Is Facebook a Marriage Killer?

There is a lot of talk right now on the Internet, in news articles, even from church pulpits, about the social networking site, Facebook, being a “Marriage Killer.”  Some lawyers are saying that Facebook is a major factor in one in five divorces.  I haven't seen that in my practice, but my we may just be behind the times here in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, which--while lovely--is often not the trendiest of places.  Other lawyers will tell you that Facebook accounts are a major source of information that they mine to get dirt on cheating spouses. There are preachers telling their congregations that, if they value their marriages, they will go home right after the service and cancel their Facebook accounts.  You can find some of that discussion in the articles linked here.  If you want more, just Google “facebook marriage killer” and you will have reading material for a week.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334482/The-marriage-killer-One-American-divorces-involve-Facebook.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334482/The-marriage-killer-One-American-divorces-involve-Facebook.html

http://business.ezinemark.com/facebook-has-become-a-virtual-marriage-killer-3192fd81c35.html

For the record, I am not a member of Facebook or any other social networking site.  I don't have anything against them, they just seem to soak up a lot of time that I need to spend on other things.

My wife, Kathy, and I are co-authors of the book How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers.  Facebook is not one of the marriage killers we list.  But, since the phrase “marriage killers” in the title, I feel compelled to put in my oar and, as a person with a naturally contrarian and argumentative personality, I am going to voice an opinion that on the subject that appears to be a minority view.

My position is simply this:  Facebook is not a marriage killer.  Or, at least, it is no more a marriage killer than the telephone, the automobile, women working outside the home, the social acceptability of men and women mixing socially without their spouses, cell phones, email, internet chat rooms, instant messaging, and text messaging—all of which were derided as greased poles to the perdition of adultery in their time.  The real marriage killers at work here are the same ones that have been at work since the beginning of time, Lack of Commitment, Boredom, and so on. 

These situations and technologies merely provide means and opportunity for adultery.  They are not the cause.  Let’s be honest.  When you “friend” an old flame on Facebook, maybe it is just for the purpose of getting caught up and talking about old times.  These are certainly reasonable and innocent objectives, if those are really what you have in mind.  On the other hand, if what you are really going for is a little excitement—not an affair mind you—just a little excitement, some flirtatious banter, a little whiff of the heady powder smoke of danger, then we are talking about something entirely different.  You are turning to someone outside the marriage for something that you should be finding inside the marriage.  Your interest is sexual.  It may not be overtly sexual.  It may not be intensely sexual.  But, it is sexual nonetheless. 

When you turn outside the marriage to a live person for some kind of sexual excitement or gratification, you are (1) showing that there is something lacking in your marriage and (2) putting your marriage in danger.  (See my post to this blog on April 7, 2007 on Infidelity for a discussion of how “innocent” flirtations can sink a marriage).  Plus, you are taking the first step down the road toward having sex with someone who is not your spouse.  In the real world, most people who stray usually do so by baby steps.  They don’t just wake up one day and decide, “Hey, I’m going to start screwing around.  What a great idea!”  Rather, they gravitate into a relationship with another person that gradually becomes more intense until it escalates into having sex with that person.  These things all start somewhere, and--apparently--Facebook is one such place.  

Better to avoid that path entirely. 

Accordingly, I don’t think that, to preserve your marriage, you need to log in right this moment and cancel your Facebook account or never join in the first place.  From what I hear, Facebook is a valuable and fun social tool that can be a real help in keeping in touch with friends, reconnecting with people from your past, and maintaining relationships with distant friends and family.  If you do have a Facebook account, however, I would strongly recommend that you carefully and objectively review your “friends” list.  Take a hard look at everyone on that list who is a credible adultery partner for you and ask yourself honestly both what your true reasons are for being in contact with that person and what is really going on in all of your communications with that person.   

You know whether what is going in is pure friendship or whether something sexual is happening.  If the latter, you need to cut it off immediately.  The dangers are too high, and the temptations are too great.  Don’t tell yourself that “it is just an innocent flirtation.”  That doesn’t work any more than, “I’m just going to eat one cookie.”  Plus, as I mentioned in my post on adultery here back in 2007, even the “innocent flirtation” takes energy away from the marriage that may be necessary to sustain it.  That excitement and sexuality needs to be channeled into your marriage, not drained into the dead end of an extramarital relationship, even if that relationship never becomes overtly sexual. 

Facebook is a mere instrumentality.  In a murder, the responsibility does not lie with the tool, it lies with the murderer.  Same with marriage. BUT, just because the responsibility for the shooting does not lie with the gun, that doesn't mean you want to play with a loaded revolver, much less point it at your own head.

For more information or to order our book about marriage killers, go to our web site http://www.honsingerbooks.com.  

Why So Many Divorces?

The statisticians tell us that about half of all marriages end in divorce.  As do most people who work in family law, though, my wife Kathy and I often wonder why there are SO MANY divorces, and why divorce is so much more frequent now than it was only a few decades ago.  Here are my, distinctly unscientific, theories on the subject.

1.  The family is no longer the primary economic unit of society.  Back in the days of my grandparents and grandparents, most Americans lived on farms or worked in small, family-owned businesses.  Mom, dad, and the kids all worked together tending fields, herding cattle, or stocking the shelves.  My great-grandfather, Q.K. Barber, was a cattleman on the prairie between Baytown and Liberty, Texas, and he worked all day on his own land within a several hundred yards of his wife and daughters, and within a few miles of similar spreads run by his brothers and sisters.  The family was together, or at least close to one another, all day, almost every day.  Shared work, shared hardship, shared triumphs, shared experiences bound husband, wife, and children together into family units that were much tighter than are most families today, in which husband and wife go off to their own jobs, kids are off doing their own thing, and folks are lucky to see each other over dinner a few nights a week.

2.  The family is a far less important social unit of society.  In our rural, agrarian past, the husband and wife typically did not have circles of friends with whom they would go out drinking or for card night or game night or girl's night out or whatever. Husband and wife were each other's best friends and were each other's primary social outlet.  Not only were there fewer opportunities to stray, this relationship was just one more set of ties, one more layer of glue, that held husband and wife together.  These two factors, husband and wife working apart from one another and then doing much of their playing apart from one another, cannot help but lessen the number and the force of the bonds that hold them together. I am convinced that one of the things that has held my marriage to Kathy together through some of the tough times has been that we work together and are each other main source of friendship and companionship.  We spend almost all of our time together.  Sure, sometimes we rub each other the wrong way, but mostly this fact means that we have so many bonds, so many shared experiences, so much that we do together, that it would take a nuclear device to drive us apart.

3.  Popular culture does not foster realistic expectations of love and marriage.  The love stories that we see on movies and on TV, that we read about in books, and--as a result--that we imagine for ourselves these days, are full of the mythos and magic of love and nearly devoid of sweat and tears that it takes to make a marriage work. The song says that "Love Will Keep Us Together," when, in reality, love will only bring us together; it takes commitment, courtesy, caring, and communication to make it stick. People think that once love has brought them together, some sort of ethereal magic will ward off all of the evil forces that might serve to drive them apart. To the contrary, the world is full of forces that strive to drive the couple apart and that, if not actively fought against by the couple almost every day, will certainly succeed, if not in causing them to divorce, at least will serve to make them unhappy.

4.  Popular culture does not praise and reinforce the traits of character and conduct that make marriages strong.  There was a time when adults in our culture were portrayed as mature grown ups, committed to their families, and bearing adult responsibilities.  Whatever their dramatic deficiencies, television programs like Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch showed Ward and June and Mike and Carol holding down professional positions, making sure that the house was clean and meals prepared, providing structure and discipline for children, paying the bills, and generally getting the job done.  Adults in family sitcoms now are generally immature, incompetent, disorganized, histrionic, and in most cases indistinguishable in their level of gravitas from the children in the show.  Indeed, much of the comedy in many of these programs is derived from the unflattering contrast between the maturity and sensibility of the children relative to the childishness of the adults.  This is not to say that TV writers can or should reset the clock to 1969, but perhaps we would all be better off of television and movies that portray families would contain more examples of adults who have their acts together and who act their age.  Many young people, particularly young men, seem to aspire to a protracted--if not eternal--adolescence (only with more money) in which they hang out with their friends, drive cool cars and buy neat stuff (the guys in these movies and shows tend to live in pads that have basketball hoops, pinball machines, sports posters, and other teenage trappings writ larger and more expensively), even if they are married and have kids.  I have heard the term "family man" spoken on these shows often with derision, rather than respect.  The prototypical sitcom husband and father of 2011 is not Ward Cleaver, but Homer Simpson.

5.  Not only does our culture not reinforce marriage, there is much in our society that seems actively dedicated to destroying it.  The media portray adultery, if not with approval, then at least in many cases without strong condemnation.  Many parts of our society wink at affairs (a trait once seen only in the very rich).  The gals in Sex and the City (I am told) bounced into and out of the beds of the married and single alike. In fact, there is even a well-financed, widely advertised dating service the explicit purpose of which is to help people tie up for extramarital sex.  No, I won't post the link or give their name here, but their motto is "Life is short.  Have an affair."  The company web site boasts offers an "affair guarantee" and touts the company as "the most recognized name in infidility . . . . We are the most recognized and reputable extramarital affair company. . . . We are the most successful website for finding cheating partners."  The website says the company has over nine million clients.  Makes me want to barf.  No, my sexual conduct has not always been the most praiseworthy (although, in all of my three marriages, I never cheated on a spouse), but the idea of a company actually being in the business of facilitating a kind of conduct that is not only illegal in many states, but that is also enormously destructive emotionally, socially, and economically just plain blows my mind.  The difference between that company and a dealer in illegal drugs is one only of degree.

In America of the Twenty-first Century, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that marriage is under attack on many fronts.  If you want your marriage to endure, you must defend it.  Our book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers, puts in your hands some very simple, robust, and powerful weapons for doing so.

Overall, we need to recognize that, these days, the seed of marriage does not fall on the fertile soil that was there to receive it a generation or two ago.  That does not mean, however, that the seed is destined to die.  Rather, it means that, if the seed is to grow, WE must nurture and water and fertilize it ourselves.  Now, more than ever, each marriage stands on its own, to flourish or perish based on the individual efforts of its members. If you are married, you must remember that society will not sustain your marriage, popular culture will not sustain your marriage, government will not sustain your marriage.  If marriage in America is going to be saved, it will be saved one couple at a time.  As with so many other things in our society, we need to build from the bottom up.  The strength of the building comes from the foundation in the ground, not the satellite antenna on the roof.  Saving your marriage is up to you.

Working with Your Divorce/Custody Attorney: Part Two

As my earlier post on this subject is one of the most widely read in the history of this blog, and as there is a lot more to say on this subject, I thought a few more pointers on how to work effectively with your attorney in your divorce or custody matter might be in order:

1.  Be HONEST with the attorney.  Surprises are bad.  Very bad.  I remember one custody case in which the father of the child showed up at the custody trial with his nose the size of Montana and the color of Barney the Dinosaur.  It turned out that, four days before the trial, my client (the mother) had slugged Dad WHILE HE WAS HOLDING THEIR BABY, knocking him flat on his back.  Luckily, an aunt caught the baby while dad was going down.  My client had not bothered to tell me this in advance.  In fact, I learned of the event only during the father's testimony on direct examination from her attorney.  The look of horror on the judge's face on hearing about these events was priceless (even as it made my heart sink).  Needless to say, my client had her head handed to her.  Had I known of this event in advance, I would at least have been prepared for it and might have moved for a continuance or done something else to lessen the impact.  As it was, I was caught with my guard completely down and could do nothing except try to keep my face from conveying to the judge the surprise and shock I felt.  You can tell your attorney anything that relates to your case:  it will remain a secret that the attorney will take to the grave, and the attorney will not judge/condemn/or work less hard for you because you have told the truth.  Those are the obligations of our profession.  It is far better to endure the embarrassment of telling damaging facts to your attorney in the privacy of the office than to have them come out as a surprise in an open courtroom.

2.  Remember that "no contact" means "no contact."  If there is a protective order or injunctive decree that tells you to have "no contact" with the opposing party in the case, the court means what it says.  No letters.  No emails.  No phone calls.  No St. Crispin's day cards.  Nothing.  I just had a client arrested and booked for sending his soon to be ex spouse a non-threatening letter about some basic family business.  He had to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, surrender his firearm, and pay a fairly hefty fine.  Now he has a criminal record.  If you have doubts about whether you can send a particular communication, ask your attorney.  These issues can also work against you in your case, particularly if it is a custody matter.  When the judge determines which parent the child will live with, part of that decision hinges on which parent the judge believes will do the best job of FOLLOWING THE COURT'S ORDERS.  If you get convicted for violating a court's no contact order, it should be no surprise to learn that this fact will work against you.

3.  Understand that litigation takes a long time.  If your case is going to court, don't expect it all to be wrapped up in a month, or two, or even six or seven.  It is not unusual for a contested domestic relations case to take more than a year from Petition to Decree, even if all the attorneys and parties are doing their jobs diligently.  Between the procedural delays imposed by the court rules, and the congested dockets of many courts, it just plain takes that long.

4.  Comply promptly with all requests for information.  If your lawyer asks for a particular document or some piece of information, it is because he or she needs it to do what he or she is doing.  Every day you delay responding to the request delays your case.  It is not unusual for a client to take two weeks to get me the information I request, and then email me the next week berating me for how "everything is taking so long."

5.  Recognize that the Court is there to decide the case, not provide you with emotional vindication.  Courts exist to resolve disputes.  In a domestic relations case, the Court's job is to grant the divorce, divide the property and the debt, determine who gets alimony and how much, decide the custody issues, set up a visitation schedule, and award child support.  It is not the job of the court to punish your ex for being a drunken, verbally abusive, lazy, slovenly lout who ignored your emotional needs.  Alimony and child support are awarded based on need, not as damages for being married to a jerk.  Property and debt are generally divided in more or less equal fashion between the spouses, not based on which spouse was nice and which was naughty.  Maybe it used to be that way, but it is not any more.  Yes, if one spouse actively stole community assets, gambled away thousands of dollars, or spent huge sums on illegal drugs or to stay drunk all the time, there ARE often remedies to the "victim spouse" in terms of property distribution, but this does not happen very often.  Most often, the property and debt are split down the middle, even of one spouse directly caused the divorce by having a notorious sexual affair.  Sorry.  Courts do not rule based on which side is morally superior; they decide cases based on the facts and law.

Web Page Issues

Those of you who browse with Safari or Chrome, or who browse from mobile devices, might have not been able to see most of the text on the web page we created for our book How to Save Your Marriage From 12 Top Marriage Killers. By the time you read this post, the problem should be corrected.  We apologize for any confusion, consternation, conflusteration, or any other negative "con" word that might come to mind.

The site is http://www.honsingerbooks.com/, and is pretty basic now.  More content and features are on their way.

The Book Has a New Web Site

We have just put up a web site for our book How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers (by "we" I mean "Kathy" who, in addition to being a brilliant writer is a talented web designer) which can be found at www.honsingerbooks.com.  There is not much there at present, but we will be beefing it up over the next several days to contain more information about the book, news about events relating to its promotion and availability, and additional tips on saving your marriage, and related information.  There is also an email link for readers to communicate with us (honsingerbooks@gmail.com).

Talk to Us. Please.

Kathy and I wrote the book, How to Save Your Marriage From 12 Top Marriage Killers based on our experience with the real-world couples who have come in our office as part of our family-law practice.  Now that we have published a book that is apparently being widely sold and read, we are very interested in hearing about people's experiences with the book.

If you are a reader of our book (which we are starting to call "The Little Blue Marriage Book") we want to hear from you.  Please tell us, not only whether you found the book readable and enjoyable, but--more importantly--how things worked out for you when you put the book into practice.

This input matters to us.  A lot.  For lots of reasons.  Here are the most important:

1.  We plan future editions.  We want to refine the advice contained in the book based on the experience of real couples.

2.  We plan future books.  We want to base those books on a broader foundation, including what we hear from couples out there trying to work on their marriages.

So, we would like to hear from you.  You can either post a comment on this site, or email us at honsingerbooks@gmail.com.

 

Back in Stock!!!

Our book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers, is now back in stock at even more bookstores, including Books a Million, Powells, and Better World Books, not to mention Barnes & Noble as pointed out in an earlier post.  Let's hope that these folks ordered more copies this time so that they won't sell out as fast.

If you want to order the book directly, please see my earlier post about purchasing it with a discount code at Createspace.com.  You can get it there for $10.00 plus postage.

The Old Stew Meat Just Ain't What It Used to Be

I am the family chef, and have been cooking since I was a teenager.  This is not unusual given my background, as my mother is Cajun and I grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  Many, if not most, Cajun men cook.  In fact, it is a widely-held belief in South Louisiana that you aren't a "real man" unless you can produce a reasonable variety of delicious meals out of a big black cast iron pot.

Some things about cooking are eternal--like how a big black cast iron pot does something magical to stews and gumbos and other meat dishes.  Other things are not, like the meat you get from the grocery store.  The meat you buy now is just different from the meat I learned to cook with.  Take, for example, beef.  When I make stew, I usually don't buy "stew meat" as it is overpriced.  I shop for sirloin or round steak on sale, and then cut it into one inch cubes, just like my mother did (and probably still does--she is in her early 70's and still cooks).  Back in days of yore, I would throw that meat in a hot cast iron pot with a few tablespoons of oil, quickly brown the meat, then brown the onions with the browned meat, then add water, potatoes, carrots, garlic, and seasonings, then simmer, and it would be stew in about an hour and twenty minutes.

NOW, I buy the same cuts of meat, cut them the same way, throw them in the same kind of pot with the same amount of oil, and the meat generates about a cup and a half of brownish liquid that I have to boil away before the meat will really brown (instead of just turning a sickly gray).  I really don't want to know what this stuff is or where it comes from.  I just know that I wish it weren't there so I could get about my business and brown my beef.  It adds about fifteen minutes to the process of cooking stew.  If there were a farmer's market or small butcher shop nearby, I would try buying my meat there, but that is just not an option in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

Chickens are different, too.  When I make chicken and sausage gumbo, the chicken tends to fall apart sooner into lots of mushy, stringy bits instead of cohering as recognizable pieces.  When I can find them, I try to make my gumbo with stewing hens, which have more flavorful meat and pieces that hold together longer, but I have a hard time finding these where I live, as well.  Either the chickens are being bred to be tenderer, or they are being shot full of stuff that has changed the way the meat cooks.

On the other hand, there are lots of good things about the modern food world:  the higher quality, variety, and flavorfulness of frozen foods, the wider variety of produce, the larger and better organized stores . . . change and progress are not all bad.  I just hate that murky brown water at the bottom of my pot when I am browning my stew meat.

Waaaah, waaaaaah.  Life is still good, but I wish that, like when I was a kid, I had relatives in the cattle business from whom I could buy beef I knew didn't have funny stuff done to it.

Buy "How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers" Direct from Createspace at Deep Discount

It has come to our attention that some booksellers are managing to sell our new book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers for vastly in excess of list price.  In fact, it seems that one guy recently got about $30.00 for a copy.  If you read this blog and want a copy of the book, we don't think you should have to pay list price, much less thirty bucks.

Accordingly, readers may purchase the book directly for $10.00 plus shipping by going to this page:
https://www.createspace.com/3572687

On the shopping cart page, there is a blank at the bottom of the page that is labelled "If you have a discount code enter it here."  Enter the following code into the blank to receive your discount:  DLTWEULT. This is our preferred purchase channel, by the way, because the authors (my wife, Kathleen, and myself) receive somewhat higher royalties from these purchases than from those sold by Amazon or in bookstores.

Our "How to Save Your Marriage" Book Back In Stock at Barnes & Noble and Elsewhere

Our new book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers has recently been in stock with several major booksellers in addition to Amazon.com, but sold out quickly.  Apparently, the savvy folks with at least some of those entities have re-ordered the book (we hope, in greater quantities than before) and now have it back in stock.  So, once again, you can order the book from Barnes & Noble for $10.79 plus shipping.  Just go to www.barnesandnoble.com and enter "honsinger" in the search box.  Our book is the first search result.

Get them while they're hot!

Of course, if your favorite seller is out, the book can always be obtained from Amazon.com, as it is a "print on demand" book.  If you order it, they will print it for you and have it in your hands in a few days, even if other sellers happen to be out at the time.