I just found an article on MSN.com called "New Rules for a Good Marriage" and you know it had to be particularly clueless to get me to blog about it. The article seeks to "debunk" five marriage myths in favor of "new rules," which is already a weird substitution (rules for myths?), but it gets better. The myths are as follows, paraphrased for convenience and brevity:
1. Never go to bed angry
2. You'll eventually grow out of love
3. Sex will become less important w/ age
4. Empty-nests breed divorce
5. Your spouse will leave you in a mid-life crisis
I suppose I've heard all of these, but I don't know if I'd accept that they were full-fledged myths. We sometimes practice the first, and I know we wondered about the second before we got married, as have some of my friends. And I can say I've thought about #4 with respect to my own parents, who seem to be adopting at least 2 animals for each child who moves out of the house. #3 and #5 have never really bothered me.
But what's more interesting are the "new" rules. The author develops most of these through the writings of John Gottman, a researcher of marriage at U of Washington (whose work is certainly valuable - more on that later). Here are the rules, which each correspond to the myths above:
1. Sleep on it
2. Marriages require work, not feelings
3. Sexual connection can grow w/ age
4. New freedom means new flourishing
5. It's healthy for both genders to reevaluate their lives "midway"
Item 1 is particularly simple-minded, to me. Just like its corresponding "myth" oversteps its usefulness by the absolute "never," this seems to suggest an equally absolute alternative. But the problem is in thinking about rules rather than, say, principles, or goals. If a couple shares the principle of communication or the goal of actually working out a problem, then they will be able to decide, in media res, whether they should work a fight to the end or sleep on it. In fact, if the couple agree to "sleep on it," then they know they are not letting things fester and can therefore calm down, and so are not, in fact, going to bed angry, anyway.
But #2 particularly blew my mind: it is apparently a "new" "rule" that marriages require work, not feelings. In fairness, I understand where this comes from, and, as admitted, we experienced the power of the "myth" ourselves while still engaged, but we never really doubted that marriage required work. Dating required work, for crying out loud; why should a binding legal, social and moral union be any easier?
I would argue that the work marriage requires more or less obviates the need for any of the other "rules" as well as dispels the power of the myths. The author herself begins with a reflection about how couples work through child-raising and career-changes - these are all the things that go into building the intimacy and connection that make empty nests, mid-life re-evaluations and old-people sex less a problem.
Of course, my bigger problem is with the rhetoric of the article, the idea of structuring our thinking about marriage according to myths and rules. I think I've established the weaknesses of that method. One thing it does positively is to normalize anxiety about the "myths" which do to some degree circulate in our cultural air. Though it offers scientific research as a means of deflating said myths, thereby ignoring our religious and cultural traditions of marriage wisdom (which are not by any means flawless) and overly schematizing things, it at least tries to offer some positive reorientations of one's thoughts.
Gottman (as a last thought) is an interesting source, too. He started by studying divorce, and now he's been studying healthy and successful marriages and has more or less gotten into the business of "marriage preservation." Interpreted sensibly, his work more or less supports the kind of values-orientation I've been arguing for here, which makes me like him all right.
28 June 2008
02 April 2008
Xenophobia in Italy
This Reuters photo caught my attention. I'm not up on my Italian politics, but apparently they're having some debates about immigration, too. The logic of the posters is that if they were to let immigrants in, they could become second-class or even exiled citizens of their own home countries, just like the Native Americans did.
I hope I'm not the first to note the obvious fact that the analogy doesn't hold very well. Consider the superior technology and military organization of the European settlers in America and the both inadvertent and deliberate germ warfare, and you'll see that whoever is coming into Italy probably doesn't represent the same kind of threat (it certainly isn't true of immigrants to America).
But I expect the point is less political than cultural, i.e. that "native" Italians could be alienated from their corporate culture and values. At least, that seems to be the underlying anxiety in the American immigration debate. The degree of that anxiety, its blatant xenophobia and disturbing appropriation of a Native American history that Italian immigrants to America no doubt helped to write, is what surprised me.
At the risk of simplifying matters, I might suggest that it's precisely the antagonistic, paranoid and fearful tone of such rhetoric that puts one's culture more at risk than the presence of persons of another culture. It implies that the paranoid culture is weak and has no confidence in its own foundations, that it exists only because it holds a majority and not because it has any validity in the realm of human social and spiritual values. This is, admittedly, a similar argument as that made against people who worry that homosexual unions will undermine the family, but I don't think you have to agree with a particular policy on homosexual unions or immigration to still see the problem with the argument from fear.
In other words, if your problem is that your culture is weak enough already, then maybe you need to attend to that. Now, that could, I suppose, mean that you should attend to that first, as in prior to allowing immigrants in who might confuse the issue. But, at least in the States, most immigrants seem to come because they want to be a part of this country and what they recognize it stands for and offers, not because they want to colonize it and make it look like where they are trying to escape from. We might, then, take a cue from the immigrants and remember the values that are worthwhile in our culture and see how we could build on those to welcome the stranger who knocks on our door for help.
N.B. - it strikes me as absurd and tragic enough that I will not be able to conciliate those who find this post disagreeably too liberal by insisting that it is in fact meant to be rather Christian.
I hope I'm not the first to note the obvious fact that the analogy doesn't hold very well. Consider the superior technology and military organization of the European settlers in America and the both inadvertent and deliberate germ warfare, and you'll see that whoever is coming into Italy probably doesn't represent the same kind of threat (it certainly isn't true of immigrants to America).
But I expect the point is less political than cultural, i.e. that "native" Italians could be alienated from their corporate culture and values. At least, that seems to be the underlying anxiety in the American immigration debate. The degree of that anxiety, its blatant xenophobia and disturbing appropriation of a Native American history that Italian immigrants to America no doubt helped to write, is what surprised me.
At the risk of simplifying matters, I might suggest that it's precisely the antagonistic, paranoid and fearful tone of such rhetoric that puts one's culture more at risk than the presence of persons of another culture. It implies that the paranoid culture is weak and has no confidence in its own foundations, that it exists only because it holds a majority and not because it has any validity in the realm of human social and spiritual values. This is, admittedly, a similar argument as that made against people who worry that homosexual unions will undermine the family, but I don't think you have to agree with a particular policy on homosexual unions or immigration to still see the problem with the argument from fear.
In other words, if your problem is that your culture is weak enough already, then maybe you need to attend to that. Now, that could, I suppose, mean that you should attend to that first, as in prior to allowing immigrants in who might confuse the issue. But, at least in the States, most immigrants seem to come because they want to be a part of this country and what they recognize it stands for and offers, not because they want to colonize it and make it look like where they are trying to escape from. We might, then, take a cue from the immigrants and remember the values that are worthwhile in our culture and see how we could build on those to welcome the stranger who knocks on our door for help.
N.B. - it strikes me as absurd and tragic enough that I will not be able to conciliate those who find this post disagreeably too liberal by insisting that it is in fact meant to be rather Christian.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)