Love Lost and Found

The following is excerpted from a beautiful article appearing in the Wall Street Journal last week:

In the late winter of 1999, Amy and I filed for divorce.

As is obvious, we never followed through on the paperwork. This weekend, in fact, we are celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary. And based on how close we've grown in the past seven years, I have no doubt we'll be together for the duration.

A near-divorce will do that to you: make you recalibrate your life and work in a
way that allows you to see what really matters with a renewed passion. But we did separate for a while, and it's in that separation -- that near-divorce -- that the moral of today's story rests.

And here's the punch line: Love never dies; it just gets lost behind life's debris, including the money and the career, that we pack in front of it.

See the full article here.

Happiness = Marriage + Money

So says an article posted yesterday on WebMD. According to a recent Gallup poll, 64% of married people say they are very satisfied with their personal lives; only 43% of single people felt the same way. Money helps, too--a large majority of those with high incomes reported being very happy with their personal lives. Safe to say that good marriage and good money will lead to happiness. It's an interesting article, and WebMD is a great resource. But they did leave one thing out: good marriage leads to good money.

Married life lie of the day

"Majority of women would reconsider their spouses" screams a news release put forth today from Woman's Day magazine and AOL.com. Their joint survey of more than 3,000 women found 36% would not remarry their husbands if they had it to do over again, and another 20% weren't sure.

Don't take it too seriously.

The survey was a voluntary, online poll, which means it hardly represents a cross-section of American wives. Those who are discontent with their married lives would likely take more interest in the poll --and be far more likely to respond to it -- than those who are content.

When surveys like this have been done using accurate scientific methods, including a random, representative sample, results are consistent: An overwhelming majority of both husbands and wives would remarry their spouses if they had the chance to do it all again.

All this leads to a question: Why are Woman's Day and AOL so eager to portray wives as miserable? I don't have a good answer for that. If you do, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Holding husband's hand has medicinal effect

A good marriage will help you calm down when stressed -- just by holding your husband's hand. That's the news in a recent study of married women published in Psychological Science, and highlighted in today's Portland Press Herald. They sum it up nicely:

"Holding any hand reduced the women's stress, but holding their husband's hand had a greater calming effect. Further, the effect varied as a function of how happy the women were with their marriage[s]."

We've known for a long time that touch has a soothing effect, and touch between two people who love and support each other appears to be even stronger. So, when you snuggle up to keep warm over these January nights, you've got science on your side.