Sex and Love

Post-Divorce Sex: The Numbers Look Good

Nancy Lee — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:32:32 -0400

I just read another dopey article claiming that married people have the best sex lives. How it's so great knowing all the person's buttons, the freedom in having just one partner, yada, yada yada.

I beg to differ. I speak from a long lack of experiences during my marriage and unless my friends — both men and women — are all lying to me, we were all to some extent in the same boat.

Take my beleagured friend D, who had the ill-fated date with me that stormy November night (check out my first post). He returned to home and hearth, willing to give his marriage another go.

"There is peace in the family and I have buried the hatchet, swallowed my miseries and decided to hang in there," he wrote me. "After looking at all the alternatives and the reaction of the brood to my breakout suggestions, I've just hunkered down. If I were in France, I would probably have found myself a mistress and lead a double life. But I'm in Norway, so I live a quiet Calvinistic life of middle class mediocrity."

Yikes.

Compare that with my randy neighbor, S, who left her husband and our quiet rural suburb and moved to a condo complex in a nearby town that had a rep of attracting lots of new divorcees. After a few months she confided, "In our neighborhood if you heard screaming, you assumed people are fighting. But here, when you hear screaming, you assume people are having really great sex."

Or my friend P, who reunited quite literally with a former squeeze after years languishing in a sexless marriage. "It was like finding the magic lamp and getting my three wishes: sex, sex, and more sex!"

Schooling Your Ex: 3 Tips to Make Education His Priority

Dr. Mark Banschick — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:48:06 -0400

It is Sunday night and Janet’s kids are back home and wild as all heck. Tom, her ex-husband, just brought Allie, age 9 and Sam, age 6, home late, tired, hungry, and wired. Tom has been less than punctual all summer but now Janet is exasperated because she has to prepare the kids for school on Monday.

Janet: “You only think about yourself. The kids are out of control and they’re not ready for school.”

Tom: “What’s the big deal? We had a good time together, isn’t that what’s really important, bonding and all?

Janet: “Tom, we no longer have the leisure to just have fun. School just started two weeks ago. Don’t you realize Allie and Sam have to wake up early tomorrow?”

Analysis: Janet is correct. School is a big transition that requires a change of schedule for the adults in their lives as well. After all, your children learn best by example — and you and your ex have to provide that example.

Summer is unstructured, while school is structured. Summer is focused on fun, while the school year is an amalgam of learning, self discipline, and play (it is a balancing act). Summer provides few frustrations while school, by its nature, can give both kids and adults much to be frustrated about. Kids have to adapt to new schedules, homework, annoying classmates or demanding teachers.

Learning comes easy for some and hard for others. You want your children to center in on their studies so that they can feel competent and capable. It is up to you and your ex-spouse to provide helpful guidance to help your kids through this transition.

Three Solid Tips:

Anticipation

Anticipate the change from summer to school and shift the schedule accordingly. The kids probably need an earlier bedtime and dinner, less television and computer time and more preparation for the next day.

Divorce the Best Thing Ever, Says Kate Hudson

Jill Brooke — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:42:08 -0400

Kate Hudson is no fool, nor does she have stardust in her eyes when she says that her divorce was "the best thing that happened to her."

The Fools Gold star and Black Crowes musician Chris Robinson divorced in 2007 but are devoted parents to their young son, Ryder.

Hudson told Cosmopolitan magazine that since separating, the two have found a rhythm that is quite harmonious and certainly not as out of tune as their relationship was when they lived together as man and wife.

“Look — Chris and I are still basically living together! We’ve figured it out. I mean, obviously, nothing’s perfect, but I could never look at our divorce as a mistake. If anything, it’s the best thing that ever happened to us," she said.

When a divorce is amicable, as many today strive it to be, the parents are in and out of each other's houses and some share the same domicle, but the parents leave while the child has the consistant home.

The secret, as she reveals, is to "figure it out." And with the help of places like firstwivesworld.com and more information on mediation and co-parenting courses, couples may break-up but simultaneously build a new family structure that can be quite strong.

Japanese Wives Resort to "Honeytraps" for Divorce

Jill Brooke — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:20:18 -0400

Japanese husbands may want to cry “entrapment” over the practices of a company that hires professional seducers to help unhappy wives get rid of their husbands.

In most U.S. states, you can just say sayonara to husbands who are belligerent, boorish or belching bores. But In Japan, where women’s rights are not highly valued, wives now see the value in fetching divorces by using fetching women to lure their husbands, thus giving them the necessary grounds for divorce.

The Times of London ran an excerpt from Lesley Downer’s new book, The Last Concubine, which reports the blow by blow — pardon the expression — of several of these stings. Here’s one:

“3.30 pm. Mr. A is outside a bank in a busy part of Ikebukuro, a faintly seedy area of Tokyo, waiting for his date. He beams as she teeters across the road on high heels. Kyoko, 20, is half his age. She has a mane of black hair, sloe eyes, a fetching smile and a cute giggle. Her blouse is open to reveal her cleavage and she has on a short skirt and sheer black tights. Mr. A is a bald 40-year-old salesman in a crumpled gray suit and glasses.

“Mr. A doesn’t know that a team of private investigators is recording his every move. The boss, the ebullient Mr. Tomiya, lurks behind a lamppost on the other side of the road and takes photographs as Kyoko meets Mr. A. Tomiya’s equipment includes a packet of cigarettes and a pen, both of which are actually cameras. Shimizu, a heavy-set man with a bullet head and cropped hair, carries a black bag. It contains a camera with which he films continuously through a tiny hole in the bag. A third man acts as a lookout. …

“When presented with the evidence, the embarrassed husband not only agrees to the divorce but agrees to favorable terms for the wife.”

Better Single Than Sorry: FWW's Book of the Week

Jill Brooke — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:14:46 -0400

Jen Schefft may have won the popular reality contest The Bachelor in 2003, but she dumped Andrew Firestone, the bachelor in question, because, she said, she didn’t want to settle on the wrong guy.

Then she was the chooser on the sequel, The Bachelorette, where she stunned the two finalists by saying that she didn’t want to commit to either of them.

Why, she wondered, was she reviled, rather than respected, for not rushing to the altar?

Her response is Better Single Than Sorry: A No-Regrets Guide to Loving Yourself and Never Settling, which reminds women that you’re OK if you’re not in a relationship.

As she points out:

• There have never been more single adult women in the U.S. than now.
• We have to learn to find enjoyment by ourselves and not through someone else.
• The odds are that each of us will be alone for parts of our lives, so we can’t look for eternal happiness in a relationship with a guy.

The message here is: You can be alone and not lonely.

The book does stretch this point like salt water taffy and could be condensed. But hey, publishers like longer books, and there are points worth mentioning.

Schefft talked to women in all stages of relationships. One said she settled for a guy and now is divorced. “At the time, I thought he was the best I could get,” she told Schefft. “As I have gotten more confident and more experienced with age, I realize that I deserve so much more.”

Schefft of course points out the advantages of being single. “It forces you to build more of a network in the world,” she says. “If you think about it in the right way and not as something tragic, you can become a much more interesting person.”

Ahmed Doesn't Want To Talk About Divorce

Sarah Farthing — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:42:06 -0400

Ahmed and I will be signing papers in October. This week, I sat down with him to ask if he is ready for the final step. I'm not sure I got an answer.

For more of Sarah's story, click here.

The Infidelity Gene: Another Excuse?

Jill Brooke — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:24:12 -0400

Along with qualities like “devoted,” “adventurous,” “successful,” and “cute,” the checklist of women deciding what they want in a man may now include “the fidelity gene.”

A study by a behavioral geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockhom confirmed what we already knew — when it comes to monogamy, it’s not about us, it’s about them.

Some guys, well, can't help themselves. You can blame the genes when he can't keep it in his jeans.

The gene in question controls the number and location of vasopressin receptors in the brain. Vasopressin is a hormone secreted during sexual activity that increases the likelihood of pair bonding.

One allele, or alternate form of a gene, and there are fewer vasopressin receptors. Two alleles and there are way fewer vasopressin receptors.

As The Washington Post reported, the finding is striking because it not only links the gene variant — present in two out of five men — with the risk of marital discord and divorce, but also appears to predict whether women involved with these men say their partners are emotionally close and available, or distant and disagreeable.

The presence of the allele also seems predictive of whether men get married or live with women without getting married.

"Men with two copies of the allele had twice the risk of experiencing marital dysfunction, with a threat of divorce during the last year, compared to men carrying one or no copies," said Hasse Walum, a behavioral geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who led the study. "Women married to men with one or two copies of the allele scored lower on average on how satisfied they were with the relationship compared to women married to men with no copies."

Blame Divorce on Sex… Says Town of Bedfordshire

Naomi Dunne — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:28:30 -0400

"Sex is the leading cause of divorce," says the headline of a new survey released in small town England.

Considering the cultural stereotype attached to the English and their sex lives, this will probably bring relief to millions of British women who, as popular opinion would have it, would gladly never have sex again. Don't have sex, don't get divorced, and live happily ever after in a G-rated utopia.

Tragically, though, it's not the sex itself that's leading to all the divorce say the people behind the study. It's sex-related causes. You know, porn surfing, infidelity, cross-dressing. Yup, cross-dressing.

According to the study done by Bedfordshire lawyers, cross-dressing by married people in the area happens often enough that it made the list of causes for divorce.

Bedfordshire, as it happens, is 10 minutes from where my mother lives. She tells me she's surrounded only by horses, but it would appear that she left out the hundreds of men in sequined palazzo pants and size 12 patent leather pumps.

The details of the study indicated that 43 percent of divorces in the area cited sex as the primary cause, although "lifestyle" issues came in at number two with 37 percent. (And secret cross-dressing isn't a lifestyle issue?)

Money came in at 11 percent, but lawyers are predicting this number is on the increase since people are losing money hand over fist and that's bound to cause some strain. Again, cross-dressing can be implicated here, as a good Coach bag for each spouse certainly makes a dent in the Disney World fund, and the wife is likely to get tetchy.

Divorce Is Up! No! Divorce Is Down!

Linda Lee — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:06:38 -0400

The divorce news from London is confusing.

First we were told that divorces were increasing because of bad economic times. The men who were out of work were rushing to get divorced, it was said, while their incomes were nonexistent. And the women who were married to still-employed husbands were rushing to get divorced while their husbands were still making big bucks.

As a rationale, those don’t really wash, since either spouse can apply to have maintenance and support adjusted as circumstances change.

And now there’s been a national study in the UK, and it turns out the divorce rate in England and Wales last year was the lowest it has been in 26 years, despite the travails of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills.

The rate fell to 11.9 divorces per thousand married people in 2007 — the lowest since 1981 — compared to 12.2 per thousand married people in 2006, according to the British Office for National Statistics.

“Since 1997 the average age at divorce in England and Wales has risen from 40.2 to 43.7 years for men and from 37.7 to 41.2 years for women, partly reflecting the rise in age at marriage,” the report said.

Divorces in the United States reached their peak in 1981 (blame the 70s) as well, with 5.3 per thousand of the total population. (In an apples to apples comparison, the United States has a higher divorce rate than Great Britain.)

The American divorce rate has been sinking ever since, hitting around 3.6 per thousand of the total population in 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available. U.S. figures are gathered from 46 states and the District of Columbia. Four states (California, Colorado, Indiana, and Louisiana) do not report divorce statistics.

Letting Go of My Husband, or Trying To...

Sondra Simmons — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 06:14:42 -0400

Somewhere in my house is a book entitled Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be by Lama Surya Das. I bought it three years ago when I lost my job and my last pregnancy within a few weeks of each other.

When the job went, that was kind of okay. I was about to take up a new vocation: motherhood. When the baby went, that was utterly not okay, and I've been trying ever since, in ways healthy and not so, to get over it.

I need to reread that book. Fifty-one weeks ago I was surprised to hear myself telling Edgar yes, I do want a divorce. I still haven't filed the papers.

I can talk about keeping the health insurance and the expense and trouble of divorce, but at least some of my delay is a result of my unwillingness to let go of a bad marriage.

Doggone it, took me 40 years to find a husband. So he wasn't the best husband, but he was — uh, still is — my husband.

It also took me quite a while to find and buy my house, which I don't really seem to be able to afford right now.

In truth, I haven't been able to afford it for quite a while.

It has been pointed out to me that if I don't figure out how to pay for, or to sell, or to rent out the house, it'll be taken from me. Then I'll have to let go. For the past several months I've been working on letting go of the conviction that I must and can hold on to my home.

I've put less effort into the idea of releasing Ed.

But I feel my tightly clenched hands being pried open, so to speak. I'm beginning to accept the possibility that it's time to let someone else (who can afford it) love this house.

Maybe the practice will help me to let go of my marriage.