Relationships & Travel
Article
Julia Sneden, M's Day: When band aids and a kiss no longer suffice to help your child deal with life, we all reach for whatever once soothed — a hug, a song, a pot of halvah quickly stirred up, a swift joke or a shared family memory. It’s the best we can do, and sometimes it’s soothing, or at least the beginnings of a healing force
The Social Connectednedness of Older Adults: A National Profile
Older Adults have Smaller, More Closely Connected Social Circles
As the US population ages, scholars and policy makers have become increasingly concerned about the social isolation of older adults. Using new data from a population-based study of older Americans ages 57 to 85, researchers Benjamin
Cornwell, Edward O. Laumann, and L. Philip Shumm provide the first comprehensive profile of older Americans’ social networks. The authors find, consistent with previous research, that older Americans do show some signs of isolation: their networks are smaller and their ties become more distant. Yet this is not the whole story. Their results show that age increases the frequency of socializing with neighbors, religious participation, and volunteering. In addition, some later-life transitions, such as retirement and bereavement, may prompt greater connectedness. The authors conclude that their findings are “inconsistent with the view that old age has a universal negative influence on social connectedness.”
Social Inequalities in Happiness in the United States , 1972 to 2004: An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis
Americans Becoming Happier, but Baby-Boomers Less Happy than Others
As Americans live longer, are they living better, happier lives? Research by Yang Yang, a sociologist at The University of Chicago, provides a comprehensive analysis of the disparities in happiness between men and women with different demographic characteristics, such as age and race. While substantial variation in subjective happiness exists between social groups, she finds that overall, levels of happiness increase with age. Since 1995, most groups of Americans have seen an up tick in happiness, with the happiness gap between men and women closing during this time. The racial disparity in happiness, although declining, continues to persist. Interestingly, she finds that baby boomers have experienced less happiness on average than both earlier and more recent cohorts. This suggests that happiness in later life is closely related to early life conditions and formative experiences. For example, larger cohort sizes increase the competition to enter schools and the labor market and create more strains to achieve expected economic success and family life. Baby boomer’s unique experiences during early adulthood may have had a lasting impact on their sense of happiness.
Essays
Julia Sneden's supermarket trip in her new car becomes an adventure, Rules of the Road: I parked neatly, but I had to haul out the manual to figure out how to turn off the motor — excuse me, both motors (electric & gasoline). Gone are the days of turning a key in the ignition
Julia Sneden, Musings on the Grand Life: Multigenerational contact provides a depth or resonance to any child’s development... It’s not all sweetness and light, of course. There are bound to be what my grandmother called starchy times
Travel Article
Joan James Rapp, Part Two of Yin and Yang on the Yangtze; A Senior Adventure in the “People’s Republic of Steps:” China is a beautiful, fascinating country, a contradiction of ancient wonders and modern technology. Just because you missed seeing it in your salad days does not mean that you can’t have a memorable journey now
Selections Trends in Marital Stability
by Betsey Stevenson and
Justin Wolfers
This paper documents trends in marital stability over recent decades. Our assessment is motivated by a desire to update earlier analysis with the latest data as well as an attempt to reconcile apparently conflicting results. The reconciliation turns out to be quite straightforward, leading us to present the most recent data on marital trends in a much more interpretable form than previous attempts.
Examining first marriages, the latest data for every anniversary up to the 25th anniversary now point to flat or slightly rising marital instability. Overall, these data suggest that the trough in marital stability occurred among those wed in the 1970s, and that subsequently there is a systematic pattern of slightly increasing marital stability. Reflecting the fact that the latest realized data for longer marriage durations reflects marriages from the period during which divorce was rising sharply (in the 1970s and earlier), this pattern is not evident beyond the 25th anniversary. Turning to second marriages we see that there is no clear pattern in the data. It is worth noting that there are fewer second marriages and thus the estimates are less precise. In general, second marriages have slightly higher dissolution rates.
...
The much-cited claim that one-in-two first marriages will end in divorce will likely end up being realized for those who married in the 1970s. Thirty years after these marriages 48.9% of them had ended in divorce. However, the more recent data give us greater confidence in forecasting that subsequent marriages are less likely to end in divorce. Indeed, the divorce probabilities of the 1990s marriage cohort are now only a little above those who married in the 1960s, for a similar marriage duration. It is worth noting that these cohorts will likely live longer than previous cohorts, giving them a longer period of time to be “at risk” of divorcing. Thus, declining divorce probabilities at each year of marriage yield a reasonably clear forecast of longer and more stable marriages, although rising longevity complicates any assessment of the relative likelihood of marriage ending by divorce rather than death.
...
Changes in the stock of people ever-divorced people reflect the rate at which people divorce and the rate at which those already divorced die. Analyses of the stock of those whose current marital status is divorced are further affected by the rate at which the divorced remarry. Only in recent years are those whose marriages dissolved during the period of highest divorce rates approaching the peak years of mortality. This explains why the stock of divorcees has continued to rise even decades after the flow of new divorces slowed..
Consult the entire paper with accompanyng charts and figures
An Excerpt From Will You Marry Me?
Seven Centuries of Love
Edited by Helene Scheu-Riesz
Published by Simon and Schuster
Isabella of Angoulme, Queen Dowager and Countess of March and Angoulme, to King Henry of England
AD 1220
We hereby signify to you that when the Earls of March and Eu departed this life, the Lord Hugh de Lusignan remained alone and without heirs in Poictou, and his friends would not permit that our daughter should be united to him by marriage, because her age is so tender, but counseled him to take a wife from whom he might speedily hope for an heir; and it was proposed that he should take a wife in France, which if he had done, all your land in Poictou and Gascony should be lost. We therefore, seeing the great peril that might accrue to you if that marriage took place, married the said Hugh Earl of March ourselves; and God knows that we rather did it for your benefit than our own. Wherefore we entreat you, as our dear son, that this thing may be pleasing to you, seeing that it conduces greatly to the profit of you and yours; and we earnestly pray that you restore to him his lawful right, that is Niort, the castles of Exeter and Rockingham, and 3,500 marks which your father, our former husband, bequeathed to us; and so, if it please you, deal with him who is so powerful, that he may not remain against you, since he can serve you well...and if it shall please you, you may send for our daughter, your sister, by a trusty messenger and letters patent, and we will send her to you.
Isabella was beautiful and mischievous. She did not send her daughter but kept her as a sort of hostage, to put pressure on the king, her son. She intrigued against him and put all sorts of difficulties in his way.
The plight in which Margery Brews, who later became Mrs. John Paston, found herself when she wrote the following letter is an example of what marriages mostly were concerned with in the fifteenth century, among wealthy commoners as among royalty.
Unto my right well-beloved Valentine, John Paston Esqu., be this bill delivered:
1477
Right reverend and worshipful and right-beloved Valentine, I recommend me to you full heartily, desiring to hear of your welfare, which I beseech the Almighty God long for to preserve .... And if it please you to hear of my welfare, I am not in good health of body nor heart nor shall be till I hear from you.
And my lady my mother hath belabored the matter to my father full diligently, but she can no more get than ye know of; for which God knoweth I am full sorry. But if ye love me as I trust verily that ye do, ye will not leave me therefore. For if ye had not half the livelihood that ye have for to do the greatest labor that any woman alive might, I would not forsake you.
No more to you at this time, but the Holy Trinity have you in keeping. And I beseech you that this bill be not seen by none earthly creature save yourself.
And this letter was indited at Topcroft, with full heavy heart
BY YOUR OWN
Margery Brews
Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Henry VII, was engaged to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon. Her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, postponed the marriage for two years, till the bridegroom had completed his fourteenth year and the bride was fifteen.
They were married in November 1501, and five months later Catherine was a widow. Henry VII was so afraid that he would have to pay back Catherines dowry and would lose the alliance with Spain that he urged the engagement of his second son, Henry, to the young widow. That the boy was only eleven at the time and Catherine seventeen did not hinder the father and Catherines friends both in England and in Spain from campaigning for a speedy celebration of the marriage. Special permission had to be obtained from the pope, who was glad to give it because he hoped the union would strengthen the Roman Church in England. Young Henry resisted for a while and registered doubts about the validity of such a marriage, but he married Catherine in the end.
Arthur, Prince of Wales, to Catherine of Aragon
1499
Most illustrious and excellent lady, my dearest spouse,
I wish you very much health .... I have read the sweet letters of your Highness, from which I have easily perceived your entire love for me. Truly your letters traced by your own hand have so delighted me and have rendered me so cheerful and jocund that I fancied I beheld your Highness and conversed with and beheld my dearest wife. I cannot tell you what an earnest desire I feel to see your Highness, and how vexatious is to me this procrastination of your coming ... let it be hastened that instead of absent we may be present with each other, and the loves conceived between us may reap their proper fruit....
From our castle of Ludlow, 5th of October 1499
Copyright 1940 by Helene Scheu-Riesz
Articles
Elizabeth Bernier, The Women in My Family: There is a great sense of gentleness in the lives of these women, a gentleness rooted in strength. They valued education; providing and encouraging it for their daughters. Education was seen as good in itself, not as a steppingstone to a career necessarily, but as a kind of disaster insurance
Joan James Rapp takes us on the road again, this time to China: Yin and Yang on the Yangtze; A Senior Adventure in the “People’s Republic of Steps,” Part One
History
From the Walrus (Canada's Magazine of the Year): The public square, so often the site of defining civic struggles, is in many ways a city’s heart. Here, Cameron Tulk and Jared Bland profile public squares from around the world to reveal their chequered histories.
Place de la Concorde, Paris
famous for: During the French Revolution, the square, temporarily renamed Place de la Révolution, housed the guillotine that killed more than a thousand people.
what you didn’t know: While Louis xvi and Marie Antoinette would meet their ends there, the square was the scene of violence long before the blade began to fall. As the masses gathered for Louis and Marie’s wedding in 1770, “a numerous banditti, from Normandy, broke in upon the vast assemblage of spectators” and sawed through the supports of the scaffolding that held up much of the crowd, notes John Carr, Esq., in The Stranger in France (1803). “The disorder became dreadful, and universal; many were crushed to death, and some hundreds of the people, whilst endeavoring to make their escape, were stabbed, and robbed.” By way of apology, the future king and queen had the victims buried in the new cemetery at l’Église de la Madeleine — the same cemetery where, two decades later, many of the Place’s revolutionary casualties “were thrown, amid heaps of headless victims, into promiscuous graves of unslacked lime! How inscrutable are the ways of destiny!” JB
Read the rest of the article at the Walrus site
The Changing Nature of
Marriage and Divorce
"The divorce rate today — 3.6 divorces per one thousand couples per year — is at its lowest level since 1970.
For marriages that occurred in the 1950s through the 1970s, the figures clearly show that the probability of divorce before each anniversary rose for each successive marriage cohort. For first marriages that occurred in the 1980s, the proportion that had dissolved by each anniversary was consistently lower and it is lower again for marriages that occurred in the 1990s."
Marriage rates are at their lowest in the past century, but divorce is less likely today than it was 30 years ago. Even though the divorce rate was rising in the 1970s, the number of children involved in each divorce has been falling since the late 1960s. Fertility and pregnancy control made possible by "the pill" and legalized abortion may help to explain both the recent decline in divorces and a rise in out-of-wedlock births. These are among the intriguing and often unexpected trends documented in Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Driving Forces (NBER Working Paper No. 12944) in which authors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers find that it's time to reassess our views of "the American family" given the relatively new and still evolving conditions that now determine whether people marry, stay single, or break-up.
These forces include the aforementioned rise of the birth control pill; higher incomes for women and greater access to education; and new household labor-saving technologies that make it more likely a marriage today will involve people with "similar incomes and interests" as opposed to individuals with clearly defined and distinctly different domestic and wage earning roles. In particular, they argue that marriages can no longer be characterized as having household specialization and children as the central tenet. These changes mean that couples today have different expectations about the benefits of both forming a union and formalizing that union through marriage.
Early in their analysis, Stevenson and Wolfers consider two basic trends in modern marriage and divorce. First, there is the often-cited fact that the marriage rate today is "the lowest in recorded history." But less discussed, they note, is the fact that the divorce rate today — 3.6 divorces per one thousand couples per year — is at its lowest level since 1970. This rate is going down even when taking into account that there are fewer marriages. "For marriages that occurred in the 1950s through the 1970s, the figures clearly show that the probability of divorce before each anniversary rose for each successive marriage cohort," they write. "Yet for first marriages that occurred in the 1980s, the proportion that had dissolved by each anniversary was consistently lower and it is lower again for marriages that occurred in the 1990s."
While not pinpointing a single cause for the decline in the divorce rate, Stevenson and Wolfers observe that overall, the married couples of today look quite different from those of a few decades ago. For example, data from 2000 show that marriage today is less prevalent among young adults but more prevalent among older adults, and that people are waiting longer to get married. In the mid-1950s, for example, the median age of men getting married was 23. Today, it's 27. Also, people over 65 are just as likely to be married today as people between 16 and 65.
But while many trends can be documented easily, Stevenson and Wolfers find that figuring out how they affect marriage rates and family composition is a trickier task. Take cohabitation for example. Not surprisingly, their statistics show that today, members of the opposite sex are increasingly likely to be "sharing living quarters." And, cohabitation is more and more the preferred "stepping stone to marriage." Stevenson and Wolfers report that in the early 2000s, 59 percent of married couples had lived together before tying the knot. While couples who cohabit prior to marriage have historically exhibited higher divorce rates, Stevenson and Wolfers observe that there is research showing that pre-marital cohabiting may be more common among those with greater uncertainty about either their compatibility or the benefits of marriage. Thus it may be that divorce-prone couples cohabit, rather than that cohabiting causes divorce. In fact, without cohabitation, divorce may be even more likely, as living together allows couples to "test" their relationship before heading to the altar.
Stevenson and Wolfers encounter another interesting factor when they consider the effect of fertility control on marriage. They note that by removing an unplanned pregnancy from the equation, the birth control pill has allowed women to be more selective about whom they will marry and when they will marry. They cite research reporting that college-educated women who use the pill have a higher age at first marriage, lower divorce rates, and lower marriage rates.
Looking to the future, Stevenson and Wolfers wonder what new forces will emerge to shape marriage and divorce decisions. They point to the dramatic rise in the use of Internet dating services as perhaps the next big factor on the horizon. And again, its effect could be complex. For example, Stevenson and Wolfers observe that the fact that a "tremendous amount" of searches on these sites is being done by those already married could be a "harbinger of rising divorce rates, yet this affect may be ameliorated by improved match quality in the new marriages."
From the National Bureau of Economic Research site.
A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING
An excerpt from Master Class by Danny Kahneman
"But first I thought I'd show you the basic puzzles of well-being. There is a line on the "Easterlin Paradox" that goes almost straight up, which is GDP per capita. The line that isn't going anywhere is the percentage of people who say they are very happy. And that's a remembering self-type of question. It's one big puzzle of the well-being research, and it has gotten worse in the last two weeks because there are now new data on international comparisons that makes the puzzle even more surprising.
"But this is within-country. And within the United States, it's the same for Japan, over a period where real income grew by a factor of four or more, you get nothing on life satisfaction. Which is sort of troubling for economists, because things are improving. I once had that conversation with an economist, David Card, at Berkeley — he used to be at Princeton—and asked him, how would an economist measure well-being? He looked at me as if I were asking a silly question and said, "income of course". I said, well what's the next measure? He said, "log income". [laughter] And the general idea is that the more money you have, the more choices you have — the more options you have — and that giving people more options can only make them better off . This is the fundamental idea of economic analysis. It turns out probably to be false, but it doesn't correspond to these data. So Easterlin as an economist caused some distress in the profession with these results.
"So what is the puzzle here? The puzzle is related to the affective forecasting that most people believe that circumstances like becoming richer will make them happier. It turns out that people's beliefs about what will make them happier are mostly wrong, and they are wrong in a directional way, and they are wrong very predictably. And there is a story here that I think is interesting.
"When people did studies of various categories of people, like the rich and the poor, you find differences in life satisfaction. But everybody looks at those differences is surprised by how small they are relative to the variability within each of these categories. You address the healthy and the unhealthy: very small differences.
"Age — people don't like the idea of aging, but, at least in the United States, people do not become less happy or less satisfied with their life as they age. So a lot of the standard beliefs that people have about life satisfaction turn out to be false. This is a whole line of research — I was doing predictive utility, and Dan Gilbert invented the term "affective forecasting", which is a wonderful term, and did a lot of very insightful studies on that.
"As an example of the kinds of studies he did, he asked people — I think he started that research in '92 when Bush became governor of Texas, running against Ann Richards — before the election, (Democrats and Republicans), how happy do you think you will be depending on whether Ann Richards or George Bush is elected. People thought that it would actually make a big difference. But two weeks after the election, you come back and you get their life satisfaction or their happiness and it's a blip, or nothing at all.
Question: What about four years later?
Kahneman: And interestingly enough, you know, there is an effect of political events on life satisfaction. But that effect, like the effect of other things like being a paraplegic or getting married, are all smaller than people expect.
Comment: Unless something goes really wrong.
Kahneman: Unless something goes terribly wrong. ...
Measuring Happiness and Satisfaction
The National Bureau of Economic Research has issued a working paper on the subject of quantifying a sense of psychological well-being. What follows is a brief outline of that paper by Les Picker:
"Happiness among American men and women reaches its estimated minimum at approximately ages 49 and 45 respectively."
To design effective social and economic policies, policymakers need a measure of individuals' "well-being." Yet while such things as real Gross Domestic Product, lifespan, height, and the incidence of cancer can be counted, it is a much more complicated task to objectively quantify psychological well-being and happiness. For example, recent statistical research has shown that countries like Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands are particularly happy, while nations such as Germany, Italy, and Portugal are less happy. However, one could argue that words such as "happiness" or "satisfaction" cannot be communicated unambiguously and in exactly the same way across countries, so it is not easy to know whether such cross-national well-being patterns are believable.
In Hypertension and Happiness across Nations (NBER Working Paper No. 12934), co-authors David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald draw upon data on 15,000 randomly sampled individuals from 16 countries, and on other larger samples, to develop a measure of well-being related to the incidence of high blood pressure. They find evidence to suggest that happier nations report fewer blood-pressure problems. And, this seems to be true regardless of the dataset used in the analysis. Nor do the results seem to be caused by differing numbers of physicians across countries.
The authors' findings in this study rest on three assumptions: first, that it is reasonable to treat their survey evidence on high-blood-pressure problems as a proxy for true measures of hypertension. Second, that people report high blood pressure in a more objective way than they report levels of happiness. Third, that the patterns they find are not merely the product of something special for this particular sample of nations.
Of course, it is possible that the results of this study are not valid because an inherently cheery nation will be optimistic about everything. However, it is hard to believe that someone told by their doctor that they have high blood pressure would have an incentive to conceal or misreport that. For researchers in general, the attraction of a blood-pressure question in surveys is that it relies on medical facts given to the individual, and thus seems valuably different in character from conventional subjective questions about well-being. Furthermore, the authors point out that while psychological health cannot be measured easily, it is nonetheless high in Denmark and low in East Germany. While happiness and hypertension are linked, more research remains needed on how such connections may operate.
In Is Well-being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle? (NBER Working Paper No.12935), Blanchflower and Oswald study happiness and life-satisfaction data for half a million Americans and Europeans. They draw two main conclusions from the data: first, that psychological well-being moves along a U-shaped curve as we age. Second, that there are important differences in the reported happiness levels of different age groups.
The authors suggest that reported well-being is U-shaped in age. Happiness among American men and women reaches its estimated minimum at approximately ages 49 and 45 respectively. Among European men and women, life satisfaction levels are at their minimum at ages 44 at 43 respectively. The authors emphasize that, because their research controls for many other influences upon happiness and life satisfaction — including income, education, and marriage — these results should be read as truly describing well-being.
By definition, the authors caution, their study has one important limitation. The international datasets that they use do not follow the same individuals over the years. They also note that what truly causes the U-shaped curve in human well-being, and the noticeable regularity of its mathematical shape in different parts of the industrialized world, is not currently known. Potential answers, some more plausible than others, include the following: first, that individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell the unfeasible aspirations of their youth. Second, that cheerful people live systematically longer than those who are miserable, and that the U-shape somehow traces out, in part, a selection effect. Third, that a kind of comparison process is occurring - for example, I may have seen school-friends die and as a result eventually come to value my blessings during my remaining years. There are likely to be other explanations for the U-shaped effect, too.
Article
Ferida Wolff, Beach Combing: We took a vacation later that year. It wasn’t to the shore. We went to Africa on safari. We had two glorious weeks of connecting with nature in its wild state. It was only two weeks. We traded year-round beach combing for this? we asked ourselves. Yes, we did. Had we bought the property, we probably would have stayed home and bought furnishings for the new house. It would have been fun but we would not have watched cheetahs on the hill stalking a lone impala. Or drank champagne ten feet away from lounging lions. There would have been no elephant charging us in our backyard either, and no incredible African sunsets
Why Humans Have Sex
by Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, Archives of Sexual Behavior
From the Introduction:
Even within the context of an ongoing mateship, there
could be numerous reasons for having sex beyond those
already documented. For example, sex might be used to
reward a partner or as a favor in exchange for something the
partner has done. Or sex might be used to punish a partner,
such as when someone engages in a retaliatory affair in
order to exact revenge on a partner for having committed
some violation within the relationship. Also, within an ongoing relationship, sex might be
used to intensify the relationship, escalate the level of
commitment within the relationship, or turn a short-term relationship into a long-term relationship. In
the clinical literature, Basson described how women
may engage in sexual intercourse for the ‘‘spin-offs’’ they
receive, such as emotional closeness, bonding, commitment,
love, affection, acceptance, tolerance, and closeness.
From yet another perspective, people might use sex as a
form of ‘‘mate guarding’. This
could function in one of several possible ways. First, satisfying
a partner sexually might function to deter the partner
from seeking sexual gratification elsewhere. Second, this
strategic use of sexuality might send signals to potential
mate poachers, perhaps by rendering the partner less ‘‘open’’
to extra-pair liaisons, causing potential mate poachers to
choose other potential targets.
Another perspective comes from the literature on sperm
competition. From this perspective, a man
whose partner might have been sexually unfaithful might
seek sex, which functions to displace the sperm of the rival
male. Or a woman might deplete the sperm of her partner,
leaving few available for insemination of rival women.
None of these hypothesized functions, of course, need
operate through conscious psychological mechanisms.
More generally, sex can be viewed as a fungible resource –
something that one person has the potential to give
and something that another person may want. As a soughtafter
resource, sex can be exchanged for other resources.
Exchanging sex for money, as in the case of prostitution, is
one obvious example. Sex
could also be exchanged for meat, as occurs among many
traditional hunter-gatherer groups such as the Ache of
Paraguay. Sex could be exchanged
for favors, special privileges, a preferred job, or indeed for any resource.
Finally, the psychology of sex does not occur merely
between the individual partners directly involved. Sex
occurs within a broader social and cultural context, with implications for prestige, status, and reputation. Having sex with a high status individual, for
example, might raise a person’s status within the group.
Within some groups, having sex with numerous partners
might enhance a person’s reputation, providing the motivational
impetus for initiating sex. Sex, of course, can
sometimes damage a person’s status and reputation, providing
reasons for avoiding it or concealing it from others
in the group. In sum, because sex has consequences for
status and reputation that can act as incentives (or deterrents),
a person might be motivated to have sex for social
reasons that have nothing to do with the personal relationship
within which it occurs. All of these diverse theoretical
perspectives, when taken together, point to a
singular conclusion: The reasons people have sex are likely
to be far more numerous and psychologically complex than
previous taxonomists have envisioned.
Read the rest of the 31 page paper at the Archives site.
The new rules of female friendship and communication
Although this study done for England's Social Issues Research Centre focused on the 25-35 age group, there are still interesting aspects for the older woman:
Despite significant blurring of the distinctions between male and female roles in modern society, 'male bonding' and 'female bonding' are in still in some ways quite different. Male bonding tends to be more formal and organised — every known human society has some form of men-only clubs or associations, special (often secret) male-bonding organisations or institutions from which women are excluded. Female bonding tends to be done more quietly and informally than the male variety, without all the fuss and bother and setting up of fancy clubs. Women just bond: we don't seem to need all the props and trappings, pomp and ceremony, sports and secrecy and silly names and funny handshakes. All women need for bonding is a couple of chairs and a pot of tea — maybe not even that.
The similarities between male and female friendships are, however, more important than the differences. For both sexes, friendship always was, and still is, a form of reciprocal altruism that assimilates non-kin to kinship roles. In other words, it is a kind of give-and-take sharing and trust-building by which people who are not related become honorary brothers and sisters. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the SIRC study both male and female respondents emphasised trust and loyalty, always 'being there' for each other and 'being oneself' as the principal and most vital elements of friendship. This is the kind of unconditional acceptance, allegiance and support that is normally associated with family, but that we also expect from our 'honorary' brothers and sisters, our friends.
It has perhaps become a bit of a cliché to say that 'friends are the new family' — and although there is some truth in this statement, it is a bit too glib and not entirely accurate. Friends have always been a kind of family — friendship has always been about treating non-kin as though they were blood relatives. There is nothing new in this: we have been doing it since the Stone Age.
Click here to download and read the full document using Adobe's Acrobat Reader but in the meantime, here is the a section on gossip and secrets:
Gossip
"Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you."
— Spanish proverb
"Gossip is what no one claims to like – but everyone enjoys."
— Joseph Conrad
"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,
and that is not being talked about."
— Oscar Wilde
Gossip or chat? The term 'gossip' today generally has a negative quality. But this was not always the case. The word comes from the Old English godsibb — literally meaning godparent — but was applied to familiar friends, especially a woman's female friends who assisted her around the time of the birth of a child. So, from godsibbs, good women friends, we inherit the term gossips — still usually women, of course, but the underlying notion of 'friends' has been somewhat diluted. Gossiping,
however, remains very much a central part of female to female bonding.
What distinguishes gossiping from other forms of verbal exchange is, as we will see later, an element of secrecy — a sharing of confidences. There also needs to be
one or two alleged 'facts' in gossip that, in turn, can lead to endless speculation or conjecture. The phrase "Mrs Jones was in the coffee shop" contains a fact but no opportunity for speculation. It is not gossip. The phrase "Mrs Jones was in the coffee shop with her neighbour's husband", however, presents all sorts of
opportunities for conjecture and, therefore, is 'good gossip'.
While gossiping (or what men describe as 'chatting' when they do it) can happen
anywhere, the workplace was seen by working women as being a very significant
arena for such activity. Conforming perhaps to stereotype, the office tea break was
identified as the best place for a gossip, particularly by older women, as shown in
Figure 15. The canteen was also seen as being a suitable location for such activity.
"When people want to talk about other people they'll go to the
hallway or do it at lunchtime or in the pub after work or something
like that."
"You've got to be careful [when gossiping] but of course everyone
does it to some extent."
"I have two friends ... and gossip is part of their being."
The poll reinforced the idea that gossip is very much a face-to-face activity, with
over 60% of women reporting that they preferred this channel over phone calls or
text and email messages.
Secrets
"We use gossip as a bonding thing. If you've got something secret to
tell someone, well …"
"It's all a bit naughty … It brings you closer to that person."
"The indication is that I value you so much that I can tell you this
thing"
"But its also this 'Well I have this secret knowledge'."
"Yeah, you have the power."
"Exactly, its that kudos thing."
Discussion of gossip in the focus groups turned quite spontaneously to the topic of secrets with little or no prompting. There was a general consensus that 'proper' gossip actually relied on secrets and a sense of conspiracy among the gossipers.
There was, however, also a dilemma here. If something is secret, you shouldn't tell any one about it. But if you can't tell anyone, then where is the basis for a good gossip? Much of the debate, therefore, was about what could or or could not be revealed, and to whom?
"No, I can't keep a secret ... I'm just a gossip really, but if I was gonna tell somebody it would probably be a specific female friend, knowing full well it wouldn't go any further."
"I think I put secrets like that in a different category [from other types
of gossip]. You know, if someone wants to tell me something that's fine ... If I'm talking to someone I don't think 'Oh god, I've got this secret in the back of my mind'… it's completely up to them. You know I don't want to get involved. I'm quite happy to listen, and I'm happy to be there for them, but I don't want to get involved at all."
Adoption in America
NPR (National Public Radio) has conducted a series of interviews with four adopting families and their children:
Transracial Adoption
Part 1 (Monday): Judy Stigger and her husband are white. Almost three decades ago, they adopted two biracial children. Their youngest adopted child, Aaron, is now 26. Judy and Aaron explain how their life together was more about learning inclusiveness as an interracial family than about rooting out prejudice.
An additional feature accompanying this segment is an audio of A Family Tree's Special Roots: "Judy and Aaron Stigger discuss an unusual way to draw a family tree as well as other experiences of being a child, and parent, in a transracial adoption."
Another is Coping Advice for 'Conspicuous Families': Read advice from an online workshop, called Conspicuous Families, for adoptive parents about how they should respond to intrusive comments about their transracial adoption.
A Misleading Adoption
Part 2 (Tuesday): Desiree and David Smolin thought they were adopting two young girls out of a dead-end life in India. They quickly learned that something terrible had gone wrong. What follows is a horrific story of the dangers of international adoption, and two girls who remain stuck between two cultures.
Another aspect to this story on the website is a checklist of tips regarding adoption agencies offering "advice for prospective
adoptive families on how to reduce their chances of becoming victims of
adoption fraud."
International Adoptions
Part 3 (Wednesday): Susan Soon-keum Cox was adopted from South Korea in 1956. Living in rural Oregon, the family had no translator. There was no cross-cultural education for the family. In fact, her parents were encouraged to "Americanize" her as quickly as possible. She remembers the experience and explains how international adoptions have changed since then.
A Complicated Family
Part 4 (Thursday): Author A.M. Homes never intended to meet her birth parents until her birth mother tracked her down. Their relationship became tenuous at best, but the experience caused her to reflect on her complicated family histories — and to wonder how those histories collide inside her own daughter.
Author A.M. Homes' excerpt from her book, The Mistress's Daughter, is compelling:
Our conversations are frequent — I call her a couple of times a week but I don't give her my phone number. They are seductive, addictive, punishing. Each one shakes me; each requires a period of recovery. Each time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a manner that leaves me wanting to tell her less, wanting her to know nothing.
The subject of adoption in relation to a parent adopting the children from their spouses' former marriage is not covered but considering the rate of divorce in this country, may have made for an interesting addition to the four situations described in the NPR series.
Study
Depression and the Psychological
Benefits of Entering Marriage*
Adrianne Frech and Kristi Williams
Journal of Health and Social Behavior 2007, Vol 48 (June): 149–163
Past research has consistently documented the positive relationship between a
transition to marriage and psychological well-being. In this study, we separate
the depressed from the nondepressed to assess whether the benefits marriage
has for psychological well-being depend on premarital depression. We also examine
whether the effect of marital quality in moderating the psychological consequences
of marriage differs for the depressed and the nondepressed. Results
indicate that, on average, those who were depressed prior to marrying report
larger psychological gains from marriage than those who were not depressed. The role of marital quality in moderating the effect of marriage on psychological
well-being is similar for previously depressed and previously nondepressed
respondents. These findings call into question the assumption that marriage is
always a good choice for all individuals. What appear to be strong average benefits
of marriage are actually highly dependent on a range of individual, interpersonal,
and structural characteristics.
Although hundreds of studies clearly show
that marriage is strongly and positively associated
with psychological well-being for men
and women, emerging
evidence indicates that these benefits do
not apply equally to all individuals. To date, no
prior research has examined whether those
who were depressed prior to entering marriage
receive the same psychological benefits from
marriage as those who were not depressed. We
hypothesize that depressed individuals receive
few or no psychological benefits from entering
marriage, in part because the depression of one
spouse and the demands it places upon the
marriage undermine marital communication
and marital quality. We analyze two waves of
data from the National Survey of Families and
Households to test this hypothesis. We focus on
a transition to marriage rather than on marital
status itself to control for premarital levels of
depression. We also separate those who are depressed
prior to entering marriage from the
nondepressed and compare their later levels of
depression to similar individuals who remain
continually unmarried.
The entire paper can be read at the Journal.
Exhibit
The National Gallery of Art in Washington is currently exhibiting Fabulous Journeys and Faraway Places, Travels on Paper, 1450 - 1700.
The gallery's Introduction: Because travel today is relatively easy and information about he world readily available, it can be difficult to imagine life at a time when people knew little about what lay beyond the horizon. But in the Middle Ages and Renaissance when travel was nasty,, brutish, and long. Europeans rarely strayed far from home. Instead, they thrilled to fanciful notions of the "faraway" and delighted in printed images of marvelous voyages and places.
The exhibit is divided into Biblical, Allegorical, and Fantasy Travel; Travel to Rome, Constantinople and the Holy Land; and Further Marvels of the East and West.
"In the fifteenth century, European artists were able for the first time to make multiple copies of printed works on paper. These images, as single leaves or bound in volumes, were easily distributed among the population and conveyed ideas and information about all subjects, including foreign lands and daring journeys. By the sixteenth century, commercial print publishers made a substantial living producing woodcuts and engravings of places that were of special interest to their stay-at-home clients. Since these prints were the only source of such knowledge for most people, they provide our best insight into early concepts of travel and distant lands."
"The prints show actual, early journeys rather than fantasy voyages. Some works are by artists who traveled and made drawings on which they later based their prints. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, great distances were crossed by foot, horse, horse-drawn vehicle, or ship. Each mode of transportation involved extreme hazards, long delays, and major discomfort, and none guaranteed a safe arrival or return. Most travelers undertook the risk for commercial or religious purposes, but occasionally for sightseeing. Rome and Jerusalem were two of the most important pilgrimage destinations; Rome was also famed for its ancient monuments. Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, was not only a frequent stopping point along the way to Jerusalem, but also one of the world’s richest centers of trade." "Moralizing tales in which travel was a metaphor for the journey of life, fraught with peril and temptation to lead astray all but the heartiest and truest souls, were popular. Divine punishment was often depicted as violent expulsion from a paradisiacal home to eternal exile in the terrifying unknown. Ancient and medieval legends that described magical enclaves in the vast, unexplored regions of the earth inspired artists to create views of enchanted lands. These charmed places offered unlimited culinary delights, opportunities for erotic love, or fountains of youth; however, not all these mythical regions were enticing. Pictorial narratives also warned of evil lurking beyond the horizon in sites inhabited by monstrous, savage beasts and demons who cast wicked spells on hapless travelers venturing into their domains."
"During the Renaissance, Europeans began to uncover antiquities from the time of the pharaohs. Excavators first unearthed these artifacts in Rome, where the ancient Romans — who had conquered Egypt — displayed spoils and also created their own Egyptian-style works. These discoveries, as well as contemporary accounts of travel in north Africa, fueled a fascination with both ancient Egyptian and modern Arab life. The two very different cultures seemed equally foreign to Europeans, whose interest encouraged a lively market in printed images of these faraway lands. At the same time, startling reports about the native peoples, plants, and animals of the New World were reaching Europe. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the demand for images of America was tremendous and prints were the sole means of disseminating them to a wide audience."
Numbers on the screen of the prints displayed will reveal more information.
Articles
Jane Shortall, On the Road Again: The 2007 French holidays have been booked. The phone calls, e-mails and even two snail mails find us here in our tiny hamlet, in the foothills of the Pyrénées, informing us that various chums, family members and in one case, people we have never heard of, will be travelling from Ireland to France this year and all are looking forward to meeting up with us
Ferida Wolff and Harriet May Savitz wrote Stick Together as a donation to children, to give young people a tool to keep themselves safe from child predators. Read it here and perhaps it will inspire you to pass it around to others who will find it helpful.
Confidants
Excerpts from a new study, Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades:
There are some things that we discuss only
with people who are very close to us. These
important topics may vary with the situation or
the person — we may ask for help, probe for
information, or just use the person as a sounding
board for important decisions — but these are
the people who make up our core network of
confidants. How have these discussion networks
of close confidants changed over the past two decades? We address that question here with
data from a high-quality national probability
survey that collected parallel data in 1985 and
2004. We find a remarkable drop in the size of
core discussion networks, with a shift away
from ties formed in neighborhood and community
contexts and toward conversations with
close kin (especially spouses). Many more people
talk to no one about matters they consider important to them in 2004 than was the case two
decades ago.
Why is this question (and its disturbing
answer) significant? Social scientists know that contacts with other people are important in both instrumental and socio-emotional domains. The closer and
stronger our tie with someone, the broader the scope of their support for us and the greater the likelihood that
they will provide major help in a crisis. These are important people in our lives. They influence us directly
through their interactions with us and indirectly by shaping the kinds of people we become.
.......
In addition to the large
proportion of respondents who have no one to
talk to, we find that the percentage of people
who depend totally on a spouse for such close
contact has increased from 5.0 to 9.2 percent.
The proportion of people who talk to non-spouse
kin (who are likely to reside outside their own
household) has dropped (58.8 to 42.9 percent).
The most striking drop, however, is in the percentage
of people who talk to at least one person
who is not connected to them through
kinship, a decline from 80.1 to 57.2 percent.
In the confidant networks of men and women, we see that women still have significantly more
kin in their networks than men do, but they no longer have fewer non-kin confidants than men....
Since the kin-dominated nature of women’s networks is
one of the staples of the social capital literature, this social change is potentially
important. It is especially noteworthy that
the shift occurs not because women are dropping
kinship ties, but rather because they are achieving
equality with men in non-kinship ties.
Unfortunately, as with growing wage equality,
the equity is being achieved by men’s shrinking
interconnection with non-kin confidants rather
than by women’s greater connection to the world outside the family.
......
More educated and younger people have significantly
larger discussion networks, as do
women. Network size gradually shrinks with
aging, and non-white Americans have fewer
network resources. Marriage draws one into
networks of people with whom one discusses
important matters (notably one’s spouse, the
most often-named type of relationship for the discussion partner).
.......
The American population has lost discussion
partners from both kin and outside the family.
The largest losses, however, have come from the
ties that bind us to community and neighborhood.
The general image is one of an already
densely connected, close, homogeneous set of
ties slowly closing in on itself, becoming smaller,
more tightly interconnected, more focused on
the very strong bonds of the nuclear family
(spouses, artners, and parents). The education
level at which one is more connected through
core discussion ties to the larger community
than to family members has shifted up into the
graduate degrees, a level of education attained
by only a tiny minority of the population. High
school graduates and those with some college
are now in a very family-dominated social environment
of core confidants.
.....
Older (60+) African American
men’s networks have declined the most (from
3.6 to 1.8). Among black women, the change is
more uniform, with the young experiencing a
larger decline than the old. Indeed, black men over 60 are the only sector of the older population
that experienced a major decline between
1985 and 2004. Otherwise, the elderly have
been more stable than most other groups in
their core social connections.
The entire study, Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades [pdf], is available at http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf
The Law and MySpace
Writ's Anita Ramasatry has written an article,
A Fourteen-Year-Old Girl's Suit Against MySpace: Should Networking Sites Be Legally Responsible for Protecting Teens from Harmful Real-World Conduct?, that is pertinent and reasoned. A few paragraphs:
The Children's Online Protection Act (COPA) requires MySpace and other websites that target children under thirteen to obtain "verifiable" parental consent before the children can use the site. MySpace goes further: It simply prohibits children under thirteen from setting up accounts and creating personal profiles on its site, no matter what.
What about children over thirteen? Federal law does not speak to the issue. But MySpace voluntarily displays only partial profiles for those registered as being fourteen or fifteen years old — unless the person viewing the profile is already on the teenager's list of friends.
Congress is contemplating measures that would further protect over-thirteen teens, but they are not yet law. Just last month, the House introduced a bill, the "Deleting Online Predators Act" (DOPA) that would both prohibit access to online social networks at schools, and require the Federal Trade Commission to create websites containing information about the potential dangers the Internet poses to children and teens.
Finally, if current federal law has any relevance here, it may actually be to immunize MySpace from liability. Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA) provides a so-called "safe harbor" which immunizes web intermediaries from liability arising from user-posted content. (The Supreme Court struck down part of the CDA in Reno v. ACLU, but this section remains good law.)
This immunity applies even if the intermediary monitors the content and, in some instances, chooses to de-post it. Indeed, Congress enacted this provision to encourage intermediaries like MySpace to do just such monitoring, and to remove harmful or offensive postings, by ensuring this kind of "family values" monitoring would be liability-free.
Read all of Anita Ramasatry's article at Writ.
Love Letters
From the Lancaster, Pennsylvania Historical Society:
Letter to Thomas Cope from Mary Cope
Judge not my beloved Friend, from my silence, that thou art absent from my thoughts — waking & sleeping, I commune with my far distant Love; and copious are the effusions I mentally pour into his unconscious ear. Last night he appeared to me in a vision, like a sudden apparition; he kiss’d me many times with great fervency but still greater haste; he did not even tarry to sit down; and was gone again on some unxplain’d momentous business swifter than a meteor in a summer sky.
Every day have I been looking for a letter; & every day have I been dissapointed; my hopes still acquiring new strength from every successive dissapointment by suggesting the probability that certainly by this or this, or this time, some leisure moment must have occurred that might be devoted to poor me –
I [have] thou sayest, ha! my hours all at my own disposal! and thou not here to praise me for their regular appropriation or to see how I would do, if left wholly to myself! – I get up & lie down when I please & no one to ask me why or wherefore? but I do not love to sit up till midnight for all – no, not even when writing to thee – when I have the sweet inducement of an interesting confidential tete-a-tete with thy dear identical self.
devoted M. C.
3 mo 15. 1808
Civil War Love Letters from the University Libraries of Virginia Tech
A letter from Harvey Black in Brandy Station, Virginia.
Black, descended from the founding family of Blacksburg, Virginia, served as a surgeon to the Army of Northern Virginia. In this letter to his wife Mary (whom he affectionately nicknamed Mollie) he recounts their courtship and expresses the great love he has for her:
Suffice it to say, the happy day of our marriage arrived and since then, hours, days, and years of time, confidence & happiness passed rapidly away, and only to make us feel that happy as were the hours of youthful days, they compare not with those of later years and perhaps even these may not be equal to that which is in reserve for us.
I don't know how much pleasure it affords you to go over these days of the past, but to me they will ever be remembered as days of felicity. And how happy the thought that years increase the affection & esteem we have for each other to love & be loved. May it ever be so, and may I ever be a husband worthy of your warmest affections. May I make you happy and in so doing be made happy in return. A sweet kiss and embrace to your greeting.
But maybe you will say it looks ridiculous to see a man getting grayhaired to be writing love letters, so I will use the remnant of my paper otherwise...
Yours affectionately H Black
Sunday night, Nov. 1 [1863]
A Valentine from Martin Luther King to Coretta Scott King, 14 February 1957:
My Darling
It is a pleasure for me to pause while attending to important business which affects the welfare of this nation and attend to to the most important business in the world namely choosing as my Valentine the sweetest and most lovely wife and mother in all the world
As the days go by my love grows even greater
You will always be my Valentine
Martin
The Science of Gender and Science Debate
Spurred on by the Lawrence Summers brouhaha last May Harvard's Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative sponsored a debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke titled The Science of Gender and Science.
Here briefly are some points made by Pinker, in case you missed seeing the debate either in person or on the Web:
The first difference, long noted by economists studying employment practices, is that men and women differ in what they state are their priorities in life. To sum it up: men, on average, are more likely to chase status at the expense of their families; women give a more balanced weighting. Once again: Think statistics! The finding is not that women value family and don't value status. It is not that men value status and don't value family. Nor does the finding imply that every last woman has the asymmetry that women show on average or that every last man has the asymmetry that men show on average. But in large data sets, on average, an asymmetry what you find.
Just one example. In a famous long-term study of mathematically precocious youth, 1,975 youngsters were selected in 7th grade for being in the top 1% of ability in mathematics, and then followed up for more than two decades. These men and women are certainly equally talented. And if anyone has ever been encouraged in math and science, these kids were. Both genders: they are equal in their levels of achievement, and they report being equally satisfied with the course of their lives. Nonetheless there are statistical differences in what they say is important to them. There are some things in life that the females rated higher than males, such as the ability to have a part-time career for a limited time in one's life; living close to parents and relatives; having a meaningful spiritual life; and having strong friendships. And there are some things in life that the males rated higher than the females. They include having lots of money; inventing or creating something; having a full-time career; and being successful in one's line of work. It's worth noting that studies of highly successful people find that single-mindedness and competitiveness are recurring traits in geniuses (of both sexes).
Here is one other figure from this data set. As you might expect, this sample has a lot of people who like to work Herculean hours. Many people in this group say they would like to work 50, 60, even 70 hours a week. But there are also slight differences. At each one of these high numbers of hours there are slightly more men than women who want to work that much. That is, more men than women don't care about whether they have a life.
Second, interest in people versus things and abstract rule systems. There is a staggering amount of data on this trait, because there is an entire field that studies people's vocational interests. I bet most of the people in this room have taken a vocational interest test at some point in their lives. And this field has documented that there are consistent differences in the kinds of activities that appeal to men and women in their ideal jobs. I'll just discuss one of them: the desire to work with people versus things. There is an enormous average difference between women and men in this dimension, about one standard deviation.
And this difference in interests will tend to cause people to gravitate in slightly different directions in their choice of career. The occupation that fits best with the "people" end of the continuum is "director of a community services organization." The occupations that fit best with the "things" end are physicist, chemist, mathematician, computer programmer, and biologist.
We see this consequence not only in the choice of whether to go into science, but also in the choice which branch of science the two sexes tend to go into. Needless to say, from 1970 to 2002 there was a huge increase in the percentage of university degrees awarded to women. But the percentage still differs dramatically across fields. Among the Ph.Ds awarded in 2001, for example, in education 65% of the doctorates went to women; in the social sciences, 54%; in the life sciences, 47%; in the physical sciences, 26%; in engineering, 17%. This is completely predictable from the difference in interests between people and living things, on the one hand, and inanimate objects, on the other. And the pattern is pretty much the same in 1980 and 2001, despite the change in absolute numbers.
Third, risk. Men are by far the more reckless sex. In a large meta-analysis involving 150 studies and 100,000 participants, in 14 out of 16 categories of risk-taking, men were over-represented. The two sexes were equally represented in the other two categories, one of which was smoking, for obvious reasons. And two of the largest sex differences were in "intellectual risk taking" and "participation in a risky experiment." We see this sex difference in everyday life, in particular, in the following category: the Darwin Awards, "commemorating those individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion." Virtually all — perhaps all — of the winners are men.
And now, a few paragraphs from Elizabeth Spelke:
But the question on the table is not, Are there biological sex differences? The question is, Why are there fewer women mathematicians and scientists? The patterns of bias that I described provide four interconnected answers to that question. First, and most obviously, biased perceptions produce discrimination: When a group of equally qualified men and women are evaluated for jobs, more of the men will get those jobs if they are perceived to be more qualified. Second, if people are rational, more men than women will put themselves forward into the academic competition, because men will see that they've got a better chance for success. Academic jobs will be more attractive to men because they face better odds, will get more resources, and so forth.
Third, biased perceptions earlier in life may well deter some female students from even attempting a career in science or mathematics. If your parents feel that you don't have as much natural talent as someone else whose objective abilities are no better than yours, that may discourage you, as Eccles's work shows. Finally, there's likely to be a snowball effect. All of us have an easier time imagining ourselves in careers where there are other people like us. If the first three effects perpetuate a situation where there are few female scientists and mathematicians, young girls will be less likely to see math and science as a possible life.
So by my personal scorecard, these are the major factors. Let me end, though, by asking, could Steve also be partly right? Could biological differences in motives — motivational patterns that evolved in the Pleistocene but that apply to us today — propel more men than women towards careers in mathematics and science?
My feeling is that where we stand now, we cannot evaluate this claim. It may be true, but as long as the forces of discrimination and biased perceptions affect people so pervasively, we'll never know. I think the only way we can find out is to do one more experiment. We should allow all of the evidence that men and women have equal cognitive capacity, to permeate through society. We should allow people to evaluate children in relation to their actual capacities, rather than one's sense of what their capacities ought to be, given their gender. Then we can see, as those boys and girls grow up, whether different inner voices pull them in different directions. I don't know what the findings of that experiment will be. But I do hope that some future generation of children gets to find out.
We do stress that this debate and its subsequent discussion takes up 36 pages, all of it quite interesting, so we've been able to highlight only a few paragraphs. Go to the Edge Third Culture pages for the entire transcript.
The Art of the Insult
When weeding out some papers we came across this friend's
recommendation for an insult mechanism, The Shakespeare Insult Kit:
Combine one word from three columns, prefaced with "Thou":
artless base-court apple-john
bawdy bat-fowling baggage
beslubbering beef-witted barnacle
bootless beetle-headed bladder
churlish boil-brained boar-pig
cockered clapper-clawed bugbear
clouted clay-brained bum-bailey
craven common-kissing canker-blossom
currish crook-pated clack-dish
dankish dismal-dreaming coxcomb
droning doghearted codpiece
errant dread-bolted death-token
fawning earth-vexing dewberry
fobbing elf-skinned flap-dragon
froward fat-kidneyed flax-wench
frothy fen-sucked flirt-gill
gleeking flap-mouthed foot-licker
goatish fly-bitten fustilarian
gorbellied folly-fallen giglet
impertinent fool-born gudgeon
infectious full-gorged haggard
jarring guts-griping harpy
loggerheaded half-faced hedge-pig
lumpish hasty-witted horn-beast
mammering hedge-born hugger-mugger
mangled hell-hated joithead
mewling idle-headed lewdster
paunchy ill-breeding lout
pribbling ill-nurtured maggot-pie
puking knotty-pated malt-worm
puny milk-livered mammet
qualling motley-minded measle
rank onion-eyed minnow
reeky plume-plucked miscreant
roguish pottle-deep moldwarp
ruttish pox-marked mumble-news
saucy reeling-ripe nut-hook
spleeny rough-hewn pigeon-egg
spongy rude-growing pignut
surly rump-fed puttock
tottering shard-borne pumpion
unmuzzled sheep-biting ratsbane
vain spur-galled scut
venomed swag-bellied skainsmate
villainous tardy-gaited strumpet
warped tickle-brained varlot
wayward toad-spotted vassal
weedy unchin-snouted whey-face
yeasty weather-bitten wagtail
Excerpt
The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love
George Bernard Shaw described marriage as an institution that brings together two people “under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions. They are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”
Shaw’s comment was amusing when he wrote it at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it still makes us smile today, because it pokes fun at the unrealistic expectations that spring from a dearly held cultural ideal — that marriage should be based on intense, profound love and a couple should maintain their ardor until death do them part. But for thousands of years the joke would have fallen flat.
For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage. In fact, many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists used to think romantic love was a recent Western invention. This is not true. People have always fallen in love, and throughout the ages many couples have loved each other deeply.
But only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married. When someone did advocate such a strange belief, it was no laughing matter. Instead, it was considered a serious threat to social order.
In some cultures and times, true love was actually thought to be incompatible with marriage. Plato believed love was a wonderful emotion that led men to behave honorably. But the Greek philosopher was referring not to the love of women, “such as the meaner men feel,” but to the love of one man for another.
Other societies considered it good if love developed after marriage or thought love should be factored in along with the more serious considerations involved in choosing a mate. But even when past societies did welcome or encourage married love, they kept it on a short leash. Couples were not to put their feelings for each other above more important commitments, such as their ties to parents, siblings, cousins, neighbors, or God.
Read the rest of the excerpt from Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz at her site.
Articles
Martha Powers, Love Letters: "Darling, the flowers on the sink are just a little something to thank you for the wonderful dinner party we had on Saturday night. The guests were really dazzled when you served the flaming Crêpes Suzettes. The fire was not entirely your fault ..."
Touch Me
Rarely do we have a chance to cite an exhibit in this section of our site but London's Victoria & Albert's Touch Me show lends itself to a place in Relationships.
Here's an excerpt from the text accompanying a 'fuddling cup' from the 17th century:
Like many special words in spoken language the word 'touch' leaves the mouth in its very own gentle way. We arrive in the world as babies. We search and cling, cling and search, and we may be rewarded for our efforts. The mouth is the great explorer, first homing in on the breast, then on everything else that the world offers. We follow our desires, we taste, we experiment.
Language is full of physics - we say 'we don't get it' if we don't understand something. We say we need to get 'a grip of ourselves'. We can even say that somebody is a 'bit touched'. The things we find 'touching' are things which affect our feelings, things that move us.
Finger tips and hands are our primary tools to check out the world, to test whether objects are rough or smooth, sharp or blunt, wet or dry, hot or cold. We learn to do this visually too, so that we can imagine all sorts of material experience way beyond our reach. For certain kinds of sophisticated knowledge we can say that somebody has a 'good eye', or that they have 'taste' - another term that we use figuratively. Eyes are good tools, but the brain is better. We are able to speculate and imagine. We learn to fantasise. We are sometimes taken by surprise by what the eye sees, but, since the eye is only a lens, we are really only surprised by our own minds.
The mouth is our third hand, holding door keys while we fumble for a purse, or an envelope while we look for stamps. The lips that enable us to speak are also the gates for all our food and drink, the point of decision for whether things are good or bad for us, orthodox or taboo. A kiss or a sip are sensual acts full of information about how the world feels, and what we feel about the feeling.
Here are two games that are part of the exhibit that can be utilized as part of the touch sensation:
Haptic Glancing
We placed an unfamiliar but identifiable object in a cavity and asked people to reach in and feel it to discover what it was. Try this with the object placed in a bag. Allow people just a second or so to feel the object. In the exhibition, visitors could see how people used methodical stroking and gripping actions to learn more about it.
Palm Reading
Blindfold a partner and ask them to hold out their palm open upwards. Select a suitable object (we used a nailbrush and a toy Dalek among other things). Then perform the following actions, allowing your partner to guess the object at each stage:
1. Gently place the object onto the palm, then remove
2. Stroke the object across the palm
3. Hold the object still and ask your partner to stroke it with their flat palm
4. Finally allow your partner to close their palm around the object
It is hard to guess the object using passive touch alone (stage 1). Moving it helps (stage 2). But active touch, where the person moves in relation to the object (stage 3), or controls the manipulation (stage 4), is best.
Take a look at the rest of the V&A exhibit, Touch Me, online
Excerpt
The Friend Who Got Away
Torch Song by
Katie Roiphe
She was one of the few girls at school that I could talk to. We would sit on her bed and chatter for hours. She would smoke insane amounts of cigarettes. I would drink insane amounts of coffee. In the background a scratchy Lou Reed song called Waltzing Mathilda might be playing; a song which for some reason we couldn't get enough of. It was about a party interrupted by the inconvenient discovery of a female corpse.
Over the years the sting of what happened between us has died down to an anecdote repeated at cocktail parties, where I had found it could be interesting sometimes to reveal something odious about yourself. "Will you listen to how you sound?" I can hear Stella saying. "It's still all about what a colorful character you are, isn't it?" In my mind her voice is perpetually and sharply sarcastic, which it wasn't always. There was plenty to Stella besides her considerable satiric gifts. But that is, after all of these years, what remains.
Read the excerpt of
The Friend Who Got Away; Twenty Women's True Life Tales of Friendships that Blew Up, Burned Out or Faded Away by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell at the Doubleday site
How Therapy Can Be Hazardous to Your Marital Health
I take no joy in being a whistle blower, but it’s time.
I am a committed marriage and family therapist, having practiced this form of therapy since 1977. I train marriage and family therapists. I believe that marriage therapy can be very helpful in the hands of therapists who committed to the profession and the practice. But there are a lot of problems out there with the practice of therapy — a lot of problems.
I used to think that the best thing we could do for couples to improve their relationship and/or solve their problems was to send them to a therapist, but since we didn’t have enough therapists, then we probably need some marriage educators. It’s like saying that anybody who has a concern about their heart should see a cardiologist, but there aren’t enough cardiologists so they should see a primary care physician. Well, I have come to believe that this is really the reverse of how it ought to be, that people first need support people, mentors, other couples in their lives, and then they need marriage educators and then they need therapists — in that order. But the fact is that most people in this country, if they do seek help for their marriage problems, turn to a professional counselor or therapist, or a pastoral counselor.
I think that there are many problems involved with all of these groups of counselors or helpers, so my critique here will not be only about people who work with couples, because that’s a small minority. Individual psychotherapists, many pastors and pastoral counselors also practice in the way that I'm going to be talking about today. In my view, there is nowhere that I know of, any category of counselor, that it’s safe to send a distressed married person to for therapy. It all depends on the particular counselor or therapist, many of whom are ill-prepared to help people with their marriage problems.
You’d be interested to know that, according to a national survey, 80 percent of all private practice therapists in the United States say they do marital therapy. And only 12% of them are in a profession that requires even one course or any supervised experience. Only marriage and family therapy as a profession requires any course work or supervised clinical experience in marital or couples therapy. So most people who say they’re doing this work picked it up on the side or not at all. The other thing I want to add, and as we go through this presentation today it is very important to keep in mind, is that most people who get any help from a counselor or therapist for their marital problems are seeing an individual counselor or therapist. That’s where most people go. If they are depressed, anxious, or having trouble with your life, most people go to an individual psychotherapist. And that’s where a lot of the damage to marriage goes on. The other aspect of the damage occurs when couples see a therapist together for marital therapy.
Read the entire paper delivered at a conference by
William J. Doherty, PhD,
Family Social Science Department, University of Minnesota, How Therapy Can Be Hazardous to Your Marital Health
The Quality of Daily Experiences
The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research conducted a survey measuring the emotional quality of daily life. What follows is from the University release about the study:
For the study, researchers analyzed questionnaires completed by a convenience sample of 909 working women. Participants answered demographic and general satisfaction questions and were asked to construct a short diary of the previous day: "Think of your day as a continuous series of scenes or episodes in a film," the directions began. After participants developed their diary, they answered a series of structured questions about each episode, including when it started and ended, what they were doing, where they were, with whom they were interacting, and how they felt. The study builds on earlier work on Americans' use of time, initiated by ISR economist F. Thomas Juster.
The average number of daily activities participants reported was 14.1 and the average duration of each episode was 61 minutes.
In addition to intimate relations, socializing, relaxing, praying or meditating, eating, exercising, and watching TV were among the most enjoyable activities. Commuting was the least enjoyable activity, with working, doing housework, using the computer for e-mail or Internet, and taking care of children rounding out the bottom of the list.
Interactions with friends and relatives were rated as the most enjoyable, followed by activities with spouses or significant others, children, clients or customers, co-workers and bosses. At the bottom of the list: activities done alone.
Personal characteristics such as trouble maintaining enthusiasm (an indicator of depression) or a poor night's sleep exerted a pervasive influence on how people felt during daily activities. Features of the current situation such as the identity of partners in an interaction or the level of time pressure experienced at work exerted a powerful effect.
But general life circumstances — such as how secure people think their jobs are, or whether they are single or married — had a relatively small impact on their feelings throughout the day. These factors were closely linked with how satisfied people said they were with their lives in general, but had little influence on how positive they felt during specific activities.
"It's not that life circumstances are irrelevant to well-being," notes Schwarz. "On the contrary, we found that people experience large variations in feelings during the course of a normal day. This variation highlights the importance of optimizing the allocation of time across situations and activities. If you want to improve your well-being, make sure that you allocate your time wisely."
Unfortunately, that's not easy. When the researchers examined the amount of time spent on various activities, they found that people spent the bulk of their waking time — 11.5 hours — engaged in the activities they enjoyed the least: work, housework and commuting.
Articles
Read Jane Shortall's article, The Man Who Only Expected Harmony:
I wondered if Eric was an aristocrat, a slightly eccentric one, who had chosen an unconventional lifestyle. His height, his build, very strong features, good teeth, and general demeanour — his politeness and gentle behaviour was almost of another age — certainly suggested something special. He looked almost mediaeval. And he lived exactly as he pleased. Possessing a strong streak of individualism, he seemed a person totally in charge of himself and completely at ease with the world around him.
Prejudice From Thin Air
You may be more prejudiced than you think, especially if you're
angry and approached by someone of a different race, religion or
creed.
A study published in the May 2004 edition of Psychological
Science
by psychology professors David DeSteno and Nilanjana Dasgupta from
Northeastern University and UMass Amherst respectively, reveals
that the experience of anger causes automatic, immediate prejudices
against those who are not a part of one's social group.
The study has particular
relevance for those in professions requiring quick assessment
and action, especially for those in jobs like
law enforcement and security. Study participants included New York
City residents and college undergraduates who were assigned to
novel groups – either as individuals who tend to "over
estimate" or "under estimate" numerical judgments – based
on a bogus personality test they believed to be valid. They were
then led to experience one of three emotional states — anger,
sadness, or neutrality.
Once the emotions had
been induced, participants completed rapid categorizations of
faces of people in their in-groups or out-groups — people who were both like them and unlike them with respect
to the created estimator groups — that were preceded by
quickly displayed words that were either positive or negative in
tone.
These rapid response tasks provide a window into the spontaneous
and non-conscious evaluations that individuals attached to the
social groups.
As expected, among sad and neutral participants, no automatic
bias against out-group members emerged. However, the presence of
anger caused the mind to shift its perceptions and evaluate out-group
members negatively, event though they had never encountered this
group before. This finding provides, for the first time, compelling
evidence showing that specific emotional states influence basic,
automatic processes in the brain that are tied to one of the central
challenges of social living: intergroup interaction.
DeSteno explains the
study by use of an example. "Much as
the experience of fear leads individuals to adaptive behaviors
to avoid dangers (e.g., quickly recoiling from a snake in one's
path), the experience of anger, due its association with preparation
for conflict, automatically shifts individuals' rapid appraisals
of social groups outside of their awareness or control," he
says. "When conflict is likely, different equals bad, and
the brain prepares to shape our behavior accordingly." Read the rest of the
release at the Northeastern
University site. Access to full-contents of the journal, Psychological
Science, is available by subscription or single article purchase.
SeniorWomenWeb Articles
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