Category: General

Here’s an article from AZCentral.com about divorce parties – events people have to celebrate the end of their marriage.

Continue reading “Divorce Parties”

I read with interest today about the new book by Sheryl Kurland about couples who have been married for more than 50 years, and what they say made the difference in their relationship. Here’s a nice review of the book in the Baltimore Sun.

Here are some of the key pieces of advice they offered:

Don’t go to bed angry. If you can’t resolve the argument by bedtime, at least agree together on your plan for dealing with it the next day.

There’s no such thing as a 50/50 marriage. A good marriage is 75/25, and both partners give 75 percent.

From the husband: Always allow your wife to win. She will anyway.

Don’t discuss sensitive subjects before dinner. Eat first.

When it all works out well and your relationship is a success, praise the other partner for making it work.

Continue reading “What Makes for a Happy Marriage?”

You may wonder why there’s so much information here on my Divorce and Family Law Blog about this state or that considering covenant marriage bills. The reason is that this is a trend. It’s real, it’s continuing, it strikes a chord with voters concerned about the breakdown of family values, and it’s going to bring about change (at least in the law) in many states. Here’s the latest, what looks like an editorial in the Leaf Chronicle from Clarksville, TN.

Continue reading “More on Covenant Marriage”

A lesbian who adopted children must pay child support after she and her partner split. This from the Indiana Cout of Appeals. Here’s the article about the decision from the Indianapolis Star. And here’s another brief article from the Los Angeles Times. The decision comes in the middle of a debate in Indiana about whether to amend the Indiana constitution to prohibit same sex marriage.
Continue reading “Lesbian Must Pay Child Support”

This probably doesn’t concern you, but I just went through a day of hell. It all started Thursday (yesterday) when WordPress (the software I use for this blog) got an upgrade. I attempted to install the upgrade, and in the process lost my database (read that, lost my blog). Bummer.

I have just completed a laborious process of deleting and reinstalling the original release of WordPress and linking it to my original database. I will continue using this release now until someone can give me a REALLY good reason to go through this again!

Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and his wife have staged a very public covenant marriage ceremony, hoping to encourage other couples in Arkansas to make the same choice. Here’s an article from the Chicago Tribune. Here’s another article on it from the Sarasota Herald Tribune.

In the midst of the current debate about President’s Bush’s proposal to change Social Security, here’s an article pointing out another issue nobody’s talking about. Entitled Motherhood: the Real Social Security Crisis, this op-ed piece in the Pasadena Star News cites historical documents that “make it clear that the council that constructed Social Security in the late 1930s purposefully chose to discourage women from working outside the home, to reward married men by giving them a bonus if they had a “dependent’ wife, to encourage men to work by linking benefit levels to years worked and income earned, and to send a message to women that they needed to stay married, since their economic security was tied to their status as a dependent of a wage-earning husband.”
Continue reading “The Other Social Security Crisis”

Marital and relationship tension account for 23 percent of all issues Canadian employees present to their employee assistance providers. This according to the latest statistics from the WarrenShepell Employee Assistance Program, based in Toronto. Here’s the article on the study from Canadian Newswire. And here’s the summary of the study on WarrenShepell’s web site.

Here are some of the findings from the study:

Relationship issues in general, including marital and relationship issues, separation, divorce, and domestic violence, account for nearly 30 percent of all cases presented to EAP providers.

Marital and relationship issues alone accounted for 23 percent of cases and were the sintle most prevalent issue.

Many other issues like personal and workplace stress were often provoked or axacerbated by marital and relationship discord.

The divorce rate is rising across Asia. During the same period that divorce rates have remained more or less stable in the Western world, divorce has increased by a third in Singapore and doubled in Thailand and mainland China. The divorce rate has tripled in Taiwan. Here’s the article about all this in the Khaleej Times.

The article assumes that the change is due to a surge in the relative power of women, and it’s forcing men into a new set of roles and expectations:

While Japanese women will see divorce as a first step to a new and improved life, Japanese men are struggling with the wholly new duties of doing the laundry or cooking, things that have traditionally been done for them all their life — first by their mothers and then by their wives. In this sense, more and more Japanese men are becoming Americanised!

Yawn. Here we go again. Another conservative commentator who has no experience with divorce pontificates about how the real problem is that divorce is too easy. Here’s the latest from somebody called Nathan Tabor. My favorite statement in his piece is that “Bitter child custody fights are often part of the cost of no-fault divorce.” Huh?

Continue reading “Is divorce too easy?”

Responding to yesterday’s post about the Vatican’s pronouncement on annulments, and specifically the question whether Americans are overusing the process of annulment, a good friend let me know about two articles that explore the issue. First, there’s Annulments in America: Keeping Bad News in Context from CanonLaw.info. Then there’s this one called Annulments in America: Rebutting a rebuttal.

My quick conclusion is that they take opposite sides in this tender and intriguing argument. I haven’t read either of them.

Two Senators, one a republican and the other a democrat, have called for prohibiting states from taking part of child support payments to fund child support services. Here’s the article about their bill in the New Kerala.

The Senators, Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Herb Kohl, D-Wis., say their proposal would put an extra $4 billion in child support collections in the hands of parents over the next five years. “It simply does not make sense to tell a family that is on welfare or trying to get off of welfare that the State is entitled to the first cut of a child support payment,” said the Senators.
Continue reading “Senators Call for Cutting Child Support Services”

The Vatican has issued revised guidelines for Catholics who wish to obtain an annulment, an essential step for Catholics who have divorced and want to remarry with the blessing of the Church. Here’s an article on the new pronouncements from The Scotsman. Here’s another from the Washington Post. And another from The Guardian.

Catholics can obtain an annulment on the grounds of impotence, refusal of the other spouse to have children, or psychological immaturity at the time of the marriage. It’s this last reason that annulment critics charge is being overused, permitting almost anyone who obtains a divorce to get an annulment. This practice seems particularly prevalant in the US, which accounts for about 2/3 of annulments worldwide.

The Alberta Court of Appeal has issued a landmark opinion that will change the complexion of child support adjustment. Here’s the article on the decision from the National Post.

The Court of Appeal ruled that when a child support payer’s income goes up, his or her obligation to pay child support normally kicks in at that time, not months or years later when the child support recipient files for a modification. The ruling means that many child support payers may owe large arrearages retroactively.
Continue reading “Retroactive Increase in Child Support”

The Scottish Executive will publish today a proposed revision of the family law in Scotland. Here’s the article from the BBC. Here’s another article from Grampian TV.

The bill will propose reducing the required waiting period from two years to one year if they both agree and from five years to two if one of them opposes divorce. It will propose allowing unmarried fathers who register the birth of their child with full parental rights. And it will propose offering more family mediation to help reduce conflict in divorce.

Chief Judge Judith Kaye has called for New York to implement no fault divorce. Here’s an article on the story from the New York Times (free registration required). Kaye leads the New York Court of Appeals, its highest court, and therefore its judiciary. She called for the change in her annual “State of the Judiciary” speech.

New York is one of the few remaining states that requires divorcing couples to demonstrate that one of them is “at fault” — a requirement that often exacerbates the tension between divorcing spouses. The law is held in place, according to the Times, “by years of opposition from some women’s rights groups, the Catholic Church, legislators, and others who believe that easier divorces and quick settlements might harm one spouse – often women – who have historically earned less money or have not worked outside the home.”
Continue reading “No Fault Divorce in New York?”

Three states – Arizona, Arkansas, and Louisiana — have passed some form of “covenant marriage,” in which a bride and groom agree when they say “I do” that it will take something beyond the normal civil standard of incompatibility for them to dissolve their marriage.

Response from the brides and grooms to these statutes has been unenthusiastic. Few people have actually opted, even in the three states permitting covenant marriages, to bind themselves to the more rigid standards against divorce. The percentage of couples opting to embrace the new requirements is between 1 and 2 percent.

Continue reading “Covenant Marriage Movement – New Tactics”

A husband and wife in Jordan were both unhappy with their marriage, so they both turned to the Internet to find comfort. The husband Bakr called himself Adnan, and the wife Sanaa called her self Jamila. Here’s the article from the Inquirer (not to be confused with the National Enquirer, which has a, shall we say, different approach to the news of the day).

You can tell the rest of the story without my help, right? In their new personalities (Bakr the devout Muslim who loved to read and Jamila the cultured, unmarried woman), they fell madly in love with each other and agreed to meet near a bus depot.

When Bakr/Adnan realized who his new consort was to be, he screamed three times “I divorce you.” You gotta wonder, don’t you? Don’t these two deserve to be together?