Do Tight Times Make Close Marriages?

Do Tight Times Make Close Marriages? - Most partnerships, business or personal, are easy when money is easy. The lucre seems to take the sting out of any disagreements, and, frankly, the cost of disharmony is too high. But according to a new report from the National Marriage Project, the Great Recession hasn't necessarily been thinning out the ranks of the married.

The survey of 1,197 married Americans aged 18–45 found that about a third of people reported that the economic downturn had been hard on their marriages. For an almost equal number of people, however, the financial strain had brought them closer. And according to the report, adorably titled "The Survey of Marital Generosity," about 38% had put the brakes on the divorce they were considering before the thin times hit.

This may be due to some old-fashioned shoulder-to-the-wheel, pull-together, family-comes-first, stick-to-it-iveness on the part of the married couple. Or it may simply be that divorce and life after divorce are huge financial hits. Several august oracles (including, maybe) predicted that the recession would increase divorce. But so far, that hasn't been true.

Meanwhile in China, which has been undergoing a sustained economic boom, divorces have shot up. Mind you, money isn't the only influence in a marriage's demise. The divorce laws in China have been loosening up and women have been gaining more economic freedom than they had been accustomed to, two factors that usually lead to more splits.

As a measure of national well-being, the divorce rate is a double-headed beast. A high rate of divorce can lead to a lot of economic and family instability, especially in countries or communities where women have little access to education or wealth. On the other hand, an extremely low level of divorce can mean that people are stuck in abusive marriages, especially — you guessed it — in countries where women have little access to education or wealth.

Similarly, divorces that are delayed for financial reasons can be good or bad news. If people find a way back to happiness by sitting through the hard times together, so much the better for them, their wealth and their children. But if economic strains are making an untenable domestic situation even more perilous, and even harder to escape from, this can have very serious — even tragic — consequences. ( time.com )

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Why Powerful Men Compulsively Cheat

Why Powerful Men Compulsively Cheat - Human males have never been thought of as models of sexual restraint — and with good reason. From the moment the adolescent libido begins to boot up, boys seem to enter an ongoing state of emotional — if not literal — priapism, from which they never fully emerge.

As far as nature is concerned, this is just fine. The goal of any organism, after all, is to ensure the survival and propagation of its genes, and males — far more so than females — are eminently equipped to do that. Even the world's most reproductively prolific mothers rarely produce more than eight or nine children in a lifetime. Males can conceive everyday, even multiple times a day, and come emotionally hardwired to do just that.

Part of the reason they don't, apart from the impracticality of trying to raise a brood of 200 children, is that they just don't get that many mating opportunities. Sex requires a willing partner, and females, with so much more on the line in terms of the time, effort and energy that pregnancy and child-rearing involve, can be extremely selective in choosing mates. That requires males to develop a whole suite of emotional muscles — self-denial, self-restraint, a facility for delayed gratification — that will help them cope with an appetite that at some levels will never be fully satisfied. And that, in turn, is a central pillar of monogamy and fidelity.

But what happens when the lid comes off? What happens when the opportunities are unlimited? In some cases, not much. Males either continue to practice self-control or, after a brief period of happy debauchery — think rock stars or leading men who are always seen stepping out with a new piece of arm candy — finally settle down into stable monogamy.

In some cases, though, the stability never happens; in some cases, unlimited opportunity simply leads to unlimited appetites. Emperors and despots may be best known for this kind of behavior. The 18th-century Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail is said to have fathered 888 children with his 500 concubines. Genghis Khan makes Ismail look practically barren. A 2003 analysis of the Y chromosome of 2,123 men now living across the former Mongol empire showed that there are 16 million males living today whose line stretches back to the great conqueror — or one out of every 200 males now on the planet. But modern-day men of power — Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, John Ensign, JFK, FDR, and most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn — with their serial wives or serial philandering, can behave just as badly, if less prolifically.

"When men have more opportunity they tend to act on that opportunity," says psychologist Mark Held, a private practitioner in the Denver area who specializes in male sexuality and the problems of overachievers. "The challenge becomes developing ways to control the impulses so you don't get yourself into self-defeating situations."

There are a lot of things that distinguish pampered and powerful men who behave themselves sexually from those who don't. Part of it is simply underlying temperament. Bill Clinton and Harry Truman were decidedly different people in the rectitude department, even if both of them were once the most powerful person in the world. There's no saying with certainty what led to Clinton's sometimes frantic need to be liked and his maddening lack of any internal governor — his broken home, his abusive stepfather, his admitted issues with low self-esteem that came from being seen as the chubby kid from the school band — but other leaders have hard-knock pasts too and not all of them become lotharios.

"It's sometimes framed as a case of character, but it can also be someone's sexual makeup," says Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the sexual disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins University. "There's a basic biological factor at play. Sex is a powerful force and some people just have to struggle more to control it than others."

Narcissists are clearly part of the poor-control camp. One of the things that made John Edwards a hard electoral sell well before his affair was revealed was the visceral sense people got that he was simply too much of a self-adoring preener. There would be no level of public adoration he could achieve that would reach the level he felt for himself. But in some cases, narcissism is not the only thing going on.

"There's a fairly new measure we use that's called 'the dark side,'" says Larry Josephs, a professor of psychology at Adelphi University. "It's a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy." Garden variety cads like Edwards clearly aren't psychopathic, but world-class monsters like Caligula — whose sexual appetites were legend — just as clearly were. All three features of the dark side personality can exist in people in different combinations and different degrees, but the more severe any one of them is, the greater the risk for sexual acting out. "Men who are low on these traits are less likely to cheat even when the opportunity presents itself," says Josephs.

Also in play is the point in life at which unusual privilege was first conferred. Members of royal families are born into a world of indulgence and entitlement, and the princelings who grow up that way may never have to develop the emotional musculature that will allow them to show self-restraint. Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth and prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free-throw they may find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and incidents of bad behavior are overlooked or covered up. Any skills they may have been developing for self-control or self-denial quickly wither.

"People who come into fame or power later in life do seem to manage their circumstances more effectively," says Berlin. "They've learned a certain discipline and they've adapted to having to contain themselves."

Men, certainly, aren't the only people who abuse their power sexually. Women exhibit the dark-side triad too, and can become accustomed to power and its perks as easily as a man can. What's more, testosterone, a primal driver of dominance behavior, is not the exclusive province of men either. "Women produce testosterone just like men do, even if at different levels," says Josephs. "That means women have testosterone-driven tendencies as well, and that pays dividends. Dominant animals tend to be more reproductively successful whether they're male or female."

But if alpha men and women dominate both the world and the gene pool, that's not to say betas don't have ways to push back. Among all social animals, leaders are tolerated only until what they give back to the group in terms of stability and order is exceeded by what they take from it, in terms of material and mating resources. When the balance tips the wrong way, the group gets restless.

"We have what we call subordinate strategies, and we see that in chimps and bonobos too," says Josephs. "You don't want the leader dominating all of the mating opportunities, so you form coalitions and topple him."

That same phenomenon, Josephs believes, may explain the public outrage when sexual misbehavior of elites — particularly the kind that involves violence or assault — become public. "We don't want our leaders to be philanderers," he says. "In an egalitarian society, nobody should monopolize all of the females or sleep with our wives, or we're going to get even."

In the case of Edwards or Spitzer, that meant banishment to a political Elba. In the case of Strauss-Kahn, it may well mean jail. In the case of Caligula, it meant assassination. It's been said for millennia, but it bears repeating: just keep it zipped, boys, just keep it zipped. ( time.com )

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When Is Tweeting Cheating?

When Is Tweeting Cheating? - Apart from the eerie similarity to the opening plot point of the Matt Damon vehicle The Adjustment Bureau (handsome potential New York City mayor brought down by ill-advised photograph), the most striking thing about the spectacle of the slow-motion Weinermobile crash that took place on Monday is how it divides the sexes.

As my colleague James Poniewozik points out, right after the last surreal moments of New York Congressman Anthony Weiner's already bizarre press conference — during which he admitted that yes, it was he who accidentally posted a picture of his unders on Twitter, and oh yeah, he'd kind of used electronic communication with strangers to get his rocks off before — most of the news channels went straight to a bunch of guys to figure out what it all meant.

The men looked a bit puzzled, many of them arguing — especially if they were Democrats — that because Weiner hadn't broken the law, they weren't quite sure what the big deal was.

There was the sticky issue of the wife, the woman to whom barely a year ago he'd pledged eternal troth. But if Weiner didn't actually meet any of the several women he admitted to having flirty and sexually charged communication with, let alone sleep with them, then where was the harm? After all, the men noted, some of it even took place before Weiner was married. Until the inadvertently public tweet, it was private, consensual social-media contact between grown people.

In the game of Monogamy, the consensus among the blokes was: Weiner deserves the equivalent of being sent to jail. No passing Go, no collecting $200, but a few rolls of the die and he's back on the streets.

For many women, on the other hand, perhaps especially wives, the whole thing is galling. How could sending dirty e-mails — or in the case of Twitter and Facebook, direct messages — to other women possibly be the faithful and loving thing to do?

It's not a hard science, but if the spectrum of infidelity has the Full Arnold (secret child with another woman) and the Semi-Eliot (occasional use of prostitutes) at one end and saying something flirty to the person handing you a caffe latte at the other, then sending pictures of your congressional member to women you don't know is somewhere in the middle, a gray area.

Social media has vastly widened the borders of this misty territory, making it easy to find former flames on Facebook, admirers on Twitter and people you liked the look of from across the conference facility on LinkedIn. Once you've found them, it's up to you and your moral compass as to what you do with them. Because of the disembodied nature of electronic communication, people are often much less guarded about how they express themselves.

There's a concept that marriage therapists talk about, emotional infidelity, where a person doesn't actually sleep with another person, but they have a relationship that's intense and intimate in every other way. Sometimes these are gateway friendships to full-blown affairs, other times they blow over. Generally guys tend to dismiss these as no big deal, a technical foul at best.

But to many women, for whom physical and emotional intimacy are kind of a package deal, these can be devastating. Why, these women like to know, is sharing intimacy with them not enough? While Weiner's biggest crime against the state seems to be subjecting it to a spectacle of ginormous cheesiness, his wife, the accomplished knockout Huma Abedin, has got to be weighing her future with a man who cannot call a moratorium on the sexy talk with strangers even in the first flush of wedded bliss.

In the end, what Weiner did was spectacularly stupid. It's forgivable to send a public tweet when you meant to send a private one (I say this as TIME magazine's reigning queen of the inadvertent "reply all"). But it's stupid to lie about it.

It's foolish, as even tweens know, to send risqué photos to people you haven't met. But it's witless to send them to the opposite sex if you're married or in a committed relationship. (How did Weiner think Abedin would feel?) It's imprudent to lie to the press, your family and supporters, and it's chowder-headed to do it if you know that you can be easily found out.

While we're at it, it's injudicious to organize a press conference so badly that there's nobody but yourself to cut off questions and let it be hijacked by a blogger and a shock-jock sidekick. And finally, it's not fair but it's true that it's particularly harebrained to do all this if you have a family name that is as memorable as Weiner.

Maybe elected Representatives don't have to be faithful or clever or honest to be decent leaders. But is a little wisdom too much to ask? ( time.com )

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Will the Kids Get Their Parents to Marry?

Will the Kids Get Their Parents to Marry? - If a new interview in USA Today is to anything to go on, kids seem to have done what Jennifer Aniston couldn't: got Brad Pitt to settle down.

Pitt, whose six children with Angelina Jolie (that striking woman with big lips — maybe you've heard of her?) range in age from 2 to 9, is even reconsidering whether he will get married. He and Jolie had famously claimed they'd make it legal only when it was legal for gay people too. But he didn't reckon with his little persuaders.

"The kids ask about marriage," he tells USA Today. "It's meaning more and more to them. So it's something we've got to look at." Moreover, while he still has a passion for motorcycles, architecture and photography, he admits that a lot of his bandwith is taken up with less exotic pursuits. His kids' safety is a big issue for him, as is cooking. "You've got to make sure they've brushed their teeth and eaten a good breakfast. You want to be present if they wake up with a bad dream."

This is Brad Pitt. The Brad Pitt of secret, slightly perverse, midday maternal fantasies throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Talking about his kids' dental hygiene. Bit of a buzzkill, no?

Even a beast as iconoclastic as Brangelina, it seems, cannot resist the normalizing force of children. Remember when Bill Gates claimed he wasn't going to leave his children much money in his will? And then he actually had children, got to know them and changed his mind. A bit. Instead of a few hundred thousand, as he initially suggested, the Gateses are going with 10% of their wealth. So ... more like hundreds of millions.

It's not a huge surprise that the Jolie-Pitt brood want their parents to get married. Scratch any parent and you'll find a person whose child wishes that s/he was less weird, stood out less, just disappeared into the indistinguishable mass of humanity known as "grown-ups." That's why the suburbs, where the families live, end up seeming so vanilla. It's not what the neighbors are saying. It's the pressure from the damn conformist kids.

Yes, kids crave stability, but it's not stability that makes the Jolie-Pitt kids want their parents to be legally wed. It's that they want to blend in. (By the way, good luck with that, guys.) Or, more specifically, kids want to stand out in ways that they have agency over. They don't wish to have attention thrust upon them for things not of their choosing.

Pick up any memoir by a child of a celebrity and if you don't find them saying, "Cary Grant was just Dad to me," they're saying, "My mother, a.k.a. Joan Crawford, ruined my life." It's as if there's a rule: no matter what you do with your life, to your children you must appear normal. Right up until they accuse you of being stultifying old conformists.

The data is clear that long-term, monogamous, loving relationships between parents are very good for children. History also seems to suggest that these relationships are facilitated by the institution of marriage (though that may be changing). Brad and Angelina may have been too untamed once for anything as stuffy as a marriage license. But then they had children have already done their domesticating damage. And there are worse reasons to get married than because six small people who love you want you to.

Just, for the love of mercy, do it quietly. ( time.com )

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