Archive for the ‘Marriage’ Category
Relatively Large Numbers of Single British Women and Men Don’t Want to Get Married
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, a survey of British singles by Mintel found that 56 percent of single women and 46 percent of single men describe themselves as “very happy.” Meanwhile, 19 percent of men and 28 percent of women said they had no interest in marriage or living with someone else.
The survey polled 1,039 singles ages 25-70. Overwhelmingly, both men and women said the biggest advantage of being single was economic and personal freedom in not having to share decision making with a partner. Seventy-one percent of men and 69 percent of women ranked “making own decisions about how to spend money” as the best thing about being single and 66 percent of men and 65 percent of women ranked “Freedom to come and go as I please” as the second most important thing about being single.
Men and women differed, however, on the disadvantages with 27 percent of men citing “not enough sex” as the biggest drawback of being single, while 36 percent of men cited “people assuming I want a partner” as the biggest drawback.
Sources:
British women are ‘happy singles’. The BBC, February 14, 2005.
Marketing to Singles - Charts. Press Release, Mintel, February 2005.
Tags: Great Britain, Marriage
Indiana Court Rules Lesbian Partner Must Pay Child Support
In February, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that a lesbian woman must pay child support for a child conceived by her partner before the two separated.
In 1997, the woman adopted her partner’s in 1997 when the two were involved in a relationship. After the relationship dissolved, the biological mother of the children sought and received a child support order while the non-biological mother sought to dissolve the adoption.
Lower courts had overturned the support order, but the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld the order. Judge John G. Baker wrote in a 22-page ruling that,
Whether a person is a man or a woman, homosexual or heterosexual, or adoptive or biological, in assuming that role, a person also assumes certain responsibilities, obligations, and duties. That person may not simply choose to shed the parental mantle because it becomes inconvenient, seems ill-advised in retrospect, or becomes burdensome because of a deterioration in the relationship with the children’s other parent.
Baker’s ruling followed a November 2004 case in which the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that same sex partners could adopt the children of their partners and still retain parental rights
Source:
State Appeals Court Extends Parental Rights to Gay Woman. Associated Press, November 29, 2004.
Lesbian Ordered to Pay Child Support. Associated Press, February 18, 2005.
Lesbian Partner Ordered to Pay Child Support. Axcess News, February 19, 2005.
Tags: Indiana, United States
Affairs Major Reason for Divorce in UK, Where Women Initiate Almost all Divorces
In January, the BBC reported on a UK survey of divorce lawyers that asked the lawyers to provide statistics on the causes of the divorces they handled.
According to the survey, adultery was the number one cause of divorce in Great Britain, with 27 percent of divorces being initiated because one of the partners had an affair. In 75 percent of those cases, the adulterous spouse was the husband.
After adultery, 11 percent of marriages ended due to family-related strains, and 17 percent from emotional or physical abuse.
The study also reported that women were overwhelmingly the initiators of divorces, petitioning for divorce in 93 percent of the cases handled by the lawyers in the survey.
Source:
Affairs ‘main reason for divorce’ The BBC, January 23, 2005.
Tags: Divorce, Great Britain, Marriage
Wage Gap Decreases as Men’s Wages Fall or Hold Steady
The recession that started in 2001 has had one interesting effect on wages — it has resulted in a further closing of the wage gap between men and women as men’s wages held steady or declined over the past few years while women’s continued to rise.
According to the New York Times, a Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that women now earn 80 percent of what men do, compared to just 62 percent 25 years ago. But, according to The Times,
It turns out that almost half of that gap closed during two comparatively short periods of relatively hard times, totaling about six years. Those periods correspond with the recessions and cutbacks in the work force that marked the opening years of the last decade and the current one.
But while the changes came about as a result of recessions, they persisted even after those recessions were over. The Times surveys various experts who offer different explanations for this, from the fact that men tend to be over-represented in industries that were hit by both recessions such as manufacturing, to companies replacing high-paid men with slightly lower-paid women for administrative and professional jobs, to the increasing educational attainment and tendency for women to work full time.
The Times notes that Bureau of Labor statistics show a big increase in women’s employment in “executive, administrative and managerial occupations”. Women today hold 46 percent of those jobs, compared to just 32 percent in 1983. Similar gains occurred in professional jobs as well.
Given that women now constitute the majority of college graduates, those trends are likely to continue and the wage gap is likely to decline even further as more women work full time and marry later, focusing on their careers in their 20s and 30s. (In 2000, for example, the average age at first marriage was 25 for all women, and even older for college-educated women).
Source:
Women are gaining ground on the wage front. Louis Uchitelle, The New York Times, December 31, 2004.
Russian E-Mail Order Bride Wins $400,000 Judgement
Earlier this year, I noted ongoing controversy over mail order brides from Eastern Europe, and whether they are victims of domestic violence at higher rates than normal (and, if so, what should be done to minimize the problem).
This month, a Ukranian woman won a $434,000 jury award against an online agency that matched up women from the former Soviet Union with American men.
Nataliya Fox sued Encounters International claiming that the agency was fraudulent and negligent when it paired her up with American businessman James Fox in 1998.
The two were married about three months after meeting, but Nataliya claimed her husband was abusive throughout their marriage.
Nataliya testified that when she told Encounters International owner Natasha Spivack about the abuse, that Spivack told her she would be deported if she left her American husband. Spivack testified that Nataliya concocted the story in order to remain in the United States.
Similarly, Nataliya testified that when she asked Spivack why another Russian woman had left James Fox only two weeks after being set up with him by Encounters International, Spivack told her that the woman had been “foolish.”
James Fox testified at the trial that he never abused his wife.
Encounters International plans to appeal the verdict.
Sources:
Online dating bride wins damages. The BBC, November 19, 2004.
Mail-order bride wins damage award. Stephanie Hanes, Baltimore Sun, November 19, 2004.
Jury awards $434,000 to woman who met husband online. Associated Press, November 19, 2004.
British Study: Men Who Never Marry Happiest
In December the University of London released a study of 4,000 Britons that found women who married the first man they had a relationship with were the most emotionally healthy women, while men who had multiple cohabitating relationships without getting married were the most emotionally healthy men.
The study claimed that following the breakup of a relationship, men tended to suffer a brief period of depression which waned as they became involved in a succeeding relationship. For women, however, there were longer term effects and the women with the most breakups also had the poorest emotional health.
If true, then the UK is an ideal place to become an emotionally healthy man as the marriage rate there is at its lowest level in more than a century.
Source:
Men happiest as ’serial monogamists’, says study. Maxine Frith, The New Zealand Herald, February 23, 2004.
Tags: Great Britain
Are Russian Mail-Order Brides Placed at Too High of a Risk?
There’s an interesting article at LegalAffairs.Org about mail-order brides from Eastern Europe. There have been a couple of high profile instances of violence against women who came to the United States as mail-order brides, leading to calls for tighter regulation of matchmaking services that arrange such marriages.
But in her article on the topic, Nadya Labi notes that a) no one knows if mail order brides from Eastern Europe are really subject to more violence than any other group, and b) the few limited studies that have been done suggest that, in fact, there isn’t a problem with these marriages. Labi writes,
So far, no definitive studies have confirmed the industry’s bad rap. In the 1996 Mail-Order Bride Act, Congress directed the Department of Justice to investigate fraud and domestic violence in mail-order marriages. But immigration officials don’t collect data on these relationships, so after three years of fact-gathering the DOJ could offer only preliminary and suspect statistics. Based on 266 immigration cases, a small sample, DOJ reported that matchmaking agencies did not play a significant role in marriage fraud. Investigators also found that mail-order brides suffer abuse less frequently than homegrown wives. On the strength of anecdotal evidence that some mail-order brides are abused, however, the 1996 law required international marriage brokers to tell foreign brides about their rights to claim certain immigration benefits if they become victims of domestic violence.
Currently Congress is considering the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act which would, according to Labi, “force agencies to ask each male client about his marital history and criminal background.” Do we want the government getting that directly involved in how people decide who they marry? As Labi writes,
But is it a broker’s job to run a background check on a man simply because he wants to meet a foreign mate? The legislation before Congress exempts matchmaking services like Match.Com and Yahoo! Personals because these companies charge the same rates to men and women and to natives and foreigners. In light of the financial incentive that mail order brokers have to side with their male clients, it makes sense to treat brokers differently by requiring them to tell foreign brides about their immigration rights. However, it seems premature to impose background checks without more proof that the men who go to brokers to meet foreign women . . . are more dangerous than men at any singles party. Mail-order brides are adults who can only hope for the best and guard against the worst. They should proceed, as others do, at their own risk.
Source:
Mrs. America: The business of mail-order marriage. Nadya Labi, Legal Affairs, January/February 2004.
Measuring Parental Preferences for Boys Over Girls
A couple of researchers recently published the results of a look at marriage patterns based on the sex of the children in the marriage and came up with a startling conclusion — the fewer male children, the larger the likelihood that a marriage will end in divorce.
Gordon Dahl, with the University of Rochester, and Enrico Moretti, with the University of California at Los Angeles, examined census data on 6 million mothers from over 60 years of census data.
They found that a couple with one daughter is 5 percent more likely to divorce than a couple with one son, and that the more daughters the higher the likelihood of divorce. Couples with three daughters, for example, were 13 percent more likely to divorce than couples with three sons.
Moreover, couples who had only sons were the least likely to divorce, while those who had only daughters were the most likely to divorce.
This follows research by the University of Washington’s Shelly Lundberg which found similar results for single mothers. Single mothers were 42 percent more likely to get married to the father of the child if the child was a boy.
There are a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon with the most obvious being that men appear to have a strong desire to have at least one son. This is consistent with a Gallup poll that for more than 50 years has asked Americans if they could only have one child, would they prefer to have a boy or a girl. Women show little preference, preferring a boy 36 percent to 32 percent for a girl (the remaining having no preference), while men choose a boy 45 percent to 19 percent (the remaining having no preference).
Sources:
Oh, No: It’s a Girl! Steven Landsburg, Slate, October 2, 2003.
Boys help make dads stay. Sarah Baxter and Judith O’Reilly, The Sunday Times (Australia), October 13, 2003.
It’s a Girl! (Will the Economy Suffer?) David Leonhardt, New York Times, October 26, 2003.
Do daughters cause divorce? The Age (Australia), November 13, 2003.
Should Divorced Parents Be Forced to Pay for Adult Children’s College Expenses?
An Associated Press story about a New Hampshire case illustrates an odd distinction between divorced and married couples — in 17 states, divorced parents can be ordered to pay for the college expenses of their adult children where married parents would never be subject to such court orders.
The AP story focuses on Alexander Durand whose daughter was accepted at both Brandeis and Brown University. A court ordered Durand to pay for half his daughters’ tuition to Brown University even though Brandeis offered his daughter a better financial aid package.
Such cases are creating something of a righteous backlash with New Hampshire considering a bill that prohibit courts form ordering divorced parents to pay for college expenses of their adult children.
At its core, these states are involved in the worst sort of social engineering. As lawyer Kate Haakonsen, who helped draft a law in Connecticut to require divorced parents to pay for college expenses, told the Associated Press,
Children of divorced parents are less likely to go to college, less likely to go to prestigious schools, and generally are less economically successful than their parents. As a matter of public policy, we have to decide if that’s what we want.
No, these are not matters for public policy, but are rather private decisions to be made by the families involved without the heavy hand of the state inserting itself into the middle of the process.
Source:
Obligations survive marriage. Associated Press, September 15, 2003.
Wambui Otieno Mbugua Sets Kenya Abuzz
Former-Mau Mau activist and politician Wambui Otieno Mbugua certainly knows how to create a controversy. When she made an appearance at a conference dedicated to creating a new constitution for Kenya, tempers flared and the conference had to be recessed for 30 minutes.
Why all the fuss? Because Wambui, 67, was married in July to a stonemason 42 years her junior.
The marriage itself drew hundreds of onlookers and created something of a schism among churches in Kenya. Although clergyman with the Presbyterian Church of East Africa opined that the marriage was perfectly appropriate, Catholic priest Father Emanuel Ngugi characterized the marriage of Wambui to a much younger man as “uncouth” and criticized her for not consulting her local community before going ahead with the marriage.
When Wambui showed up at the constitutional conference, Member of Parliament Bonny Khalwale was the leader of a faction of male MPs who demanded that she be ejected from the conference. Khalwale was quoted by the BBC as saying, “We are discussing African culture and what she did [by marrying a much-younger man] negated the very concept of our culture.”
Not everyone in Kenya thought this was the major issue facing delegates. According to the BBC, conference delegate Hubbie Hussein noted that, “there are land grabbers, looters, murderers and other criminals among the delegates, but no one has questioned their presence in the conference.”
Sources:
Kenya split by wedding row. Kariuki wa Mureithi, BBC News, July 22, 2003.
Kenyan woman slams ‘disgusting’ MPs. BBC, August 21, 2003.
Tags: Kenya