I Do

I Do

A play showing at the Ameida Theatre on the events in hotel just before a wedding

There was a nice little article in the Evening Standard on it yesterday (18th July 2013) by Louise Jury

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The panic and passions of the final 10 minutes before a couple get married are captured in a new play that takes place in six rooms of a real London hotel.

Audiences for the work, entitled I Do, will be divided into six groups to embark on different journeys through the 65-minute family saga of the bride and groom and family members aged from nine to their seventies.

They will discover the best man practising his speech, the bridesmaids squeezing the bride into her dress, and the parents seeing each other for the first time in years.

Director Daphna Attias said the play would explore what it means to be married in Britain today and why people still do it — while being “lots of fun for the audience” as they piece together the characters’ stories.

“All members of the audience will go through the same situations but I think obviously the opening and the ending have a big impact on how you experience the piece. It will be really intimate. The audience are like flies on the wall.”

Juliet Bravo star Anna Carteret, 70, who plays a grandmother struggling to get her disabled husband dressed for the ceremony, said: “The audience gets to look into the private lives of each of the characters.

“It’s like being in on something secret, that is what is so dramatic about it. And you feel very exposed doing it in rooms with the audience a foot away from you.”

The show was devised by Dante or Die theatre company run by Attias with Terry O’Donovan, who plays the groom, with a script written by Chloe Moss.

Six performances will run from August 1 to 3 at the Hilton Islington as part of the annual festival organised by the Almeida Theatre.

Will try and see if I can get tickets…

Bringing home the filet mignon

What happens when the wife is earning more than the husband?

Is it really a problem?

Is it a problem for the wife or the husband?

Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica (both University of Chicago) and Jessica Pan (National University of Singapore) present a study looking at the social norm that “a man should earn more that his wife”.

The abstract from the paper Gender identity and relative income within households is shown below:

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households.

We establish that gender identity – in particular,

an aversion to the wife earning more than the husband – impacts

marriage formation,

the wife’s labor force participation,

the wife’s income conditional on working,

marriage satisfaction,

likelihood of divorce, and

the division of home production.

The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his.

Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline.

Within couples, if the wife’s potential income (based on her demographics) is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work.

Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce.

Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband.

Not great news…

The paper talks about ‘compensatory behaviours’ that women engage in, in order to reduce the threat raised by their higher income.

Compensatory behaviours!

Men it seems are strange creatures!

More food for thought

The Darling Buds of May

Another school classic

Sonnet 18

William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Come live with me and be my love

Another lovely poem from my school days.

The Passionate Shepherd to his Love

C Marlowe

COME live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair linèd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy buds
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love.

Thy silver dishes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat,
Shall on an ivory table be
Prepared each day for thee and me.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.

Love

I love this and have not forgotten it.

 

First learnt it during GCSE English literature classes

 

 

 

 

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats

The Long Haul

Sheri and Bob Stritof married in 1963 have been presenting at workshops on marriage for over 40 years.

In talking with couples who have been married for many years, these aspects of marriage (not listed in any type of priority) are listed as necessary for a long lasting marriage.

•Continue to build intimacy — both sexually and emotionally — throughout your marriage.

•Create passion for life and for one another.

•Forgive one another. Don’t hang on to past baggage and past hurts. Be willing to let go and to move forward with your lives.

•Continue to be committed to each other and celebrate your sense of commitment.

•Like one another and be friends with each other.

•Be open to compromise.

•Have fun together, laugh together, and use humor in healthy ways.

•Comfort, encourage, and affirm one another.

•Be able to stand on your own feet as a couple and not be dependent either financially or emotionally on either of your parents.

•Respect one another’s need for privacy and space.

•Parent together.

•Deal with a crisis and adversity together.

•Fight fair.

•Accept your differences and don’t try to change your spouse.

•Keep romance alive in your marriage.

More food for thought!

Are married people happier?

So I am wondering if my intense desire to be married is to:

• make me happier? or

• to be happy?

Is there a difference or is it all semantics?

Would I be happy if I was married?

Would I be happier if I was married?

Google being the font of all knowledge,
tells me that the Office of National Statistics

(ONS) completed a survey on Happiness last year. Between April 2011 and March 2012. 165,000 people were asked to rate their life in four areas:

• Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?

• Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

• Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?

• Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?

On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘not
at all’ and 10 is ‘completely’.

The following taken from the report

How is relationship status related to personal well-being?

This section focuses on how our closest relationships, those with spouses and partners relate to personal well-being. This analysis uses the data available in the APS to take a basic look at how relationship status in the household relate to personal well-being.

3.4.1 Key Points

Holding other factors equal:

People who are married or in a civil partnership gave higher ratings for ‘life satisfaction’, feelings that the things they do in their lives are ‘worthwhile’, and ’happiness yesterday’ than those in the other relationship categories.

• People who are widowed, divorced, or separated gave lower ratings for ‘life satisfaction’, feelings that the things they do in their lives are ‘worthwhile’, and ’happiness yesterday’ than other groups.

• People who are married or in civil partnerships rate their level of ’anxiety yesterday’ lower than
other groups.

3.4.2 Delving deeply into our relationships

The analysis looked at current relationship status and considered whether being married, cohabiting, divorced, separated, single or widowed is related to personal well-being when other factors are held equal.

Holding other factors equal:

those who are single, widowed, divorced or separated all have lower average ratings for ‘life satisfaction’, ‘worthwhile’ and ‘happy yesterday’ than people who are married or in a civil partnership.

Looking at the scale of the differences in personal well-being associated with these different relationship situations, other things being equal:

Single people rate their ‘life satisfaction’ 0.5 points lower on average than married people or those in a civil partnership.

The ‘life satisfaction’ scores of people who are widowed and living alone is on average 0.7 points lower than that of married people or those in a civil partnership.

People who are divorced or separated and living alone similarly rate their ‘life satisfaction’ 0.6 points lower on average than married people or those in civil partnerships.

The size of the association between relationship status and personal well-being would be considered moderate.

Although people who are cohabiting also give lower ratings on average than married people/civil partners for ‘life satisfaction’, ‘worthwhile’ and ’happy yesterday’, the scale of the difference between their ratings and those of people in a marriage/civil partnership is much smaller than the difference between married people/civil partners and those in all the other relationship status categories.

In terms of anxiety, all the relationship groups considered here report higher ‘anxiety yesterday’ than married people and those in civil partnerships, but size effects were small (on average, around 0.1 to 0.2 points).

These results are consistent with findings from other studies and confirm that relationships are a key ingredient of personal well-being (Dolan et al., 2008). However, it is important to note that factors that are not measured here may also contribute to a person’s relationship status. For example, if people who tend to be happier are also more likely to get married or to enter into a civil partnership,then the differences in personal well-being observed between those who are married or in civil partnership and those who are not may actually be a reflection of underlying personality differences rather than relationship status per se.

Source: Annual Population Survey - Office for National Statistics

Source: Annual Population Survey – Office for National Statistics

Therefore one could assume that married people are:

~ 0.1 points happier than co-habiting couples

~ 0.3 points happier than single people

~ 0.4 points happier than divorced/separated people

~ 0.6 points happier than those who are widowed or surviving civil partner

But what I would like to know is:

What is 0.4 point of happiness?

What was the actual baseline level of happiness on that same scale for each category?

For instance was the average 7 or 2?

There is presumably is a big difference.

How do you measure happiness anyway?

So

food for thought…

maybe I should concentrate on being happy instead…?

The secret of our success

35 years of marriage

 

So I am sitting on the Tube reading the Evening Standard or rather reading over the shoulder of a fellow passenger – reading the Evening Standard– I see Gloria Estefan is about to celebrate 35 years of marriage

The secret of their success:

We do everything together — he’s my face to the rest of the world

We make decisions together and we run a lot of businesses together. It’s a lot different from when we started — we have hotels and restaurants now.

There is no real secret. I wouldn’t recommend this to everyone, but we just happen to have very different personalities that balance each other out. There is a great deal of respect and there is a line that is never crossed. There should be a line of respect with the person you love dearly.

You can always forget but you can’t take things out of a person’s heart and mind. We rarely differ on business, so on the things that count, that can really tear you apart, we’re pretty much on the same page. I never imagined I’d get married that early, if at all, but luckily I found him and I think it was destined

They have been together as long as I have been alive.

 

 

Marriage on the cards…?

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So how do you know when a marriage is not on the cards?

A week into the relationship?

6 months ? One year?

The easiest thing is to talk about it.

From where I am standing marriage is this heavenly place that I am just not qualified or worthy to get into.

From where I am standing marriage is this status that I just cannot achieve .

Marriage appears to be the thing that I want most in the world, that I just cannot have.

Marriage consumes my thoughts night and day.

It appears that all my friends and peers are married and happy.

I sometimes wonder what I really want- to be married per se or to be married to somebody I love and want to spend the rest of my life with.

What is driving this unending obsession?

Society? From where I am standing marriage to me appears to be the pinnacle of respectability and stability. It’s what people do, who are stable and committed. It is not entered into lightly and it is cherished and valued.

Parents? At this stage in my life – rolling towards forty – I am under immense pressure to settle down. There is no conversation that goes by without a mention of me ‘doing the right thing’ before it is too late.

Personal anxiety? A year into a new relationship – I am wondering where it is all going. Marriage has been discussed but no conclusions come to!

I have made up my mind that I would like to be married to this lovely person but I am not sure the feeling is mutual. I am not sure if I am being realistic.

I am not sure I want to call an ultimatum and say ‘MARRIAGE OR ELSE’

I know what the answer will be…

I wonder if I should be patient and wait.

But what I am waiting for?

How long do I wait?

Why should I be subject to somebody else’s whims and whats?

Can I be in a long-term relationship with somebody that I love and adore but not be married to them?

Should I leave and look for somebody else – try and fall in love again, get married but always know that it was a second choice.

What would be the point in that? What would I have achieved?

Am I prepared to walk away from something good and be single because I cannot be married?

Is being single that bad?

I am meant to be a bold 21st century woman, who is able to ask for what she wants and moves on if it does not happen.

So I wonder why it is that I am writing about wanting to be married instead of planning a wedding and setting the foundation for a lifelong marriage?

If I cannot have that conversation with the person I am in a relationship with – perhaps I am not mature enough to be in a relationship called marriage?