Baby Blues....Marriage Blues?

Although I am in the Marriage and Family Studies major, I have struggled with the idea of what I will eventually do will my degree. People usually ask after learning of my major, "Oh! What are you going to do with that?" The honest answer is. "I really don't know." But as I've been prompted to take certain classes within this field, I've come to realize that I do have a direction and a purpose here. It is within my own family. I might not ever be able to finish my bachelors degree or it might take me 15 years, a little at a time, as we begin our family together and bring children into our home. Even if I never get to finish, I will be so grateful I have taken classes pertaining to family. My family has already been blessed as I have applied the principles I've learned throughout this and past semesters and I am excited to apply things I've learned for future situations.

Tomorrows class is dealing with marital satisfaction and the birth of children. Studies have shown that there is a significant drop in marital satisfaction with the birth of the 1st child. This trend continues on through the 2nd, 3rd, 4th...etc. children and then something happens as the children leave the home. Marital satisfaction increases, one by one, as children leave for college or other interests. In general, this is what studies have shown to the common American marriage.

Just KNOWING this helps me to be aware of the kinds of things to expect. I will know, in the future, if I begin to notice a decrease of satisfaction in my marriage, that there are things I can do to increase it. For instance, remembering to focus on my husbands needs, and not just the child's, will help me show love and acknowledgment within my marriage. Being positive, happy and focusing on trying to be verbal about the things my husband and I AGREE on instead of DISAGREE on will help us to enjoy each others company. Also, my teacher mentioned involving your husband in a creative way. Such as, during pregnancy, explaining to your husband what it feels like when the baby kicks and sharing those moments along the way so they feel part of the whole experience with you.

These are just a few things you can do to increase the satisfaction within your marriage as you begin to bring children into the home. Help it be an enjoyable one! If your constantly "down in the dumps", complaining, and nagging, of course it won't be a fun experience. As you focus on the need's of your spouse, you will begin to see how life gets easier.

This week in class I learned some interesting statistics comparing couples in marriage and cohabitation. Couples who cohabit (living together not married) are more likely to separate, have less satisfaction with physical intimacy, have higher rates of violence within the relationship, poorer health, higher levels of depression, higher affair rates, spend more money on alcohol and tobacco, and spend less money on education. I think people began to be afraid of marriage, since they saw friends and family members going through divorces, and thought cohabiting would fix the problem. The only thing is....it didn't. In fact, from these statistics, its obvious that most married couples are happier than couples who just live together with marriage never a goal. Why is this? There's a much higher level of commitment within a marriage. You promise loyalty to another person when you accept another as your life-long spouse. You promise to be faithful, through thick and thin. If a couple cohabits, with no wedding in sight, there are no strings attached. Either of the two could walk out anytime they just get "tired" of the relationship. Cohabiting couples tend not to share as many resources as married couples do and there is a much lower level of commitment.

"Understanding Same-Sex Attraction"

The information in this post was taken from "Understanding Same-Sex Attraction", the LDS edition. Author: Dean Byrd.

Gender and gender roles is a controversial subject currently in our country. There are a wide spectrum of opinions. "Opinion" is the key word here. I would like to discuss social science and well-done research. I was presented with social science research this past week that helped me understand the need to be understanding of same-sex attraction individuals. Not only this but that there is no proof that homosexuals are "born that way", although falsely suggested in the media. Much of the scientific research done about same-sex attraction and the brain, was taken by people, skewed, and misrepresented. For example, LeVay's Brain Research. This is one of the most well-known research between homosexual and heterosexual men's brains. It is thought that through this research, a biological identification was made about homosexuals. It is known that through this research, we have proved that homosexuals are simply, "born that way." This is what the researcher has to say about his findings. I might add that LeVay, along with two other researchers involved in this work, are homosexual. (50% of this research is conducted by scientists who are homosexual.) LeVay has said:

"It is important to stress what I didn’t find. I did not prove that homosexuality was genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn’t show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain." (D. Nimmons, “Sex and the Brain,” Discover, March 1994, 64–71.)

The media has taken false conclusions from his study and presented the idea that homosexuals are "born that way". There has been no study that has proven this.

The Identical Twin Studies: "J. Michael Bailey and Richard C. Pillard studied identical twins and found a 52 percent concordance rate, which means that for every homosexual twin, the chances were about 50 percent that his twin would also be homosexual...If there was something in the genetic code that made an individual homosexual, why did not all the identical twins become homosexual, since identical twins have the same genetic endowment?" ( J. M. Bailey and R. C. Pillard, “A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation,” Archives of General Psychiatry 48, no. 12 (1991): 1089–96.)

Why is the media pushing so hard that homosexuality is predetermined in our genes?
"Perhaps LeVay has the answer. He noted that “people who think that gays and lesbians are ‘born that way’ are more likely to support gay rights.” (LeVay, Queer Science, 282.)

Lisa Diamond, a lesbian psychologist, noted that “it may well be that for now, the safest way to advocate for lesbian/gay/bisexual rights is to keep propagating a deterministic model: sexual minorities are born that way and can never be otherwise. If this is an easier route to acceptance (which may in fact be the case), is it really so bad that it is inaccurate?”(L. M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 257.)

This is only a snippet of the research that has been proven falsely claimed and a small portion of the sciences regarding homosexuality. But there is such a skewed view of what's "normal" in this world. What we usually see on T.V. and movies is that men, real men, love hunting and fishing. They like "MAN" stuff. They yell at sports games and like to blow things up. Women, on the other hand, always love to cook and sew. They have no interest in mechanics or cars and would rather work on artsy things like crafts. (Which is often times true about either gender.) But the thing that we're missing is that there's a whole RANGE of feminine and masculine qualities and activities. Instead of thinking of a huge barrier between men and women, we should think of it on a line like this:

Masculine <----------------------------------------------> Feminine.


Whether you are male or female. You can lie in this range in different places. For instance, I was the only one out of my sisters that really liked to play sports when I was young. I often chose to play with the guys on the playground instead of the girls. I felt more comfortable around guys than girls, at times. Sometimes, I just liked "guy stuff". Does that change my gender or make me attracted to women? No. That's just how I am. Sometimes boys like to create more than they like to blow up things. Some boys have no interest in guns and sports. In fact, many boys when they are younger like to try on their sister's dresses or play with their mothers makeup. They are more sensitive than their male classmates and love to do crafts and projects. This does not mean that this child is going to grow up to be gay or should be interested in the same gender sexually. This means that the son tends to have more feminine qualities than most males.  Many of these boys turn out to be GREAT husbands because they can empathize and communicate so well with their wives.

So, what about the boys the actually end up having sexual relations with the same sex? Many of the boys that tend to like more feminine activities get distanced by their male age group. They tend to play more with the girls in activities but still long for approval from males. They want relationships, not anything sexual, from other guys! But it's hard because they don't like a lot of the same things and other boys judge them and make fun of them. Sometimes these boys are called "gay" growing up. As my teacher said today in class, "this is not a sexual problem, it's an intimacy problem!" These boys are longing for a simple relationship with people of their same sex. We are social creatures and need social interaction from both genders.

At some point in time the boy made fun of growing up starts to think that there really is something wrong with him like everyone else thinks. He begins to wonder if he is broken and does not fit into either gender group. He places himself in the "third gender" and begins to think "Maybe they ARE right. Maybe I AM gay." There are other factors involved such as molestation (there are much higher cases of molestation in people to report to be homosexual rather than heterosexual) and also a distance from the father in the home. This is another reason why the son tends to long for a male relationship. All of this can be very confusing to a boy. He begins to experiment and when his body responds to the same sex, he thinks it's an assurance that he really is attracted to the same-sex and eventually your sexual orientation can become skewed to preference a certain gender. The good news is that it can be changed back!

Okay, I will step off my soap box. The biggest thing I have come to get from the research I've been presented to this past week is to try to be understanding of everyone. This does not mean I agree with homosexuality but I know we are all children under the same God and we all deserve the same respect and love. If you want to help someone, you need to understand them and understand WHY they are a certain way. Please, Please Please read about this in "Understanding Same-Sex Attraction"(The LDS edition) by Dean Byrd. It's an awesome resource and can help you understand no matter what side of the band wagon you are on! Wow- thanks for reading this far!

Until next week,

Loni

Discussing Family in Culture and Social Class

This week in class we have talked about how social class and culture can affect the family. I started thinking about what type of external experiences affected my family and how my family might have been different in another culture. I came to the conclusion that each person in my family would be different which would influence our whole family unit. For instance, in a show called "People Like Us" ( which you can view on YouTube) Tammy and her family lived in poverty. This "social class" that they are considered in directly affected their relationships with each other. Walking 10 miles to work and back every day, due to lack of funds to buy transportation, took away precious time Tammy could be spending with her children. They lived in a trailer and one of her children refused to invite friends over to their house because he was embarrassed of his families "class". This directly influenced his relationships with friends. Culture, social class, religion: all of these things influence your family relationship and interactions. How might your family be different if you changed these things?