Maggie Scarf's Blog, page 4

Just curious

I was not making an anti-marriage statement. I was just curious about this statistic and wondered what others might make of it.
Maggie Scarf

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Are Marriage Vows Meaningful?

CHILDREN LIVING IN AMERICA WITH TWO MARRIED PARENTS HAVE A HIGHER RISK OF EXPERIENCING A FAMILY BREAKUP THAN DO CHILDREN LIVING WITH TWO UNMARRIED PARENTS IN SWEDEN,
WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT MARRIAGE IN AMERICA?

Children living with two married parents in the United States have a higher risk of experiencing a family breakup than do children living with two unmarried parents in Sweden.
What does this say about marriage in America?

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The source for my blog on sex and aging

There was a study reported upon in the New England Journal of Medicine. I will look up the exact reference and publish it when I have the opportunity to go through my files.
Maggie Scarf

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Remarriage Is More Fragile Than First Marriage

Are second marriages more fragile than first marriages?

Are later marriages generally more successful and stable than first-time marriages? And, given that most remarriages (some 90 percent) follow upon divorce rather than death, do the disaffected ex-partners tend to make smarter, more mutually satisfying choices in a second or higher-order relationship?

Apparently not. The rate of marital breakup is spectacularly high in America–currently, over half of all first marriages end in divorce; but...

The Emergence of the Marriage Gap

What is the “marriage gap”?

Since the great social ferment of the 1960s, a number of alternatives to old-fashioned, traditional marriage have emerged on the social scene. Relationships that once were viewed as morally offensive – sexual partners living together before marrying; out-of-wedlock births; single-parent child rearing – are now both acceptable and commonplace. Couples enter wedlock with a more light-hearted attitude (“If this doesn’t work out, I can move on). A reflection of this is...

Have we foreknowledge of our fates?

Is there such a thing as foreknowledge of one’s fate? Carl Jung thought that such a phenomenon existed. A patient of his dreamed of being in a skiing accident in which he was killed, and Jung advised him sternly to cancel plans for a forthcoming ski holiday. The patient ignored that advice and went ahead with his plans: He actually did die in a ski accident during that ski trip!

I am thinking of this because a friend of mine used to tell me that her greatest fear was of becoming a bag lady in...

Interview with a Pentecostal

He identified himself as a Pentecostal on my e-mail, and asked for an interview in regard to my recent book, September Songs. My book is about “young-old” adult long-marrieds (couples 50-75 yrs), so I thought the topic of our talk would be clear. But should I identify myself as Secular in advance, or just let the subject come up in our talk? I decided on the latter course.

However when he called, at the appointed time, he didn’t want to talk about “senior marriage”; he wanted to talk about sex...

Is This Really Worth Fighting About?

The intensity of arguments change over time

In 1980, I wrote a book about marriage – Intimate Partners – in which the oldest couple interviewed was in their late forties. I got a lot of flak about that from older readers, who wrote to me and said, “Hey, what about us? We’re still alive and kicking! Why exclude the marriages of older people?

I recognized the validity of that complaint, but for the next twenty years I never really returned to the subject of couples’ relationships. When I finally...