I'd rather you hadn't - shared it that is.  Not on this list serve
anyway.  Jennie 

-----Original Message-----
From: Social Determinants of Health [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
John Courtneidge
Sent: 14 February 2007 19:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SDOH] Strong marriages and poverty: wrong direction of
cause and effect attributed by Bush administration?

Dear friends

I hope that sharing this doesn't blow any valves

Love

john

----------------------------------------------


*_DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN DIVORCED?_*

*_DID THEY ENJOY IT? WAS IT GOOD FOR THEIR KIDS?_*

*_ _*

*Dr John Courtneidge, (was) 13 North Road, Hertford, England.*

* *

* At the divorce rate of the 1980's, 37% of UK marriages will end in
divorce,

*57% of those divorces will involve children under the age of 16.

(Hertfordshire Family Court Welfare and Conciliation Service, 1994)

These terrible statistics tell us that we are making a mess of keeping
marriages together and of being efficient parents.

And yet most of us start off into adult life having no idea how to do
otherwise!

The problem, I suggest, is that we have no route map for setting out on
our journey from childhood to adulthood.

Back in the nineteen-nineties, my name was added to the pain that these
divorce statistics represent. In the time since, I've thought about why
my marriage went wrong: twenty years, and two children, after I started
out on my particular journey, I've come up with a new view on why
marriages fail and written a book 'Adult Life: How To Do It'.

I'd like to share with you what I've discovered.

In their book 'Families and How To Survive Them' John Cleese and Robin
Skynner tell us about the stages through which children have to pass in
order to become adults.

Their book takes us to the point where young adults are about to leap
off and form relationships of their own, in mine, I try to step forward
to discover how those new relationships can grow: and why, perhaps, so
many fail.

As John Cleese and Robin Skynner say, seriously dysfunctional families,
where violence, abuse, drink, drugs and so on are involved, produce
deeply unhappy and damaged people. But, so often, such causes as these
are not so obvious.

What, then, is the factor that causes all the other marriages to go
wrong?

Why do so many of us go through this torment?

At first sight, you might think that the reasons would be as varied as
the marriages themselves, but the universe does run on patterns and
there _are_ simple laws that govern events.

So I wondered:

'Is there one factor that we should think about?'

Surprisingly, I think that there is a simple factor that points the way
to successful, sustainable, and nourishing relationships, and, as a
preview to my book, I've summarised this key factor here.

Although you might have already rushed ahead to the diagrams to find out
what that one factor is, I'll give you a little explanation first.

If you think about every living creature, the one activity they all put
above all others is the task of creating the next generation.

Thinking about this need to reproduce, it seems to me that there are two
strategies which are used to achieve this goal.

The first strategy, which I'll call this the "scattergun approach" 
involves producing hundreds, if not thousands, of offspring.

This abundance of offspring are cast off into the world to survive as
best they can. As long as some survive, the species survives - this is
the strategy used by simple organisms - insects, fish, plants and so on.

The other method I call the "selective, protective" approach.

This alternative, but, perhaps riskier, strategy is used by mammals: 
they produce a small number of offspring and then guard them against all
comers, until the time that the offspring themselves become viable
adults.

Now, this latter approach is the one available to women: most women have
about ten to fifteen "chances" of producing viable adult offspring in
their fertile lifetimes, and so it's no wonder that they are so
protective of their own children.

Men, on the other hand, could opt for either approach: stay close and
guard their children against all comers or - perhaps? every sixteen-year
old boy's dream? - to use the scattergun approach, and blast away at
every female in sight (OK girls, I know the joke: the scattergun
approach is the one on which simple organisms rely!)

Do you see the paradox? Men have a choice of strategies; women don't.

So: how is this paradox resolved? What encourages men to opt for the
"selective. protective" strategy?

I'm suggesting that the answer lies in the marriage contract and the
invention of adult love.

If you look at the words and the intention of a marriage service, the
deal that gets struck goes something like this.

The woman in effect says to the man "If you are prepared to stay with
me, guard, protect, and help to bring up my children, I'll compensate
you in, the loss of being free to go out and blast away at every new
woman that you see. I'll care for you, make a comfortable home for you
and have sex pretty well whenever you want."

However, this creates a problem: sex with the same person is perhaps
great the first time, perhaps the second, but for twenty, thirty, forty,
fifty years? How can any thrill be kept alive for such a time?

I think that the solution is the creation of adult love.

Plenty of songs try to define what adult love is. In my book, I simply
say that, for each of us, the adult that we love is best defined as the
person with who, given all options, is the one with who we'd most like
to spend our intimate time with.

Now, with that background, let's return to a consideration of the very
start of the new relationship.

It seems that, at the outset, the woman gives herself wholeheartedly to
the man, and the man takes all that is being given. In other words, at
the outset, there is a major inequality between what the one is giving
and the other is taking, and, therefore, we are here at that _one,
single parameter_ which we need to consider in deciding whether that
relationship will develop over the long term, or whether, quickly or
slowly, it will break up:

That parameter is selfishness.

If you look at the first diagram, you'll see that I've put the man in a
more selfish state than the woman at the outset of the relationship. 
That fits with what I've said before, and any walk through a shopping
mall, watching teenagers making up to one-another, will show all the
signs that this is so.

However, this imbalance cannot sustain: as time develops, the woman's
selfishness has to increase and the man's has to reduce, until the
optimal balance is reached.

Indeed, it has to, if she is to survive: to be the long-term victim of
such imbalance would be bad enough, but, if children are born in the
early stages of the relationship, the woman's protective instincts will
inevitably make her more and more selfish as she demands the payoff from
the man.


So, then, why is it that so many adult relationships break down?

Why is our divorce rate so high?

Looking at the 'good' diagram, I think that there are only three
diagrams that show how and why things go wrong.

In the worst case, shown in the second diagram, if the, necessary,
increasing selfishness of the woman is not matched by a decreasing
selfishness by the man, we will eventually find two selfish people
trying to survive living together and, barring enforcement by outsiders,
this intolerable situation will blow up and separation will ensue: two
selfish people together will quickly fly apart.

Pure selfishness is .a recipe for a separation if ever there was one.


So, thinking back to the 'good' diagram, if this selfishness is to be
avoided, the man has got to decrease his selfishness and the woman
increase hers.

However, and this is the supreme subtlety of sustainable relationships,
work also has to be put in to avoid things slipping into the, equally
unsupportable, position shown in the third diagram, where the two 'cross
in the night'. The second key is that the woman has got to positively
moderate her increasing selfishness and pay attention to her part of the
deal: both have to avoid the crossover shown in the third diagram, while
the man has to actively pull out of a complete surrender of his
selfishness: to become, rather, self-assertive.


_So: it is only when both parties to the deal find the optimum balance
of selfishness and selflessness, where both are self-assertive, that a
long term, sustainable relationship can be formed_.

Without this discovery of mutual self-assertiveness, our search for
long-term mutually nourishing relationships, damaged children and a
damaged society will result, and, moreover, the problems caused will be
handed on from generation to generation.

It is only in this dynamic balance of selfishness and selflessness that
our relationships can develop, with each partner asking for what they
want, giving what they can and declining to give whatever they cannot
do.

Incidentally, this key factor is also the recipe for great, long term
sex: just imagine how awful the sex between the people involved in both
the second and the fourth (and final) diagram must be!


Life for this pair must be colourless beyond words:

All that "After you. No, after you, No, no, after you.....".

Yuk!

So, finally, why bother with all this stuff?

Firstly, divorce is no fun: believe me.

Subconsciously, good relationships start off towards the optimum balance
It is, however, all too easy at the pressure time in our lives ( at 'the
times for trying / the trying times' as children are born, as career
pressures and financial worries increase and even as the demands of our
own ageing parents press in) that even the partners in these initially
good relationships pass one another and grow apart.

Secondly, we will only be good parents and produce happy adults if we do
the job properly. These diagrams show us the one, single parameter that
we need to consider for success.

It is at the fully, mutually, assertive selfishness / selflessness
balance that relationally sustainable life results: the first diagram is
the route map to happy adult relationships.

Dr John Courtneidge

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Lily Kay wrote:

> Marriage is tougher when it's 'for poorer'
> By ROBYN BLUMNER
> Published January 28, 2007
> St. Petersburg Times
>
> http://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/28/News/Marriage_is_tougher_w.shtml
>
> posted by Lily Kay
> University of South Florida
> Instructor/Clinical Assistant Professor Colleges of Nursing and 
> Medicine PhD student Department of Applied Anthropology
>
>
>
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