On Saturday evening, I watched the CBS made-for-TV movie, Vinegar Hill. I found myself yelling “Assume Love” at the screen many times. The movie’s based on an Oprah Book Club selection by A. Manette Ansay. It opens with a close-knit and cheery family of four packing up in Chicago to move in with his parents on their farm. Ellen and Jake have lost their jobs, and she’ll be...
The folks at Gallup released a poll on Monday about Values and Beliefs. Topping the list of moral acceptability: divorce. Seventy percent rated it morally acceptable. Only twenty-two percent said it was morally unacceptable. But it would be a mistake, I think, to jump to the conclusion that divorce has become no big deal for most of us. At the opposite end of the spectrum of sixteen morality...
The U.S. and Saudi governments are both rolling out Healthy Marriage initiatives. But what a difference! Here in the U.S., a healthy marriage is defined as a mutually beneficial and satisfying relationship between two people with deep respect for each other and the skills to communicate and handle conflict. The initiative involves supporting and strengthening secular and faith-based marriage...
Sometimes, it seems it must be awfully difficult to keep a marriage going for very long. After all, for every two couples marrying in the U.S. each year, another couple gets divorced. But it’s really not true caring for each other as long as we vow rests on anything as random as a coin toss. Saturday, in London’s Westminster Cathedral, 700 couples married for ten years or more renewed...
Another upside to being married: It’s the rational thing to do. In MIT Professor Dan Ariely’s new book, Predictably Irrational, he shows how irrationally we’ll behave to keep our options open, whether it’s TV surfing, paying extra for features we don’t even know if we have any use for, or pursuing interesting opportunities that distract us from our goals. Professor...
