FamilyLife Culture Watch

Jon & Kate Plus 25

You thought their life was complicated before divorce? Just wait!

By Ron L. Deal

Editor’s note: Ron L. Deal is president of Successful Stepfamilies.com, and offers a unique perspective on the marriage problems faced by Jon and Kate Gosselin.

Jon and Kate Gosselin are divorcing and the world debates what will become of their eight children. How will they care for them after the split? Should they continue their television program, Jon and Kate Plus 8, on TLC, or would doing so be “psychologically abusive” to the children?

Most of the discussion seems to be focused on the next few weeks of this family’s existence; I’m thinking a few years down the road. As a therapist, author, and speaker who specializes in stepfamilies, I know how complicated life is about to become for this household.

Assuming that Jon and Kate are like most divorced adults, they will remarry (75 percent do), even though right now they may be saying that’s the last thing on their mind. Marriage is part of the American ideal and we don’t give up on it easily. Statistically speaking, Jon and Kate will both be hitched again within five years.

Let’s say that Jon’s new wife is previously married and have children of her own (let’s assume two), but Kate’s new spouse has not been married before and doesn’t have any children. This means the eight Gosselin children will only have two stepsiblings to get to know, but they will also have to forge relationships with two new stepparents (and their stepmother’s ex-husband), three new sets of stepgrandparents, and countless aunts, uncles, and cousins. Jon and Kate Plus 8 can quickly become Jon and Kate Plus 25 or more very quickly. This expanded stepfamily system will have three households to manage on a daily basis, and six household schedules to navigate when it comes time to visit the grandparents at Christmas. And if that doesn’t seem complicated enough, the number of possible interactions between family members within this now three household stepfamily will likely be 34,000 times more than before the divorce. I’m not sure Facebook will solve that.

The process of “decoupling”

But there’s even more complexity to manage. Divorce includes what we sometimes call “decoupling”—the emotional process couples must maneuver to stop being lovers and learn only to be co-parents (doesn’t it sound painful?). Ironically, decoupling can pave the way to healthy coparenting during the stepfamily years. But this process is extremely difficult for most couples and they simply don’t manage it well.

Why?

Around the World in 80 Words - #54

EGYPT: After a two-year appeal to his parents to allow him to marry a woman from a lower caste, a 25-year-old man castrated himself. Marriages in southern Egypt are usually within castes, and rarely for love.

UNITED KINGDOM: Statistics show a continuing decline and divorce rates and increase in the number of years the average couple is married.

AFGHANISTAN: Women’s rights advocates are still battling the government saying changes in the marriage law don’t go far enough to confront marital rape.

Boredom Can Uproot Your Marriage

Everyone who's been married for even a short while knows what conflict can do to a marriage. But a new study of marriages in the "seven year itch" shows that the absence of conflict (and interest) can be just as destructive.

Couples who found themselves in a rut in year seven of their marriage were likely to report dissatisfaction by their 16th anniversary. However, satisfaction in the seventh year didn't predict less boredom by year 16.

The researchers, from University of Michigan and Stony Brook University, found that boredom undermines closeness, which in turn reduces marital satisfaction. Things like lack of satisfaction and unresolved bitterness lead to isolation, the polar opposite of oneness. 

"It suggests that excitement in relationships facilitates or makes salient closeness, which in turn promotes satisfaction in the long term," [researcher Terri Orbuch] said.

Couples can reduce boredom by participating together in exciting activities. The closeness may lead to greater satisfaction, partner responsiveness, commitment and trust, the researchers said.

Truth is that, without intervention, isolation is the default direction of marriage. Only couples who are actively growing toward each other will continue to experience satisfaction in their marriage relationship.

That is why much of FamilyLife's ministry has always focused on helping couples grow in oneness and fight isolation. And since marriage is such an intimate, multi-faceted relationship oneness needs to develop not just physically, but emotionally, socially and spiritual as well.

God never intended us to settle for so-so marriages, or even good ones. Marriage is designed by God as an earthly reflection of the relationship he desires with the man and woman he created in His image. Here are some resources to help you avoid boredom and isolation and to experience a truly great marriage as God intends it.

• Simply Romantic Nights: Igniting Passion in Your Marriage

• Moments with You: Daily Connections for Couples

• Simply Romantic Dates

• Two Hearts Praying As One

A little communication here

By Scott Williams

In addition to publishing Culture Watch, I also create a weekly poll for FamilyLife.com. I can generally anticipate what the results will be, but a recent poll was a bit of a surprise.

Have you given your mate a love note in the past month?
Yep, a full-blown letter/card	14.2%
I've scratched out a quick note	15.7%
I sent one electronically. Does that count?	15.7%
Ouch! It's been that long?	54.5%
Total Votes: 134

I was sure that very few readers would have written a full love letter or card to their spouse in the past month, but fairly certain that most would have at least scribbled a note or sent an email or text message. So to find that five out of every nine people who took the poll haven't sent any kind of love note in more than a month was a bit of an eye opener.

I noticed this troubling sign just before we entered our weekly planning meeting for our emagazine, The Family Room.  Less than a half-hour into our meeting, I made another similar discovery. We were comparing the average pageviews for articles within FamilyLife.com's Healthy Marriage topic. All of us there were a bit surprised that Loneliness and Isolation ranked #1. Communication, on the other hand, was way on down the list. How ironic.

It seems that in our individualistic, consumerist culture, we want others to reach out to us but don't feel a compelling need to make the effort to reach out to others. When our spouses aren't noticing us or "meeting our needs," we may tend to get resentful, which often causes us to shut down communication and retreat to our own bitter feelings. The result is loneliness and isolation.

The antidote is communication. When lines of communication are open, those petty squabbles, minor annoyances and simple misunderstandings don't have the chance to fester into full-blown bitterness. In fact, they become opportunities to relate to each other in a much more personal way, sharing feelings that might never have been discussed had the situation not required you to deal with the cause of the grievances. Once the problems are resolved though, your relationship becomes closer, and you've established a new tone of openness and healthy communication for the next time a disagreement comes along.

I invite you to check out the wealth of articles on FamilyLife.com. Sure you can check out the Loneliness and Isolation articles, but your time might be better spent proactively looking at the tips on communication.

Pop Goes the Gender

By Scott Williams

Although his parents might object to me calling him such, two-year-old Pop is a social experiment.

The Swedish toddler's mom and dad, eschewing social gender constraints, refuse to let anyone know whether the child is a boy or girl. They never use pronouns to refer to the toddler, and have outfitted the child with everything from dresses to pants. They also regularly change the child's hairstyle.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

While the outcome of this informal experiment might answer some long-standing questions about how much of gender is biological and how much is conditioned by the culture, it may come at the expense of Pop. It wouldn't be the first time.

More than 40 years ago, a botched circumcision on a twin brother prompted parents to raise Bruce Reimer as "Brenda." He had reconstruction work and was encouraged to dress and act like a girl. As his brother Brian tells it, "the only difference between him and I was he had longer hair." Only when Bruce/Brenda began to rebel against femininty as a teen did his father tell him the whole story.

After bouts with anger and depression, Bruce changed his name to David and underwent surgical procedures and hormone treatments to become a man. He eventually married and was able to have a normal sex life and, despite being unable to father children of his own, did raise three children with his wife.

But by then, David's psychological trauma was exacting its toll. After a separation from his wife, a job loss, and the death of his twin brother, David committed suicide in 2004. In the years before, he had publicly spoken of his ordeal, labeling the gender identity experiment a crushing failure.

Before adolescence blew the lid off of everything, those who said it was nurture not nature that determined gender identity had pointed to the Reimer case as proof. Eventually Johns Hopkins University, which had initially encouraged the Reimers to allow Bruce to be Brenda, abandoned its gender reassignment ideals.

You would think that people would learn, but with our current cultural tendency to reject anything that limits our ability to define our own humanity, the practice continues. One of the current parenting fads is to delay puberty with hormonal treatments until a child settles what gender most closely matches his or her feelings.

The whole thing is much simpler than we make it out to be. Sexual identity, both physical and emotional, is by God's design. He created male and female to correspond to each other, both physically and emotionally. Sure, there are cultural norms that either downplay or caricature gender attributes. Some may be harmful, but others (like pink and blue) are benign and petty.

It's okay and even healthy to reject narrow, often arbitrary, gender constraints. It's foolish, on the other hand, to pretend that these differences are completely devoid of divine design. True balance comes from understanding God's original design and operating within that realm.

Nowhere does God mention pink and blue.  He does not forbid men to cry or women to do auto mechanics. He has, however, created men to be risk-takers, providers, initiators and achievers, and women to be responders, nurturers, and to experience life as a holistic blend of mind and emotion. And He has also created us as infinitely unique individuals who vary wildly within those male/female designs. Understanding God's design provides both structure and freedom.

I hope Pop's parents realize the futility of their blank slate approach to gender before the damage is done. With Pop due to become a big brothersister in the next few months, that realization can't come too soon.