A Chinese man who was fined $400,000 for having 8 children just got his fine reduced to $14,000
Vanessa Gu
Wed, July 7, 2021, 4:11 AM
A family in China's Sichuan was fined $400,000 for having 8 children, but this was later reduced to $14,000. d3sign/Getty Images
A family in west China's Sichuan province was fined $400,000 for having eight children.
The fine was eventually lowered to $14,000.
Liu Mouhua and his wife had five daughters before having two sons in 2006 and 2010, SCMP reported.
A Chinese family with eight children was slapped with a 2.6 million yuan ($401,660) fine for breaking China's family planning laws. This was later reduced to 90,000 yuan ($13,900), Chinese news site Jiemian reported on Monday.
In their quest for a son, 50-year-old farmer Liu Mouhua and his former wife continued having children. The couple from Anyue county in west China's Sichuan had five daughters before giving birth to two sons in 2006 and 2010, and a daughter in between the boys, according to the South China Morning Post.
Anyue county is located in Sichuan province, west China. Google Maps
In China, many families have a preference for sons because they are the ones who pass on the family name. However, the country also has a strict population planning policy, under which families who exceed the number of children allowed are fined or have to pay "social support fees."
These fines and payments are usually calculated based on annual income and decided by local governments. In Sichuan province and before 2016, the fine was between six and eight times the family's annual income, reported Jiemian. The fine was later reduced to three times the family's annual income.
All of Liu's children were born before 2015 - at which point China relaxed its one-child policy to two - so he was fined for every child born after the first. The 2.6 million yuan fine was a penalty for Liu's sixth, seventh, and eighth children. It's unclear how much he paid in fines or "social support" for his other children.
After local authorities spoke to the local court and lawyers, the fine was lowered to 90,000 yuan to be paid in installments, Jiemian reported.
The father of eight told Jiemian he was resigned to paying the fine but admitted it was a struggle with five children who are still in school and two in college.
"I'll pay what I have, after deducting expenditure for my children and parents' daily lives. I will face it and pay as much as I can," he told the Chinese news site.
Liu's story has caused a stir on Chinese social media as China suffers from a rapidly aging and shrinking population. Earlier this year, the country expanded its two-child policy to three to encourage more births.
Marriages
Why My Daughter Got (Temporarily) Married at 13
Having been shamed about my sexuality when I was young, I was determined, as a mother, to celebrate my child’s romantic wishes.
Five years ago, when my daughter was in the 8th grade, she fell for a boy with strict, religious parents. Tall and slender with luxurious hair that swooped stylishly across his delicate face, he resembled a shy, well-mannered Justin Bieber. They both played soccer for their middle-school teams.
My daughter — tall for her age — had been recruited by the school’s soccer coach, who had attended a girls’ basketball game in which she had fouled out. The coach told her that the girls’ team needed an enforcer. (She had never played soccer.) During their courtship, this shy Justin Bieber look-alike promised to teach her how to score if she taught him how to knock people down. I was delighted by the match.
The eldest by a minute, she is the only heterosexual in our family; her twin is a lesbian and so are her two moms. Her exuberant sexuality was evident at a young age — her delight in her own body was almost always channeled toward boys. In grade school, on the playground, she often picked up the ones she favored and carried them about like trophies, which necessitated early and ongoing conversations about consent.
Although she was eager for emotional connection with both girls and boys, her flirtatiousness seemed aimed only at persons of the masculine persuasion. For years we had a shrine in our house to the deceased “Glee” star Cory Monteith; we still mark his death day on the family calendar. Because I grew up in an Irish-Catholic household where sexual feelings were at best contained, at worst annulled, I took particular pleasure in allowing hers to flourish.
The boyfriend’s parents were not as delighted by the middle-school romance as I was. From what I understood, they each had been raised in other faiths and had converted to Islam. They insisted on strict compliance with religious laws. Meaning: Their boy with the luxurious hair was not allowed to date, not allowed even incidental physical contact with girls who were not related to him.
I did what no parent should: I became complicit in their circumventing his parents’ prohibitions by driving my daughter to ice cream parlor dates and rendezvous at local parks. More than once, she hid a blanket in the bag she took with her.
One does not need a psychology degree to surmise that my own family’s disapproval of my lesbian desire fueled this indecorous behavior on my part. When, in my 20s, I finally mustered the courage to come out to my parents, they expressed their disgust at my sexuality with great clarity, my mother applying everything she thought she knew about lesbians — lonely, perverse, a danger to children — to me, her third and once favored child.
She began what would become a never-ending, lifelong campaign to change me. When my parents visited Europe for the first time, she prayed for my transformation, lighting candles in every cathedral they visited.
At 13, my daughter was thrilled to have a boyfriend, but also, I suspect, thrilled by the clandestine nature of their love. At home, we began to joke that she was the only person in the family in a closeted relationship. I told her to be careful: If she and the boyfriend were to get caught by his parents, he would likely get in terrible trouble, and she would likely never see him again.
Of course, they got caught. Instead of forbidding the liaison, the parents did something I did not expect: They proposed a temporary marriage between my 13-year-old and theirs, although I would not know about this until moments before the ceremony.
A type of Muslim marriage, a mut’ah contract joins a couple for a fixed time period. Historically it was used so that a traveling man could have a temporary wife when away from his family for many months or even years. Today, some young Muslims engage in mut’ah marriage to date without breaking Islamic law.
The ceremony took place in a local Mexican coffee house, just a short walk from the middle school. Both of the boy’s parents were in attendance, but I was my daughter’s sole family representative because she had failed to mention the exact nature of the meeting when she asked me to join. I thought I was simply coming along to meet the mother.
My eldest whispered the relevant details in my ear as they walked through the door. We all smiled awkwardly during introductions, the father bringing a hand to his heart when I thoughtlessly went to shake hands. The boy’s mother was strikingly beautiful and at least a decade younger than me.
After we had all gotten our hot chocolates, she took out her Quran and explained that temporary marriage was a way for our children to have some limited physical contact without jeopardizing her son’s soul. If temporarily married, they could hold hands and possibly even kiss without the boy being consigned to a state of sin. I saw immediately that, like my own mother, she was the moral center around which the family coalesced.
As his mother spoke, she held my gaze, her large brown eyes lit with intensity and seriousness of purpose. I was fully aware of the irony of our situation: a Muslim mother negotiating her son’s marriage with a lesbian mother; I thought that she was aware of it, too. Like me, she was trying to live in a country where not everyone shared her values. Without speaking, she was asking all of us to hold the contradictions inherent to our distinctly American venture with great care.
And so, I assented. I assented without calling home to consult my partner of 20-something years, a lapse in judgment that would become a sore point between us. In the crowded cafe, I was, perhaps not surprisingly, overcome with thoughts of my own mother, who was preoccupied until her death with the state of my soul. I thought of what it would have meant to her, to us, if she had been granted a religious ceremony that legitimized my desire, a ceremony that, even if temporary, would have made my touching another woman into something other than sin.
I didn’t want the boy or his mother to suffer in the way my own mother had. I could see that her beliefs, however different from my own, were passionately held. At the same time, I didn’t want my daughter to be prevented from touching the boy she loved. I didn’t want what had been done to me to be done to her.
So I assented, and the boy’s parents read the ritual phrases in Arabic, and the children nodded along and, without my understanding a word, they were married. When the ceremony was finished, my daughter and the boy reached across the table to hold hands.
Their temporary marriage lasted until they broke up a year later. By then, they were in high school, 9th grade, and had become an object of great fascination to their peers from whom they had not thought to keep the temporary marriage secret. My daughter had had to withstand a barrage of public questioning about how and whether they had sex, a level of curiosity she found disturbingly invasive and, indeed, exoticizing, although she wouldn’t have used that word at the time or understood how it applied in her new context.
When first love faded, there was no subsequent ceremony to end the marriage, only the familiar teen rituals of recrimination and tears.
Although my partner likes to tease that she would have negotiated a better dowry for our daughter than the symbolic gift bag proffered — an anthropologist, she was the only person in the family familiar with mut’ah contract before it was proposed — she was genuinely disappointed, on the day of the impromptu wedding, that I hadn’t insisted on her presence. She felt I had let the boy’s parents off the hook — my solitary participation allowing them to suppress their knowledge of our lesbian coupledom.
By not calling home, I had made it easy for their family to ignore the full reality of ours, to pretend that the families being joined were more alike, more aligned, than they were. I had eased into sameness the very differences and contradictions that sacred ritual is meant to contain.
I don’t think my partner is wrong but, at the same time, I don’t regret my decision. I knew then, as I do now, that my immediate assent to the temporary marriage was a gift I was giving my exuberant daughter, an explicit acknowledgment that her romantic and sexual feelings were worth honoring. Indeed, worth celebrating.
By participating in the ritual, I was signaling that I didn’t see her body and soul as separate entities. I was signaling that I understood her desire to be sacred, rather than profane, and as important to who she is, and who she will become, as my own desire has been to me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/styl ... 6_50_ranks
Having been shamed about my sexuality when I was young, I was determined, as a mother, to celebrate my child’s romantic wishes.
Five years ago, when my daughter was in the 8th grade, she fell for a boy with strict, religious parents. Tall and slender with luxurious hair that swooped stylishly across his delicate face, he resembled a shy, well-mannered Justin Bieber. They both played soccer for their middle-school teams.
My daughter — tall for her age — had been recruited by the school’s soccer coach, who had attended a girls’ basketball game in which she had fouled out. The coach told her that the girls’ team needed an enforcer. (She had never played soccer.) During their courtship, this shy Justin Bieber look-alike promised to teach her how to score if she taught him how to knock people down. I was delighted by the match.
The eldest by a minute, she is the only heterosexual in our family; her twin is a lesbian and so are her two moms. Her exuberant sexuality was evident at a young age — her delight in her own body was almost always channeled toward boys. In grade school, on the playground, she often picked up the ones she favored and carried them about like trophies, which necessitated early and ongoing conversations about consent.
Although she was eager for emotional connection with both girls and boys, her flirtatiousness seemed aimed only at persons of the masculine persuasion. For years we had a shrine in our house to the deceased “Glee” star Cory Monteith; we still mark his death day on the family calendar. Because I grew up in an Irish-Catholic household where sexual feelings were at best contained, at worst annulled, I took particular pleasure in allowing hers to flourish.
The boyfriend’s parents were not as delighted by the middle-school romance as I was. From what I understood, they each had been raised in other faiths and had converted to Islam. They insisted on strict compliance with religious laws. Meaning: Their boy with the luxurious hair was not allowed to date, not allowed even incidental physical contact with girls who were not related to him.
I did what no parent should: I became complicit in their circumventing his parents’ prohibitions by driving my daughter to ice cream parlor dates and rendezvous at local parks. More than once, she hid a blanket in the bag she took with her.
One does not need a psychology degree to surmise that my own family’s disapproval of my lesbian desire fueled this indecorous behavior on my part. When, in my 20s, I finally mustered the courage to come out to my parents, they expressed their disgust at my sexuality with great clarity, my mother applying everything she thought she knew about lesbians — lonely, perverse, a danger to children — to me, her third and once favored child.
She began what would become a never-ending, lifelong campaign to change me. When my parents visited Europe for the first time, she prayed for my transformation, lighting candles in every cathedral they visited.
At 13, my daughter was thrilled to have a boyfriend, but also, I suspect, thrilled by the clandestine nature of their love. At home, we began to joke that she was the only person in the family in a closeted relationship. I told her to be careful: If she and the boyfriend were to get caught by his parents, he would likely get in terrible trouble, and she would likely never see him again.
Of course, they got caught. Instead of forbidding the liaison, the parents did something I did not expect: They proposed a temporary marriage between my 13-year-old and theirs, although I would not know about this until moments before the ceremony.
A type of Muslim marriage, a mut’ah contract joins a couple for a fixed time period. Historically it was used so that a traveling man could have a temporary wife when away from his family for many months or even years. Today, some young Muslims engage in mut’ah marriage to date without breaking Islamic law.
The ceremony took place in a local Mexican coffee house, just a short walk from the middle school. Both of the boy’s parents were in attendance, but I was my daughter’s sole family representative because she had failed to mention the exact nature of the meeting when she asked me to join. I thought I was simply coming along to meet the mother.
My eldest whispered the relevant details in my ear as they walked through the door. We all smiled awkwardly during introductions, the father bringing a hand to his heart when I thoughtlessly went to shake hands. The boy’s mother was strikingly beautiful and at least a decade younger than me.
After we had all gotten our hot chocolates, she took out her Quran and explained that temporary marriage was a way for our children to have some limited physical contact without jeopardizing her son’s soul. If temporarily married, they could hold hands and possibly even kiss without the boy being consigned to a state of sin. I saw immediately that, like my own mother, she was the moral center around which the family coalesced.
As his mother spoke, she held my gaze, her large brown eyes lit with intensity and seriousness of purpose. I was fully aware of the irony of our situation: a Muslim mother negotiating her son’s marriage with a lesbian mother; I thought that she was aware of it, too. Like me, she was trying to live in a country where not everyone shared her values. Without speaking, she was asking all of us to hold the contradictions inherent to our distinctly American venture with great care.
And so, I assented. I assented without calling home to consult my partner of 20-something years, a lapse in judgment that would become a sore point between us. In the crowded cafe, I was, perhaps not surprisingly, overcome with thoughts of my own mother, who was preoccupied until her death with the state of my soul. I thought of what it would have meant to her, to us, if she had been granted a religious ceremony that legitimized my desire, a ceremony that, even if temporary, would have made my touching another woman into something other than sin.
I didn’t want the boy or his mother to suffer in the way my own mother had. I could see that her beliefs, however different from my own, were passionately held. At the same time, I didn’t want my daughter to be prevented from touching the boy she loved. I didn’t want what had been done to me to be done to her.
So I assented, and the boy’s parents read the ritual phrases in Arabic, and the children nodded along and, without my understanding a word, they were married. When the ceremony was finished, my daughter and the boy reached across the table to hold hands.
Their temporary marriage lasted until they broke up a year later. By then, they were in high school, 9th grade, and had become an object of great fascination to their peers from whom they had not thought to keep the temporary marriage secret. My daughter had had to withstand a barrage of public questioning about how and whether they had sex, a level of curiosity she found disturbingly invasive and, indeed, exoticizing, although she wouldn’t have used that word at the time or understood how it applied in her new context.
When first love faded, there was no subsequent ceremony to end the marriage, only the familiar teen rituals of recrimination and tears.
Although my partner likes to tease that she would have negotiated a better dowry for our daughter than the symbolic gift bag proffered — an anthropologist, she was the only person in the family familiar with mut’ah contract before it was proposed — she was genuinely disappointed, on the day of the impromptu wedding, that I hadn’t insisted on her presence. She felt I had let the boy’s parents off the hook — my solitary participation allowing them to suppress their knowledge of our lesbian coupledom.
By not calling home, I had made it easy for their family to ignore the full reality of ours, to pretend that the families being joined were more alike, more aligned, than they were. I had eased into sameness the very differences and contradictions that sacred ritual is meant to contain.
I don’t think my partner is wrong but, at the same time, I don’t regret my decision. I knew then, as I do now, that my immediate assent to the temporary marriage was a gift I was giving my exuberant daughter, an explicit acknowledgment that her romantic and sexual feelings were worth honoring. Indeed, worth celebrating.
By participating in the ritual, I was signaling that I didn’t see her body and soul as separate entities. I was signaling that I understood her desire to be sacred, rather than profane, and as important to who she is, and who she will become, as my own desire has been to me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/styl ... 6_50_ranks
Re: Marriages
BBC
Sologamy: India woman's plan to 'marry herself' sparks debate
Geeta Pandey - BBC News, Delhi
Thu, June 2, 2022, 10:34 PM
Kshama Bindu
Kshama Bindu is a blogger based in western India
Sologamy, a wedding ceremony where people marry themselves, has been a growing trend in the West over the past few years. It has now reached Indian shores.
Kshama Bindu has a traditional Hindu ceremony due to take place on the evening of 11 June in a temple in the city of Vadodara, in the western state of Gujarat.
Decked up in her red bridal outfit, with henna on her hands and vermilion powder in her hair parting, the bride will do the customary seven rounds around the sacred fire, she tells me on the phone from her home.
Pre-wedding rituals such as Haldi (where turmeric mixed with oil is applied on the bride) and sangeet (music and dance) will be held earlier in the day. After the wedding, she will visit Goa for a two-week-long honeymoon.
The only missing component from all the celebrations will be: a groom. That's because Ms Bindu plans to "marry" herself in what is perhaps going to be India's first case of sologamy.
"Many people tell me I'm a great catch," the 24-year-old sociology student and a blogger said. "I tell them, 'I caught myself'."
By marrying herself, Ms Bindu said, she would be dedicating her life to "self-love".
"Self-marriage is a commitment to being there for yourself, to choosing the livelihood and lifestyle that will help you grow and blossom into the most alive, beautiful, and deeply happy person you can be.
"It's my way of showing that I'm accepting all the different parts of me, especially the parts of myself that I have tried to deny or disown such as my weaknesses - be they physical, mental or emotional. For me, this marriage is really a deep act of self-acceptance. What I'm trying to say is that I accept myself - all of me, even the parts that don't look pretty."
Her family, Ms Bindu told me, have given their blessings and will be attending the ceremony along with her friends.
"My mom said, 'Oh, you always think of something new.' But my parents, who are very open-minded, took it in their stride. They said, 'As long as it makes you happy, we're fine with it,'" she added.
Kshama Bindu's wedding card
The idea of "marrying" oneself first made news nearly 20 years ago when Carrie Bradshaw, a character in the hugely popular American series Sex and the City, raised it. But the show was a comedy drama.
Since then, reports say there have been hundreds of such "marriages", mostly by single women. Brides have walked down the aisle dressed in pristine wedding gowns, carrying a bouquet, sometimes with families and friends cheering them on. And in one highly unusual case, a 33-year-old Brazilian model "divorced" herself three months after her "wedding".
Businesses have also proliferated in many parts of the world, catering to the trend, offering wedding kits, including rings, vows and affirmation cards that say things like "Hell yeah, I'm awesome".
But since such stories are as yet unheard of in India, news of Ms Bindu's impending nuptials have become a talking point.
A mental health expert I spoke to seemed "surprised" by what Sologamy represented.
"To me it seems like a very strange concept," said Dr Savita Malhotra, former dean and professor of psychiatry at PGIMER hospital in the city of Chandigarh.
"Everyone has self-love. You don't have to break it up or create an external replica to demonstrate self-love. It's intrinsic to all of us. And marriage is about two entities coming together."
Why growing numbers are saying 'yes' to themselves
Italian woman 'marries herself'
The news has also started a debate on social media. Some applauded her saying she would be an inspiration to many, but most people just tried to wrap their heads around the concept of sologamy.
One woman on Twitter wondered what was the need for marriage if there was no-one else involved. Another said it appeared that Ms Bindu was just trying to run away from family responsibilities.
Some even criticised sologamy as "a bizarre and sad act" and blamed it on "chronic narcissism".
To her critics Ms Bindu has "only one thing" to say: "It's my decision to marry who I want - whether it's a man or a woman or myself. And by marrying myself, I want to normalise sologamy. I want to tell people that you come into the world alone and you leave it alone. So who can love you more than yourself? If you fall, it's you who are going to have to pick yourself up."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/in ... 00657.html
Sologamy: India woman's plan to 'marry herself' sparks debate
Geeta Pandey - BBC News, Delhi
Thu, June 2, 2022, 10:34 PM
Kshama Bindu
Kshama Bindu is a blogger based in western India
Sologamy, a wedding ceremony where people marry themselves, has been a growing trend in the West over the past few years. It has now reached Indian shores.
Kshama Bindu has a traditional Hindu ceremony due to take place on the evening of 11 June in a temple in the city of Vadodara, in the western state of Gujarat.
Decked up in her red bridal outfit, with henna on her hands and vermilion powder in her hair parting, the bride will do the customary seven rounds around the sacred fire, she tells me on the phone from her home.
Pre-wedding rituals such as Haldi (where turmeric mixed with oil is applied on the bride) and sangeet (music and dance) will be held earlier in the day. After the wedding, she will visit Goa for a two-week-long honeymoon.
The only missing component from all the celebrations will be: a groom. That's because Ms Bindu plans to "marry" herself in what is perhaps going to be India's first case of sologamy.
"Many people tell me I'm a great catch," the 24-year-old sociology student and a blogger said. "I tell them, 'I caught myself'."
By marrying herself, Ms Bindu said, she would be dedicating her life to "self-love".
"Self-marriage is a commitment to being there for yourself, to choosing the livelihood and lifestyle that will help you grow and blossom into the most alive, beautiful, and deeply happy person you can be.
"It's my way of showing that I'm accepting all the different parts of me, especially the parts of myself that I have tried to deny or disown such as my weaknesses - be they physical, mental or emotional. For me, this marriage is really a deep act of self-acceptance. What I'm trying to say is that I accept myself - all of me, even the parts that don't look pretty."
Her family, Ms Bindu told me, have given their blessings and will be attending the ceremony along with her friends.
"My mom said, 'Oh, you always think of something new.' But my parents, who are very open-minded, took it in their stride. They said, 'As long as it makes you happy, we're fine with it,'" she added.
Kshama Bindu's wedding card
The idea of "marrying" oneself first made news nearly 20 years ago when Carrie Bradshaw, a character in the hugely popular American series Sex and the City, raised it. But the show was a comedy drama.
Since then, reports say there have been hundreds of such "marriages", mostly by single women. Brides have walked down the aisle dressed in pristine wedding gowns, carrying a bouquet, sometimes with families and friends cheering them on. And in one highly unusual case, a 33-year-old Brazilian model "divorced" herself three months after her "wedding".
Businesses have also proliferated in many parts of the world, catering to the trend, offering wedding kits, including rings, vows and affirmation cards that say things like "Hell yeah, I'm awesome".
But since such stories are as yet unheard of in India, news of Ms Bindu's impending nuptials have become a talking point.
A mental health expert I spoke to seemed "surprised" by what Sologamy represented.
"To me it seems like a very strange concept," said Dr Savita Malhotra, former dean and professor of psychiatry at PGIMER hospital in the city of Chandigarh.
"Everyone has self-love. You don't have to break it up or create an external replica to demonstrate self-love. It's intrinsic to all of us. And marriage is about two entities coming together."
Why growing numbers are saying 'yes' to themselves
Italian woman 'marries herself'
The news has also started a debate on social media. Some applauded her saying she would be an inspiration to many, but most people just tried to wrap their heads around the concept of sologamy.
One woman on Twitter wondered what was the need for marriage if there was no-one else involved. Another said it appeared that Ms Bindu was just trying to run away from family responsibilities.
Some even criticised sologamy as "a bizarre and sad act" and blamed it on "chronic narcissism".
To her critics Ms Bindu has "only one thing" to say: "It's my decision to marry who I want - whether it's a man or a woman or myself. And by marrying myself, I want to normalise sologamy. I want to tell people that you come into the world alone and you leave it alone. So who can love you more than yourself? If you fall, it's you who are going to have to pick yourself up."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/in ... 00657.html
I Married the Wrong Person, and I’m So Glad I Did
Tish Harrison Warren
I truly believe that everyone marries the wrong person. But even by that standard, my husband’s and my match was particularly fraught. We got married young with no idea what we were getting into or how to decide who — or if — to marry. We both brought plenty of baggage into our relationship. We argued a lot, and didn’t handle conflict well. We had a vague sense that marriage was good and a mistaken idea that it was a necessary passage into adulthood. But even as I walked down the aisle, I harbored doubts about whether we should marry.
My husband is now also an Anglican priest and over the last two decades we’ve both presided over weddings and offered premarital counseling. We both admit that if a couple came to us with the doubts and issues we had when we got engaged we’d probably say, “maybe don’t do this,” which is what our premarital counselor told us at the time. He sensed that our life paths were pulling in different directions, that neither of us had a clear idea of who we were or what we wanted, and that I was romantically hung up on another guy. We didn’t listen to his advice.
Nearly two decades later, I’m glad we didn’t. But I can also say that he was right to warn us of trouble ahead.
The last 17 years have held long stretches where one or both of us was deeply unhappy. There have been times when contempt settled on our relationship, caked and hard as dried mud. We’ve both been unkind. We’ve both yelled curse words and stormed out the door. We both have felt we needed things that the other person simply could not give us. We have been to marriage counseling for long enough now that our favorite counselor feels like part of the family. We should probably include her photo in our annual Christmas card. At times, we stayed married sheerly as a matter of religious obedience and for the sake of our children.
There was a time, not long ago, when getting a divorce in America was prohibitively difficult. That left individuals — usually women — stuck with philandering husbands and in abusive and dangerous marriages. Divorce is at times a tragic necessity. I’m very glad it is available.
But now the pendulum has swung so far that surrendering personal happiness to remain in an unfulfilling marriage seems somehow shameful or cowardly, perhaps even wrong.
We hear stories of people leaving a marriage as an act of self-love, to embark on a personal, spiritual or sexual journey of self-discovery. There’s even a new trend of divorce celebration parties. In contrast, the story of someone staying in a disappointing marriage for the kids or because of a religious commitment or for some other similarly pedestrian reason is, at best, boring. Worse, it seems inauthentic and uncreative, lacking in boldness and a zest for life.
This represents a shift in our societal understanding of what marriage is and what it should be like. In a 2010 piece for The Times, Tara Parker-Pope wrote: “Plenty of miserable couples have stayed together for children, religion or other practical reasons. But for many couples, it’s just not enough to stay together. They want a relationship that is meaningful and satisfying.” Today, she continued, people “want partners who make their lives more interesting.”
If we as a culture view seeking personal fulfillment as a sacred duty, staying in an unhappy marriage is then seen as an act of self-betrayal.
I don’t know if I truly loved my husband when we got married or if I even knew what love was. But I know that we are learning to love each other with each passing day and that there is profound joy in that messy process. There are nights when he sits quietly reading, and I look at his face and recall what a steep hill we’ve climbed and will keep climbing, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude that he has stuck with me, that we get to live this life together, with all the sorrow, betrayal, glory, loveliness, surprise and mystery that entails. So much beauty has grown from what at times seemed like impossibly stony ground.
Of course we all want relationships that are meaningful and satisfying. I don’t want to return to the days when we expect marriage to be nothing but a slog — the days when the famous 18th-century pastor John Wesley (somewhat hilariously) said of his marriage, “I did not seek happiness thereby, and I did not find it.” But perhaps part of forming the meaningful relationships we long for involves enduring prolonged periods of dissatisfaction and disappointment.
The last thing that I am is some kind of relationship guru. And I know my husband’s and my situation isn’t translatable to other marriages. I know we’re lucky. We have two people in a relationship willing to work at it, which isn’t the case for everyone, and we’ve been spared substance abuse or severe untreated mental illness, things that often wreck relationships. I don’t give a lot of marriage advice. But I want to simply offer that choosing to stay in a marriage for all kinds of unromantic reasons is a good and even a brave choice. And, even if it would never make a great book or movie, that choice offers its own kind of quiet path of discovery, growth, love and flourishing.
Statistics bear this out. A 2002 longitudinal study by a University of Chicago sociologist, Linda J. Waite, found that “two out of three unhappily married adults who avoided divorce or separation ended up happily married five years later.” It also showed that for those who were unhappy, divorce didn’t increase happiness over time: “Unhappily married adults who divorced or separated were no happier, on average, than unhappily married adults who stayed married.” Nor did divorce decrease rates of depression or lead to improvement in self-esteem.
I fully understand that sometimes divorce is unavoidable, and I certainly don’t want anyone to stay for a minute in a violent relationship. But for people in nonviolent but difficult marriages, Waite concludes that divorce often fails to deliver its promised benefits, and that “both people and marriages are likely to be happier in communities with a strong commitment to marital permanence.”
In an essay for The Times, Alain De Botton wrote, “Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.”
I want to normalize significant periods of confusion, exhaustion, grief and unfulfillment in marriage. There’s an older couple I know who are in their fifth decade of marriage. They are funny and kind and, by almost any standard, the picture of #relationshipgoals. Early on in our marriage they told us, “There are times in marriage when the Bible’s call to love your enemies and the call to love your spouse are the same call.”
I’ve held on to this in moments of deep frustration, when my husband and I sank to the kitchen floor in tears, bone-weary after going round and round, not knowing what else to do but pray, have friends pray and keep putting one foot in front of the other. These kitchen floor moments were awful, yet I think they are when the growth in our marriage really began.
The day we got married, people wrote us kind notes of blessing. Some said, “May you always feel about each other how you feel today.” Even then, that felt slightly more like a curse, a way of wishing for stagnation. I don’t feel about my spouse how I did when we got married. We are both so much more aware of the obnoxious imperfections and real pathologies each of us brings to the table, but I also feel far more loyalty, respect, love, delight and care for him than I was capable of back then. I have discovered how difficult I am to live with and how difficult my spouse is to live with. But we have also learned the tragic, comedic, stumbling and deeply joyful dance of living together anyway.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opin ... _best_algo
Couple, both 100 years old, celebrate 80 years of marriage
Charlie and Annie Muise were married on July 13, 1942
Lifelong love birds Charlie and Annie Muise get asked a lot how they've managed to stay together for 80 years.
But the pair from Tusket, N.S., says there's no mysterious formula.
"Oh, there's no secret. I mean, we work hard, and that's all I can say," Annie told CBC's Radio Maritime Noon on Monday.
Charlie and Annie are both 100 years old and marked their 80th wedding anniversary on July 13.
They celebrated with a party at their daughter's place, and then returned home to the house they bought together 75 years ago — for $2,000 — in Yarmouth County, near the southern tip of Nova Scotia.
Charlie and Annie met at a dance.
"It was a church supper," said Annie, jumping in as Charlie tells the story.
"That's when I first saw you, but I didn't talk to you then," responded Charlie, who remembers being smitten right away.
Annie said Charlie looked pretty good, too.
"He was handsome and good-natured, so I liked him. Then we fell in love," she said.
Charlie and Annie Muise live in the same house they bought 75 years ago for $2,000. (Muise family)
The couple, who lived a few kilometres away from one another, were married in July 1942. Just three months later, Charlie boarded a ship overseas to serve in the Second World War.
"Every chance I got I would write a letter or even some little notes," said Charlie.
Annie, meanwhile, sent him care packages every month of chocolate and cigarettes.
While Charlie was overseas, Annie spent time working for her aunt in the U.S. and saving money.
When Charlie returned home on New Year's Day, 1946, the couple started looking for a home to call their own.
"And then we bought the big house, it's quite big, and we paid $2,000 for the house, and that was from the money that Annie had saved while I was away," Charlie said.
Together through the tough times
Annie is the family's accountant, and said raising eight children meant being very careful about spending.
"I was raised during the Depression, so we had to save everything," she said. "Nothing was lost ... and we work hard."
The pair have lived a lot of life, side by side. There have been difficult times when they had to be apart or struggled to pay the bills.
"But after a while you know, it got better," said Charlie.
So whatever life throws at you, Annie's marital advice is simple: "Be true to each other. That's the main thing."
"I certainly agree with that," said Charlie.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-sco ... -1.6523896
Lifelong love birds Charlie and Annie Muise get asked a lot how they've managed to stay together for 80 years.
But the pair from Tusket, N.S., says there's no mysterious formula.
"Oh, there's no secret. I mean, we work hard, and that's all I can say," Annie told CBC's Radio Maritime Noon on Monday.
Charlie and Annie are both 100 years old and marked their 80th wedding anniversary on July 13.
They celebrated with a party at their daughter's place, and then returned home to the house they bought together 75 years ago — for $2,000 — in Yarmouth County, near the southern tip of Nova Scotia.
Charlie and Annie met at a dance.
"It was a church supper," said Annie, jumping in as Charlie tells the story.
"That's when I first saw you, but I didn't talk to you then," responded Charlie, who remembers being smitten right away.
Annie said Charlie looked pretty good, too.
"He was handsome and good-natured, so I liked him. Then we fell in love," she said.
Charlie and Annie Muise live in the same house they bought 75 years ago for $2,000. (Muise family)
The couple, who lived a few kilometres away from one another, were married in July 1942. Just three months later, Charlie boarded a ship overseas to serve in the Second World War.
"Every chance I got I would write a letter or even some little notes," said Charlie.
Annie, meanwhile, sent him care packages every month of chocolate and cigarettes.
While Charlie was overseas, Annie spent time working for her aunt in the U.S. and saving money.
When Charlie returned home on New Year's Day, 1946, the couple started looking for a home to call their own.
"And then we bought the big house, it's quite big, and we paid $2,000 for the house, and that was from the money that Annie had saved while I was away," Charlie said.
Together through the tough times
Annie is the family's accountant, and said raising eight children meant being very careful about spending.
"I was raised during the Depression, so we had to save everything," she said. "Nothing was lost ... and we work hard."
The pair have lived a lot of life, side by side. There have been difficult times when they had to be apart or struggled to pay the bills.
"But after a while you know, it got better," said Charlie.
So whatever life throws at you, Annie's marital advice is simple: "Be true to each other. That's the main thing."
"I certainly agree with that," said Charlie.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-sco ... -1.6523896
The Sixth Love Language Does Not Exist
The author of the seminal book on love languages is surprised that the concept has become a cultural phenomenon. But he still wants couples to heed his advice.
By Alisha Haridasani GuptaIllustrations by Luis Mazon
Aug. 27, 2022
It wasn’t always this way; there was a time when the words “love” and “language” were rarely combined and certainly not used as a stand-alone noun. Then, three decades ago, Gary Chapman, a 50-year-old Southern Baptist pastor with a doctorate in adult education, introduced the concept to the world with his seminal book, “The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts.” People have different ways of expressing and understanding love, Dr. Chapman explained, and in order to make your partner feel loved, you simply need to speak that person’s language. As the book’s introduction notes:
Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other.
Dr. Chapman based the five love languages on anecdotal evidence he found while working as a marriage counselor at his church for more than 20 years. They are words of affirmation (verbal compliments), quality time (doing something together and being focused in that moment), receiving gifts (anything from a spontaneous bouquet of flowers to more significant presents), acts of service (helping your partner with chores or cooking a meal) and physical touch (holding hands, sex and everything in between).
In the years since the book was published, the term “love languages” has been tossed around with such abandon that it has become disconnected from its creator. It has evolved into a cultural phenomenon and shorthand for anything that brings a person joy.
“As much as I knew about the love languages, I did not know the person behind it,” said Kasey Borger, a comedian who, with her fiancé, James Folta, co-wrote a satirical list of new love languages for the humor website McSweeney’s (sample entry: “talking about your commute”). “I didn’t even know his name,” she said.
The cultural explosion was also unexpected for Dr. Chapman, who is now 80. “I’m as surprised as you are,” he said in a recent interview. Despite the enthusiasm, though, he doesn’t think anyone has discovered a sixth love language.
To him, the memes all sound like “dialects” — or versions — of the original five. “I’ve seen some of those — you know, ‘The sixth love language is tacos,’ and one guy said, ‘The sixth love language is chocolate,’” he said. “Well, if they bought it, it’s a gift. If they made it, it’s an act of service. I’m not dogmatic, but I think most of the ways of expressing love fit into one of these five.”
About a year after graduating from Wheaton College in 1960, Dr. Chapman got married — to Karolyn, who, like him, grew up in China Grove, N.C., and went to the same church. When they first met, Dr. Chapman was actually dating her best friend.
In 1967, the couple moved to Winston-Salem, N.C., where Dr. Chapman became a pastor and started offering adult education classes that covered day-to-day advice on matters such as financial planning. In those courses, he would discuss marriage and family, and couples who were struggling would often turn to him for advice, he said.
“I really got pushed into counseling,” he said. “It was not even in my job description when I became a pastor.”
As he was helping couples in his professional life, his own marriage was difficult, Dr. Chapman said. He and Ms. Chapman would get into heated arguments over small things. Ms. Chapman, for example, never closed drawers and cabinet doors, which bugged him. And Ms. Chapman expected him to do his fair share of chores around the house — which Dr. Chapman did not do. “We knew nothing about resolving conflict,” he added.
“I would tell her how nice she looked, how much I appreciated everything she did, and I would tell her, over and over, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’” he said. “But one night she said to me, ‘You keep saying, “I love you,” but if you love me, why don’t you help me?’”
That was the eureka moment: Dr. Chapman realized that what he appreciated in a relationship was receiving compliments (or words of affirmation), which he said he had gotten from his parents while he was growing up. Those didn’t matter as much to his wife; she valued acts of service. “A lot of my counseling and writing has been influenced by our experience,” he said.
Karolyn and Gary Chapman at their wedding reception in August 1961. The couple, who have been married for over 60 years, said they had a rocky start.Credit...via Dr. Gary Chapman
He noticed that the couples who had sought his help at church seemed to be having the same problem: They did not know how to express love in a way that the other person appreciated. In one of the examples he included in the book, a woman came into his office frustrated that her husband had been procrastinating on painting their bedroom. Dr. Chapman suggested: “The next time your husband does anything good, give him a verbal compliment. If he takes the garbage out, say, ‘Dan, I want you to know that I really appreciate your taking the garbage out.’” Three weeks later, she returned to his office to tell him that their plan had worked. Her husband’s love language was kind words and positive affirmations.
Over time, Dr. Chapman gathered his notes and looked for patterns. He found that what most people said they needed from their partners fit into the five broad buckets he would write about in his book. And in October 1992, “The 5 Love Languages” was born.
That first year, the book barely made a splash, selling about 8,400 copies. But slowly, more and more people started buying it. “My publisher told me that every year it sells more than it did the year before,” Dr. Chapman said. It has now sold more than 20 million copies (including print, e-book and audio versions), according to the publishing company, Moody Publishers.
There are now half a dozen versions for a variety of audiences — including “The 5 Love Languages for Men,” “The 5 Love Languages of Children,” “The 5 Love Languages Military Edition” and even “The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace.” Dr. Chapman hosts a weekly hourlong podcast and “Marriage Conferences,” daylong seminars in churches around the United States, to help couples understand the basics of the love languages. Roughly 1,000 people attended his last conference in April of this year, in Winston-Salem.
He devised a simple multiple-choice quiz to help people understand their own and their partners’ love languages; Oprah Winfrey answered it live during his appearance on “Oprah’s Lifeclass” in 2013. When asked whether she would appreciate it if her partner helped clean the house, Ms. Winfrey paused. “I think cleaning the house is number one, two and three of foreplay,” she told an amused Dr. Chapman, seated next to her.
After just a few more questions, Ms. Winfrey’s love language was revealed: words of affirmation. “‘Kind, encouraging and positive words are truly life-giving’ — so true; how did you know this about me?” she asked him, seemingly echoing what many couples have thought when taking the quiz themselves.
Arming Couples With Words
Among other well-known couples therapists, opinion of Dr. Chapman’s work is split. For Dr. Julie Gottman, a clinical psychologist and a co-founder of the Gottman Institute in Seattle, the book “assumes that people don’t have the capacity to learn different ways to express love.”
“The categories are superficial and rigid,” she said. “People are much more flexible than they are given credit for in ‘Love Languages.’”
Dr. Gottman used physical touch as an example. If someone is uncomfortable with intimacy, she said it would be important to understand why it makes that person uncomfortable. “Maybe they were touched too little in their early years, or they were touched too much,” she said. “Maybe they were physically or sexually abused.”
However, she added, there are ways of introducing someone to touch in a way that feels safe and affectionate and warm. Though physical touch might not have been that person’s love language, it might become one. People can evolve in terms of how they express and receive love. The five languages aren’t set in stone.
Another criticism of Dr. Chapman’s work is that it’s entirely based on anecdotal observations of the couples who turned to him for help, and to date, scientific evidence to support his work remains sparse. And his educational background and doctorate are in anthropology and adult education, not psychology. “That’s what drives me nuts,” Dr. Gottman said.
For Dr. Orna Guralnik, the plain-talking star psychologist of the Showtime series “Couples Therapy,” the lack of scientific evidence isn’t a deal breaker. “It’s what we call face validity — if it wasn’t useful for people, if it didn’t tap into something that matters, it would have disappeared,” she said.
Many of the couples who have come to Dr. Guralnik for therapy have either read Dr. Chapman’s book or have a cursory knowledge of the theory, she said. But to her, the love languages are a MacGuffin: a vessel, usually an unimportant or seemingly random object, used in fiction to move the plot forward. The five categories themselves are not as important as what the overall theory signals to people — that “their own frame of mind is not the way their partner is processing things.”
Though the literature isn’t robust, some researchers have started to set their sights on Dr. Chapman’s books, publishing their work in peer-reviewed outlets. In 2006, a study found that the concept of five disconnected love languages was difficult to confirm. Instead, the study suggests that individuals are more likely to use all five languages, at varying levels, and not just one or another.
In another study, published this year, researchers at the University of Warsaw in Poland recruited 100 couples between the ages of 17 and 58 who had been together for at least six months and asked them to rank their preferences out of the five (rather than singling out one love language) and their relationship satisfaction. The researchers found that couples who seemed to speak each other’s love languages — meaning individuals who preferred expressing love in the ways that their partners preferred to receive it — reported having greater relationship satisfaction.
They also found that not only did people want their partners to communicate with them in their own love languages, but also that when you speak your partners’ love language, it “makes you more happy in the relationship,” said Maciej Stolarski, one of the authors of the paper.
Last August, the Chapmans celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. They went for dinner to the same local restaurant in Winston-Salem that they go to every year — an upscale steak house, where they often order their favorites (steak for Dr. Chapman, salmon for Ms. Chapman).
It took just a couple of years for the Chapmans to figure out how to overcome their initial marriage troubles, Dr. Chapman said. Now, Ms. Chapman, though still inclined to keep drawers open, is Dr. Chapman’s unofficial editor, reading and cleaning up his manuscripts before he sends them to his publisher. She also helps keep him grounded. “I tell people, ‘Don’t tell him he’s famous,’” she said.
And Dr. Chapman has learned to do more around the house, including all the post-dinner cleanup, his wife said. “He’s very good at it,” she added.
“I just walk out of the kitchen now.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a gender reporter covering politics, business, technology, health and culture through the gender lens. She writes the In Her Words newsletter. @alisha__g
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/well ... 778d3e6de3
By Alisha Haridasani GuptaIllustrations by Luis Mazon
Aug. 27, 2022
It wasn’t always this way; there was a time when the words “love” and “language” were rarely combined and certainly not used as a stand-alone noun. Then, three decades ago, Gary Chapman, a 50-year-old Southern Baptist pastor with a doctorate in adult education, introduced the concept to the world with his seminal book, “The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts.” People have different ways of expressing and understanding love, Dr. Chapman explained, and in order to make your partner feel loved, you simply need to speak that person’s language. As the book’s introduction notes:
Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other.
Dr. Chapman based the five love languages on anecdotal evidence he found while working as a marriage counselor at his church for more than 20 years. They are words of affirmation (verbal compliments), quality time (doing something together and being focused in that moment), receiving gifts (anything from a spontaneous bouquet of flowers to more significant presents), acts of service (helping your partner with chores or cooking a meal) and physical touch (holding hands, sex and everything in between).
In the years since the book was published, the term “love languages” has been tossed around with such abandon that it has become disconnected from its creator. It has evolved into a cultural phenomenon and shorthand for anything that brings a person joy.
“As much as I knew about the love languages, I did not know the person behind it,” said Kasey Borger, a comedian who, with her fiancé, James Folta, co-wrote a satirical list of new love languages for the humor website McSweeney’s (sample entry: “talking about your commute”). “I didn’t even know his name,” she said.
The cultural explosion was also unexpected for Dr. Chapman, who is now 80. “I’m as surprised as you are,” he said in a recent interview. Despite the enthusiasm, though, he doesn’t think anyone has discovered a sixth love language.
To him, the memes all sound like “dialects” — or versions — of the original five. “I’ve seen some of those — you know, ‘The sixth love language is tacos,’ and one guy said, ‘The sixth love language is chocolate,’” he said. “Well, if they bought it, it’s a gift. If they made it, it’s an act of service. I’m not dogmatic, but I think most of the ways of expressing love fit into one of these five.”
About a year after graduating from Wheaton College in 1960, Dr. Chapman got married — to Karolyn, who, like him, grew up in China Grove, N.C., and went to the same church. When they first met, Dr. Chapman was actually dating her best friend.
In 1967, the couple moved to Winston-Salem, N.C., where Dr. Chapman became a pastor and started offering adult education classes that covered day-to-day advice on matters such as financial planning. In those courses, he would discuss marriage and family, and couples who were struggling would often turn to him for advice, he said.
“I really got pushed into counseling,” he said. “It was not even in my job description when I became a pastor.”
As he was helping couples in his professional life, his own marriage was difficult, Dr. Chapman said. He and Ms. Chapman would get into heated arguments over small things. Ms. Chapman, for example, never closed drawers and cabinet doors, which bugged him. And Ms. Chapman expected him to do his fair share of chores around the house — which Dr. Chapman did not do. “We knew nothing about resolving conflict,” he added.
“I would tell her how nice she looked, how much I appreciated everything she did, and I would tell her, over and over, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’” he said. “But one night she said to me, ‘You keep saying, “I love you,” but if you love me, why don’t you help me?’”
That was the eureka moment: Dr. Chapman realized that what he appreciated in a relationship was receiving compliments (or words of affirmation), which he said he had gotten from his parents while he was growing up. Those didn’t matter as much to his wife; she valued acts of service. “A lot of my counseling and writing has been influenced by our experience,” he said.
Karolyn and Gary Chapman at their wedding reception in August 1961. The couple, who have been married for over 60 years, said they had a rocky start.Credit...via Dr. Gary Chapman
He noticed that the couples who had sought his help at church seemed to be having the same problem: They did not know how to express love in a way that the other person appreciated. In one of the examples he included in the book, a woman came into his office frustrated that her husband had been procrastinating on painting their bedroom. Dr. Chapman suggested: “The next time your husband does anything good, give him a verbal compliment. If he takes the garbage out, say, ‘Dan, I want you to know that I really appreciate your taking the garbage out.’” Three weeks later, she returned to his office to tell him that their plan had worked. Her husband’s love language was kind words and positive affirmations.
Over time, Dr. Chapman gathered his notes and looked for patterns. He found that what most people said they needed from their partners fit into the five broad buckets he would write about in his book. And in October 1992, “The 5 Love Languages” was born.
That first year, the book barely made a splash, selling about 8,400 copies. But slowly, more and more people started buying it. “My publisher told me that every year it sells more than it did the year before,” Dr. Chapman said. It has now sold more than 20 million copies (including print, e-book and audio versions), according to the publishing company, Moody Publishers.
There are now half a dozen versions for a variety of audiences — including “The 5 Love Languages for Men,” “The 5 Love Languages of Children,” “The 5 Love Languages Military Edition” and even “The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace.” Dr. Chapman hosts a weekly hourlong podcast and “Marriage Conferences,” daylong seminars in churches around the United States, to help couples understand the basics of the love languages. Roughly 1,000 people attended his last conference in April of this year, in Winston-Salem.
He devised a simple multiple-choice quiz to help people understand their own and their partners’ love languages; Oprah Winfrey answered it live during his appearance on “Oprah’s Lifeclass” in 2013. When asked whether she would appreciate it if her partner helped clean the house, Ms. Winfrey paused. “I think cleaning the house is number one, two and three of foreplay,” she told an amused Dr. Chapman, seated next to her.
After just a few more questions, Ms. Winfrey’s love language was revealed: words of affirmation. “‘Kind, encouraging and positive words are truly life-giving’ — so true; how did you know this about me?” she asked him, seemingly echoing what many couples have thought when taking the quiz themselves.
Arming Couples With Words
Among other well-known couples therapists, opinion of Dr. Chapman’s work is split. For Dr. Julie Gottman, a clinical psychologist and a co-founder of the Gottman Institute in Seattle, the book “assumes that people don’t have the capacity to learn different ways to express love.”
“The categories are superficial and rigid,” she said. “People are much more flexible than they are given credit for in ‘Love Languages.’”
Dr. Gottman used physical touch as an example. If someone is uncomfortable with intimacy, she said it would be important to understand why it makes that person uncomfortable. “Maybe they were touched too little in their early years, or they were touched too much,” she said. “Maybe they were physically or sexually abused.”
However, she added, there are ways of introducing someone to touch in a way that feels safe and affectionate and warm. Though physical touch might not have been that person’s love language, it might become one. People can evolve in terms of how they express and receive love. The five languages aren’t set in stone.
Another criticism of Dr. Chapman’s work is that it’s entirely based on anecdotal observations of the couples who turned to him for help, and to date, scientific evidence to support his work remains sparse. And his educational background and doctorate are in anthropology and adult education, not psychology. “That’s what drives me nuts,” Dr. Gottman said.
For Dr. Orna Guralnik, the plain-talking star psychologist of the Showtime series “Couples Therapy,” the lack of scientific evidence isn’t a deal breaker. “It’s what we call face validity — if it wasn’t useful for people, if it didn’t tap into something that matters, it would have disappeared,” she said.
Many of the couples who have come to Dr. Guralnik for therapy have either read Dr. Chapman’s book or have a cursory knowledge of the theory, she said. But to her, the love languages are a MacGuffin: a vessel, usually an unimportant or seemingly random object, used in fiction to move the plot forward. The five categories themselves are not as important as what the overall theory signals to people — that “their own frame of mind is not the way their partner is processing things.”
Though the literature isn’t robust, some researchers have started to set their sights on Dr. Chapman’s books, publishing their work in peer-reviewed outlets. In 2006, a study found that the concept of five disconnected love languages was difficult to confirm. Instead, the study suggests that individuals are more likely to use all five languages, at varying levels, and not just one or another.
In another study, published this year, researchers at the University of Warsaw in Poland recruited 100 couples between the ages of 17 and 58 who had been together for at least six months and asked them to rank their preferences out of the five (rather than singling out one love language) and their relationship satisfaction. The researchers found that couples who seemed to speak each other’s love languages — meaning individuals who preferred expressing love in the ways that their partners preferred to receive it — reported having greater relationship satisfaction.
They also found that not only did people want their partners to communicate with them in their own love languages, but also that when you speak your partners’ love language, it “makes you more happy in the relationship,” said Maciej Stolarski, one of the authors of the paper.
Last August, the Chapmans celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. They went for dinner to the same local restaurant in Winston-Salem that they go to every year — an upscale steak house, where they often order their favorites (steak for Dr. Chapman, salmon for Ms. Chapman).
It took just a couple of years for the Chapmans to figure out how to overcome their initial marriage troubles, Dr. Chapman said. Now, Ms. Chapman, though still inclined to keep drawers open, is Dr. Chapman’s unofficial editor, reading and cleaning up his manuscripts before he sends them to his publisher. She also helps keep him grounded. “I tell people, ‘Don’t tell him he’s famous,’” she said.
And Dr. Chapman has learned to do more around the house, including all the post-dinner cleanup, his wife said. “He’s very good at it,” she added.
“I just walk out of the kitchen now.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a gender reporter covering politics, business, technology, health and culture through the gender lens. She writes the In Her Words newsletter. @alisha__g
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/well ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Marriages
Marriage Is Hard. Just Ask Tom and Gisele.]/b]
Nov. 3, 2022
Credit...Illustration by Alicia Tatone; photographs by James Devaney and Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
By Elizabeth Spiers
Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist. She was the editor in chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker.
The 45-year-old superstar quarterback Tom Brady and the 42-year-old supermodel Gisele Bündchen announced last week that they had gotten a divorce — reports said they disagreed about Mr. Brady’s decision to end his retirement and return to playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In my neck of the woods, Brooklyn, this is not a typical reason to get divorced. Most of us aren’t in relationships where everyone involved can monetize insanely beautiful bodies for millions of dollars.
The contours of it, however, are familiar: One person in the marriage has forfeited a career to enable the other one’s success. Then the beneficiary of that trade-off is supposed to reciprocate, but doesn’t. In heteronormative marriage it is, with disappointing regularity, the woman’s career that suffers.
We never really know what’s going on in anybody else’s marriage, but if you are the kind of person whose every last perfectly photographed move happens to make its way into celebrity tabloids, you can’t exactly blame the public for thinking it does. Mr. Brady, who has seven Super Bowl championship rings, decided that he still had things to accomplish on the field. It’s easy to imagine that Ms. Bündchen, who had overseen matters on the home front, had other things she, too, wanted to accomplish.
My sympathies are with Ms. Bündchen for a lot of reasons, and some of them are about the specific nature of what she’s asking. My husband and I are both 45, and at that age, even if you’re in great shape you still wake up some days having twisted your ankle while sleeping, or forgetting some obvious thing you absolutely knew last week — and neither of us has spent an entire career getting hit in the head by linebackers.
At some point, it seems reasonable to want the father of your children to stop doing that before he suffers an injury he can’t come back from. I’m also a little biased because I grew up in Alabama, where college football is more or less a religion, and I am an apostate. I have brothers who played football, and have seen one too many close calls. Tom Brady may be in a class by himself, but I still can’t think of the sport as anything other than “concussion ball.”
Where my sympathies might lie with Mr. Brady, they revolve around what happens to a marriage when one person loses something he thinks is an important part of his identity. What is retirement compared to the roaring adoration of fans every time you step out onto the field? A lot of athletes find they don’t quite know what to do with themselves when their career begins to dim.
So do a lot of models. Ms. Bündchen hadn’t aged out of her career, however. She put it to the side to enable Mr. Brady’s. (Brady fans who want him on the field dismiss her work as frivolous, unimportant, in the context of his. But let’s be honest: Neither one of them was exactly curing cancer.)
Motherhood can uproot anyone’s sense of who she used to be, even if Gisele’s fortune, fame and cultural power obviously exempt her from many of the practical realities that weigh so heavily on so many mothers. I was lucky enough to have several months of maternity leave when I had my son, and it was surreal to go from having adult conversations about company valuations, during business hours, to replaying indie-rock-ified lullabies 200 times to a small human whose only forms of communication were screeching, giggling and crying. I enjoyed being with my son, but also needed to be the person I am outside of my roles as a mother and wife.
If you’re accustomed to being a supermodel who’s famous enough to go by one name, I’d imagine that the transition is even more of a jolt, and maybe even a little irritating given that “Tom Brady’s wife” is a full two syllables longer than “Gisele.”
These are, of course, non-issues for people in marriages where one person chooses to have a career and the other opts for domesticity, and both are satisfied with that arrangement. But it breaks down when both consider the work they do part of their core identities and the compromises they make fail.
Almost half of U.S. families are two-income households. While some people find work to be soul-sucking, others are lucky enough to have jobs they find fulfilling, more than just bringing home a paycheck. (For most of us, it can be one or both on any given day.) Yet during the pandemic, when a great many people dropped out of the work force to serve as caretakers, the gender skew was extreme, and you can guess which direction.
Marriage, in its modern incarnation, has become less a contract between a couple and their community, and more a promise between two people to single-handedly fulfill each other’s every need. Pop culture narratives venerate marriage as an accomplishment by itself, whereby two people who are perfectly matched are emotionally and economically interdependent, untethered to friends and family and other members of their community — exactly the support network that might provide a sense of validation and worth when you can’t play pro football anymore.
To be fair, it’s difficult to have a consistently equal partnership in marriage. Roles shift. When I was engaged, a friend who’d been married for a while told me something his father had told him. I’ve since repeated variations of it many times myself.
Imagine, he said, all the things that could undergo unforeseeable, drastic changes during your marriage — serious illness, incapacitation, unemployment, financial ruin, the death of loved ones, the death of children, infidelities, and more. No matter how wonderful it all seems right now, some or all of those issues are going to arise. There’s no way around it. Nothing stays the same.
For women like Ms. Bündchen in marriages where both partners have interests outside of the marriage and household, roles often shift based on availability, income, health and whatever they agreed to in the partnership. They also shift according to societal expectations, and even wealthy women like Ms. Bündchen, who can afford child care and outside help and has more control over her time than a lot of working women, are still subject to the old biases — that their role is essentially supportive and their own ambitions secondary.
They are, in video game lingo, “non-player characters,” or characters who have no meaningful narrative or agency outside of the role they play in allowing the players of the game to achieve victory. They cannot meaningfully win themselves.
If it was never going to be her turn, I don’t blame Ms. Bündchen for opting out of the game entirely.
Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers), a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist. She was the editor in chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Nov. 3, 2022
Credit...Illustration by Alicia Tatone; photographs by James Devaney and Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
By Elizabeth Spiers
Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist. She was the editor in chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker.
The 45-year-old superstar quarterback Tom Brady and the 42-year-old supermodel Gisele Bündchen announced last week that they had gotten a divorce — reports said they disagreed about Mr. Brady’s decision to end his retirement and return to playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In my neck of the woods, Brooklyn, this is not a typical reason to get divorced. Most of us aren’t in relationships where everyone involved can monetize insanely beautiful bodies for millions of dollars.
The contours of it, however, are familiar: One person in the marriage has forfeited a career to enable the other one’s success. Then the beneficiary of that trade-off is supposed to reciprocate, but doesn’t. In heteronormative marriage it is, with disappointing regularity, the woman’s career that suffers.
We never really know what’s going on in anybody else’s marriage, but if you are the kind of person whose every last perfectly photographed move happens to make its way into celebrity tabloids, you can’t exactly blame the public for thinking it does. Mr. Brady, who has seven Super Bowl championship rings, decided that he still had things to accomplish on the field. It’s easy to imagine that Ms. Bündchen, who had overseen matters on the home front, had other things she, too, wanted to accomplish.
My sympathies are with Ms. Bündchen for a lot of reasons, and some of them are about the specific nature of what she’s asking. My husband and I are both 45, and at that age, even if you’re in great shape you still wake up some days having twisted your ankle while sleeping, or forgetting some obvious thing you absolutely knew last week — and neither of us has spent an entire career getting hit in the head by linebackers.
At some point, it seems reasonable to want the father of your children to stop doing that before he suffers an injury he can’t come back from. I’m also a little biased because I grew up in Alabama, where college football is more or less a religion, and I am an apostate. I have brothers who played football, and have seen one too many close calls. Tom Brady may be in a class by himself, but I still can’t think of the sport as anything other than “concussion ball.”
Where my sympathies might lie with Mr. Brady, they revolve around what happens to a marriage when one person loses something he thinks is an important part of his identity. What is retirement compared to the roaring adoration of fans every time you step out onto the field? A lot of athletes find they don’t quite know what to do with themselves when their career begins to dim.
So do a lot of models. Ms. Bündchen hadn’t aged out of her career, however. She put it to the side to enable Mr. Brady’s. (Brady fans who want him on the field dismiss her work as frivolous, unimportant, in the context of his. But let’s be honest: Neither one of them was exactly curing cancer.)
Motherhood can uproot anyone’s sense of who she used to be, even if Gisele’s fortune, fame and cultural power obviously exempt her from many of the practical realities that weigh so heavily on so many mothers. I was lucky enough to have several months of maternity leave when I had my son, and it was surreal to go from having adult conversations about company valuations, during business hours, to replaying indie-rock-ified lullabies 200 times to a small human whose only forms of communication were screeching, giggling and crying. I enjoyed being with my son, but also needed to be the person I am outside of my roles as a mother and wife.
If you’re accustomed to being a supermodel who’s famous enough to go by one name, I’d imagine that the transition is even more of a jolt, and maybe even a little irritating given that “Tom Brady’s wife” is a full two syllables longer than “Gisele.”
These are, of course, non-issues for people in marriages where one person chooses to have a career and the other opts for domesticity, and both are satisfied with that arrangement. But it breaks down when both consider the work they do part of their core identities and the compromises they make fail.
Almost half of U.S. families are two-income households. While some people find work to be soul-sucking, others are lucky enough to have jobs they find fulfilling, more than just bringing home a paycheck. (For most of us, it can be one or both on any given day.) Yet during the pandemic, when a great many people dropped out of the work force to serve as caretakers, the gender skew was extreme, and you can guess which direction.
Marriage, in its modern incarnation, has become less a contract between a couple and their community, and more a promise between two people to single-handedly fulfill each other’s every need. Pop culture narratives venerate marriage as an accomplishment by itself, whereby two people who are perfectly matched are emotionally and economically interdependent, untethered to friends and family and other members of their community — exactly the support network that might provide a sense of validation and worth when you can’t play pro football anymore.
To be fair, it’s difficult to have a consistently equal partnership in marriage. Roles shift. When I was engaged, a friend who’d been married for a while told me something his father had told him. I’ve since repeated variations of it many times myself.
Imagine, he said, all the things that could undergo unforeseeable, drastic changes during your marriage — serious illness, incapacitation, unemployment, financial ruin, the death of loved ones, the death of children, infidelities, and more. No matter how wonderful it all seems right now, some or all of those issues are going to arise. There’s no way around it. Nothing stays the same.
For women like Ms. Bündchen in marriages where both partners have interests outside of the marriage and household, roles often shift based on availability, income, health and whatever they agreed to in the partnership. They also shift according to societal expectations, and even wealthy women like Ms. Bündchen, who can afford child care and outside help and has more control over her time than a lot of working women, are still subject to the old biases — that their role is essentially supportive and their own ambitions secondary.
They are, in video game lingo, “non-player characters,” or characters who have no meaningful narrative or agency outside of the role they play in allowing the players of the game to achieve victory. They cannot meaningfully win themselves.
If it was never going to be her turn, I don’t blame Ms. Bündchen for opting out of the game entirely.
Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers), a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist. She was the editor in chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Marriages
YOUNG lovers in India who felt doomed by the official fiat to hug a cow on Valentine’s Day instead of going out with their partners, were relieved by the quick reversal of the order. The rowing back did not, of course, imply that the original idea stood undermined. It’s just that it wouldn’t be expedient when the government was bracing to host the all-important and habitually curious G20 heads for it to showcase an Indian tool of social control.
It would be counterproductive if, instead of transmitting exalted ancient traditions to an errant new generation, the government found itself explaining to the invited heads the range of boons the cow brings to India. Consider another possibility: what if the Indian fiat of cow hug was unwittingly fulfilling the purpose claimed by Valentine’s Day, of bringing young hearts together?
An engaging story about Valentine’s Day is complex, and, in fact, distant, from those posited by both its opponents and supporters. In Egyptian mythology, in which the cow was worshipped as the goddess Hathor, protection was given to young lovers who sought her blessings. At the same time, the accepted story about the man called Valentine shows him as one among many Christians martyred by Roman kings, in his case in 270 AD on Feb 14, at the hands of Emperor Claudius, among the cruellest in the lineage.
The Christian priest was arrested, and while in custody, helped his jailer overcome an intractable crisis. He became the jailer’s friend, who introduced his young daughter to the special prisoner. The priest’s letter on the day of his execution to the girl was “from your Valentine”, or so the story goes. The preacher had shown several virtues, which fetched him the order of sainthood, hence St Valentine.
It does seem odd that of the 365 days in a year, young hearts should flutter only on one assigned day.
For many reasons, the story could be deemed unworthy of being associated with the pining of young hearts today. Of course, there’s a commercial interest in shoring up the sentimental story. However, an absorbing legend associated with the Christian priest brings him closer to the idea of young love in an impishly devious way.
It seems that the cruelties of Claudius had made him totally unpopular with his own people. He requisitioned a strong new army to inflict more pain all around but found it difficult to enlist enough able-bodied men. Told that the young Romans were more attracted to the idea of settling down with a family instead of joining Claudius’s army, the emperor forbade future marriages and clamped down on young lovers, a method that seems akin to the ‘anti-Romeo’ vigilante squads once let loose by the celibate chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Valentine was very pleased with the young men’s refusal to join Claudius’s army, and he gave them all manner of help to meet and romance secretly. There is, of course, no way to ascertain the veracity of this lovely, subversive story. Also, it does seem odd that of the 365 days in a year, young hearts should flutter only on one assigned day to share flowers, send cards, and indulge in assorted revelries.
Return to Hathor, the cow goddess, who represented what ancient Egyptians saw loveable in the female identity. In some ways she carried in herself qualities associated with Indian deities in different avatars in the country and beyond. Hathor represented “fertility and motherhood, but also love, joy, music, the dance and all that was beautiful”, says one assessment of the legend.
There’s a vast difference though, between the way the current crop of right-wing nationalists propagate cow worship, and its worship in other cultures, of which there are legion. Hindutva’s militant assertion — that the cow was worshipped though its flesh was not eaten in ancient India — has been vehemently challenged by eminent historians, usually with textual and related evidence. In Egypt’s case, given that its people also were an agricultural lot, the cow was important for the milk it provided. But its meat, blood, horns and skin were also regarded as a boon with tradable value. The Egyptians thus interpreted it as a nurturing power, which Hathor provided for her people.
Historians and archaeologists have estimated that there were more girls named after Hathor than girls with any other name. Priests presiding over her worship could be both women and men.
Contrariness is not uncommon in deity worship anywhere. Perhaps because of her association with the evening, the cow goddess was also associated with death, and she is often found on the walls of tombs, welcoming the newly dead into the pleasant afterlife with food and drink.
India’s Durga is often worshipped in her avatar as the goddess Kali, bearing a red tongue, depicting the blood she drank from the invincible demon Raktabeej. Egyptian mythology has Hathor in a similar blood-curdling form. When men on earth plotted against the sun god Ra, who Hathor was variously mother and daughter to, she was enraged. Like a protective mother figure, Hathor set out to obliterate all those who opposed Ra, the king of the gods. The slaughter was so great that the higher gods intervened to stall the destruction of the human race. They flooded the Nile with red-coloured beer, resembling blood, which Hathor drank up greedily. She soon became intoxicated and passed out, ending the slaughter.
On the flipside, the invocation of Hathor was popular among those in search of love. This aspect of her is said to have prompted the Greeks to see in Hathor their avatar of Aphrodite. Cattle worship was common in practically every agrarian culture, China included. It was the Spanish gold-diggers that brought the cow to the Americas from Europe. Thus, the Mayan ceremony saw the ritual slaughter of deer and leopards, which they worshipped and ate. Some of them practised cannibalism too, but never ever lynched anyone, whether for loving or for eating what was deemed forbidden.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, February 14th, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1737072/st-va ... e-holy-cow
It would be counterproductive if, instead of transmitting exalted ancient traditions to an errant new generation, the government found itself explaining to the invited heads the range of boons the cow brings to India. Consider another possibility: what if the Indian fiat of cow hug was unwittingly fulfilling the purpose claimed by Valentine’s Day, of bringing young hearts together?
An engaging story about Valentine’s Day is complex, and, in fact, distant, from those posited by both its opponents and supporters. In Egyptian mythology, in which the cow was worshipped as the goddess Hathor, protection was given to young lovers who sought her blessings. At the same time, the accepted story about the man called Valentine shows him as one among many Christians martyred by Roman kings, in his case in 270 AD on Feb 14, at the hands of Emperor Claudius, among the cruellest in the lineage.
The Christian priest was arrested, and while in custody, helped his jailer overcome an intractable crisis. He became the jailer’s friend, who introduced his young daughter to the special prisoner. The priest’s letter on the day of his execution to the girl was “from your Valentine”, or so the story goes. The preacher had shown several virtues, which fetched him the order of sainthood, hence St Valentine.
It does seem odd that of the 365 days in a year, young hearts should flutter only on one assigned day.
For many reasons, the story could be deemed unworthy of being associated with the pining of young hearts today. Of course, there’s a commercial interest in shoring up the sentimental story. However, an absorbing legend associated with the Christian priest brings him closer to the idea of young love in an impishly devious way.
It seems that the cruelties of Claudius had made him totally unpopular with his own people. He requisitioned a strong new army to inflict more pain all around but found it difficult to enlist enough able-bodied men. Told that the young Romans were more attracted to the idea of settling down with a family instead of joining Claudius’s army, the emperor forbade future marriages and clamped down on young lovers, a method that seems akin to the ‘anti-Romeo’ vigilante squads once let loose by the celibate chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Valentine was very pleased with the young men’s refusal to join Claudius’s army, and he gave them all manner of help to meet and romance secretly. There is, of course, no way to ascertain the veracity of this lovely, subversive story. Also, it does seem odd that of the 365 days in a year, young hearts should flutter only on one assigned day to share flowers, send cards, and indulge in assorted revelries.
Return to Hathor, the cow goddess, who represented what ancient Egyptians saw loveable in the female identity. In some ways she carried in herself qualities associated with Indian deities in different avatars in the country and beyond. Hathor represented “fertility and motherhood, but also love, joy, music, the dance and all that was beautiful”, says one assessment of the legend.
There’s a vast difference though, between the way the current crop of right-wing nationalists propagate cow worship, and its worship in other cultures, of which there are legion. Hindutva’s militant assertion — that the cow was worshipped though its flesh was not eaten in ancient India — has been vehemently challenged by eminent historians, usually with textual and related evidence. In Egypt’s case, given that its people also were an agricultural lot, the cow was important for the milk it provided. But its meat, blood, horns and skin were also regarded as a boon with tradable value. The Egyptians thus interpreted it as a nurturing power, which Hathor provided for her people.
Historians and archaeologists have estimated that there were more girls named after Hathor than girls with any other name. Priests presiding over her worship could be both women and men.
Contrariness is not uncommon in deity worship anywhere. Perhaps because of her association with the evening, the cow goddess was also associated with death, and she is often found on the walls of tombs, welcoming the newly dead into the pleasant afterlife with food and drink.
India’s Durga is often worshipped in her avatar as the goddess Kali, bearing a red tongue, depicting the blood she drank from the invincible demon Raktabeej. Egyptian mythology has Hathor in a similar blood-curdling form. When men on earth plotted against the sun god Ra, who Hathor was variously mother and daughter to, she was enraged. Like a protective mother figure, Hathor set out to obliterate all those who opposed Ra, the king of the gods. The slaughter was so great that the higher gods intervened to stall the destruction of the human race. They flooded the Nile with red-coloured beer, resembling blood, which Hathor drank up greedily. She soon became intoxicated and passed out, ending the slaughter.
On the flipside, the invocation of Hathor was popular among those in search of love. This aspect of her is said to have prompted the Greeks to see in Hathor their avatar of Aphrodite. Cattle worship was common in practically every agrarian culture, China included. It was the Spanish gold-diggers that brought the cow to the Americas from Europe. Thus, the Mayan ceremony saw the ritual slaughter of deer and leopards, which they worshipped and ate. Some of them practised cannibalism too, but never ever lynched anyone, whether for loving or for eating what was deemed forbidden.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, February 14th, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1737072/st-va ... e-holy-cow
No Shame. No Sorrow. Divorce Means It’s Party Time in Mauritania.
It is common for people in this West African desert nation to divorce many times. And when they do, the women celebrate.
The henna artist bent over her client’s hand, glancing at the smartphone to get the precise details of the pattern chosen by her customer, a young woman living in an ancient desert city in the West African nation of Mauritania.
Under a sliver of brightening moon, the young woman, Iselekhe Jeilaniy, sat gingerly on a mat, careful that the wet henna on her skin would not smudge, just as she had on the eve of her wedding day.
But she was not getting married. She was getting divorced. The next day would be her divorce party.
“Your attention, married ladies — my daughter Iselekhe is divorced now!” Ms. Jeilaniy’s mother called out to the townspeople, ululating three times and drumming on a plastic tray turned upside down. Then she added the traditional reassurance that the marriage had ended more or less amicably: “She’s alive, and so is her ex.”
Ms. Jeilaniy giggled, looking at her phone. She was busy posting henna pictures on Snapchat — the modern version of a divorce announcement.
Divorce in many cultures is seen as shameful and carries a deep stigma. But in Mauritania, it is not just normal, but even seen as a reason to celebrate and spread the word that the woman is available once more for marriage. For centuries, women have been coming together to eat, sing and dance at each others’ divorce parties. Now, the custom is being updated for the selfie generation, with inscribed cakes and social media montages, as well as the traditional food and music.
A person dressed in a white garment stands in a courtyard while s child sits on a rug behind her.
On the eve of her divorce party, Ms. Jeilaniy prayed in the courtyard of her family’s home.
Three people sit in darkness, with a small light illuminating the space between two of them.
By the light of a cellphone, the henna artist Halima El-Haddad, right, decorates Ms. Jeilaniy’s hands in preparation for her divorce party.
In this almost 100 percent Muslim country, divorce is frequent; many people have been through five to 10 marriages, and some as many as 20.
Some scholars say the country has the highest divorce rate in the world, though there is little reliable data from Mauritania, partly because divorce agreements there are often verbal, not documented.
Divorce in the country is so common, according to Nejwa El Kettab, a sociologist who studies women in Mauritanian society, partly because the majority Maure community inherited strong “matriarchal tendencies” from their Berber ancestors. Divorce parties were a way for the country’s nomadic communities to spread the word of a woman’s status. Compared with other Muslim countries, women in Mauritania are quite free, she said, and can even pursue what she called a “matrimonial career.”
“A young, divorced woman is not a problem,” Ms. El Kettab said, adding that divorced women were seen as experienced and hence desirable. “Divorce can even increase women’s value.”
As Ms. Jeilaniy carefully rearranged her melafha — a long cloth wrapped around her hair and body, its bright white chosen to highlight the dark henna — her mother, Salka Bilale, strode across the family courtyard and crossed her arms, posing for pictures destined for campaign posters.
Ms. Bilale had also divorced young, become a pharmacist and never remarried. Now, she was running to become the first ever female member of the national legislature for Ouadane, their hilltop town of a few thousand people living in simple stone houses abutting a 900-year-old ruined city.
Four women and a car pass along a dusty road bordered by sparse trees.
Four women walk along a dusty street in Ouadane, a town founded in the 11th century to serve camel caravans crossing the Sahara.
A woman uses a calculator at a desk as two people stand outside an open window.
Salka Bilale serving customers at the pharmacy of a hospital in Ouadane. She is running to be the first female member of the national legislature for the town.
Divorce was the reason Ms. Bilale could do any of this. She had been married young, before she could pursue her dream of becoming a doctor, and divorced when she said she realized her husband was seeing other women. Her former husband, who has since died, had wanted her back, but she refused, so he cut her off financially, initially giving her nothing, and then only $30 a month to raise their five children, she said.
In dire need of money, Ms. Bilale opened a store, and eventually made enough to put herself through school. Last year, a new hospital opened in Ouadane, and, in her early 60s, she finally got a job in the medical field.
Her daughters’ experience had been very different. Ms. Jeilaniy married much later, at 29, and 28-year-old Zaidouba had, so far, turned down all marriage offers she’d had, preferring to study and take on a series of internships.
Many women find that divorce affords them freedoms they never dreamed of before or during marriage, especially a first marriage. Mauritanians’ openness to divorce — which seems so modern — coexists with very traditional practices around first marriages. It is common for parents to choose the groom themselves and marry daughters off when they are still young — more than a third of girls are married by the time they are 18 — allowing the women little choice in their partners.
Image
A woman hands her young child to another woman at the entrance to a home.
Lakwailia Rweijil, seated, and her baby daughter at her home in Ouadane. Like many Mauritanians, Ms. Rweijil has been through multiple divorces.
Image
Two men carry loaves of bread in a walkway between tall stone walls.
Two men carrying loaves of bread taking a shortcut through the ruins of Ouadane’s old city, a World Heritage Site.
When another resident of Ouadane, Lakwailia Rweijil, got married for the first time as a teenager, her father held the wedding ceremony without her knowledge, informing her afterward.
It wasn’t long before she divorced that husband. But she has been married off again and again in the more than two decades since.
Ms. Rweijil had no choice over any of her six husbands, and as a result, she said: “I don’t put people deep in my heart. When they come, they come. When they leave, they leave.”
Image
A road passes through hills in a dry valley.
The road that connects Ouadane with Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott.
But she has been able to choose whom to divorce. Women can legally initiate divorce in Mauritania under certain circumstances, and although it is usually men who technically do so, it is often at the women’s insistence.
Women typically get priority over men for custody of any children after a divorce. Although men are legally responsible for paying for their children’s maintenance, there is little enforcement and women often end up bearing the financial burden.
Even though many women never plan to get divorced, if it happens, it is easier for them to move on than in many other countries, said Ms. El Kettab, the sociologist, because society supports instead of condemning them. “They make it so simple, it’s easier to turn the page,” she said.
And one of the ways a woman’s circle shows that support is through parties.
Image
Two women sit on sofa-like seating at a table in a room adorned with pictures and a mirror.
The sociologist Nejwa El Kettab, right, with a friend at a cafe in Nouakchott.
Image
Two women stand amid stacks of fabrics, pillows and other things for sale.
After divorce, women in Nouakchott often head to the Divorced Women’s Market to sell their clothes, furnishings and other belongings.
Ms. Jeilaniy said she had divorced because her husband was too jealous, sometimes even refusing to let her go out. She had to wait three months to finalize the divorce and have her divorce party, an interval that is required to ensure that the woman is not pregnant. If she is, the couple usually waits until the child’s birth.
On the day of her divorce party, Ms. Jeilaniy dabbed foundation on her cheeks and highlighted her dark eyebrows in gold, as she had learned from YouTube.
Wrapping herself in a melafha of deep indigo, she stepped out of the front door and set off for the party, hosted by a friend of her mother’s in the living room of her modest stone house.
The women dipped dates in canned cream. They scooped up camel meat and onions with hunks of bread. Then they ate handfuls of rice from a common platter, rolling them into balls in their palms as they talked. Small boys crouched and peered at the increasingly raucous party through the open windows, which in Ouadane are at the level of the sandy street.
Image
A woman applies makeup to her face while looking into a hand-held mirror.
Ms. Jeilaniy doing her makeup before the celebration.
Image
A woman stands in front of a bluish gray wall.
Ms. Jeilaniy posing for a picture after getting ready for her divorce party.
More women arrived, and the singing began. Women who had known many divorces and attended many divorce parties sang of love, and then of the Prophet Muhammad — lilting, drifting, sometimes sorrowful desert music, accompanied only by drums and clapping.
Mauritania, a land of nomads, camels and empty moon-like landscapes, is sometimes called the land of a million poets. And even divorce is poetic.
“There is so much poetry about the seduction of divorced women,” said Elhadj Ould Brahim, a professor of cultural anthropology at Nouakchott University. This stands in sharp contrast, he pointed out, to much of the Muslim world, including Mauritania’s immediate neighbors like Morocco, where, he said, the social stigma is so strong that “it’s death for a woman to be divorced.”
Today’s divorce-themed poetry, Mr. Ould Brahim said, is more visual and is conveyed via social media.
“Snapchat is the new ululation,” he said.
Image
Two women dance in a room while others play drums and clap.
Ms. Jeilaniy, second from right, singing as her friends dance at her divorce party.
Image
Women smile and talk as they sit around a bowl of food.
Ms. Jeilaniy sharing lunch with friends and relatives during her divorce party.
The sisters’ mother arrived and plopped down on the carpet near Ms. Jeilaniy, who had spent much of her party on her phone, messaging and posting selfies. The party began to wind down.
Ms. Bilale looked at her elder daughter. “She’s only interested in marriage and men,” she said. “When I was her age, I was already interested in politics.”
Ms. Bilale got up from the carpet. If Ms. Jeilaniy wouldn’t use her status as a divorced woman to advance her career and build her independence, then Ms. Bilale would concentrate on using her own. She headed out the door toward the kitchen, where she had spied some potential voters for the upcoming election.
“I’m going to the young people to get votes,” she said.
Image
A woman walks along a street in a desert region town.
Ouadane at dusk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The henna artist bent over her client’s hand, glancing at the smartphone to get the precise details of the pattern chosen by her customer, a young woman living in an ancient desert city in the West African nation of Mauritania.
Under a sliver of brightening moon, the young woman, Iselekhe Jeilaniy, sat gingerly on a mat, careful that the wet henna on her skin would not smudge, just as she had on the eve of her wedding day.
But she was not getting married. She was getting divorced. The next day would be her divorce party.
“Your attention, married ladies — my daughter Iselekhe is divorced now!” Ms. Jeilaniy’s mother called out to the townspeople, ululating three times and drumming on a plastic tray turned upside down. Then she added the traditional reassurance that the marriage had ended more or less amicably: “She’s alive, and so is her ex.”
Ms. Jeilaniy giggled, looking at her phone. She was busy posting henna pictures on Snapchat — the modern version of a divorce announcement.
Divorce in many cultures is seen as shameful and carries a deep stigma. But in Mauritania, it is not just normal, but even seen as a reason to celebrate and spread the word that the woman is available once more for marriage. For centuries, women have been coming together to eat, sing and dance at each others’ divorce parties. Now, the custom is being updated for the selfie generation, with inscribed cakes and social media montages, as well as the traditional food and music.
A person dressed in a white garment stands in a courtyard while s child sits on a rug behind her.
On the eve of her divorce party, Ms. Jeilaniy prayed in the courtyard of her family’s home.
Three people sit in darkness, with a small light illuminating the space between two of them.
By the light of a cellphone, the henna artist Halima El-Haddad, right, decorates Ms. Jeilaniy’s hands in preparation for her divorce party.
In this almost 100 percent Muslim country, divorce is frequent; many people have been through five to 10 marriages, and some as many as 20.
Some scholars say the country has the highest divorce rate in the world, though there is little reliable data from Mauritania, partly because divorce agreements there are often verbal, not documented.
Divorce in the country is so common, according to Nejwa El Kettab, a sociologist who studies women in Mauritanian society, partly because the majority Maure community inherited strong “matriarchal tendencies” from their Berber ancestors. Divorce parties were a way for the country’s nomadic communities to spread the word of a woman’s status. Compared with other Muslim countries, women in Mauritania are quite free, she said, and can even pursue what she called a “matrimonial career.”
“A young, divorced woman is not a problem,” Ms. El Kettab said, adding that divorced women were seen as experienced and hence desirable. “Divorce can even increase women’s value.”
As Ms. Jeilaniy carefully rearranged her melafha — a long cloth wrapped around her hair and body, its bright white chosen to highlight the dark henna — her mother, Salka Bilale, strode across the family courtyard and crossed her arms, posing for pictures destined for campaign posters.
Ms. Bilale had also divorced young, become a pharmacist and never remarried. Now, she was running to become the first ever female member of the national legislature for Ouadane, their hilltop town of a few thousand people living in simple stone houses abutting a 900-year-old ruined city.
Four women and a car pass along a dusty road bordered by sparse trees.
Four women walk along a dusty street in Ouadane, a town founded in the 11th century to serve camel caravans crossing the Sahara.
A woman uses a calculator at a desk as two people stand outside an open window.
Salka Bilale serving customers at the pharmacy of a hospital in Ouadane. She is running to be the first female member of the national legislature for the town.
Divorce was the reason Ms. Bilale could do any of this. She had been married young, before she could pursue her dream of becoming a doctor, and divorced when she said she realized her husband was seeing other women. Her former husband, who has since died, had wanted her back, but she refused, so he cut her off financially, initially giving her nothing, and then only $30 a month to raise their five children, she said.
In dire need of money, Ms. Bilale opened a store, and eventually made enough to put herself through school. Last year, a new hospital opened in Ouadane, and, in her early 60s, she finally got a job in the medical field.
Her daughters’ experience had been very different. Ms. Jeilaniy married much later, at 29, and 28-year-old Zaidouba had, so far, turned down all marriage offers she’d had, preferring to study and take on a series of internships.
Many women find that divorce affords them freedoms they never dreamed of before or during marriage, especially a first marriage. Mauritanians’ openness to divorce — which seems so modern — coexists with very traditional practices around first marriages. It is common for parents to choose the groom themselves and marry daughters off when they are still young — more than a third of girls are married by the time they are 18 — allowing the women little choice in their partners.
Image
A woman hands her young child to another woman at the entrance to a home.
Lakwailia Rweijil, seated, and her baby daughter at her home in Ouadane. Like many Mauritanians, Ms. Rweijil has been through multiple divorces.
Image
Two men carry loaves of bread in a walkway between tall stone walls.
Two men carrying loaves of bread taking a shortcut through the ruins of Ouadane’s old city, a World Heritage Site.
When another resident of Ouadane, Lakwailia Rweijil, got married for the first time as a teenager, her father held the wedding ceremony without her knowledge, informing her afterward.
It wasn’t long before she divorced that husband. But she has been married off again and again in the more than two decades since.
Ms. Rweijil had no choice over any of her six husbands, and as a result, she said: “I don’t put people deep in my heart. When they come, they come. When they leave, they leave.”
Image
A road passes through hills in a dry valley.
The road that connects Ouadane with Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott.
But she has been able to choose whom to divorce. Women can legally initiate divorce in Mauritania under certain circumstances, and although it is usually men who technically do so, it is often at the women’s insistence.
Women typically get priority over men for custody of any children after a divorce. Although men are legally responsible for paying for their children’s maintenance, there is little enforcement and women often end up bearing the financial burden.
Even though many women never plan to get divorced, if it happens, it is easier for them to move on than in many other countries, said Ms. El Kettab, the sociologist, because society supports instead of condemning them. “They make it so simple, it’s easier to turn the page,” she said.
And one of the ways a woman’s circle shows that support is through parties.
Image
Two women sit on sofa-like seating at a table in a room adorned with pictures and a mirror.
The sociologist Nejwa El Kettab, right, with a friend at a cafe in Nouakchott.
Image
Two women stand amid stacks of fabrics, pillows and other things for sale.
After divorce, women in Nouakchott often head to the Divorced Women’s Market to sell their clothes, furnishings and other belongings.
Ms. Jeilaniy said she had divorced because her husband was too jealous, sometimes even refusing to let her go out. She had to wait three months to finalize the divorce and have her divorce party, an interval that is required to ensure that the woman is not pregnant. If she is, the couple usually waits until the child’s birth.
On the day of her divorce party, Ms. Jeilaniy dabbed foundation on her cheeks and highlighted her dark eyebrows in gold, as she had learned from YouTube.
Wrapping herself in a melafha of deep indigo, she stepped out of the front door and set off for the party, hosted by a friend of her mother’s in the living room of her modest stone house.
The women dipped dates in canned cream. They scooped up camel meat and onions with hunks of bread. Then they ate handfuls of rice from a common platter, rolling them into balls in their palms as they talked. Small boys crouched and peered at the increasingly raucous party through the open windows, which in Ouadane are at the level of the sandy street.
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A woman applies makeup to her face while looking into a hand-held mirror.
Ms. Jeilaniy doing her makeup before the celebration.
Image
A woman stands in front of a bluish gray wall.
Ms. Jeilaniy posing for a picture after getting ready for her divorce party.
More women arrived, and the singing began. Women who had known many divorces and attended many divorce parties sang of love, and then of the Prophet Muhammad — lilting, drifting, sometimes sorrowful desert music, accompanied only by drums and clapping.
Mauritania, a land of nomads, camels and empty moon-like landscapes, is sometimes called the land of a million poets. And even divorce is poetic.
“There is so much poetry about the seduction of divorced women,” said Elhadj Ould Brahim, a professor of cultural anthropology at Nouakchott University. This stands in sharp contrast, he pointed out, to much of the Muslim world, including Mauritania’s immediate neighbors like Morocco, where, he said, the social stigma is so strong that “it’s death for a woman to be divorced.”
Today’s divorce-themed poetry, Mr. Ould Brahim said, is more visual and is conveyed via social media.
“Snapchat is the new ululation,” he said.
Image
Two women dance in a room while others play drums and clap.
Ms. Jeilaniy, second from right, singing as her friends dance at her divorce party.
Image
Women smile and talk as they sit around a bowl of food.
Ms. Jeilaniy sharing lunch with friends and relatives during her divorce party.
The sisters’ mother arrived and plopped down on the carpet near Ms. Jeilaniy, who had spent much of her party on her phone, messaging and posting selfies. The party began to wind down.
Ms. Bilale looked at her elder daughter. “She’s only interested in marriage and men,” she said. “When I was her age, I was already interested in politics.”
Ms. Bilale got up from the carpet. If Ms. Jeilaniy wouldn’t use her status as a divorced woman to advance her career and build her independence, then Ms. Bilale would concentrate on using her own. She headed out the door toward the kitchen, where she had spied some potential voters for the upcoming election.
“I’m going to the young people to get votes,” she said.
Image
A woman walks along a street in a desert region town.
Ouadane at dusk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Would Marrying Her Be a Giant Mistake?
I was warned not to marry outside my faith, but when Jillian was asleep in my bed, I would cry, unable to imagine a world without her.
I am Muslim. My potential father-in-law, Bob, is an evangelical Christian. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with his daughter, Jillian, but Bob had some serious concerns about that plan.
“What if he exerts his Muslim manhood on you?” he asked Jillian.
When Jillian told me about her father’s remark, I thought, “I barely have manhood. How do I get Muslim manhood?”
In 2013, I had been dating Jillian for a little over a year. She made medical school bearable at the University of Wisconsin, where during our third year we were placed at the same hospital for our psychiatry rotation. After we finished that, Jillian hosted a Rubik’s Cube-themed party, and I swapped clothes with other classmates and ended up in all yellow clothes, including not-so-flattering yellow tights.
I hadn’t made a move on her during the party, so I hung around after everyone left, offering to help clean up. Before I knew it, Jillian’s roommates were asleep, and I was sitting on the couch alone with her, talking about what she should say at her grandfather’s funeral the next day. I think I gave her good advice; at the end of the night, we made out.
Over the next few months, we went on a series of dates throughout the state of Wisconsin as we worked through our different clinical rotations. When I finished days on the general surgery service in Madison, I would meet Jillian outside the medical school library, and we would talk about our patients. The days were long, waking up at 3 a.m., but I always looked forward to seeing her. It was in these moments that I thought I could do this for the rest of my life.
At the start of our fourth year of medical school, it was decision time for us. To continue being together, we would need to apply for a “couples match” to ensure we would be in the same city for residency. I wasn’t going to continue our relationship if we were in different states. To me, that was near impossible, especially given how busy medical training is. When Jillian brought up the idea of matching together, I hesitated.
I’m not a devout Muslim — I don’t have the discipline to pray five times a day. I’m not even sure I could take medications twice a day if my life depended on it. But I believe in God and fast during Ramadan.
Jillian is agnostic but was raised by an evangelical father who refers to Islam as “a religion of the sword.” My father is a conservative Muslim. I could see the trains colliding from the moment she brought up the idea of matching together. Before even thinking of getting our families involved, I needed to think solely about my relationship with Jillian and if we were compatible for the long haul.
On paper, we were so different. She was from a small town in Wisconsin. I was born in Bangladesh. Raised in America with other Muslims, I believed that I was destined to marry a Muslim woman. I was told stories of marriages that crumbled because a Muslim married someone outside their faith.
My three older siblings all had married within the faith. And they were concerned that Jillian and I were too different. Instead of providing the vote of confidence I so desperately sought, they urged caution.
Sign Up for Love Letter Your weekly dose of real stories that examine the highs, lows and woes of relationships. This newsletter will include the best of Modern Love, weddings and love in the news. Get it sent to your inbox.
I consulted my South Asian friends, friends from college and childhood, who also warned me about marrying outside my faith and culture. At times, when Jillian was asleep in my bed, I cried, looking at her, thinking of a world without her.
But when I looked at our relationship outside the constraint of religion, I felt comfortable. We laughed a lot and understood each other’s jokes. Jillian and I were from the same economic background, which I valued because I had read articles that said divorce in America is often because of money issues.
Since neither she nor I had much money growing up, we were both in major debt from paying for school and were similarly committed to living within our means. I didn’t want to throw away what Jillian and I had together simply because our religious beliefs differed.
I didn’t want to be religiously rigid either. Jillian and I went on many walks around the city of Madison, talking about how we would raise children and how she would support my Muslim faith, but she was not going to convert.
I wanted her to because it would make my life easier and make my parents happy — the same parents who uprooted their family of six to start over in America so my siblings and I could have a better life. My father, who had an M.B.A. in Bangladesh and was a successful businessman, did janitorial work upon first arriving in the United States.
But I knew that I couldn’t ask Jillian to convert for me. I decided to evolve away from thinking that I needed to marry someone of the same faith. She and I had similar values — that’s what was going to make us work.
I committed to doing a couples match with Jillian. Convincing our parents that our relationship would work would take a lot of effort though.
Jillian met my parents for the first time when we went to their house in Oshkosh, and I was happy that my parents didn’t kick me out for bringing someone home who didn’t believe in the Shahadah, or faith. I was excited about that, but after we left, Jillian looked distraught.
During dinner, my mother had said, “Two doctors? How will you have kids?” And after we had finished, my father said to Jillian, “You can marry my son when you become Muslim.”
On the drive back to Madison, Jillian said, “I can’t become Muslim just to marry you.”
“That’s fine, you won’t have to,” I said.
“But how?”
It was the first time my parents had met her, but I knew if they got to know her, they couldn’t reasonably object to our getting married. They would see in her what I saw: a kind, caring and talented person.
I no longer intended for Jillian to convert to Islam; I just wanted her to understand it. That way, she would understand me and my family. I needed her to understand that I had grown up only eating meat that had been prepared according to Islamic tradition — meaning, no Big Macs. To have halal meat, my parents slaughtered chickens in our garage.
Eventually, by spending time with my parents and cooking with my mother in her kitchen, Jillian won their approval.
Jillian’s father was a different story. When she told him of her intention to marry me, he said, “You’re making a giant mistake.”
Bob didn’t participate in any of our family’s initial meetings. My parents and Jillian’s mother, Mary (she and Bob were divorced), got along because Mary was genuinely interested in other people and liked talking to my parents.
Bob wanted to meet with me when Jillian and I made our intentions to marry clear. He and I met at a small Mexican restaurant in Green Bay. We ordered burritos and he told me about his concerns.
Bob was afraid his daughter was marrying someone who would force her to do things that she wouldn’t want. I imagined that he was afraid I was going to make her wear a burqa or adhere to Shariah law, which was very much in the news at the time. I could tell he was doing his version of looking out for his daughter.
I tried to address Bob’s concerns, putting my ego aside, but it’s hard and awkward to try to disprove someone’s negative perceptions of you. I assured Bob that in the house where I grew up, my mother was the glue that held our family together. Jillian would be the same.
Despite my assurances, Bob wasn’t convinced, and I could tell that I wasn’t going to be able to convince him. And that was OK.
After Jillian and I matched to residencies in the Twin Cities, we married in a tiny ceremony in my parents’ living room with 10 people in attendance, including Jillian’s mother and grandmother. Bob did not attend.
Nine years later, Jillian and I have two children who have the gift of being raised by parents from two different countries, two different traditions and two different faiths. As for Bob, he visits occasionally and loves his grandchildren and calls me “a good guy.” My hope for my children is that they learn from our example to become compassionate humans who are accepting of others. I call that exerting my Muslim manhood.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/styl ... nship.html
I am Muslim. My potential father-in-law, Bob, is an evangelical Christian. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with his daughter, Jillian, but Bob had some serious concerns about that plan.
“What if he exerts his Muslim manhood on you?” he asked Jillian.
When Jillian told me about her father’s remark, I thought, “I barely have manhood. How do I get Muslim manhood?”
In 2013, I had been dating Jillian for a little over a year. She made medical school bearable at the University of Wisconsin, where during our third year we were placed at the same hospital for our psychiatry rotation. After we finished that, Jillian hosted a Rubik’s Cube-themed party, and I swapped clothes with other classmates and ended up in all yellow clothes, including not-so-flattering yellow tights.
I hadn’t made a move on her during the party, so I hung around after everyone left, offering to help clean up. Before I knew it, Jillian’s roommates were asleep, and I was sitting on the couch alone with her, talking about what she should say at her grandfather’s funeral the next day. I think I gave her good advice; at the end of the night, we made out.
Over the next few months, we went on a series of dates throughout the state of Wisconsin as we worked through our different clinical rotations. When I finished days on the general surgery service in Madison, I would meet Jillian outside the medical school library, and we would talk about our patients. The days were long, waking up at 3 a.m., but I always looked forward to seeing her. It was in these moments that I thought I could do this for the rest of my life.
At the start of our fourth year of medical school, it was decision time for us. To continue being together, we would need to apply for a “couples match” to ensure we would be in the same city for residency. I wasn’t going to continue our relationship if we were in different states. To me, that was near impossible, especially given how busy medical training is. When Jillian brought up the idea of matching together, I hesitated.
I’m not a devout Muslim — I don’t have the discipline to pray five times a day. I’m not even sure I could take medications twice a day if my life depended on it. But I believe in God and fast during Ramadan.
Jillian is agnostic but was raised by an evangelical father who refers to Islam as “a religion of the sword.” My father is a conservative Muslim. I could see the trains colliding from the moment she brought up the idea of matching together. Before even thinking of getting our families involved, I needed to think solely about my relationship with Jillian and if we were compatible for the long haul.
On paper, we were so different. She was from a small town in Wisconsin. I was born in Bangladesh. Raised in America with other Muslims, I believed that I was destined to marry a Muslim woman. I was told stories of marriages that crumbled because a Muslim married someone outside their faith.
My three older siblings all had married within the faith. And they were concerned that Jillian and I were too different. Instead of providing the vote of confidence I so desperately sought, they urged caution.
Sign Up for Love Letter Your weekly dose of real stories that examine the highs, lows and woes of relationships. This newsletter will include the best of Modern Love, weddings and love in the news. Get it sent to your inbox.
I consulted my South Asian friends, friends from college and childhood, who also warned me about marrying outside my faith and culture. At times, when Jillian was asleep in my bed, I cried, looking at her, thinking of a world without her.
But when I looked at our relationship outside the constraint of religion, I felt comfortable. We laughed a lot and understood each other’s jokes. Jillian and I were from the same economic background, which I valued because I had read articles that said divorce in America is often because of money issues.
Since neither she nor I had much money growing up, we were both in major debt from paying for school and were similarly committed to living within our means. I didn’t want to throw away what Jillian and I had together simply because our religious beliefs differed.
I didn’t want to be religiously rigid either. Jillian and I went on many walks around the city of Madison, talking about how we would raise children and how she would support my Muslim faith, but she was not going to convert.
I wanted her to because it would make my life easier and make my parents happy — the same parents who uprooted their family of six to start over in America so my siblings and I could have a better life. My father, who had an M.B.A. in Bangladesh and was a successful businessman, did janitorial work upon first arriving in the United States.
But I knew that I couldn’t ask Jillian to convert for me. I decided to evolve away from thinking that I needed to marry someone of the same faith. She and I had similar values — that’s what was going to make us work.
I committed to doing a couples match with Jillian. Convincing our parents that our relationship would work would take a lot of effort though.
Jillian met my parents for the first time when we went to their house in Oshkosh, and I was happy that my parents didn’t kick me out for bringing someone home who didn’t believe in the Shahadah, or faith. I was excited about that, but after we left, Jillian looked distraught.
During dinner, my mother had said, “Two doctors? How will you have kids?” And after we had finished, my father said to Jillian, “You can marry my son when you become Muslim.”
On the drive back to Madison, Jillian said, “I can’t become Muslim just to marry you.”
“That’s fine, you won’t have to,” I said.
“But how?”
It was the first time my parents had met her, but I knew if they got to know her, they couldn’t reasonably object to our getting married. They would see in her what I saw: a kind, caring and talented person.
I no longer intended for Jillian to convert to Islam; I just wanted her to understand it. That way, she would understand me and my family. I needed her to understand that I had grown up only eating meat that had been prepared according to Islamic tradition — meaning, no Big Macs. To have halal meat, my parents slaughtered chickens in our garage.
Eventually, by spending time with my parents and cooking with my mother in her kitchen, Jillian won their approval.
Jillian’s father was a different story. When she told him of her intention to marry me, he said, “You’re making a giant mistake.”
Bob didn’t participate in any of our family’s initial meetings. My parents and Jillian’s mother, Mary (she and Bob were divorced), got along because Mary was genuinely interested in other people and liked talking to my parents.
Bob wanted to meet with me when Jillian and I made our intentions to marry clear. He and I met at a small Mexican restaurant in Green Bay. We ordered burritos and he told me about his concerns.
Bob was afraid his daughter was marrying someone who would force her to do things that she wouldn’t want. I imagined that he was afraid I was going to make her wear a burqa or adhere to Shariah law, which was very much in the news at the time. I could tell he was doing his version of looking out for his daughter.
I tried to address Bob’s concerns, putting my ego aside, but it’s hard and awkward to try to disprove someone’s negative perceptions of you. I assured Bob that in the house where I grew up, my mother was the glue that held our family together. Jillian would be the same.
Despite my assurances, Bob wasn’t convinced, and I could tell that I wasn’t going to be able to convince him. And that was OK.
After Jillian and I matched to residencies in the Twin Cities, we married in a tiny ceremony in my parents’ living room with 10 people in attendance, including Jillian’s mother and grandmother. Bob did not attend.
Nine years later, Jillian and I have two children who have the gift of being raised by parents from two different countries, two different traditions and two different faiths. As for Bob, he visits occasionally and loves his grandchildren and calls me “a good guy.” My hope for my children is that they learn from our example to become compassionate humans who are accepting of others. I call that exerting my Muslim manhood.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/styl ... nship.html
Does Anyone Care About Justin Trudeau’s Separation?
A stable marriage (publicly at least) used to be a cornerstone of any world leader’s résumé. Not in 2023.
Justin Trudeau is the first Canadian prime minister to go through a separation in office since that of his own parents. Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Like many public statements on the disintegration of a high-profile split these days, this one appeared on Instagram. “After many meaningful and difficult conversations,” a joint post said, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, had separated from his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau. The couple, who have three children and have been married for 18 years, were once seen to have had a fairy tale romance. But while the story was soon dominating headlines, millions also gave a digital shrug.
Once upon a time, for most world leaders, major political capital lay in the careful crafting of at least the outward appearance of a stable marriage and persona as a family man or woman. According to Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist and a host of the “Dear Therapists” podcast, people wanted to feel that their leaders were a solid and steady presence, much as children want to feel safe with their parents, the leaders of their family.
“Because our first leaders were our parents or adult caregivers, we tend to equate stability with family stability,” she said in an email, “which is why politicians tend to make their ‘perfect’ families part of the campaign, trotting them out in public. They’re saying, ‘I have created a solid, stable family, and I can do that for my country.’”
Orna Guralnik, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, said that generally, social and political leaders have been supposed to hold onto the ego ideal, a Freudian concept for the idea of perfection that a person strives to emulate.
“Historically they have been imbued with everything that we want to idealize,” Dr. Guralnik said in a telephone interview. “But in recent years, the ideological background of what we wish to project has changed rapidly.”
Justin Trudeau is the first Canadian prime minister to go through a separation in office since that of his own parents. In one of the first instances globally, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife, Margaret, went through a divorce during his final months in office in 1984, having initially separated in 1977.
In the United States, Ronald Reagan may have been the first divorced president in history (none have divorced while in office), but it was Bill Clinton who really pressed the reset button and created a spectrum of acceptability on what a presidential marriage in 21st-century America could look like.
And elsewhere, world leaders including Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Vladimir Putin in Russia have divorced while in office.
Image
Outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie Johnson leave Downing Street in London,
When Boris Johnson, the prime minister of Britain, married Carrie Symonds in May 2021, he was the first prime minister to marry in office since Lord Liverpool in 1822.Credit...Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock
Others have divorced and remarried while on the job, indicating perhaps that while divorce may have become more acceptable, marriage remains a cornerstone of political brand building.
Nicolas Sarkozy of France divorced his second wife in 2007, five months after the start of his term as president, then married the supermodel Carla Bruni four months later. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain finalized his divorce from Marina Wheeler in 2020. His marriage to his next wife, Carrie Symonds, in May 2021, made him the first prime minister of Britain to marry in office since Lord Liverpool in 1822.
The role of mayor of New York is not that of a world leader. But the way in which former Mayor (and 2020 presidential candidate) Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, announced their separation last month — in a long and frank interview with The New York Times — underscored the ways their problems can sound just like our own.
Who would want to be married to a politician anyway?
Several former world leaders — and their spouses — have been candid about the toll of such a role on their relationships. In May, a month after losing a tight election, Sanna Marin, the prime minister of Finland, announced that she and her husband, Markus Raikkonen, had filed for divorce. Jacinda Ardern, who stepped down as prime minister of New Zealand last year, said she did so because “the role had taken a lot out of me” and she “finally” wanted to marry her longtime partner, Clarke Gayford, after years of delays.
In a 2019 interview with The Daily Beast, Justin Trudeau’s mother, Margaret, said her marriage to Pierre Trudeau broke down while he was in office because he worked 14 hours a day.
“We had one hour together every day,” she said. “I was alone all the time. As first lady I was mostly either pregnant or nursing. My life was not as anyone imagined it was. We weren’t in the same place.”
Mr. de Blasio said, “I can look back now and say, ‘Here were these inflection points where we should have been saying something to each other.’”
“And I think one of the things I should have said more is: ‘Are you happy? What will make you happy? What’s missing in your life?’”
Image
Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin wears a pink shirt.
A month after losing a tight election, Sanna Marin, the prime minister of Finland, announced that she and her husband, Markus Raikkonen, had filed for divorce. Credit...Martin Divisek/EPA, via Shutterstock
Just like us
As notions of family structures expand, and if political leaders’ lives reflect our own, does that endear or alienate them from a population? Ms. Gottlieb suggested that political separations reinforce the idea that money or privilege can’t buy happiness, much like the way people see separations of celebrities or royalty.
“Sometimes people might feel empathy for a couple, but what I see most is a feeling of relief for themselves,” she said.
“They think: Wow, even world leaders who have everything — power, money, fame, mansions paid for by our taxes — struggle with parenting, arguing, sex lives, disconnection and personality differences just like many ‘regular’ people do.”
Dr. Guralnik said that while people are more realistic about what they expect from modern marriage, a breakdown in expectations for public figures in their personal lives chimed, amid culture wars and a climate crisis, with a wider sense of being let down by those in power.
“The fact that leaders separate or divorce doesn’t create shock waves as it once did because idealization around them has shattered,” she said. “From the couch I hear so much about a loss of faith and even deep despair in modern governance and leadership. A marriage split leaves people resigned to thinking: There’s just another human being that can’t help us.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/styl ... ation.html
Justin Trudeau is the first Canadian prime minister to go through a separation in office since that of his own parents. Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Like many public statements on the disintegration of a high-profile split these days, this one appeared on Instagram. “After many meaningful and difficult conversations,” a joint post said, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, had separated from his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau. The couple, who have three children and have been married for 18 years, were once seen to have had a fairy tale romance. But while the story was soon dominating headlines, millions also gave a digital shrug.
Once upon a time, for most world leaders, major political capital lay in the careful crafting of at least the outward appearance of a stable marriage and persona as a family man or woman. According to Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist and a host of the “Dear Therapists” podcast, people wanted to feel that their leaders were a solid and steady presence, much as children want to feel safe with their parents, the leaders of their family.
“Because our first leaders were our parents or adult caregivers, we tend to equate stability with family stability,” she said in an email, “which is why politicians tend to make their ‘perfect’ families part of the campaign, trotting them out in public. They’re saying, ‘I have created a solid, stable family, and I can do that for my country.’”
Orna Guralnik, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, said that generally, social and political leaders have been supposed to hold onto the ego ideal, a Freudian concept for the idea of perfection that a person strives to emulate.
“Historically they have been imbued with everything that we want to idealize,” Dr. Guralnik said in a telephone interview. “But in recent years, the ideological background of what we wish to project has changed rapidly.”
Justin Trudeau is the first Canadian prime minister to go through a separation in office since that of his own parents. In one of the first instances globally, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife, Margaret, went through a divorce during his final months in office in 1984, having initially separated in 1977.
In the United States, Ronald Reagan may have been the first divorced president in history (none have divorced while in office), but it was Bill Clinton who really pressed the reset button and created a spectrum of acceptability on what a presidential marriage in 21st-century America could look like.
And elsewhere, world leaders including Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Vladimir Putin in Russia have divorced while in office.
Image
Outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie Johnson leave Downing Street in London,
When Boris Johnson, the prime minister of Britain, married Carrie Symonds in May 2021, he was the first prime minister to marry in office since Lord Liverpool in 1822.Credit...Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock
Others have divorced and remarried while on the job, indicating perhaps that while divorce may have become more acceptable, marriage remains a cornerstone of political brand building.
Nicolas Sarkozy of France divorced his second wife in 2007, five months after the start of his term as president, then married the supermodel Carla Bruni four months later. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain finalized his divorce from Marina Wheeler in 2020. His marriage to his next wife, Carrie Symonds, in May 2021, made him the first prime minister of Britain to marry in office since Lord Liverpool in 1822.
The role of mayor of New York is not that of a world leader. But the way in which former Mayor (and 2020 presidential candidate) Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, announced their separation last month — in a long and frank interview with The New York Times — underscored the ways their problems can sound just like our own.
Who would want to be married to a politician anyway?
Several former world leaders — and their spouses — have been candid about the toll of such a role on their relationships. In May, a month after losing a tight election, Sanna Marin, the prime minister of Finland, announced that she and her husband, Markus Raikkonen, had filed for divorce. Jacinda Ardern, who stepped down as prime minister of New Zealand last year, said she did so because “the role had taken a lot out of me” and she “finally” wanted to marry her longtime partner, Clarke Gayford, after years of delays.
In a 2019 interview with The Daily Beast, Justin Trudeau’s mother, Margaret, said her marriage to Pierre Trudeau broke down while he was in office because he worked 14 hours a day.
“We had one hour together every day,” she said. “I was alone all the time. As first lady I was mostly either pregnant or nursing. My life was not as anyone imagined it was. We weren’t in the same place.”
Mr. de Blasio said, “I can look back now and say, ‘Here were these inflection points where we should have been saying something to each other.’”
“And I think one of the things I should have said more is: ‘Are you happy? What will make you happy? What’s missing in your life?’”
Image
Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin wears a pink shirt.
A month after losing a tight election, Sanna Marin, the prime minister of Finland, announced that she and her husband, Markus Raikkonen, had filed for divorce. Credit...Martin Divisek/EPA, via Shutterstock
Just like us
As notions of family structures expand, and if political leaders’ lives reflect our own, does that endear or alienate them from a population? Ms. Gottlieb suggested that political separations reinforce the idea that money or privilege can’t buy happiness, much like the way people see separations of celebrities or royalty.
“Sometimes people might feel empathy for a couple, but what I see most is a feeling of relief for themselves,” she said.
“They think: Wow, even world leaders who have everything — power, money, fame, mansions paid for by our taxes — struggle with parenting, arguing, sex lives, disconnection and personality differences just like many ‘regular’ people do.”
Dr. Guralnik said that while people are more realistic about what they expect from modern marriage, a breakdown in expectations for public figures in their personal lives chimed, amid culture wars and a climate crisis, with a wider sense of being let down by those in power.
“The fact that leaders separate or divorce doesn’t create shock waves as it once did because idealization around them has shattered,” she said. “From the couch I hear so much about a loss of faith and even deep despair in modern governance and leadership. A marriage split leaves people resigned to thinking: There’s just another human being that can’t help us.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/styl ... ation.html
At Asian Weddings, Cash Is King
Forget registries — in Asia, it is common to give marrying couples envelopes of cash. But unwritten rules on how much to give depend on who you are and which superstitions you believe.
When I received a wedding invitation from my friends Jiyeon Kim and Olof Norlander this year, I knew exactly where I would pick up their wedding present: the bank.
The two had already married in Uppsala, Sweden, where they live, but Ms. Kim’s father wanted the newlyweds to have a second ceremony in Changwon, South Korea, where he had spent years attending the weddings of his friends’ and colleagues’ children.
As is tradition, he gave the marrying couples envelopes of cash known in Korean as chug-ui-geum, or congratulatory money. Having a wedding in South Korea would allow him not only to share the joyous occasion with his family and friends, but also to offset the costs of the event with reciprocated cash gifts from attendees.
“We can’t deny that the surplus in money was one of the good outcomes of the wedding,” said Ms. Kim, 32, who held her second ceremony in May.
Weddings are peaking at this time of year, and in Asia, it has long been custom to congratulate marrying couples with cash instead of gifts from a registry. In South Korea, guests present their envelopes of cash to an appointed friend or family member of the newlywed couple upon arriving at the reception. In return, they are presented with a meal ticket that allows them entrance to the wedding banquet, and the amount given is discreetly written in a register. Guests who cannot attend are given the option to wire money to the newlyweds’ bank account number written on the invitation.
While it has become increasingly popular for couples in the United States to ask for cash when getting married, it is still rare for American couples to have a registry that is cash only, said Emily Forrest, director of communications for Zola, a wedding registry website.
Nobu Nakaguchi, a co-founder at Zola, said he noticed cultural differences in gift-giving when he got married in 2005. He had a Roman Catholic wedding in the United States and a Buddhist wedding in Japan. It was a fascinating experience to receive cash at his Japanese wedding, he said, since many Americans believe that giving cash is gauche.
“If you go to an Asian country like Japan or Korea, the expectation is to receive a cash gift,” Mr. Nakaguchi, 48, said. “I don’t think we’re fully there in the U.S.”
Despite long-held customs around giving cash, discussing expectations about money was considered a cultural taboo in Asian countries, said Lee Eun-hee, a consumer science professor at Inha University in South Korea.
“While money gifts are expected and desired, our culture forbids us to explicitly spell out what we want,” she said, pointing out that this is why etiquette dictates money be presented in envelopes.
This dichotomy has resulted in a rich conversation around the etiquette of giving cash at weddings in Asia. Should a gift reflect the cost of your banquet meal? How do you put a numerical value on a friendship? Here are some unwritten rules on how giving money works at Asian weddings.
When Parents Own the Wedding
Mengqi Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Duke Kunshan University who had two weddings in China, described both of her experiences as large affairs that did not try to reflect her and her husband’s relationship. She felt an obligation to have the ceremonies, largely because she knew they were important rituals for her parents.
“We don’t have that money,” she said of the cash gifts, which ultimately went to her parents. “I don’t even know how much money my parents got.”
While weddings in Asia are increasingly becoming less traditional, parents play a vital role in arranging the event and making financial decisions because they are often paying for it. It’s common for parents to determine how much of the congratulatory money the newlyweds keep.
This is why a parent at a Korean wedding is referred to as the hon-ju, or owner of the wedding. Many Korean couples work out a system with their parents in which they keep a specific portion of the money. However, when money may be a point of contention, some brides will appoint a gabang-sooni, or person in charge of your bag, to collect the money in private rather than at the reception.
Don’t Show Me the Money
Image
A woman wearing a wedding gown is lifted into the air by a man wearing a tuxedo on a sidewalk lined with trees that are roped in twinkly lights.
A couple in Tokyo being photographed for their wedding book. In Asia, it has long been the custom to congratulate marrying couples with cash instead of gifts from a registry.Credit...Kimimasa Mayama/EPA, via Shutterstock
Gift money is never meant to be physically seen. To work around this, many Asian cultures have special envelopes for the occasion. In South Korea, only crisp, new bills are to be presented — stacked front-first — in a white envelope with the giver’s name written vertically on it.
In Japan, the shugi-bukuro, or envelope for congratulatory money, was traditionally made by hand in red and white, but can now be bought in a variety of colors. In many Chinese cultures, the envelope most associated with the Lunar New Year, hong-bao, is famously red. Since money is given for a number of occasions, including funerals, Asian wedding attendees should make sure the correct envelope is given.
Recently, sending money through a bank transfer or electronically via digital envelopes on messaging apps like WeChat and KakaoTalk has also become acceptable.
Calculate Your Closeness
Ms. Kim, who has attended weddings in Europe and Asia, said it was much harder for her to decide how much to contribute to a wedding in Sweden, since the customs are different.
While a gift anywhere is a consideration of your relationship and the social situation, there is often a socially accepted formula to gift-giving in Asia that takes into account a variety of factors, including beliefs about auspicious numbers and power in relationships.
In Japan, where the average goshugi, or envelope of cash given at an auspicious occasion, is somewhere from 30,000 yen ($211) to 50,000 yen ($350), it is generally understood that a younger adult or college student should contribute ¥10,000 ($70), while workplace superiors and older relatives should aim for the higher end of that range or more.
General advice from Korean blogs and society reporting recommends asking yourself these questions to understand what constitutes a close relationship: Is the person inviting you a work colleague? Did you receive a mobile invitation only? Does your mother know this person’s name? Would your mother’s response to hearing the person’s name be “Oh, right, that person’s daughter”? Any answer pointing to closeness would add to the appropriate amount — typically resulting in a payment from 50,000 won ($39) to 100,000 won ($77), according to a survey of South Korean singles in 2022.
Ms. Wang, the anthropology professor, said the money given at weddings was also used to establish a stronger bond, or guanxi.
“The wedding is one of those occasions where you get to give a gift to someone,” she said. “Without a special occasion, it would look out of context. To give a gift — a good one — is also a way to cement relationships.”
It’s not just a monetary exchange but an exchange of credit and debt, she added.
As such, the wedding gift giving system has been abused by people in power, and governments in Asia have even tried to regulate gifts to prevent bribery and corruption. In South Korea, an anti-graft law, the Kim Young-ran Act, was put into place limiting how much public servants could be given on various occasions — capping cash gifts at 100,000 won at weddings. But the act has been difficult to enforce because a separate entity would have to audit each gift presented at the ceremonies.
Cover Your Plate
In addition to social position and proximity, conventional wisdom in Asia says the cost of the banquet meal should be factored in. This idea is so widespread in Singapore that dozens of websites lay out how much a table costs at most major hotels in the country.
Michelle Tay, an editor at Singapore Brides, says that while she encourages readers to pay as much ang bao (Hokkien for red envelope) as they can, many people like to have a rough estimate of how much others are paying by first looking at the prices listed on the venue.
“Every half a year or so, venues will adjust their banquet prices according to rising costs,” Ms. Tay said. “This indirectly causes people to feel pressured to pay more when they check the ang bao guides that are updated with the new rates.”
Ms. Lee, the consumer science professor, is often contacted by Korean media organizations for advice on how much to pay at a wedding. She said her rule of thumb was always: “Look up the venue where the couple is getting married. See how much a meal there costs. And if you will not cover the price of your plate, it’s better not to go and send them an electronic transfer of 50,000 won instead.”
Use a Lucky Number
Since many Asian cultures have superstitions around money, it may be wise to look up which numbers are considered lucky at the wedding in question. In South Korea, the number four is considered unlucky because of its resemblance to the character for death. In Japan, be wary of any sum that is divisible by two, because it is easily separated. In China, values ending in eight are preferred for their association with wealth and prosperity.
It’s Not Tit for Tat
Ms. Wang said her mother’s principle was always: “You have to remember how much the person gave you, and you reciprocate, but never the equal amount of value. It shouldn’t feel like a market transaction. Reciprocate by adding a little more to indicate you want to continue to have a relationship with that person.”
Her mother’s advice also came with a warning: “If you pay too much more, it can come across as arrogance.”
In China, when she is unsure of how much to pay, Ms. Wang calls her friends to compare notes.
“If we lived in a perfectly closed community, everybody would know their positions and they would know how much to give, but the reality is that we’re always mobile,” she said. This is true whether a person is trying to put a figure on a wedding gift, sending condolences to a funeral (also a cash gift in many Asian countries) or trying to pick out a gift for a baby shower.
In some ways, “it’s no different than what happens in America,” Mr. Nakaguchi said. People remember what guests spent at their wedding and try to reciprocate equal or higher values.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/busi ... 778d3e6de3
When I received a wedding invitation from my friends Jiyeon Kim and Olof Norlander this year, I knew exactly where I would pick up their wedding present: the bank.
The two had already married in Uppsala, Sweden, where they live, but Ms. Kim’s father wanted the newlyweds to have a second ceremony in Changwon, South Korea, where he had spent years attending the weddings of his friends’ and colleagues’ children.
As is tradition, he gave the marrying couples envelopes of cash known in Korean as chug-ui-geum, or congratulatory money. Having a wedding in South Korea would allow him not only to share the joyous occasion with his family and friends, but also to offset the costs of the event with reciprocated cash gifts from attendees.
“We can’t deny that the surplus in money was one of the good outcomes of the wedding,” said Ms. Kim, 32, who held her second ceremony in May.
Weddings are peaking at this time of year, and in Asia, it has long been custom to congratulate marrying couples with cash instead of gifts from a registry. In South Korea, guests present their envelopes of cash to an appointed friend or family member of the newlywed couple upon arriving at the reception. In return, they are presented with a meal ticket that allows them entrance to the wedding banquet, and the amount given is discreetly written in a register. Guests who cannot attend are given the option to wire money to the newlyweds’ bank account number written on the invitation.
While it has become increasingly popular for couples in the United States to ask for cash when getting married, it is still rare for American couples to have a registry that is cash only, said Emily Forrest, director of communications for Zola, a wedding registry website.
Nobu Nakaguchi, a co-founder at Zola, said he noticed cultural differences in gift-giving when he got married in 2005. He had a Roman Catholic wedding in the United States and a Buddhist wedding in Japan. It was a fascinating experience to receive cash at his Japanese wedding, he said, since many Americans believe that giving cash is gauche.
“If you go to an Asian country like Japan or Korea, the expectation is to receive a cash gift,” Mr. Nakaguchi, 48, said. “I don’t think we’re fully there in the U.S.”
Despite long-held customs around giving cash, discussing expectations about money was considered a cultural taboo in Asian countries, said Lee Eun-hee, a consumer science professor at Inha University in South Korea.
“While money gifts are expected and desired, our culture forbids us to explicitly spell out what we want,” she said, pointing out that this is why etiquette dictates money be presented in envelopes.
This dichotomy has resulted in a rich conversation around the etiquette of giving cash at weddings in Asia. Should a gift reflect the cost of your banquet meal? How do you put a numerical value on a friendship? Here are some unwritten rules on how giving money works at Asian weddings.
When Parents Own the Wedding
Mengqi Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Duke Kunshan University who had two weddings in China, described both of her experiences as large affairs that did not try to reflect her and her husband’s relationship. She felt an obligation to have the ceremonies, largely because she knew they were important rituals for her parents.
“We don’t have that money,” she said of the cash gifts, which ultimately went to her parents. “I don’t even know how much money my parents got.”
While weddings in Asia are increasingly becoming less traditional, parents play a vital role in arranging the event and making financial decisions because they are often paying for it. It’s common for parents to determine how much of the congratulatory money the newlyweds keep.
This is why a parent at a Korean wedding is referred to as the hon-ju, or owner of the wedding. Many Korean couples work out a system with their parents in which they keep a specific portion of the money. However, when money may be a point of contention, some brides will appoint a gabang-sooni, or person in charge of your bag, to collect the money in private rather than at the reception.
Don’t Show Me the Money
Image
A woman wearing a wedding gown is lifted into the air by a man wearing a tuxedo on a sidewalk lined with trees that are roped in twinkly lights.
A couple in Tokyo being photographed for their wedding book. In Asia, it has long been the custom to congratulate marrying couples with cash instead of gifts from a registry.Credit...Kimimasa Mayama/EPA, via Shutterstock
Gift money is never meant to be physically seen. To work around this, many Asian cultures have special envelopes for the occasion. In South Korea, only crisp, new bills are to be presented — stacked front-first — in a white envelope with the giver’s name written vertically on it.
In Japan, the shugi-bukuro, or envelope for congratulatory money, was traditionally made by hand in red and white, but can now be bought in a variety of colors. In many Chinese cultures, the envelope most associated with the Lunar New Year, hong-bao, is famously red. Since money is given for a number of occasions, including funerals, Asian wedding attendees should make sure the correct envelope is given.
Recently, sending money through a bank transfer or electronically via digital envelopes on messaging apps like WeChat and KakaoTalk has also become acceptable.
Calculate Your Closeness
Ms. Kim, who has attended weddings in Europe and Asia, said it was much harder for her to decide how much to contribute to a wedding in Sweden, since the customs are different.
While a gift anywhere is a consideration of your relationship and the social situation, there is often a socially accepted formula to gift-giving in Asia that takes into account a variety of factors, including beliefs about auspicious numbers and power in relationships.
In Japan, where the average goshugi, or envelope of cash given at an auspicious occasion, is somewhere from 30,000 yen ($211) to 50,000 yen ($350), it is generally understood that a younger adult or college student should contribute ¥10,000 ($70), while workplace superiors and older relatives should aim for the higher end of that range or more.
General advice from Korean blogs and society reporting recommends asking yourself these questions to understand what constitutes a close relationship: Is the person inviting you a work colleague? Did you receive a mobile invitation only? Does your mother know this person’s name? Would your mother’s response to hearing the person’s name be “Oh, right, that person’s daughter”? Any answer pointing to closeness would add to the appropriate amount — typically resulting in a payment from 50,000 won ($39) to 100,000 won ($77), according to a survey of South Korean singles in 2022.
Ms. Wang, the anthropology professor, said the money given at weddings was also used to establish a stronger bond, or guanxi.
“The wedding is one of those occasions where you get to give a gift to someone,” she said. “Without a special occasion, it would look out of context. To give a gift — a good one — is also a way to cement relationships.”
It’s not just a monetary exchange but an exchange of credit and debt, she added.
As such, the wedding gift giving system has been abused by people in power, and governments in Asia have even tried to regulate gifts to prevent bribery and corruption. In South Korea, an anti-graft law, the Kim Young-ran Act, was put into place limiting how much public servants could be given on various occasions — capping cash gifts at 100,000 won at weddings. But the act has been difficult to enforce because a separate entity would have to audit each gift presented at the ceremonies.
Cover Your Plate
In addition to social position and proximity, conventional wisdom in Asia says the cost of the banquet meal should be factored in. This idea is so widespread in Singapore that dozens of websites lay out how much a table costs at most major hotels in the country.
Michelle Tay, an editor at Singapore Brides, says that while she encourages readers to pay as much ang bao (Hokkien for red envelope) as they can, many people like to have a rough estimate of how much others are paying by first looking at the prices listed on the venue.
“Every half a year or so, venues will adjust their banquet prices according to rising costs,” Ms. Tay said. “This indirectly causes people to feel pressured to pay more when they check the ang bao guides that are updated with the new rates.”
Ms. Lee, the consumer science professor, is often contacted by Korean media organizations for advice on how much to pay at a wedding. She said her rule of thumb was always: “Look up the venue where the couple is getting married. See how much a meal there costs. And if you will not cover the price of your plate, it’s better not to go and send them an electronic transfer of 50,000 won instead.”
Use a Lucky Number
Since many Asian cultures have superstitions around money, it may be wise to look up which numbers are considered lucky at the wedding in question. In South Korea, the number four is considered unlucky because of its resemblance to the character for death. In Japan, be wary of any sum that is divisible by two, because it is easily separated. In China, values ending in eight are preferred for their association with wealth and prosperity.
It’s Not Tit for Tat
Ms. Wang said her mother’s principle was always: “You have to remember how much the person gave you, and you reciprocate, but never the equal amount of value. It shouldn’t feel like a market transaction. Reciprocate by adding a little more to indicate you want to continue to have a relationship with that person.”
Her mother’s advice also came with a warning: “If you pay too much more, it can come across as arrogance.”
In China, when she is unsure of how much to pay, Ms. Wang calls her friends to compare notes.
“If we lived in a perfectly closed community, everybody would know their positions and they would know how much to give, but the reality is that we’re always mobile,” she said. This is true whether a person is trying to put a figure on a wedding gift, sending condolences to a funeral (also a cash gift in many Asian countries) or trying to pick out a gift for a baby shower.
In some ways, “it’s no different than what happens in America,” Mr. Nakaguchi said. People remember what guests spent at their wedding and try to reciprocate equal or higher values.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/busi ... 778d3e6de3
To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career
When I’m around young adults I like to ask them how they are thinking about the big commitments in their lives: what career to go into, where to live, whom to marry. Most of them have thought a lot about their career plans. But my impression is that many have not thought a lot about how marriage will fit into their lives.
The common operating assumption seems to be that professional life is at the core of life and that marriage would be something nice to add on top sometime down the road. According to an analysis of recent survey data by the University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, 75 percent of adults ages 18 to 40 said that making a good living was crucial to fulfillment in life while only 32 percent thought that marriage was crucial to fulfillment. In a Pew Research Center survey, 88 percent of parents said it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to be financially independent, while only 21 percent said it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to marry.
It’s not that I meet many people who are against marriage. Today, as in the past, a vast majority of Americans would like to tie the knot someday. It’s just that it’s not exactly top of mind.
Fewer people believe that marriage is vitally important. In 2006, 50 percent of young adults said it was very important for a couple to marry if they intended to spend the rest of their lives together. But by 2020 only 29 percent of young adults said that.
Many people have shifted the way they conceive of marriage. To use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s language, they no longer view it as the “cornerstone” of their life; they view it as the “capstone” — something to enter into after they’ve successfully established themselves as adults.
Partly as a result of these attitudes, there is less marriage in America today. The marriage rate is close to the lowest level in American history. For example, in 1980, only 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married. As of 2021, 25 percent of 40-year-olds have never been married.
As I confront young adults who think this way, I am seized by an unfortunate urge to sermonize. I want to put a hand on their shoulder and say: Look, there are many reasons you may not find marital happiness in your life. Maybe you won’t be able to find a financially stable partner, or one who wants to commit. Maybe you’ll marry a great person but find yourselves drifting apart. But don’t let it be because you didn’t prioritize marriage. Don’t let it be because you didn’t think hard about marriage when you were young.
My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy. Please use your youthful years as a chance to have romantic relationships, so you’ll have some practice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to marry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the masters.
This is not just softhearted sentimentality I’m offering. There are mountains of evidence to show that intimate relationships, not career, are at the core of life, and those intimate relationships will have a downstream effect on everything else you do.
Last month, for example, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was “the most important differentiator” between happy and unhappy people. Married people are 30 points happier than the unmarried. Income contributes to happiness, too, but not as much.
As Wilcox writes in his vitally important forthcoming book, “Get Married”: “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America. Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared to peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.”
“When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.”
Economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell studied two groups of adults over time, some who married and some who didn’t. They found that marriage caused higher levels of life satisfaction, especially in middle age, when adults’ average level of satisfaction tends to be at its lowest. It wasn’t only the traits people brought into the marriage; marriage itself had positive effects.
We could do a lot to raise the marriage rate by increasing wages — financial precarity inhibits marriage. But as a culture, we could improve our national happiness levels by making sure people focus most on what is primary — marriage and intimate relationships — and not on what is important but secondary — their career.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/opin ... areer.html
The common operating assumption seems to be that professional life is at the core of life and that marriage would be something nice to add on top sometime down the road. According to an analysis of recent survey data by the University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, 75 percent of adults ages 18 to 40 said that making a good living was crucial to fulfillment in life while only 32 percent thought that marriage was crucial to fulfillment. In a Pew Research Center survey, 88 percent of parents said it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to be financially independent, while only 21 percent said it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to marry.
It’s not that I meet many people who are against marriage. Today, as in the past, a vast majority of Americans would like to tie the knot someday. It’s just that it’s not exactly top of mind.
Fewer people believe that marriage is vitally important. In 2006, 50 percent of young adults said it was very important for a couple to marry if they intended to spend the rest of their lives together. But by 2020 only 29 percent of young adults said that.
Many people have shifted the way they conceive of marriage. To use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s language, they no longer view it as the “cornerstone” of their life; they view it as the “capstone” — something to enter into after they’ve successfully established themselves as adults.
Partly as a result of these attitudes, there is less marriage in America today. The marriage rate is close to the lowest level in American history. For example, in 1980, only 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married. As of 2021, 25 percent of 40-year-olds have never been married.
As I confront young adults who think this way, I am seized by an unfortunate urge to sermonize. I want to put a hand on their shoulder and say: Look, there are many reasons you may not find marital happiness in your life. Maybe you won’t be able to find a financially stable partner, or one who wants to commit. Maybe you’ll marry a great person but find yourselves drifting apart. But don’t let it be because you didn’t prioritize marriage. Don’t let it be because you didn’t think hard about marriage when you were young.
My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy. Please use your youthful years as a chance to have romantic relationships, so you’ll have some practice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to marry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the masters.
This is not just softhearted sentimentality I’m offering. There are mountains of evidence to show that intimate relationships, not career, are at the core of life, and those intimate relationships will have a downstream effect on everything else you do.
Last month, for example, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was “the most important differentiator” between happy and unhappy people. Married people are 30 points happier than the unmarried. Income contributes to happiness, too, but not as much.
As Wilcox writes in his vitally important forthcoming book, “Get Married”: “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America. Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared to peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.”
“When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.”
Economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell studied two groups of adults over time, some who married and some who didn’t. They found that marriage caused higher levels of life satisfaction, especially in middle age, when adults’ average level of satisfaction tends to be at its lowest. It wasn’t only the traits people brought into the marriage; marriage itself had positive effects.
We could do a lot to raise the marriage rate by increasing wages — financial precarity inhibits marriage. But as a culture, we could improve our national happiness levels by making sure people focus most on what is primary — marriage and intimate relationships — and not on what is important but secondary — their career.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/opin ... areer.html
Everyone’s Breaking Up, but Nobody’s Bitter: What’s Going On?
In one divorce announcement after another, high-profile couples are abiding by the golden rule of the schoolyard: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Billy Porter and Adam Smith, another casualty of the year of the celebrity split.Credit...Leon Bennett/Getty Images
Throughout the year, many former pairs — including Ricky Martin and Jwan Yosef, Billy Porter and Adam Smith, Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth, and Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello — issued similar breakup statements that showcased their consideration for each other, reflected on many wonderful years together, and proclaimed that they would move forward with love and kindness.
Though the joint announcement has become more common, it can still read to many as insincere. In a society accustomed to acrimony, fans are eager to come up with theories about why a relationship ended and who was to blame. Divorces need a villain and a victim.
Melissa Lenon, a therapist and divorce coach in Santa Clara, Calif., said this style of “reactive uncoupling,” with couples going to court in hopes of getting their “pound worth of flesh,” was what the public had come to expect.
“We’re doing this using our frontal lobe,” she said, referring to a part of the brain that controls critical thinking and judgment, “instead of our amygdala,” a part that processes emotions.
There are times when the courtroom is the only option, but for people in the public eye, mediation or collaboration is helpful, according to Ms. Lenon. “You want control over the narrative, but also you want control over the result,” she said, “because that is what’s going to impact your life and also how you feel about the other person.”
Not everyone in the public eye chooses to release a statement. In 2022, the actress Busy Philipps revealed that she and Marc Silverstein, her husband of 14 years, were no longer together in an episode of her podcast that was released more than a year after they broke up. She said that she did not want to go along with the “conventional idea of what a person in the public eye is supposed to do when their relationship ends.”
“You make a statement, you’re committed to remaining friends, ‘please respect our privacy and our family’s privacy in this time,’” she said. “But the truth is like, who made that rule up, that that’s how you do it?”
The concept of an amicable divorce has perhaps never occupied more space in the cultural conversation than in 2014, when Ms. Paltrow and her then husband, the singer Chris Martin, announced that they were separating — and introduced the term “conscious uncoupling” to the wider lexicon.
In a blog post with that title on Ms. Paltrow’s website, Goop, the couple wrote that despite “working hard for well over a year” to make it work, they had concluded that “while we love each other very much, we will remain separate.”
Image
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin smiling at a table at a gala dinner.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, the ur-uncouplers.Credit...Colin Young-Wolff/Invision, via Associated Press
Ms. Paltrow and Mr. Martin went on to emphasize that they would always be a family and parents to their two children. (Their note has since been replaced on the Goop website with information about conscious uncoupling, a term coined in 2009 by the marriage and family therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas.)
At the time, reporters tapped counselors and relationship experts to explain what conscious uncoupling meant. (The New York Times called it a “new, ungainly phrase.”) And the online backlash was swift: Critics mocked the stars for their upbeat announcement, which many interpreted as holier-than-thou. One advice blogger, Tracy Schorn, said in a particularly caustic post that she was thrilled the term was being received with “the snark and derision it so rightly deserves.”
“On the other hand,” she added, “the notion that divorce should be free of baser emotions like grief and anger is still a solid part of our culture.”
Writing in British Vogue in the wake of the separation, Ms. Paltrow recalled how quickly the public’s surprise at the news transformed into ridicule: “A strange combination of mockery and anger that I had never seen.”
Now, nearly a decade after the announcement, the Paltrow-Martin model is exactly what many couples navigating a breakup strive for. “Instead of people approaching me with ‘Why did you say that?’” Ms. Paltrow wrote at the time, “they now approach me with ‘How do you do that?’”
What does a marriage mean if a person is happy about the divorce? For her part, Ms. Lenon doesn’t believe that a reduction in divorce stigma and a positive approach to uncoupling will necessarily lead to a lack of commitment to marriage.
“Is the coming forward with a way to divorce, or saying we’ve kept this amicable and we’re taking care of ourselves and the family as we restructure — is that going to change the numbers of people divorcing?” she said. “I think it will stay about the same until we figure out more of the underlying factors of how to make relationships work long-term.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/styl ... 778d3e6de3
Billy Porter and Adam Smith, another casualty of the year of the celebrity split.Credit...Leon Bennett/Getty Images
Throughout the year, many former pairs — including Ricky Martin and Jwan Yosef, Billy Porter and Adam Smith, Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth, and Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello — issued similar breakup statements that showcased their consideration for each other, reflected on many wonderful years together, and proclaimed that they would move forward with love and kindness.
Though the joint announcement has become more common, it can still read to many as insincere. In a society accustomed to acrimony, fans are eager to come up with theories about why a relationship ended and who was to blame. Divorces need a villain and a victim.
Melissa Lenon, a therapist and divorce coach in Santa Clara, Calif., said this style of “reactive uncoupling,” with couples going to court in hopes of getting their “pound worth of flesh,” was what the public had come to expect.
“We’re doing this using our frontal lobe,” she said, referring to a part of the brain that controls critical thinking and judgment, “instead of our amygdala,” a part that processes emotions.
There are times when the courtroom is the only option, but for people in the public eye, mediation or collaboration is helpful, according to Ms. Lenon. “You want control over the narrative, but also you want control over the result,” she said, “because that is what’s going to impact your life and also how you feel about the other person.”
Not everyone in the public eye chooses to release a statement. In 2022, the actress Busy Philipps revealed that she and Marc Silverstein, her husband of 14 years, were no longer together in an episode of her podcast that was released more than a year after they broke up. She said that she did not want to go along with the “conventional idea of what a person in the public eye is supposed to do when their relationship ends.”
“You make a statement, you’re committed to remaining friends, ‘please respect our privacy and our family’s privacy in this time,’” she said. “But the truth is like, who made that rule up, that that’s how you do it?”
The concept of an amicable divorce has perhaps never occupied more space in the cultural conversation than in 2014, when Ms. Paltrow and her then husband, the singer Chris Martin, announced that they were separating — and introduced the term “conscious uncoupling” to the wider lexicon.
In a blog post with that title on Ms. Paltrow’s website, Goop, the couple wrote that despite “working hard for well over a year” to make it work, they had concluded that “while we love each other very much, we will remain separate.”
Image
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin smiling at a table at a gala dinner.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, the ur-uncouplers.Credit...Colin Young-Wolff/Invision, via Associated Press
Ms. Paltrow and Mr. Martin went on to emphasize that they would always be a family and parents to their two children. (Their note has since been replaced on the Goop website with information about conscious uncoupling, a term coined in 2009 by the marriage and family therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas.)
At the time, reporters tapped counselors and relationship experts to explain what conscious uncoupling meant. (The New York Times called it a “new, ungainly phrase.”) And the online backlash was swift: Critics mocked the stars for their upbeat announcement, which many interpreted as holier-than-thou. One advice blogger, Tracy Schorn, said in a particularly caustic post that she was thrilled the term was being received with “the snark and derision it so rightly deserves.”
“On the other hand,” she added, “the notion that divorce should be free of baser emotions like grief and anger is still a solid part of our culture.”
Writing in British Vogue in the wake of the separation, Ms. Paltrow recalled how quickly the public’s surprise at the news transformed into ridicule: “A strange combination of mockery and anger that I had never seen.”
Now, nearly a decade after the announcement, the Paltrow-Martin model is exactly what many couples navigating a breakup strive for. “Instead of people approaching me with ‘Why did you say that?’” Ms. Paltrow wrote at the time, “they now approach me with ‘How do you do that?’”
What does a marriage mean if a person is happy about the divorce? For her part, Ms. Lenon doesn’t believe that a reduction in divorce stigma and a positive approach to uncoupling will necessarily lead to a lack of commitment to marriage.
“Is the coming forward with a way to divorce, or saying we’ve kept this amicable and we’re taking care of ourselves and the family as we restructure — is that going to change the numbers of people divorcing?” she said. “I think it will stay about the same until we figure out more of the underlying factors of how to make relationships work long-term.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/styl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Marriages
Attention Canadian citizens and permanent residents – beware of marriage fraud!
It’s a crime for you and a foreign applicant to set up what’s known as a “marriage of convenience” to allow your sponsored spouse or common-law partner to immigrate to Canada.
Immigration officers know how to detect false marriages, and there are serious criminal charges such as we may:
• take legal action against you, including a fine of up to 100,000, imprisonment for up to 5 years or both
• won't allow your sponsored spouse or common-law partner to enter Canada for five years
• deport your sponsored spouse or common-law partner from Canada
Don’t let a marriage of convenience inconvenience you. No matter the reason, it's not worth the risk.
Avoid scams and learn the rules for sponsoring a spouse : https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-re ... fraud.html
It’s a crime for you and a foreign applicant to set up what’s known as a “marriage of convenience” to allow your sponsored spouse or common-law partner to immigrate to Canada.
Immigration officers know how to detect false marriages, and there are serious criminal charges such as we may:
• take legal action against you, including a fine of up to 100,000, imprisonment for up to 5 years or both
• won't allow your sponsored spouse or common-law partner to enter Canada for five years
• deport your sponsored spouse or common-law partner from Canada
Don’t let a marriage of convenience inconvenience you. No matter the reason, it's not worth the risk.
Avoid scams and learn the rules for sponsoring a spouse : https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-re ... fraud.html
Tanzanian President, Samia Suhulu encourages men to marry many wives
Tanzanian President, President Samia Suluhu Hassan has openly declared her support for polygamy and encouraged men to marry more wives and father multiple children.
In a Update that has since gone viral, President Samia Suluhu Hassan addressed an audience at an event in Mwanza, Tanzania, where she discussed the topic of marriage and harvesting. During her speech, she claimed that in Tanzania, it is common for men to marry multiple wives after a successful harvest.
President Hassan expressed her support for men who choose to have multiple wives and emphasized that there is nothing wrong with such arrangements, including the bearing of children. She further advised women not to feel jealous if their husbands decide to take on additional wives.
As the first female president in East Africa, President Samia Suluhu Hassan concluded her speech by encouraging men to engage in farming and work hard to provide for their families and children.
The president’s remarks have sparked conversations and debates on social media and within the community regarding cultural practices, gender roles, and the dynamics of marriage in Tanzania.
Editor:[email protected]
https://ugandaupdatenews.com/tanzanian- ... any-wives/
Re: Marriages
How Mariachi, a Mexican Wedding Standard, Is Evolving for a New Age
Mariachi, a soundtrack for celebration in Mexico, offers a way for couples to honor their heritage at their weddings.
Kristina Trejo and Anthony Salguero incorporated a mariachi band performance into their wedding on June 23, 2023. “The mariachi was a way for me to honor, deep down, who I am,” said Ms. Trejo, who is a first-generation Mexican American. Credit...Max Junio
Weddings are steeped in tradition, but where did those traditions come from? And how do those customs differ in other cultures? In our new column, “Traditions,” we aim to explore the origins of various wedding customs from the United States and around the world.
Early on in the planning process, Kristina Trejo was steadfast about the type of entertainment she wanted at her wedding. As a first-generation Mexican American from Culver City, Calif., she thought certain details should pay tribute to her cultural heritage, including — and perhaps especially — the music.
“The mariachi was a way for me to honor, deep down, who I am,” said Ms. Trejo, 29, an event planner and the founder of Viva Planning and Event Design. “I’m very proud of where my parents come from.”
When she told her parents she intended to hire a mariachi, a traditional Mexican band, for her wedding at South Coast Winery Resort and Spa in Temecula, Calif., on June 23, 2023, to Anthony Salguero, 28, a project manager at the construction management firm Bernards, they both had “very emotional” reactions.
“My mom didn’t get to have the typical white-dress wedding, so for her to be able to experience it through her firstborn, that was very special to her,” Ms. Trejo said. “My dad actually wanted that to be his gift, so my dad gifted us the mariachi for the day.”
Leslie Tate wasn’t even sure that she wanted a wedding to begin with. She and Sean Tate, then her fiancé, considered eloping and keeping their nuptials casual. But when they decided to plan a party after all, mariachi was the one requirement for the bride so she could incorporate her Mexican culture into the festivities.
“I know I had the band booked before I even had my dress,” said Ms. Tate, 26, a designer based in Marietta, Ga. “I wanted to somehow pay homage to my background and heritage.”
Image
Leslie Tate and Sean Tate, who planned a last-minute wedding celebration on Oct. 1, 2022, included a mariachi band in their celebration. Credit...via Leslie Tate
As loved ones took the lead on planning the last-minute ceremony and reception, Ms. Tate’s only requests were “a mariachi band and vanilla cake.” She married Mr. Tate, 30, the owner of a vintage shop, Collected Atlanta, in Marietta, on Oct. 1, 2022, at Events On Main in Canton, Ga.
“I was more excited about that mariachi band and having that representation because my husband is African American and our families are coming together,” Ms. Tate said. “I feel like that’s what made the wedding. Without the band, I don’t know if it would’ve been the same.”
The Rhythm of a Culture
Mariachi, as a word, has multiple meanings. The term can stand for the specific genre of music, for the ensemble playing it or for an individual group member.
A mariachi musician “plays in a mariachi band playing mariachi music,” said Estevan Azcona, 51, an assistant professor at the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona who has taught ethnomusicology and Chicano and Latino music, history and culture for more than 20 years.
In a mariachi, musicians play various string instruments — guitar, guitarrón, violin and, on occasion, harp — along with trumpets and, depending on the size of the ensemble, drums. Typically, there are one or two lead vocalists. The energized rhythms combine to produce an intense, infectious and distinct sound.
“Singing is part and parcel of what we have congealed in our imagination as traditional mariachi; this, of course, alongside the stylized charro, charra or charrx attire the musicians typically wear,” said Laura G. Gutiérrez, 55, an associate professor of Latinx studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “A talented mariachi can make any song in the tradition of mariachi. Because of this openness, I think everyone feels invited into the celebration, and we all feel welcomed.”
The music’s origins can be traced to central Mexico, largely around Jalisco. The folk music that developed in the region hybridized Indigenous, African and Spanish rhythms.
Mariachi culture also has roots in Nayarit, Colima and parts of Michoacán, Mr. Azcona said.
“It is one of numerous regional traditions that emerged during the colonial era into those early decades of independence,” he said. “It was music of the people, of the community.”
Over time, mariachi became synonymous with celebration, a soundtrack for festivities including baptisms, birthdays, graduations and weddings. And what was once primarily a word-of-mouth enterprise is now finding fresh avenues for business, thanks to a new generation of musicians turning to social media.
To date, Mariachi Reyes, a father-son-daughter trio based in Queens, has garnered more than 10 million likes and nearly 165,000 followers on TikTok. The group receives regular direct messages inquiring about its mariachi services.
Albert Reyes, 25, remembers having a conversation with his younger sister, Jazmin Reyes, 17, about how they might continue the family business. Their father, Santiago Reyes, 49, has been a mariachi since he was 13. Now, the three perform as a group full time.
“I knew that there had to be faces to the mariachi,” Mr. Albert Reyes said. “You need to be known a little bit more. A lot of the comments, if they talk about one of us, it’s like ‘the father’ or ‘the daughter’ or ‘the son’ — they know us as a family.”
A New Take on Tradition
Ms. Trejo’s vendor search led her to Mariachi Tierra Mia, a mixed-gender mariachi based in Los Angeles.
“Mariachi is incredibly traditional, but I wanted a little twist: a mariachi group that had a female lead, because it’s typically very male dominated,” Ms. Trejo said. “Another really important thing was to find a group that could feel comfortable doing things that were untraditional for mariachi.”
Maira Solis, 30, is a violinist and the director of Mariachi Tierra Mia. Since its establishment in 2017, Solis estimated, the group has performed at more than 200 weddings.
For the wedding of Ms. Trejo and Mr. Salguero, Ms. Solis worked closely with the couple to customize their music selection. They chose a few contemporary songs, such as Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” which the mariachi played after the couple exchanged vows and kissed.
“We typically find a popular piece of the song and loop it,” Ms. Solis said. “Once the ceremony was done: ‘I want to dance with somebody, I want to dance with somebody.’ We kept doing that as they kept walking out, and we would alternate that with a trumpet solo because they wanted to keep the high energy.”
Image
Angela Lopez surprised her husband, Daniel Garnica, by performing with the mariachi band during their wedding celebration on Oct. 28, 2022, in Aguascalientes, Mexico.Credit...Eva Waltz
Angela Lopez, 28, collaborated with the mariachi at her wedding on Oct. 28, 2022, in Aguascalientes, Mexico, using a slightly different approach. She chose to take part in the performance herself.
“It was a surprise,” Ms. Lopez, a photographer and content creator, said. “I love mariachi music. Our family’s very musical, so it was really, really important for me to sing to my husband with the mariachi.”
The bride serenaded her husband, Daniel Garnica, 28, with two classic Mexican love songs: “Hermoso Cariño,” by Vicente Fernandez, and Christian Nogales’ rendition of “Si Nos Dejan,” by Luis Miguel.
“The feeling of when you hear mariachi — the music, the instruments — it softens the people’s hearts and it brings some sort of comfort,” Ms. Lopez said. “It makes you feel like you’re in a movie.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/fash ... 778d3e6de3
Mariachi, a soundtrack for celebration in Mexico, offers a way for couples to honor their heritage at their weddings.
Kristina Trejo and Anthony Salguero incorporated a mariachi band performance into their wedding on June 23, 2023. “The mariachi was a way for me to honor, deep down, who I am,” said Ms. Trejo, who is a first-generation Mexican American. Credit...Max Junio
Weddings are steeped in tradition, but where did those traditions come from? And how do those customs differ in other cultures? In our new column, “Traditions,” we aim to explore the origins of various wedding customs from the United States and around the world.
Early on in the planning process, Kristina Trejo was steadfast about the type of entertainment she wanted at her wedding. As a first-generation Mexican American from Culver City, Calif., she thought certain details should pay tribute to her cultural heritage, including — and perhaps especially — the music.
“The mariachi was a way for me to honor, deep down, who I am,” said Ms. Trejo, 29, an event planner and the founder of Viva Planning and Event Design. “I’m very proud of where my parents come from.”
When she told her parents she intended to hire a mariachi, a traditional Mexican band, for her wedding at South Coast Winery Resort and Spa in Temecula, Calif., on June 23, 2023, to Anthony Salguero, 28, a project manager at the construction management firm Bernards, they both had “very emotional” reactions.
“My mom didn’t get to have the typical white-dress wedding, so for her to be able to experience it through her firstborn, that was very special to her,” Ms. Trejo said. “My dad actually wanted that to be his gift, so my dad gifted us the mariachi for the day.”
Leslie Tate wasn’t even sure that she wanted a wedding to begin with. She and Sean Tate, then her fiancé, considered eloping and keeping their nuptials casual. But when they decided to plan a party after all, mariachi was the one requirement for the bride so she could incorporate her Mexican culture into the festivities.
“I know I had the band booked before I even had my dress,” said Ms. Tate, 26, a designer based in Marietta, Ga. “I wanted to somehow pay homage to my background and heritage.”
Image
Leslie Tate and Sean Tate, who planned a last-minute wedding celebration on Oct. 1, 2022, included a mariachi band in their celebration. Credit...via Leslie Tate
As loved ones took the lead on planning the last-minute ceremony and reception, Ms. Tate’s only requests were “a mariachi band and vanilla cake.” She married Mr. Tate, 30, the owner of a vintage shop, Collected Atlanta, in Marietta, on Oct. 1, 2022, at Events On Main in Canton, Ga.
“I was more excited about that mariachi band and having that representation because my husband is African American and our families are coming together,” Ms. Tate said. “I feel like that’s what made the wedding. Without the band, I don’t know if it would’ve been the same.”
The Rhythm of a Culture
Mariachi, as a word, has multiple meanings. The term can stand for the specific genre of music, for the ensemble playing it or for an individual group member.
A mariachi musician “plays in a mariachi band playing mariachi music,” said Estevan Azcona, 51, an assistant professor at the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona who has taught ethnomusicology and Chicano and Latino music, history and culture for more than 20 years.
In a mariachi, musicians play various string instruments — guitar, guitarrón, violin and, on occasion, harp — along with trumpets and, depending on the size of the ensemble, drums. Typically, there are one or two lead vocalists. The energized rhythms combine to produce an intense, infectious and distinct sound.
“Singing is part and parcel of what we have congealed in our imagination as traditional mariachi; this, of course, alongside the stylized charro, charra or charrx attire the musicians typically wear,” said Laura G. Gutiérrez, 55, an associate professor of Latinx studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “A talented mariachi can make any song in the tradition of mariachi. Because of this openness, I think everyone feels invited into the celebration, and we all feel welcomed.”
The music’s origins can be traced to central Mexico, largely around Jalisco. The folk music that developed in the region hybridized Indigenous, African and Spanish rhythms.
Mariachi culture also has roots in Nayarit, Colima and parts of Michoacán, Mr. Azcona said.
“It is one of numerous regional traditions that emerged during the colonial era into those early decades of independence,” he said. “It was music of the people, of the community.”
Over time, mariachi became synonymous with celebration, a soundtrack for festivities including baptisms, birthdays, graduations and weddings. And what was once primarily a word-of-mouth enterprise is now finding fresh avenues for business, thanks to a new generation of musicians turning to social media.
To date, Mariachi Reyes, a father-son-daughter trio based in Queens, has garnered more than 10 million likes and nearly 165,000 followers on TikTok. The group receives regular direct messages inquiring about its mariachi services.
Albert Reyes, 25, remembers having a conversation with his younger sister, Jazmin Reyes, 17, about how they might continue the family business. Their father, Santiago Reyes, 49, has been a mariachi since he was 13. Now, the three perform as a group full time.
“I knew that there had to be faces to the mariachi,” Mr. Albert Reyes said. “You need to be known a little bit more. A lot of the comments, if they talk about one of us, it’s like ‘the father’ or ‘the daughter’ or ‘the son’ — they know us as a family.”
A New Take on Tradition
Ms. Trejo’s vendor search led her to Mariachi Tierra Mia, a mixed-gender mariachi based in Los Angeles.
“Mariachi is incredibly traditional, but I wanted a little twist: a mariachi group that had a female lead, because it’s typically very male dominated,” Ms. Trejo said. “Another really important thing was to find a group that could feel comfortable doing things that were untraditional for mariachi.”
Maira Solis, 30, is a violinist and the director of Mariachi Tierra Mia. Since its establishment in 2017, Solis estimated, the group has performed at more than 200 weddings.
For the wedding of Ms. Trejo and Mr. Salguero, Ms. Solis worked closely with the couple to customize their music selection. They chose a few contemporary songs, such as Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” which the mariachi played after the couple exchanged vows and kissed.
“We typically find a popular piece of the song and loop it,” Ms. Solis said. “Once the ceremony was done: ‘I want to dance with somebody, I want to dance with somebody.’ We kept doing that as they kept walking out, and we would alternate that with a trumpet solo because they wanted to keep the high energy.”
Image
Angela Lopez surprised her husband, Daniel Garnica, by performing with the mariachi band during their wedding celebration on Oct. 28, 2022, in Aguascalientes, Mexico.Credit...Eva Waltz
Angela Lopez, 28, collaborated with the mariachi at her wedding on Oct. 28, 2022, in Aguascalientes, Mexico, using a slightly different approach. She chose to take part in the performance herself.
“It was a surprise,” Ms. Lopez, a photographer and content creator, said. “I love mariachi music. Our family’s very musical, so it was really, really important for me to sing to my husband with the mariachi.”
The bride serenaded her husband, Daniel Garnica, 28, with two classic Mexican love songs: “Hermoso Cariño,” by Vicente Fernandez, and Christian Nogales’ rendition of “Si Nos Dejan,” by Luis Miguel.
“The feeling of when you hear mariachi — the music, the instruments — it softens the people’s hearts and it brings some sort of comfort,” Ms. Lopez said. “It makes you feel like you’re in a movie.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/fash ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Marriages
THE MODERN LOVE ISSUE
Can a Sexless Marriage Be a Happy One?
Experts and couples are challenging the conventional wisdom that sex is essential to relationships.
By Amanda Montei
Published April 17, 2024
Updated April 18, 2024, 3:11 p.m. ET
Will and Rose met online 10 years ago. His screen name was professorparsley, and he looked the part — tall and thin, with glasses, features that Rose found attractive. On their first date, Rose learned that Will was a college student living with his mother, and his handle came from a nickname given to him by a child at an art camp where he worked. They laugh about it now, as they do with most things. Will thought Rose was exciting and direct. He grew up in suburban Ontario, and she was from Southern California, which was like another world to him. Right away, what they loved about each other were their differences.
Listen to this article, read by Julia Whelan
Rose was drawn to how stable Will seemed — so unlike the other men she had dated, who dreaded commitment. Their relationship survived multiple moves, about a year of long-distance dating and the challenges of finding time to be together while living with parents and roommates. Now, seven years into their marriage, they have their own place: a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, where Rose sees Pilates clients. Will is gone during the day, teaching, and at night they cuddle in bed and watch television. “It’s my favorite part of the day,” Rose says. (Rose and Will are middle names. All subjects asked to be referred to by their first names, middle names or a nickname, out of concerns for their privacy.)
As much as Will grounds her, Rose feels that the familiar calm of their relationship also shuts her down sexually. They go months without sex, but they don’t lack intimacy. They have a policy of never refusing a hug, something they instituted to resolve the minor disagreements that inevitably crop up in any relationship. They have also talked candidly about how, for her, the safe predictability of their marriage — the quality she loves about their lives together — dulls her sex drive. She knows that can be confusing, even frustrating, for Will, but she doesn’t like the idea of forcing herself to have sex. Rose’s mother, now divorced, felt obligated to have sex with Rose’s father once a week. That’s not the kind of relationship Rose wants.
To get into a sexual mood, Rose relies on a set of rituals to help build anticipation — doing her hair and makeup, shaving her legs, having a glass of wine over dinner or, when their schedules allow, going on vacation to break out of their routines. Will doesn’t need to do anything to feel ready for sex, and Rose sees this as another way in which they’re different. Over the years, they have accepted that this is what their sex life looks like, and will look like, if they want to be together, which they do.
During the pandemic, the couple went more than a year without having sex, but they savored their extra time together. Rose used to spend hours driving in traffic to different workout studios, coming home late, not seeing her husband much. Stuck at home, they took walks around their neighborhood. They talked constantly. They started taking online yoga classes together, a hobby that stuck. Will appreciates these smaller opportunities to connect. Rose thinks she’s not the nurturing type, but Will disagrees. “She’s not stingy in spirit or time,” he says.
Sometimes they shower together and hold each other naked, without any expectation of sex. Though Will remains hopeful that these moments will lead to something else, he doesn’t push it.
Cultural attitudes about the role sex plays in a marriage have evolved significantly over time. Where once marital sex was primarily a means for bearing children, in recent decades, the conventional wisdom was that frequent sex was integral to a happy union. During the 1990s, a new wave of sex positivity coincided with the ascendancy of different forms of therapy, including couples counseling. Experts coached couples on how to strengthen their marriages, often relying on the belief that healthy relationships included consistent sex with partners. By the 2010s, appointment sex had become one popular method for maintaining intimacy and, somewhat implicitly, safeguarding against separation.
In more recent years, however, both relationship experts and couples themselves have been gradually dismantling some of these commonly held views, working to destigmatize the unconventional approaches that some take to stay together. Online groups have sprung up for couples who challenge basic assumptions that spouses should share a bedroom or even a home. Sharon Hyman, who runs a Facebook group called Apartners for couples who have chosen to live separately, told me that many of the members in her community find their sex lives improve when they don’t spend every minute together. “My goal is to show that there are healthy options for relationships,” Hyman says. “No one size fits all.”
One effect of the ever-changing sexual climate is that many couples today are simply less willing to tolerate what the psychotherapist Esther Perel calls “boredom” in the bedroom. Perel has made a career of articulating how domestic overexposure saps eroticism, which requires some intrigue, mystery and unfamiliarity. That’s not to suggest that long-term love and desire are impossible, but according to Perel, keeping sexual interest alive requires getting creative. In her podcast, “Where Should We Begin?” Perel helps couples explore and articulate their fantasies, honor each other as individuals and experiment with new approaches to fulfilling their desires together.
For Perel, as for many other relationship experts, that sometimes means re-examining investment in another foundational premise of marriage: monogamy. The advice columnist Dan Savage, too, has argued that monogamy isn’t entirely plausible, or pleasurable, for everyone, and is critical of Americans’ obsession with moralizing infidelity. He encourages married people to be honest with each other about how hard it is to carry the responsibility of fulfilling their partner’s sexual and emotional needs for decades on end.
While some are questioning the standard of monogamous sex in marriage by exploring polyamorous and open relationships, others are pushing back against the pressure to have sex at all. In fact, Americans on the whole are having less sex than they used to — across race, gender, region, educational level and work status. One study found that American adults born in the 1990s are having less sex than older generations; they are in fewer steady partnerships, and those who are partnered are also having less sex. The 2021 General Social Survey found that about 50 percent of all adults polled had sex once a month or less, with half of those people reporting they hadn’t had sex for a year. Researchers have speculated about the reasons for this 30-year sexual low, from isolation caused by technology to cultural conversations about consent.
Many younger women, for instance, shaped in part by the #MeToo movement, are engaging in intentional abstinence. There are trends on TikTok about going “boysober,” a word coined by the comedian Hope Woodard, who says that taking a break from sex can be empowering for women who previously altered their desires to accommodate men. The digital feminist 4B movement, which originated in South Korea but has spread globally through social media, advocates a rejection of childbearing, as well as heterosexual dating, marriage and sex. “Platonic life partners,” meanwhile — friends who commit to owning a home and even raising children together — insist that sex and romance are not necessary to lifelong unions.
The sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski is resistant to the idea that frequent sex should be a chief component of every committed relationship. Nagoski — who has been open about her own hiatus from marital sex — doesn’t endorse obligatory sex, nor does she encourage aiming for any sexual base line in terms of regularity or behavior. Drawing on the work of the Canadian sexologist Peggy Kleinplatz, Nagoski believes that low desire can sometimes be evidence of good judgment. “It’s not dysfunctional not to want sex you don’t like,” Nagoski says.
In her new book, “Come Together,” Nagoski urges couples who want to explore their sexualities and deepen their sexual bond to begin by figuring out what each person wants when they want sex. For many, sex represents freedom from the ordinary, but what it takes to get there will look different for every couple and is likely to change over time. After all, desires don’t always align, or they evolve in unexpected ways.
Michelle and John met in 2005 at a party, and in the early years of their relationship, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Four years ago, however, after experiencing what she calls a “traumatic” childbirth, Michelle began to worry that intercourse would cause her pain.
She and John did not have sex for a year after they became parents. Now they can go months without it. Friends of theirs, too, seem to be experiencing new chapters in their own sex lives and opening up their marriages, which has sparked conversations between Michelle and John about the possibilities for reinvigorating their sex life. But they don’t always agree on what they want, or what they’re comfortable with.
John knows, however, that having sex outside the marriage is a red line for Michelle. She witnessed infidelity tear apart her parents’ relationship. “I think there’s a big fear about ‘I have an urge that may be resolved in a minute or two,’ but the sense of what could be broken is not worth the risk,” John says.
Love, for both, is about much more than fulfilling those momentary desires. After almost two decades together, they consider themselves best friends and “soul mates.” When they first began dating, Michelle was reeling from the loss of her brother, who died in a car accident. She talked with John about the experience on an early date, and they were inseparable after that. John thought she was beautiful and wanted to spend as much time with her as he could. Michelle thought he was a welcome distraction, someone who could lift her out of her grief. They went to concerts. He made her mixtapes. But there were also times when she broke down crying, and he was there for her.
John used to try to comfort Michelle by saying he understood how she felt, but when he lost his own brother in 2012, he realized how wrong he had been. As he mourned, Michelle “just knew what to do in the unspoken moments — whether it was knowing when to give me space, or knowing when I needed a hug, or I just needed her to be next to me,” John says. Today, Michelle remains the “central piece” of his happiness.
Michelle and John share a one-bedroom with their daughter, and while they get some privacy during the day, they’re busy working from home. Now, most days, Michelle masturbates in the morning, while John takes their daughter to preschool. He masturbates at night in the bathroom, while watching porn on his phone. For John, it’s merely a physical release, but for Michelle, pleasuring herself serves a different purpose: She is trying to figure out what makes her feel good. Exploring her changed body alone eliminates the guilt she has when she can’t climax with her husband. She doesn’t want him to think it has anything to do with him. “I want to get there, but it’s not getting there,” she says.
Of the more than 30 married people I interviewed, many, like Michelle, told me that becoming parents irrevocably changed their sex lives. Camille, who lives in California, felt her marriage was the most solid and caring relationship she had ever experienced, but becoming a mother distanced her from her desire. “It feels like something I can’t quite touch, like in another room, or another part of me that I don’t know how to access,” she says.
Other mothers started to see sex as one more chore, another line item on their list of responsibilities. Keti, a mother of a neurodivergent child who craved being held, found that sex with her husband had become “robotic” as she began to see it as “one more demand.” Her husband was doing everything he could to support her, but she felt an obligation to get back to their old sex life, even though she wanted “desperately to go into a forest and just lie down and not hear anyone or anything.”
Lilien, who has two kids, says becoming a mother was a turning point for her. She had to leave her previous career and didn’t know who she was or what she wanted. “My identity was totally eviscerated,” she says. “I was really confused about what my worth was.” Her history of sexual assault also resurfaced in profound ways. She thought she needed to be “permeable” to nurture her children. She didn’t have the capacity to extend that physical openness to her husband. She couldn’t stand soft caresses from him, which felt like the tickling of her child’s hands.
Lilien’s husband, Philip, never pressured her to be intimate, for which she is grateful. “The most important thing for me was to maintain a place where the sex you have is very positive, very consensual, very understood and mutually enjoyed,” he says. Five years later, Philip knows she is still coming to terms with everything motherhood has brought into her life. Recently they started having more sex, about once every other month. Lilien loves her husband’s firm back rubs, which he’s happy to give.
Other couples, much like Rose and Will, confessed to feeling sexually misaligned with their partners as their desires shifted in different directions. Jean, a 38-year-old mother living in Virginia, told me that her husband’s interest in sex has dropped off gradually over the course of their 13-year marriage. She, on the other hand, experienced what she called “a secondary puberty” as her kids grew older and became less dependent on her. She felt “so sexually charged” that she visited her gynecologist to confirm she wasn’t having a hormonal issue. She’s now trying to figure out how to navigate her husband’s low desire. “I feel like I’m living in the upside-down a lot of the time,” she says. “My friends complain about their husbands grabbing their butt while they wash dishes, and I think, Wow, I would love to feel wanted like that.”
Another mother, Emily, says that sex gradually became less important over the course of her 34-year marriage. When her kids were little, intimacy with her husband stalled briefly, but as their children grew older, they had a “revival of a good sex life,” Emily says. Now she is 59 and has had several operations resulting from a battle with cancer, including a hysterectomy and mastectomy. As a result, her desire lessened, and sex began to feel like “vacuuming the house” — something she did to make her husband happy. And he noticed. “If you are used to somebody responding to you in a certain way, you can tell when they are acting,” she says. “I wasn’t the same person.”
One night in bed, about 10 years after she went on a hormone treatment for her cancer that put her into early menopause, they had a frank conversation about their sex life. “We discussed my lack of desire, and he said that if I’m not turned on, then he’s not either,” Emily says. He admitted that his sex drive had dipped, too. So they decided not to force it. She feels there’s some cultural pressure for older people to keep up their sex lives into their 80s. She’s read, with skepticism, articles claiming that maintaining sex later in life is healthy. “Is it?” she said. “I don’t know.”
Emily feels their marriage has progressed naturally: They experienced decades of passion, and while they remain affectionate outside of the bedroom, their relationship now transcends sex in many ways. It’s about the life they’ve built together. “We’ve been in a sexless relationship for years now,” Emily says. “We get along great, but we’re more like best buds than lovers.”
Despite their insistence that sex isn’t essential in their marriages, most of the couples I spoke with still keep track of how often they have sex. They also appear haunted by how far they deviate from perceived norms. John, for instance, hopes he and his wife can work back up to having sex two or three times a week, but admits he has no idea where that figure came from.
Numbers, Nagoski believes, can be a counterproductive metric. It’s impossible to hear such statistics and not judge one’s relationship against them. Numbers also don’t account for whether participants are enjoying the sex they are having. “You’re comparing yourself — you’re judging yourself as OK or inadequate — compared to a whole bunch of people you’re not having sex with, who are not having sex with you,” Nagoski says.
For couples measuring themselves against what Nagoski calls the “fictions” of sex, or for those worried that their relationship is on the line whenever they enter the bedroom or don’t meet some monthly number, there may be too much pressure for sex to be enjoyable. It’s more important that couples establish what kind of sex is worth having.
‘There are people who tell you all the sex they’re having. I feel like it’s a lot more common that a lot of people are not.’
Rose admits to feeling the weight of societal expectations. Recently she decided that since she and Will were rarely having sex, she would have her birth-control implant removed from her arm. During the procedure, the nurse intimated there was something wrong with Rose’s marriage. Rose felt shamed and angry. The idea that she should be living in a constant state of arousal with her husband after a decade together is, to her, ridiculous, but also part of a facade she thinks many married couples maintain.
“There are people who tell you all the sex they’re having,” she says. “I feel like it’s a lot more common that a lot of people are not.” With the help of her therapist, Rose is exploring whether her A.D.H.D. may play a role in her need to seek new stimuli — not because she sees it as a problem but because she is interested in understanding her desire more fully. “Apparently the partner fatigue I experience is not so uncommon because our ‘special’ brains are always seeking out what’s new,” she says.
Will sometimes turns to Buddhist writings on restraint to explore his sexuality. He jokes there may be some confirmation bias at work, but he thinks his wife’s self-awareness — and her unwillingness to force herself into sex that she doesn’t want to have — has matured him. For Will, intimacy is less about completion and more about connection. “I’ve learned, even just about the act of sex itself, the ending is not always the best part,” Will says. “There’s pleasure throughout the spectrum.”
In March, for Rose’s 40th birthday, they took a trip to Hawaii. She switched off her phone for hours as they sprawled out by the ocean. Will remembers turning toward his wife and staring at her, watching her relaxing, her body loose. In that moment, he wasn’t thinking about sex or how beautiful Rose looked under the sun. He was thinking about how similar they actually are. More than anything, they want to enjoy themselves in their own way, to savor the small moments when they can let the rest of the world fade away.
Amanda Montei is the author of “Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control.” She is based in California.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/maga ... 778d3e6de3
Can a Sexless Marriage Be a Happy One?
Experts and couples are challenging the conventional wisdom that sex is essential to relationships.
By Amanda Montei
Published April 17, 2024
Updated April 18, 2024, 3:11 p.m. ET
Will and Rose met online 10 years ago. His screen name was professorparsley, and he looked the part — tall and thin, with glasses, features that Rose found attractive. On their first date, Rose learned that Will was a college student living with his mother, and his handle came from a nickname given to him by a child at an art camp where he worked. They laugh about it now, as they do with most things. Will thought Rose was exciting and direct. He grew up in suburban Ontario, and she was from Southern California, which was like another world to him. Right away, what they loved about each other were their differences.
Listen to this article, read by Julia Whelan
Rose was drawn to how stable Will seemed — so unlike the other men she had dated, who dreaded commitment. Their relationship survived multiple moves, about a year of long-distance dating and the challenges of finding time to be together while living with parents and roommates. Now, seven years into their marriage, they have their own place: a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, where Rose sees Pilates clients. Will is gone during the day, teaching, and at night they cuddle in bed and watch television. “It’s my favorite part of the day,” Rose says. (Rose and Will are middle names. All subjects asked to be referred to by their first names, middle names or a nickname, out of concerns for their privacy.)
As much as Will grounds her, Rose feels that the familiar calm of their relationship also shuts her down sexually. They go months without sex, but they don’t lack intimacy. They have a policy of never refusing a hug, something they instituted to resolve the minor disagreements that inevitably crop up in any relationship. They have also talked candidly about how, for her, the safe predictability of their marriage — the quality she loves about their lives together — dulls her sex drive. She knows that can be confusing, even frustrating, for Will, but she doesn’t like the idea of forcing herself to have sex. Rose’s mother, now divorced, felt obligated to have sex with Rose’s father once a week. That’s not the kind of relationship Rose wants.
To get into a sexual mood, Rose relies on a set of rituals to help build anticipation — doing her hair and makeup, shaving her legs, having a glass of wine over dinner or, when their schedules allow, going on vacation to break out of their routines. Will doesn’t need to do anything to feel ready for sex, and Rose sees this as another way in which they’re different. Over the years, they have accepted that this is what their sex life looks like, and will look like, if they want to be together, which they do.
During the pandemic, the couple went more than a year without having sex, but they savored their extra time together. Rose used to spend hours driving in traffic to different workout studios, coming home late, not seeing her husband much. Stuck at home, they took walks around their neighborhood. They talked constantly. They started taking online yoga classes together, a hobby that stuck. Will appreciates these smaller opportunities to connect. Rose thinks she’s not the nurturing type, but Will disagrees. “She’s not stingy in spirit or time,” he says.
Sometimes they shower together and hold each other naked, without any expectation of sex. Though Will remains hopeful that these moments will lead to something else, he doesn’t push it.
Cultural attitudes about the role sex plays in a marriage have evolved significantly over time. Where once marital sex was primarily a means for bearing children, in recent decades, the conventional wisdom was that frequent sex was integral to a happy union. During the 1990s, a new wave of sex positivity coincided with the ascendancy of different forms of therapy, including couples counseling. Experts coached couples on how to strengthen their marriages, often relying on the belief that healthy relationships included consistent sex with partners. By the 2010s, appointment sex had become one popular method for maintaining intimacy and, somewhat implicitly, safeguarding against separation.
In more recent years, however, both relationship experts and couples themselves have been gradually dismantling some of these commonly held views, working to destigmatize the unconventional approaches that some take to stay together. Online groups have sprung up for couples who challenge basic assumptions that spouses should share a bedroom or even a home. Sharon Hyman, who runs a Facebook group called Apartners for couples who have chosen to live separately, told me that many of the members in her community find their sex lives improve when they don’t spend every minute together. “My goal is to show that there are healthy options for relationships,” Hyman says. “No one size fits all.”
One effect of the ever-changing sexual climate is that many couples today are simply less willing to tolerate what the psychotherapist Esther Perel calls “boredom” in the bedroom. Perel has made a career of articulating how domestic overexposure saps eroticism, which requires some intrigue, mystery and unfamiliarity. That’s not to suggest that long-term love and desire are impossible, but according to Perel, keeping sexual interest alive requires getting creative. In her podcast, “Where Should We Begin?” Perel helps couples explore and articulate their fantasies, honor each other as individuals and experiment with new approaches to fulfilling their desires together.
For Perel, as for many other relationship experts, that sometimes means re-examining investment in another foundational premise of marriage: monogamy. The advice columnist Dan Savage, too, has argued that monogamy isn’t entirely plausible, or pleasurable, for everyone, and is critical of Americans’ obsession with moralizing infidelity. He encourages married people to be honest with each other about how hard it is to carry the responsibility of fulfilling their partner’s sexual and emotional needs for decades on end.
While some are questioning the standard of monogamous sex in marriage by exploring polyamorous and open relationships, others are pushing back against the pressure to have sex at all. In fact, Americans on the whole are having less sex than they used to — across race, gender, region, educational level and work status. One study found that American adults born in the 1990s are having less sex than older generations; they are in fewer steady partnerships, and those who are partnered are also having less sex. The 2021 General Social Survey found that about 50 percent of all adults polled had sex once a month or less, with half of those people reporting they hadn’t had sex for a year. Researchers have speculated about the reasons for this 30-year sexual low, from isolation caused by technology to cultural conversations about consent.
Many younger women, for instance, shaped in part by the #MeToo movement, are engaging in intentional abstinence. There are trends on TikTok about going “boysober,” a word coined by the comedian Hope Woodard, who says that taking a break from sex can be empowering for women who previously altered their desires to accommodate men. The digital feminist 4B movement, which originated in South Korea but has spread globally through social media, advocates a rejection of childbearing, as well as heterosexual dating, marriage and sex. “Platonic life partners,” meanwhile — friends who commit to owning a home and even raising children together — insist that sex and romance are not necessary to lifelong unions.
The sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski is resistant to the idea that frequent sex should be a chief component of every committed relationship. Nagoski — who has been open about her own hiatus from marital sex — doesn’t endorse obligatory sex, nor does she encourage aiming for any sexual base line in terms of regularity or behavior. Drawing on the work of the Canadian sexologist Peggy Kleinplatz, Nagoski believes that low desire can sometimes be evidence of good judgment. “It’s not dysfunctional not to want sex you don’t like,” Nagoski says.
In her new book, “Come Together,” Nagoski urges couples who want to explore their sexualities and deepen their sexual bond to begin by figuring out what each person wants when they want sex. For many, sex represents freedom from the ordinary, but what it takes to get there will look different for every couple and is likely to change over time. After all, desires don’t always align, or they evolve in unexpected ways.
Michelle and John met in 2005 at a party, and in the early years of their relationship, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Four years ago, however, after experiencing what she calls a “traumatic” childbirth, Michelle began to worry that intercourse would cause her pain.
She and John did not have sex for a year after they became parents. Now they can go months without it. Friends of theirs, too, seem to be experiencing new chapters in their own sex lives and opening up their marriages, which has sparked conversations between Michelle and John about the possibilities for reinvigorating their sex life. But they don’t always agree on what they want, or what they’re comfortable with.
John knows, however, that having sex outside the marriage is a red line for Michelle. She witnessed infidelity tear apart her parents’ relationship. “I think there’s a big fear about ‘I have an urge that may be resolved in a minute or two,’ but the sense of what could be broken is not worth the risk,” John says.
Love, for both, is about much more than fulfilling those momentary desires. After almost two decades together, they consider themselves best friends and “soul mates.” When they first began dating, Michelle was reeling from the loss of her brother, who died in a car accident. She talked with John about the experience on an early date, and they were inseparable after that. John thought she was beautiful and wanted to spend as much time with her as he could. Michelle thought he was a welcome distraction, someone who could lift her out of her grief. They went to concerts. He made her mixtapes. But there were also times when she broke down crying, and he was there for her.
John used to try to comfort Michelle by saying he understood how she felt, but when he lost his own brother in 2012, he realized how wrong he had been. As he mourned, Michelle “just knew what to do in the unspoken moments — whether it was knowing when to give me space, or knowing when I needed a hug, or I just needed her to be next to me,” John says. Today, Michelle remains the “central piece” of his happiness.
Michelle and John share a one-bedroom with their daughter, and while they get some privacy during the day, they’re busy working from home. Now, most days, Michelle masturbates in the morning, while John takes their daughter to preschool. He masturbates at night in the bathroom, while watching porn on his phone. For John, it’s merely a physical release, but for Michelle, pleasuring herself serves a different purpose: She is trying to figure out what makes her feel good. Exploring her changed body alone eliminates the guilt she has when she can’t climax with her husband. She doesn’t want him to think it has anything to do with him. “I want to get there, but it’s not getting there,” she says.
Of the more than 30 married people I interviewed, many, like Michelle, told me that becoming parents irrevocably changed their sex lives. Camille, who lives in California, felt her marriage was the most solid and caring relationship she had ever experienced, but becoming a mother distanced her from her desire. “It feels like something I can’t quite touch, like in another room, or another part of me that I don’t know how to access,” she says.
Other mothers started to see sex as one more chore, another line item on their list of responsibilities. Keti, a mother of a neurodivergent child who craved being held, found that sex with her husband had become “robotic” as she began to see it as “one more demand.” Her husband was doing everything he could to support her, but she felt an obligation to get back to their old sex life, even though she wanted “desperately to go into a forest and just lie down and not hear anyone or anything.”
Lilien, who has two kids, says becoming a mother was a turning point for her. She had to leave her previous career and didn’t know who she was or what she wanted. “My identity was totally eviscerated,” she says. “I was really confused about what my worth was.” Her history of sexual assault also resurfaced in profound ways. She thought she needed to be “permeable” to nurture her children. She didn’t have the capacity to extend that physical openness to her husband. She couldn’t stand soft caresses from him, which felt like the tickling of her child’s hands.
Lilien’s husband, Philip, never pressured her to be intimate, for which she is grateful. “The most important thing for me was to maintain a place where the sex you have is very positive, very consensual, very understood and mutually enjoyed,” he says. Five years later, Philip knows she is still coming to terms with everything motherhood has brought into her life. Recently they started having more sex, about once every other month. Lilien loves her husband’s firm back rubs, which he’s happy to give.
Other couples, much like Rose and Will, confessed to feeling sexually misaligned with their partners as their desires shifted in different directions. Jean, a 38-year-old mother living in Virginia, told me that her husband’s interest in sex has dropped off gradually over the course of their 13-year marriage. She, on the other hand, experienced what she called “a secondary puberty” as her kids grew older and became less dependent on her. She felt “so sexually charged” that she visited her gynecologist to confirm she wasn’t having a hormonal issue. She’s now trying to figure out how to navigate her husband’s low desire. “I feel like I’m living in the upside-down a lot of the time,” she says. “My friends complain about their husbands grabbing their butt while they wash dishes, and I think, Wow, I would love to feel wanted like that.”
Another mother, Emily, says that sex gradually became less important over the course of her 34-year marriage. When her kids were little, intimacy with her husband stalled briefly, but as their children grew older, they had a “revival of a good sex life,” Emily says. Now she is 59 and has had several operations resulting from a battle with cancer, including a hysterectomy and mastectomy. As a result, her desire lessened, and sex began to feel like “vacuuming the house” — something she did to make her husband happy. And he noticed. “If you are used to somebody responding to you in a certain way, you can tell when they are acting,” she says. “I wasn’t the same person.”
One night in bed, about 10 years after she went on a hormone treatment for her cancer that put her into early menopause, they had a frank conversation about their sex life. “We discussed my lack of desire, and he said that if I’m not turned on, then he’s not either,” Emily says. He admitted that his sex drive had dipped, too. So they decided not to force it. She feels there’s some cultural pressure for older people to keep up their sex lives into their 80s. She’s read, with skepticism, articles claiming that maintaining sex later in life is healthy. “Is it?” she said. “I don’t know.”
Emily feels their marriage has progressed naturally: They experienced decades of passion, and while they remain affectionate outside of the bedroom, their relationship now transcends sex in many ways. It’s about the life they’ve built together. “We’ve been in a sexless relationship for years now,” Emily says. “We get along great, but we’re more like best buds than lovers.”
Despite their insistence that sex isn’t essential in their marriages, most of the couples I spoke with still keep track of how often they have sex. They also appear haunted by how far they deviate from perceived norms. John, for instance, hopes he and his wife can work back up to having sex two or three times a week, but admits he has no idea where that figure came from.
Numbers, Nagoski believes, can be a counterproductive metric. It’s impossible to hear such statistics and not judge one’s relationship against them. Numbers also don’t account for whether participants are enjoying the sex they are having. “You’re comparing yourself — you’re judging yourself as OK or inadequate — compared to a whole bunch of people you’re not having sex with, who are not having sex with you,” Nagoski says.
For couples measuring themselves against what Nagoski calls the “fictions” of sex, or for those worried that their relationship is on the line whenever they enter the bedroom or don’t meet some monthly number, there may be too much pressure for sex to be enjoyable. It’s more important that couples establish what kind of sex is worth having.
‘There are people who tell you all the sex they’re having. I feel like it’s a lot more common that a lot of people are not.’
Rose admits to feeling the weight of societal expectations. Recently she decided that since she and Will were rarely having sex, she would have her birth-control implant removed from her arm. During the procedure, the nurse intimated there was something wrong with Rose’s marriage. Rose felt shamed and angry. The idea that she should be living in a constant state of arousal with her husband after a decade together is, to her, ridiculous, but also part of a facade she thinks many married couples maintain.
“There are people who tell you all the sex they’re having,” she says. “I feel like it’s a lot more common that a lot of people are not.” With the help of her therapist, Rose is exploring whether her A.D.H.D. may play a role in her need to seek new stimuli — not because she sees it as a problem but because she is interested in understanding her desire more fully. “Apparently the partner fatigue I experience is not so uncommon because our ‘special’ brains are always seeking out what’s new,” she says.
Will sometimes turns to Buddhist writings on restraint to explore his sexuality. He jokes there may be some confirmation bias at work, but he thinks his wife’s self-awareness — and her unwillingness to force herself into sex that she doesn’t want to have — has matured him. For Will, intimacy is less about completion and more about connection. “I’ve learned, even just about the act of sex itself, the ending is not always the best part,” Will says. “There’s pleasure throughout the spectrum.”
In March, for Rose’s 40th birthday, they took a trip to Hawaii. She switched off her phone for hours as they sprawled out by the ocean. Will remembers turning toward his wife and staring at her, watching her relaxing, her body loose. In that moment, he wasn’t thinking about sex or how beautiful Rose looked under the sun. He was thinking about how similar they actually are. More than anything, they want to enjoy themselves in their own way, to savor the small moments when they can let the rest of the world fade away.
Amanda Montei is the author of “Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control.” She is based in California.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/maga ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Marriages
British Pakistanis increasingly reject cousin marriage
Pakistan has one of the highest rates of cousin marriage globally. But the practice is falling out of favor among the UK's Pakistani community.
Many Britons of Pakistani heritage reject the idea of marrying within the family, but the practice persists
When British-Kashmiri Shagufta Rashid migrated to the UK from Pakistan in 1990, she was already a married woman with a stable home life. Her husband was also her cousin, but in her culture, especially at the time, it was considered normal.
The couple had five children and things were going well.
"All of my kids were very intelligent and beautiful," she told DW. The first sign of trouble, however, came with one of her daughters complaining of poor eyesight.
"We were preparing to celebrate the 18th birthday of this daughter when she complained about seeing problems," Rashid said.
Soon, the daughter's vision got worse and she could no longer see anything.
UK Bradford | Shagufta Rashid UK Bradford | Shagufta Rashid
Shagufta Rashid says cousin marriages were very common among British Pakistanis in the pastImage: Shahid Arsalan/DW
"I felt completely shattered and devastated," Rashid said. Then, doctors warned that the daughter "might go blind permanently" for suffering from an illness that usually shows up in elderly people.
Whispers from neighbors
Still, the daughter managed to get two essential surgeries — one at the age of 18 and another at 21 — and avoid blindness.
"She still cannot see without her glasses, but she is much better now and leading a married life in Dubai," Rashid said.
But when her neighbors in the UK heard about the trouble affecting her child, they started speculating that the illness was due to Rashid being married to her cousin — and her child was a product of a consanguineous marriage.
Rashid's sister Sabiha Hasan said other family members also dealt with the stigma. Hasan's son is married to his cousin, and one of his children is autistic, while another family member in a consanguineous marriage had two obese children. Even with children eventually losing the excessive weight, the family heard whispers about the children's health troubles being due to their parents being closely related.
UK Bradford | Sahiba HasanUK Bradford | Sahiba Hasan
Sahiba Hasan says many women have healthy children even with people they are related toImage: Shahid Arsalan/DW
Hasan acknowledges it could be a factor, but she doesn't see it as a deciding one because "there are many women married to cousins in our area and having a normal life."
Deadly risk of genetic defects
However, medical facts indicate that the risk cannot be so easily dismissed. A briefing published by the Born in Bradford research program, looking at child deaths in Bradford, Birmingham and the London borough of Redbridge, found that "20-40% of child deaths may be due to genetic disorders associated with consanguinity and chromosomal conditions."
Dr Shabi Ahmed from Birmingham City Hospital also warns that consanguinity carries a serious risk of genetic issues.
"And such problems are not among British Pakistanis and Kashmiris only but they are also found among the Arabs and other communities where such marriages are common," Ahmed told DW.
Intrafamily marriage rates diminishing in Britain
Consanguineous marriage is defined as a union in which the male-female couple are related as second cousins or closer. The practice is socially embedded in many regions of the world, including South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. It is estimated that globally around 10-15% of newborns have consanguineous parents.
While the practice persists among the British Pakistanis, it appears to be on decline. Studying 13,500 families between 2007 and 2011, the Born in Bradford project found 60% of couples of Pakistani heritage were related by blood (first cousin, second cousin or other blood relative). But if both parents of Pakistani origin had been born in the UK, this fell to 30%.
A follow-up study between 2016 and 2020 found a sharp decline in consanguinity in the Pakistani community — from 60% to 40% overall.
Even so, it is still dramatically higher than the rates of intrafamily marriage among white Britons, where available data shows that less than 1% are married to their first cousin.
Young people more informed due to social media
Both Hasan and Rashid confirm the practice of marrying family members is becoming less common. They believe this is partly due to modern technology.
"British-born kids are more aware about health issues because they are on social media all the time that discuss everything, including health," Rashid says.
Pakistan: Talk show on taboo topics rattles conservatives
Video
03:52
Rashid also believes that family quarrels that often follow marriage are also pushing people away from marrying their cousins.
A British Punjabi of Pakistani origin, who now lives close to Bradford, says youth should be allowed to choose their partners on their own.
"My own son refused to marry his cousin despite all family pressure but I supported him unlike other family members," he told DW on condition of anonymity. "We need to recognize that such marriages pose medical issues and must be discouraged."
Religion, obedience push youth towards consanguineous marriage
Bradford-based activist Beenash Faris admits that by and large consanguineous marriages are declining. But she also points out an interesting trend — the practice is resurfacing, albeit on a limited scale, among religious-minded young people.
"Religion lays a lot of emphasis on the respect and obedience of parents. So, I have seen some religious-minded young guys accepting their parents' advice on marriage matters or in some matters showing willingness to marry their cousins," she told DW.
https://www.dw.com/en/british-pakistani ... a-70522172
Pakistan has one of the highest rates of cousin marriage globally. But the practice is falling out of favor among the UK's Pakistani community.
Many Britons of Pakistani heritage reject the idea of marrying within the family, but the practice persists
When British-Kashmiri Shagufta Rashid migrated to the UK from Pakistan in 1990, she was already a married woman with a stable home life. Her husband was also her cousin, but in her culture, especially at the time, it was considered normal.
The couple had five children and things were going well.
"All of my kids were very intelligent and beautiful," she told DW. The first sign of trouble, however, came with one of her daughters complaining of poor eyesight.
"We were preparing to celebrate the 18th birthday of this daughter when she complained about seeing problems," Rashid said.
Soon, the daughter's vision got worse and she could no longer see anything.
UK Bradford | Shagufta Rashid UK Bradford | Shagufta Rashid
Shagufta Rashid says cousin marriages were very common among British Pakistanis in the pastImage: Shahid Arsalan/DW
"I felt completely shattered and devastated," Rashid said. Then, doctors warned that the daughter "might go blind permanently" for suffering from an illness that usually shows up in elderly people.
Whispers from neighbors
Still, the daughter managed to get two essential surgeries — one at the age of 18 and another at 21 — and avoid blindness.
"She still cannot see without her glasses, but she is much better now and leading a married life in Dubai," Rashid said.
But when her neighbors in the UK heard about the trouble affecting her child, they started speculating that the illness was due to Rashid being married to her cousin — and her child was a product of a consanguineous marriage.
Rashid's sister Sabiha Hasan said other family members also dealt with the stigma. Hasan's son is married to his cousin, and one of his children is autistic, while another family member in a consanguineous marriage had two obese children. Even with children eventually losing the excessive weight, the family heard whispers about the children's health troubles being due to their parents being closely related.
UK Bradford | Sahiba HasanUK Bradford | Sahiba Hasan
Sahiba Hasan says many women have healthy children even with people they are related toImage: Shahid Arsalan/DW
Hasan acknowledges it could be a factor, but she doesn't see it as a deciding one because "there are many women married to cousins in our area and having a normal life."
Deadly risk of genetic defects
However, medical facts indicate that the risk cannot be so easily dismissed. A briefing published by the Born in Bradford research program, looking at child deaths in Bradford, Birmingham and the London borough of Redbridge, found that "20-40% of child deaths may be due to genetic disorders associated with consanguinity and chromosomal conditions."
Dr Shabi Ahmed from Birmingham City Hospital also warns that consanguinity carries a serious risk of genetic issues.
"And such problems are not among British Pakistanis and Kashmiris only but they are also found among the Arabs and other communities where such marriages are common," Ahmed told DW.
Intrafamily marriage rates diminishing in Britain
Consanguineous marriage is defined as a union in which the male-female couple are related as second cousins or closer. The practice is socially embedded in many regions of the world, including South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. It is estimated that globally around 10-15% of newborns have consanguineous parents.
While the practice persists among the British Pakistanis, it appears to be on decline. Studying 13,500 families between 2007 and 2011, the Born in Bradford project found 60% of couples of Pakistani heritage were related by blood (first cousin, second cousin or other blood relative). But if both parents of Pakistani origin had been born in the UK, this fell to 30%.
A follow-up study between 2016 and 2020 found a sharp decline in consanguinity in the Pakistani community — from 60% to 40% overall.
Even so, it is still dramatically higher than the rates of intrafamily marriage among white Britons, where available data shows that less than 1% are married to their first cousin.
Young people more informed due to social media
Both Hasan and Rashid confirm the practice of marrying family members is becoming less common. They believe this is partly due to modern technology.
"British-born kids are more aware about health issues because they are on social media all the time that discuss everything, including health," Rashid says.
Pakistan: Talk show on taboo topics rattles conservatives
Video
03:52
Rashid also believes that family quarrels that often follow marriage are also pushing people away from marrying their cousins.
A British Punjabi of Pakistani origin, who now lives close to Bradford, says youth should be allowed to choose their partners on their own.
"My own son refused to marry his cousin despite all family pressure but I supported him unlike other family members," he told DW on condition of anonymity. "We need to recognize that such marriages pose medical issues and must be discouraged."
Religion, obedience push youth towards consanguineous marriage
Bradford-based activist Beenash Faris admits that by and large consanguineous marriages are declining. But she also points out an interesting trend — the practice is resurfacing, albeit on a limited scale, among religious-minded young people.
"Religion lays a lot of emphasis on the respect and obedience of parents. So, I have seen some religious-minded young guys accepting their parents' advice on marriage matters or in some matters showing willingness to marry their cousins," she told DW.
https://www.dw.com/en/british-pakistani ... a-70522172
Re: Marriages
A New Life Started Where Others Are Laid to Rest
Holding a wedding in a cemetery has become more commonplace. For some couples it’s deeply personal, for others strictly budgetary.
Shelby Prevatt and Zak Cowell had their wedding ceremony in 2022 at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Va.Credit...True Story Photography
By Alexander Nazaryan
Oct. 31, 2024
It’s right there in the vows uttered at innumerable weddings each year: “Till death do us part.” So it should come as no surprise that some couples want to highlight their (hopefully) eternal bond by marrying in a cemetery.
Cemetery weddings are nothing new. Jews living in Eastern Europe and in the United States sometimes held weddings in cemeteries during times of mass disease, like during the 1918 influenza, in the belief that having the ceremony in the presence of the dead might bring about better times.
In the United States, Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif., became a popular site for weddings after it opened in 1906. In 1940, Ronald Reagan chose it as the venue for his marriage to his first wife, the actress Jane Wyman.
For most of the 20th century, though, cemeteries were cordoned off in the American imagination as morbid spaces one didn’t visit unless necessary. This has changed with the recent “positive death” movement, which has sought to remake the cemetery as a place of exploration, and even celebration.
Image
The chapel at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Omaha has held numerous weddings.Credit...AP Photo/The Omaha World-Herald/Matt Miller
“Every year, we get more and more requests,” said Richard Harker, the executive director of the foundation that operates the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. He said that last year Oakland hosted 36 weddings and 25 funerals.
But holding a cemetery wedding does present challenges that marrying in a hotel ballroom or chapel might not. Below is some advice from those who have been through the experience.
The Reasons Vary
The decision can be deeply personal. This was the case for Sabrina Gandara, 38, of Portland, Ore., who works in a retirement community. In 2019, she married Andrew Rodriguez, 37, a service writer for a car dealership, while standing over the grave of her grandfather, Joe Gandara II, at the Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, Calif.
“Growing up, I was my grandpa’s baby,” Ms. Gandara said. She and her grandfather used to talk each evening on the phone, she said, and he had promised to walk her down the aisle when she got married. But he died in 2007.
Marrying at his gravesite was a way to stay true to his vow. “If my grandfather couldn’t walk me down the aisle, then I could walk down the aisle to my grandfather,” Ms. Gandara said in a text message.
Sometimes, the decision comes out of the blue. Shelby Prevatt, a 30-year-old therapist in private practice, was scouting for wedding locations in Richmond, Va., when her mother offered a surprising suggestion: the historic Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, the 135-acre final resting place of two former U.S. presidents, James Monroe and John Tyler.
Image
Ms. Prevatt and Mr. Cowell sharing a kiss along a path in the cemetery.Credit...True Story Photography
Ms. Prevatt was intrigued. The first trip she had taken with her husband-to-be, Zak Cowell, 31, a director of digital marketing, was to a music performance at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington. The couple, who now live in Bangor, Maine, had their wedding ceremony at Hollywood Cemetery in 2022. “We think about our wedding all the time,” Ms. Prevatt said. “It’s one of the most special moments that we’ve had. I don’t have any regrets.”
An Affordable Option
The restrictions that a cemetery is likely to place on the size and scope of events may make it a perfect option for couples on a budget who want to have an intimate but memorable ceremony. “More and more people are realizing they want to save money for a down payment on a house, and they’d rather have a small, simple wedding,” said Caroline DuBois, the president of the New York Marble Cemetery in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
Image
The Marble Cemetery in East Village, Manhattan, charges $5,000 to rent out its intimate garden.Credit...Paul Krenkler
It costs $5,000 to rent out the cemetery’s intimate garden, Ms. DuBois said. Ms. Prevatt said that to hold her wedding at Hollywood Cemetery, she donated $2,500. In comparison, the average wedding venue in 2023 costs $12,800, according to a survey conducted by the Knot.
Research the History
“I would recommend that the celebrants focus on the historic aspect of the venue,” said Paul K. Williams, the superintendent of the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, where the longtime Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham is buried. Weddings and other private events are held in the cemetery’s Renwick Chapel.
To marry at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn (which no longer accepts wedding reservations) is to consort with the ghosts of the composer Leonard Bernstein and the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Forest Lawn Memorial Park is brimming with Hollywood A-listers: Walt Disney, Sammy Davis Jr. and Michael Jackson, to name a few.
At the same time, history can be complicated — and painful. The Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond is home to many Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis and J.E.B. Stuart. The cemetery does not advertise that fact, but Ms. Prevatt said she knew they were interred there.
“That was always something we were wanting to make sure we were mindful of — not in any way making that history a part of our day/celebration,” Ms. Prevatt said in an email. “Our way of doing so was to ensure we remained in a different part of the cemetery.”
Learn the Rules
“Logistically, there are challenges,” said Lauren Purcell, who plans high-end weddings in the Washington area. In 2018, she worked with a couple who married at the Congressional Cemetery, whose 70,000 permanent residents include the notorious F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover and Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington.
Cemeteries aren’t hotels — each one will have unique facilities, quirks and rules for a prospective wedding party to consider. Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta has seven wedding venues. They include a bell tower dating to 1899, two lawns able to hold 200 guests each, a former “women’s comfort station” built in 1908 and remodeled into an indoor venue, and three mausoleums. “We have a coordinator who works with the bride and groom,” Mr. Harker said. Couples are asked to choose vendors from a list approved by the cemetery. If they don’t, they are charged an extra fee.
Image
Before a wedding ceremony at the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.Credit...Ashley White
At the Marble Cemetery in the East Village, the scope of the ceremony is constrained by the presence of underground vaults holding human remains from the 19th century. “We don’t allow dancing,” Ms. DuBois said. “We don’t allow loud music.” Her guidelines for events run to 18 pages. “We have a lot of rules,” she said.
At the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, Ms. Purcell could walk only on the established paths during the ceremony. And vendors were given only narrow windows of time (outside of regular visiting hours) during which they could prepare the site. “We had a full reception there,” Ms. Purcell said. “We had dinner, a bar, a band and dancing,” almost entirely conducted on the cemetery’s paths.
Some couples may hold their ceremony at a cemetery and then move the reception elsewhere. Mr. Cowell, Ms. Prevatt’s husband, said that after the ceremony at the Hollywood Cemetery, the wedding party celebrated at the nearby Jefferson Hotel.
Officiant Considerations
Agreeing to officiate a cemetery wedding could also introduce challenges — as well as opportunities for reflection.
“Look at the land, look at the layout, make sure that you’re comfortable officiating in that space,” said Lewis King, the director of American Marriage Ministries, which ordains wedding officiants. “You have a certain responsibility to do justice to the venue.”
Done right, a cemetery wedding can refresh a rite that often succumbs to logistical anxieties or the need for one Instagram-worthy moment after another. There’s nothing like death, after all, to focus the mind on what matters in life.
“There’s so much love and life” in a cemetery, Laura Lavelle, who works at Oak Hill in Washington. “It can hold sadness and happiness. It can hold grief and joy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/fash ... 778d3e6de3
Holding a wedding in a cemetery has become more commonplace. For some couples it’s deeply personal, for others strictly budgetary.
Shelby Prevatt and Zak Cowell had their wedding ceremony in 2022 at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Va.Credit...True Story Photography
By Alexander Nazaryan
Oct. 31, 2024
It’s right there in the vows uttered at innumerable weddings each year: “Till death do us part.” So it should come as no surprise that some couples want to highlight their (hopefully) eternal bond by marrying in a cemetery.
Cemetery weddings are nothing new. Jews living in Eastern Europe and in the United States sometimes held weddings in cemeteries during times of mass disease, like during the 1918 influenza, in the belief that having the ceremony in the presence of the dead might bring about better times.
In the United States, Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif., became a popular site for weddings after it opened in 1906. In 1940, Ronald Reagan chose it as the venue for his marriage to his first wife, the actress Jane Wyman.
For most of the 20th century, though, cemeteries were cordoned off in the American imagination as morbid spaces one didn’t visit unless necessary. This has changed with the recent “positive death” movement, which has sought to remake the cemetery as a place of exploration, and even celebration.
Image
The chapel at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Omaha has held numerous weddings.Credit...AP Photo/The Omaha World-Herald/Matt Miller
“Every year, we get more and more requests,” said Richard Harker, the executive director of the foundation that operates the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. He said that last year Oakland hosted 36 weddings and 25 funerals.
But holding a cemetery wedding does present challenges that marrying in a hotel ballroom or chapel might not. Below is some advice from those who have been through the experience.
The Reasons Vary
The decision can be deeply personal. This was the case for Sabrina Gandara, 38, of Portland, Ore., who works in a retirement community. In 2019, she married Andrew Rodriguez, 37, a service writer for a car dealership, while standing over the grave of her grandfather, Joe Gandara II, at the Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, Calif.
“Growing up, I was my grandpa’s baby,” Ms. Gandara said. She and her grandfather used to talk each evening on the phone, she said, and he had promised to walk her down the aisle when she got married. But he died in 2007.
Marrying at his gravesite was a way to stay true to his vow. “If my grandfather couldn’t walk me down the aisle, then I could walk down the aisle to my grandfather,” Ms. Gandara said in a text message.
Sometimes, the decision comes out of the blue. Shelby Prevatt, a 30-year-old therapist in private practice, was scouting for wedding locations in Richmond, Va., when her mother offered a surprising suggestion: the historic Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, the 135-acre final resting place of two former U.S. presidents, James Monroe and John Tyler.
Image
Ms. Prevatt and Mr. Cowell sharing a kiss along a path in the cemetery.Credit...True Story Photography
Ms. Prevatt was intrigued. The first trip she had taken with her husband-to-be, Zak Cowell, 31, a director of digital marketing, was to a music performance at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington. The couple, who now live in Bangor, Maine, had their wedding ceremony at Hollywood Cemetery in 2022. “We think about our wedding all the time,” Ms. Prevatt said. “It’s one of the most special moments that we’ve had. I don’t have any regrets.”
An Affordable Option
The restrictions that a cemetery is likely to place on the size and scope of events may make it a perfect option for couples on a budget who want to have an intimate but memorable ceremony. “More and more people are realizing they want to save money for a down payment on a house, and they’d rather have a small, simple wedding,” said Caroline DuBois, the president of the New York Marble Cemetery in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
Image
The Marble Cemetery in East Village, Manhattan, charges $5,000 to rent out its intimate garden.Credit...Paul Krenkler
It costs $5,000 to rent out the cemetery’s intimate garden, Ms. DuBois said. Ms. Prevatt said that to hold her wedding at Hollywood Cemetery, she donated $2,500. In comparison, the average wedding venue in 2023 costs $12,800, according to a survey conducted by the Knot.
Research the History
“I would recommend that the celebrants focus on the historic aspect of the venue,” said Paul K. Williams, the superintendent of the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, where the longtime Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham is buried. Weddings and other private events are held in the cemetery’s Renwick Chapel.
To marry at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn (which no longer accepts wedding reservations) is to consort with the ghosts of the composer Leonard Bernstein and the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Forest Lawn Memorial Park is brimming with Hollywood A-listers: Walt Disney, Sammy Davis Jr. and Michael Jackson, to name a few.
At the same time, history can be complicated — and painful. The Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond is home to many Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis and J.E.B. Stuart. The cemetery does not advertise that fact, but Ms. Prevatt said she knew they were interred there.
“That was always something we were wanting to make sure we were mindful of — not in any way making that history a part of our day/celebration,” Ms. Prevatt said in an email. “Our way of doing so was to ensure we remained in a different part of the cemetery.”
Learn the Rules
“Logistically, there are challenges,” said Lauren Purcell, who plans high-end weddings in the Washington area. In 2018, she worked with a couple who married at the Congressional Cemetery, whose 70,000 permanent residents include the notorious F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover and Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington.
Cemeteries aren’t hotels — each one will have unique facilities, quirks and rules for a prospective wedding party to consider. Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta has seven wedding venues. They include a bell tower dating to 1899, two lawns able to hold 200 guests each, a former “women’s comfort station” built in 1908 and remodeled into an indoor venue, and three mausoleums. “We have a coordinator who works with the bride and groom,” Mr. Harker said. Couples are asked to choose vendors from a list approved by the cemetery. If they don’t, they are charged an extra fee.
Image
Before a wedding ceremony at the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.Credit...Ashley White
At the Marble Cemetery in the East Village, the scope of the ceremony is constrained by the presence of underground vaults holding human remains from the 19th century. “We don’t allow dancing,” Ms. DuBois said. “We don’t allow loud music.” Her guidelines for events run to 18 pages. “We have a lot of rules,” she said.
At the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, Ms. Purcell could walk only on the established paths during the ceremony. And vendors were given only narrow windows of time (outside of regular visiting hours) during which they could prepare the site. “We had a full reception there,” Ms. Purcell said. “We had dinner, a bar, a band and dancing,” almost entirely conducted on the cemetery’s paths.
Some couples may hold their ceremony at a cemetery and then move the reception elsewhere. Mr. Cowell, Ms. Prevatt’s husband, said that after the ceremony at the Hollywood Cemetery, the wedding party celebrated at the nearby Jefferson Hotel.
Officiant Considerations
Agreeing to officiate a cemetery wedding could also introduce challenges — as well as opportunities for reflection.
“Look at the land, look at the layout, make sure that you’re comfortable officiating in that space,” said Lewis King, the director of American Marriage Ministries, which ordains wedding officiants. “You have a certain responsibility to do justice to the venue.”
Done right, a cemetery wedding can refresh a rite that often succumbs to logistical anxieties or the need for one Instagram-worthy moment after another. There’s nothing like death, after all, to focus the mind on what matters in life.
“There’s so much love and life” in a cemetery, Laura Lavelle, who works at Oak Hill in Washington. “It can hold sadness and happiness. It can hold grief and joy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/fash ... 778d3e6de3