Couples Who Pray Together, Stay Together
ANI, Aug 14, 2010
Couples who share religious practices tend to be happier than those who don’t, according to a new study. True to the aphorism, couples who pray together stay together, said study co-author W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and "African American couples are more likely to have a shared spiritual identity as a couple." In the study, researchers found that 40 per cent of blacks in marriages and live-in relationships who attended religious services regularly had a partner who did the same, compared with 29 per cent of non-Hispanic whites and 29 per cent of Hispanics. White couples, in general, reported greater relationship satisfaction than other groups, presumably because of income and educational advantages, the study says. But the racial gap lessens when religious similarities come into the mix. "What this study suggests is that religion is one of the key factors narrowing the racial divide in relationship quality in the United States," the Washington Post quoted Wilcox as saying. The strongest difference-maker for couples was spiritual activities such as praying or reading the Bible at home. "Praying together as a couple is something that is very intimate for people who are religious. It adds another level of closeness to a relationship," Wilcox said. The study appears in this month’s issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family. Women Should Do All the Housework to Avoid Divorce, Study Suggests
by Anna Klenke, October 3, 2012
A recent Norwegian study found that the divorce rates for couples who share housework are fifty percent higher than for couples in which the wife assumes the sole responsibility for household chores — and implicitly suggests that couples who share housework value marriage less, or that women nagging their partners about helping out around the house may lead to divorce. So much for equality between the sexes. “The more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study (news.com). The researchers did not find a cause-and-effect relationship between the man’s duties at home, but rather chalk the higher divorce rate up to modern attitudes. “Modern couples are just that, both in the way they divide up the chores and in their perception of marriage.” Maybe couples who share housework just don’t find marriage to be as sacred as more “traditional” couples do. So if you share housework, you aren’t as committed to your marriage? A step backwards The way this study has been presented is a huge step back in the quest for gender equality. Hansen seems to suggest that it is beneficial for women to do the majority of housework, to avoid nagging their partners and causing stress in the relationship. “There could be less quarrels,” he said, “since you can easily get into squabbles if both have the same roles and one has the feeling that the other is not pulling his or her own weight.” Maybe so, but Hansen seems to suggest that women should just bear down and take care of all the housework. Why not encourage men to take over the household duties? In June 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that all women (even those with full time jobs) spend more time on household duties than men, about 2.6 hours per day compared to 2.1 hours. Women still do the vast majority of daily cooking and cleaning, as well as childcare, while men spend more time on yard work and home maintenance projects. Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/women-should-do-all-the-housework-to-avoid-divorce-study-suggests.html#ixzz29pD5Ie9l |