about it
...not easy to know when it's warranted
...not easy to know how much information to give.

In that regard, I don't imagine there is that much difference between parents of the Victorian era, or the Father Knows Best 1950s, or today. "The Talk" is just never easy.

For today's parents, though, the not-so-easy has become a whole lot harder, as an article in Tuesday's Washington Post points out.

What a complex new world parents have to explain today. It's not just that some kids have two mommies, others two daddies or no daddy at all. Or that national debates on abortion and gay marriage, along with news stories on in vitro fertilization and sex changes, are generating a whole new set of questions.

We've also got a transgender person—born a woman but now living as a man, albeit with female reproductive organs intact—showing off what seems to be his six-month pregnancy bump on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Try explaining that to a 9-year-old—or a 40-year-old, for that matter.

When I was a child, my curiosity was about how babies are made and why the male and female bodies are so different. Those were generally topics that didn't come up in polite conversation, so it was easy for parents back then to just ignore the issue until they were forced to deal with it.

Well, today's children have the same questions about where babies come from and why our bodies are different. But they're bombarded every day with sex-driven advertising, music and television. They probably know women who are pregnant without husbands.They've probably received uninvited Internet pop-ups or maybe even nude photos of classmates on their cell phones. They're seeing news reports of polygamy cults and teachers who have sex with students.

As parents, we want to share the purity and the glory of sex with our children as God designed it—the intimate physical relationship between a man and woman devoted to each other for life. But the world has taken a beautiful thing and twisted it a million ways to make it complicated and convoluted, if not downright nasty.

Most everyone today—whether it's FamilyLife's Dennis and Barbara Rainey or a secular child psychologist—agrees that being open with children about sex and being willing to answer their questions honestly is the best policy. Still, it seems most of what our children are being exposed to today is not so much about sex as it is perversion.

My only guide on these matters is understanding God's design for sex, and a lot of prayer for wisdom and sensitivity. Even as an experienced parent, though, I still have a hard time figuring out how to approach the specifics of things that our culture throws at our children.

So I just thought I'd throw it out there. Fellow parents, how have you approached the subject with your children without further jeopardizing their innocence? Or for some of you who are younger, how did your parents navigate these touchy issues with you?

What Price Freedom?

In a culture that seems to place a premium on personal choice, the concept of marriage and family as social or economic institutions gets little consideration.

Well, a groundbreaking report released this week by four family organizations gives a reality check to the notion of marriage as a private matter by showing the impact of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing on U.S. taxpayers. How much? The report states that conservatively, it's $122 billion annually, or more than $1 trillion each decade.

Those who released the report claim that even small reductions in the divorce and non-marital birth rates can produce great benefits, economically, socially and personally.

"This study documents for the first time, that divorce and unwed childbearing-besides being bad for children-are also costing taxpayers a ton of money," said David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values. "Even a small improvement in the health of marriage in America would result in enormous savings to taxpayers," he continued. "For example, a 1 percent reduction in rates of family fragmentation would save taxpayers $1.1 billion."

"These costs are due to increased taxpayer expenditures for anti-poverty, criminal justice and education programs, and through lower levels of taxes paid by individuals whose adult productivity has been negatively affected by increased childhood poverty caused by family fragmentation," said principal investigator Ben Scafidi, Ph.D., economics professor at Georgia College & State University.

"Prior research shows that marriage lifts single mothers out of poverty and therefore reduces the need for costly social benefits," said Scafidi. "This new report shows that public concern about the decline of marriage need not be based only on 'moral' concerns, but that reducing high taxpayer costs of family fragmentation is a legitimate concern of government, policymakers and legislators, as well as community reformers and faith communities."

"These numbers represent real people and real suffering," said Randy Hicks, president of Georgia Family Council. "Both economic and human costs make family fragmentation a legitimate public concern. Historically, Americans have resisted the impulse to surrender to negative and hurtful trends. We fight problems like racism, poverty and domestic violence because we understand that the stakes are high. And while we'll never eliminate divorce and unwed childbearing entirely, we can certainly be doing more to help marriages and families succeed."

These comments dovetail nicely with commentary from Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship, who was addressing the situation, not in the U.S., but in the United Kingdom. And he brings the issue full circle by placing it back at the feet of our society's insistence on personal freedom.

In Britain's case, this politically correct politics "for a decade maintained that all kinds of families are equally valuable." Government officials "have campaigned for all references to marriage to be removed from state documents"; and a plan for helping British children "does not even mention marriage once."

Bad news-very bad news-because the links between crime and family breakdown are so well-established nobody could deny them anymore. Likewise, the link between marriage and children's well-being is not a subject for debate-it is documented. And as marriage declines, so does the birth rate.

So, why do societies persist in this? Their worldviews demand it. Their commitment to personal autonomy and sexual freedom will not permit them to make the needed sacrifices to promote healthy families.

And by "them," I also mean us. The state of marriage in America will be the subject of the president's meeting with the Pope this week. And it will be the subject of tomorrow's "BreakPoint." Be sure to tune in.

This is clearly a case of "be careful what you wish for," because, sadly, the consequences will not be limited to those doing the wishing.

When a Home Loses Its Worth

In her "Surreal Estate" column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Carol Lloyd notes a freakish impact from the downturn in the housing market. Now that the once red hot California real estate market has turned stone cold, what's happening to stone cold marriages? She's calling it

Post-marital cohabitation

As it turns out, couples who would normally separate and sell the house as part of the divorce settlement have nowhere to go and are stuck with each other, living together in a house divided.

"There is a whole new aspect of divorce that most couples never had to face," explained Janell Weinstein, a partner in the law firm of Federbusch & Weinstein in New Jersey. "Many couples are forced to live under the same roof because they can't afford to move on until their home gets sold. This can go on for months or even years as the real estate market across the United States slows down tremendously. Homes that used to sell in weeks are now not moving at all."

And it's not just the couples who are adjusting their thinking. Family (read, divorce) lawyers and judges are having to step even more carefully than usual through the divorce process with couples, because so much of divorce is about splitting up the family property.

"Courts are not ordering properties for sale because of the market," explained [certified family law specialist Stephen] Ruben, who said that judges now routinely bring in real estate experts and analyze housing forecasts to decide whether to side with the spouse who wants to sell now, or the one who wants to wait for the market to improve. "We're seeing judges decide to wait, based on the assumption that the market will improve in the summer or fall. It's having a major impact on resolution of these cases."

Hopefully, seeing another negative aspect of divorce will cause some couples to reconsider their decision to split. Or at least they can wisely use their time while waiting on the house to sell to work on their relationship, so they can learn to tolerate each other while living under the same roof. Who knows, they might even learn to love each other again and make a marriage out of it.

Around the World in 80 Words - #21

SPAIN: Using a legal loophole, couples are getting temporarily divorced, long enough for their children to be placed in better school districts under a government program for disadvantaged children.

FINLAND: Parliament is considering legislation granting a all workers week paid leave for a "Love Vacation" to keep relationships from disintegrating from workplace stress

MALAYSIA: New director of the Women's Affair Ministry is focusing on the big problem areas: Rising rates of child abuse, early divorce; falling rates of marriages, births.

Walkaway Wife Syndrome

In the current issue of Psychology Today, Michelle Weiner Davis writes that two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by wives, and she astutely identifies a distinct pattern that many, if not most, of these wives go through on the way to divorce.

During the early years of marriage, a woman tends to be the emotional caretaker of her relationship. She makes certain her marriage remains a priority, insisting on quality time together, meaningful conversation and shared activities. . . However, if the marriage takes a back seat to other commitments, she pursues her husband for more connection by having frequent heart-to-heart talks. If these tête-à-têtes are successful, the marriage blossoms. If not, her complaints are no longer confined to her feeling unimportant. She begins to find fault with many other aspects of their relationship. . .

Suffice it to say, these complaints hardly prompt him to want to spend more time with her. And so, she quietly plans her exit strategy. She tells herself, "I'll leave when my youngest goes to college, or "I'm going to find my soul mate and then I'll leave this marriage," or "As soon as I can support myself financially, I'm outta' here."

Exit strategies often take years to execute and during that time women are focused on fortifying their resources, not fixing their marriages. The absence of complaints has their husbands believing that things have improved; they're out of the dog house. "No news is good news," they tell themselves as they obliviously continue to lead separate lives. But then "D-Day" arrives and their wives inform them that the marriages are over, triggering shock and devastation. "Why didn't you tell me you were this unhappy," these men protest, words that finally nail the marital coffin shut. It is then that they start to recognize the importance of their wives and their children. They become desperate to save their marriages.

The threat of divorce generates true soul-searching. . . [M]ost of these men sincerely undergo a personal transformation that shifts their priorities forever. They typically make great second husbands. . . Gradually, they become the husbands these women have been wanting.

But for so many women it's "too little, too late," or "I know this is not going to last. If I stay in this marriage, you will go back to your old shenanigans," which, though completely understandable, is nonetheless, tragic.

This scenario is all too common, and that's the very reason why it's important for husbands and wives to work hard at communication, and learn to speak each others' languages. Every one of us, male or female, needs to know we're valued. To a wife, this means having a husband who loves her, who talks with her and shows her how important she is to him. For a husband this means having his wife's respect, knowing she appreciates what he does for her and the family, and reminds him that what he is doing is making an impact.

A great resource for understanding this concept is a series of three FamilyLife Today broadcasts with Emmerson Eggerichs, author of Love and Respect and Cracking the Communication Code. Listen online for free.

• Understanding the Connection Between Love and Respect
• Communication Principles to Live By
• The Jesus Way of Talking

Teach Your Children Well

“The school will teach children how to read, but the environment of the home must teach them what to read. The school can teach them how to think, but the home must teach them what to believe.”

–Charles A. Wells

Most Likely to Divorce

A new study out of Washington-Lee University of 100,000 professionals finds that women who hold MBA degrees are more likely to divorce; more likely than than women with other degrees and even more likely than men with MBAs.

The "Working Dad" blog of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (the author of which has an MBA wife) brought up some poignant comments.

"Between the ability to leave and probably constraints on how much they put back into the relationship they (women with MBAs) are probably a more at risk population," says Pepper Schwartz, a relationship expert and sociology professor at the University of Washington. "I do think we are in a transitional mode, almost everything we are talking about it's first or second generation...most of these people don't have models."

Washington & Lee's Robin Fretwell Wilson, meanwhile, offered up fodder for debate when talking about the "opt out of family" trend:

"But when family no longer makes sense to those in whom society has invested the most, society really loses. This abdication of family robs all of us of a vibrant, functioning community -- weakening the economy, weakening families, weakening the professionals themselves."

Working Mom I love you, MBA. or no MBA.

Marriage in the Marketplace

The Barna Research Group recently released the results of a survey that challenges two widely-held myths:

• Half of all marriages end in divorce
• Divorce is as common among evangelicals as it is the general population

The Barna telephone survey of 3,800 adults all but busts both. According to the findings

• Only 33 percent of respondents who had ever been married reported ever divorcing.
• Only 26 percent of evangelicals report ever having divorced, 20 percent lower than the general population.

Encouraging, right? Well, put it in a different context, though. If we consider "till death do us part" as a reasonable equivalent to a lifetime warranty, a one-third or one-fourth failure rate would hardly be acceptable, would it? Could it be that culturally we've come to expect less from marriage than from the stuff we buy?

In a way, that's what Christian researcher George Barna is saying in his news release on the recent study.

"Interviews with young adults suggest that they want their initial marriage to last, but are not particularly optimistic about that possibility. There is also evidence that many young people are moving toward embracing the idea of serial marriage, in which a person gets married two or three times, seeking a different partner for each phase of their adult life."

"There no longer seems to be much of a stigma attached to divorce; it is now seen as an unavoidable rite of passage."

Kind of like a marital version of planned obsolescence. Continuing with the merchandise analogy, Americans have become impulse buyers when it comes to relationships, according to Barna's assessment.

"Studies showing the importance and value of preparing for marriage seem to fall on deaf ears. America has become an experimental, experience-driven culture. Rather than learn from objective information and teaching based on that information, people prefer to follow their instincts and let the chips fall where they may. Given that tendency, we can expect America to retain the highest divorce rate among all developed nations of the world."

"Government statistics and a wealth of other research data have shown that co-habitation increases the likelihood of divorce, yet cohabiting is growing in popularity."

We truly have come to treat marriage more as a consumable than a commitment.

Men Mistake Women's Non-Verbal Cues

(Photo by Mikas Vitkauskas)

A new study shows that men tend to often mistake women's friendliness as expressions of romantic or sexual interest. That may be nothing new, but the same study indicated that men often missed women's sexual interest clues and passed them off as mere friendliness.

The study, conducted by Indiana and Yale universities and appearing in the April edition of Psychological Science, involved both men and women looking at photographs of fully clothed women and make a determination whether the women in the pictures were friendly, sad, sexually interested or rejecting. Facial expressions, non-verbal clues like posture, and clothing choices were variables in the decisions by the participants.

The idea was to test two separate theories. The Bias Theory holds that men tend to oversexualize clues, whereas the Sensitivity Theory posits that men are just not as adept as women at delineating between a woman's romantic and platonic interests.

The women studied more accurately identified the intended communication of the women in the picture-whether friendly, sexual, rejecting or sad-in every category. Interestingly, these women participants were more likely than the men to view a woman's clothing as a signal of sexual interest.

In the study's findings, the authors admit that the results only prove a couple of things: that women are better than men at recognizing subtle clues and are more accurate in their first impressions about other women. The study's authors said that more research needed to be done to test whether men get better at their impressions through continual interaction.

In other words, a man may tend to test the idea about whether a woman may or may not be romantically interested by pursuing her. This theory is borne out by another university study that shows that two-thirds of women had experienced an incident where a male acquaintance misinterpreted her friendliness as sexual interest.

I know I'm going against evolutionary psychologists here (big surprise), but I believe God has generally hardwired men to react to situations, pursue goals and solve problems, while He's made women more likely to prefer to respond and be pursued.

Nature and our culture both allow women more latitude in expressing emotion than they do men, so a smile, sustained eye contact, standing close or touching are appropriate in women for conveying both platonic friendliness and sexual interest. Culturally, men don't have the same frame of reference for these actions. And since they tend to be more sexually hardwired than women, they interpret these actions with more romantic intent.

As a man, I'm tempted to say here that this study proves that women need to say what they mean and not expect men to play guessing games. But maybe the point is that it's part of our original design. It's interesting that the ambiguous nature of women's non-verbal communication causes a man to initiate and a woman to be pursued, something that fits well with God's design for both sexes.

Around the World in 80 Words - #20

QATAR: Somewhere in the country, a couple divorces about every 27 hours, most initiated by men in their mid to late 20s.

AFGHANISTAN: President Hamid Karzai called for fathers to stop forcing the marriage of their underage daughters. Eighty percent of women face forced marriage, two-thirds of those before age 16.

CHINA: An official has ruled that the country's one-child policy will be in effect for at least another decade. About 200 million Chinese will be entering childbearing years during that time.

Marriage and the Glory of God

(photo by Nat Arnett)

I enjoy reading Al Mohler's blog because he has an inquisitive mind, a knack for finding interesting topics in our culture to address, and a thoroughly biblical perspective. Last week the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary had a great blog post, "Marriage and the Glory of God," that provides a wonderful big-picture perspective of God's purpose for marriage in a post-modern culture.

Marriage is about our happiness, our holiness, and our wholeness--but it is supremely about the glory of God. When marriage is entered into rightly, when marriage vows are kept with purity, when all the goods of marriage are enjoyed in their proper place-God is glorified.

Our chief end is to glorify God-and marriage is a means of His greater glory. As sinners, we are all too concerned with our own pleasures, our own fulfillments, our own priorities, our own conception of marriage as a domestic arrangement. The ultimate purpose of marriage is the greater glory of God-and God is most greatly glorified when His gifts are rightly celebrated and received, and His covenants are rightly honored and pledged.

At the end of his piece, Mohler asks, "How does marriage glorify God?" And he quotes Tertullian, an early church father:

How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in home, one in desire, one in the way of life they follow, one in the religion they practice . . . Nothing divides them either in flesh or in spirit . . . They pray together, they worship together, they fast together; instructing one another, encouraging one another, strengthening one another. Side by side they visit God's church and partake God's banquet, side by side they face difficulties and persecution, share their consolations. They have no secrets from one another; they never shun each other's company; they never bring sorrow to each other's hearts . . . Seeing this Christ rejoices. To such as these He gives His peace. Where there are two together, there also He is present.

What a great picture of marriage as God intends it.