FamilyLife Culture Watch

Why Men and Women Have Affairs

"Men's affairs in particular are often the cause of troubled marriages and not the effect. In my data, 56 percent of men who entered into affairs said they had ''happy'' or ''very happy'' marriages, compared with 30 percent of women. For men, the strongest predictor for having an affair is their attitudes and values about monogamy. For women, it's marital unhappiness."

--Author and psychotherapist Shirley Glass, in her book NOT Just Friends

A New Immigration Problem

Illegal immigration has been one of the hottest topics in the U.S. over the past year. But the day's most impassioned pleas for the return of these illegal Mexican workers are not coming from those fearing lost jobs.

They're coming from wives and children south of the border.

A recent Washington Post article details the plight and pleas of self-proclaimed "wetback wives," women from Tecalpulco, Mexico who are calling for the U.S. Government to deport their husbands. Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies points out that the pursuit of income as the means to happiness isn't meeting the deepest needs.

"These women would not be asking their husbands to come back if they themselves were starving," he said. "It's really more of people wanting more, a better life."

While the income is surely helpful, these women realize it is coming at a great cost: lost companionship. Together, they have established their own website for communicating with the people of the U.S, and with their husbands. The opening words of the site reveal their heartache:

"From the women and children of Mexico... ...To the people of the U.S.A.

Enforce Your Laws.

Please Close the United States Border to Illegal Migration. Help us to Keep our Husbands Home with our Families."

Marital Commitment in a Consumer Culture

"In the consumer culture of marriage, commitments last as long as the other person is meeting our needs. We still believe in commitment, because we know that committed relationships are good for us, but powerful voices coming from inside and outside tell us that we are suckers if we settle for less than we think we need and deserve in our marriage.

"Most baby boomers and their offspring carry in our heads the internalized voice of the consumer culture—to encourage us to stop working so hard or to get out of a marriage that is not meeting our current emotional needs."

--Bill Doherty, director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota

A Clash of Perspectives on Purity

by Scott Williams

In the Western culture today, there is an undeniable clash of worldviews—secular and Christian—over the issue of marriage and family. That clash was quite evident in a March 19 guest editorial in USA Today, A dance for chastity. In it, Mary Zeiss Stange, a professor of women's studies and religion at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., took exception to the "purity ball," an event in which fathers celebrate their daughters as special and encourage them to remain sexually pure until marriage.

While not all Christians may agree with the idea of the "purity ball", they can at least understand the basis for it: God has set the father as the spiritual leader of his family and protector of his children, and has designed sex only within the context of marriage.

So how in the world could Stange fault that? On three basic grounds: Male headship is inherently suspect; sexual expression shouldn’t be suppressed; and personal independence is paramount. Consider these excerpts from the column:

(T)here is something profoundly disturbing about these purity balls and all they represent. They reflect, and worse, they romanticize, several of the most pernicious aspects of patriarchal religion.

But the assumption that the father is the Lord's stand-in in the household is as dangerous as is the idea that his "undefiled" daughter is a princess.

But the pampering comes at the price of her sexual self-agency.

Underlying this whole business, of course, is the age-old assumption that sex is dirty…

Similar in spirit to Promise Keepers, the evangelical men's leadership movement whose motto is "Men of Integrity," this Purity Revolution puts women and girls in their place, and that place is defined by, and subordinate to, the men in their lives.

No girl is her father's property. Nor should any young woman be placed in a position where she could risk unsafe sex, or unplanned pregnancy, or the guilt of breaking a promise to a parent, only to say, "I pledged my virginity to Dad, and now all I've got is this lousy T-shirt."

What Married Women Want

A scholarly study released last year by a team of sociologists at the University of Virginia is giving a glimpse into what makes marriages happy... and successful. An interview in Christianity Today of one of the study's authors highlights some of the major findings. Just picking a few here:

• Evangelical women tend to be happier in their marriages than other women, particularly when both the wife and the husband attend church on a regular basis
• Couples who attend church regularly are between 35 and 50 percent less likely to divorce than Americans who attend church just nominally
• If the husband earns more than 66 percent of the income, the wife is more likely to report that she's happy with her marriage, and she's also more likely to report that she spends quality time with her husband.

The study's authors, Brad Wilcox and Steven Nock, have a website (happiestwives.org) devoted to the findings of this study. In it, they list the top predictors of women's happiness, in order of importance:

1. A husband's emotional engagement
2. Fairness
3. A breadwinning husband
4. A commitment to marriage
5. Staying at home
6. Shared religious attendance
7. Traditional gender attitudes