Sunday, February 14, 2010
News, In this Issue...

Put away the valentine and save your marriage

An economic downturn is the perfect time to fix a troubled union

“It gives me a nice feeling,” Atlanta marriage counselor Rhoda Margolis says of love notes from her husband of 45 years, Stephen.
Courtesy the Margolises

By Diane Loupe
 
After Valentine’s Day, it’s not unusual to find some wives and hubbies hammered by regret over the gifts they gave (or didn’t), or nursing bitterness over what they received (or didn’t). 
 
With an estimated half of all first marriages ending in divorce, marriage counselors say we’d do better spending our time and energy on improving our marriages instead of crying over the Godiva. For couples in solid marriages, Valentine’s Day is strictly amateur night. But even a good marriage may need the services of a therapist to work out problems ranging from something as inflammatory as infidelity to something as seemingly innocent as failing to unload the dishwasher.
 
Oddly enough, the moribund economy seems to be good for marriages, and bad for divorce attorneys. “Things have gotten very slow,” says divorce attorney Mary Beth Hebert. “People are too afraid of the economy and too broke to get divorced.”
 
Trapped as troubled couples may feel, right now might be the perfect time to make their marriages better.

“The popular belief is that if marriage is not making you gloriously happy around the clock all the time, you’ve married the wrong person,” scoffs Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman. “There are times when you hate one another. And there are times when you are totally dependant on one another.”

Pittman has been married almost 50 years. With his wife Betsy working by his side, he’s written an armload of self-help books about marriage and relationships, including “Private Lies: Infidelity and Betrayal of Intimacy,” “Grow Up!: How Taking Responsibility Can Make You a Happy Adult,” and “Turning Points: Treating Families in Transition and Crisis.”

Rhoda Margolis, a licensed clinical social worker and director of clinical services at Jewish Family and Career Services, takes a similar approach, acknowledging that too many couples begin marriage unprepared for the change and compromise necessary.

 “People invest a great deal of time and money in the wedding without thinking about the marriage that comes after it,” says Margolis. “They think nothing is going to have to change.”

Couples may get into arguments fighting “for the rightness of a position,” rather than trying to build a relationship, she says. Sometimes, when a wife is complaining about a husband’s annoying habit, Margolis will ask: “Is that really an issue, or are you struggling with the fact that you can’t control him?”
 
When couples are drawn apart, Margolis tries to get them to examine “what brought them together, their common goals.”
 
Four signs of a troubled marriage include criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling and contempt, says Michael L. Chafin, executive director of the Georgia Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (GAMFT). In fact, if a couple doesn’t have a ratio of at least five positive comments to each negative one, he says, “the marriage is not in good shape. The best marriages have a 20 to 1 ratio.”
 
Margolis finds that some partners, when a marriage breaks up, “don’t look at their own issues, what they brought to the marriage.” Many times, she predicts they will “marry the same person all over again”—meaning they will marry someone with the same problems or issues the first partner had.
 
“I say to a couple, you might as well work it out with him or her, or you’ll go through all that trouble and despair with another partner,” Margolis says. Second marriages, she says, don’t have a high rate of success.
 
While some troubles are the same in any era—things like finances, infidelity, and alcoholism—Chafin says he’s seen a new development in marital problems: Sex addiction and pornography are becoming more common issues in floundering marriages. When a relationship is suffering, he says, some people look for intimacy online. Chat rooms can lead to affairs, or to people who “look for sex in pictures and just get addicted to it. It’s a pretty serious problem.”

About 70 percent of couples who commit to marital counseling or therapy will improve, says Chafin, who is now seeing more clients coming to him for marriage counseling than for depression, formerly the issue he saw most often.

INFIDELITY

Even outright infidelity need not be fatal to a marriage, says Pittman.

“I rarely, if ever, see a divorce in an established first marriage without somebody screwing around,” says Pittman. Often, the marriage is most undermined not by the infidelity itself, but the massive deception involved.

“Infidelity may come about because of the emotion of the moment,” he says. “Lying requires constant distance, hiding things from one another. In many ways it’s worse: It’s planned, it’s intentional, and it’s a way of putting distance in the marriage.”

Marriages can weather infidelity, Pittman says, but it requires the couple to talk about their issues. “And that doesn’t mean one person sitting down and being lectured for hours,” he
warns.

If sex is the problem, Margolis reassures couples, it’s a common one.

“Sexual desire is very individual, not in reaction to the other person,” says Margolis. “That’s about communication, recognizing that desire is not going to be equal, and having a way to work through those things.”
 
Another common source of conflict in marriages is household chores. This sort of fighting tends to cover up other issues of respect, compromise and communication, says Margolis.

She adds that domestic violence is an issue that requires immediate action: If someone is hitting you, you should seek help and get out.

Pittman suggests that working on one’s marriage is important for future generations. Children of divorced parents have “a terrible time with marriage,” he says, because they didn’t grow up “seeing people uncover problems, talking about problems, solving the problems and getting on with it.”

Children aren’t as affected by “not having a lot of stuff” as they are by their parents’ moods, Margolis says. Parents who are going through economic problems but remain connected to a house of worship, school, and civic organizations tend to maintain strong families, she says.
Popular culture hasn’t served up many examples of happy marriages, but one shining example, says Pittman, is the Obamas.

“I love their ability to beam at one another as they walk to the mic,” says Pittman. “I love watching them; I love watching how proud he is of her.”
 
That can't be easy, since marriage necessitates that people give up narcissistic tendencies.
 
“Marriage requires that we consider the other person, that we be grownups,” says Pittman, “that we be concerned with how we’re making other people feel, rather than, we’re furious, we feel cheated if our spouse is thinking of something other than our happiness.”
 
Couples need to go on a date or a vacation, or set aside some time to be together, to “treat one another the way they might treat somebody they’re not married to,” says Margolis.
 
After 45 years of marriage, Margolis still gets little love notes from her husband, simple sticky notes saying “I heart you.”

“I put it in my pocket,” she says. “It gives me a nice feeling.” 
  
One of Margolis’ most treasured memories is that of a woman who came up to her and whispered: “You don’t remember me, but my husband and I came to you 20 years ago for marital counseling. We’re celebrating our 40th anniversary this year.” SP

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WHAT IF YOU DIVORCE?

“None of the issues in a divorce are what they seem to be about.”—Attorney Mary Beth Hebert

Dissolving a marriage doesn’t have to mean drawn-out litigation that aggravates the pain already felt by parents, children and extended families. Some attorneys take less traditional approaches to divorce.

Mary Beth Hebert specializes in collaborative divorce, which teams specially trained lawyers, mental health professionals, child advocates and financial specialists to help couples work out a more family-friendly divorce.
 
“It’s a much healthier approach to divorce,” says Hebert, a member of the Atlanta Collaborative Divorce Alliance.
 
Each party has a “divorce coach,” a mental health professional who consults with them about communication issues, which is “critical to the process,” Hebert says.
 
That’s because “none of the issues in a divorce are what they seem to be about,” she says. “What does the husband really mean when he tells his future ex-wife, ‘I’ll make sure you’re OK’? Does that mean alimony for the rest of your life, or ‘You’re a smart woman, you’ll find a job?’ What does a woman mean when she says, ‘I’m afraid?’ Is she worried about custody of the children, finances, or being alone?”
 
A neutral financial expert—“who has no dog in the fight”—examines the couple’s property and generates spreadsheets with options. Having a shared financial expert can save a couple thousand dollars in fees, Hebert says.
 
The couples’ minor children meet with a children's mental health professional to find out their concerns and to act as a “voice for the children," says Hebert. This specialist helps the parents work out a parenting plan. 
 
At an average of $20,000, a collaborative divorce costs about the same as a mediated one, she says, and can cost much less than a fully litigated divorce, which can run $80,000 to $100,000 or more. Couples who’ve worked out all their issues ahead of time can get divorced for less.
 
A collaborative divorce often appeals to women, who “are the ones who find it online or hear about it,” she says. Men often agree to it because it prevents private issues from being aired in a public courtroom.
   
Joe Cordell, senior partner at Cordell & Cordell, a law firm specializing in men’s divorce litigation, says that men preparing for a split need to recognize that divorce law and practice can be lopsided, at times vastly favoring the soon-to-be-ex-wife.

“Men are not always treated unfairly in divorce court,” says Cordell, “but the fact is that discrimination does exist against many guys in family courts, and there are some topics that guys are particularly vulnerable with respect to. For example, if a guy wants to pursue primary custody, he might have to work a little harder and present more persuasive evidence than his wife would.”

Men are also at a disadvantage, he says, in seeking alimony and in regard to protective orders.

Cordell says proper preparation and research should start before the paperwork is filed.

“Often, guys have a sense a divorce is on its way, and for that reason [a guy] should get an attorney as quickly as he has reason to suspect that a divorce petition is coming down the pike,” he says. “That allows more flexibility and planning time than hiring an attorney after a case has ‘hardened.’”

Julie Batson, who heads Georgians for Family Law Reform, agrees that the legal system is sometimes stacked against fathers. She cites the lack of traction of a shared custody bill passed by the Georgia legislature in 2008. Under the bill, parents are supposed to come to the table with a shared parenting plan, which then goes to a mediator if the attorneys can’t work it out.

“We have heard horror stories where judges have ignored it,” she says. “It’s very rare when a dad gets shared parenting, let alone full custody.”

Her advice for men is to “fight for what you want right out of the gate and not to give in to visitation. If you have truly been a decent father and want to share custody of your children, then fight for it from the get-go.”

She adds that men should fight “tooth and nail” against the other spouse moving away with the kids if it makes shared parenting difficult.

But custody isn’t the only issue for men. Money usually comes into play.

“If a client comes in and says she’s sure her husband is hiding money, we’ve got to go the litigation route,” says collaborative divorce attorney Hebert. 

Cordell, however, says men proactively protect assets from a raid by a soon-to-be-ex, who might consume those funds and then later ask for support on the basis that she can’t support herself. He says it’s crucial that a man keep key records related to assets and transactions to use in consumption and income-habit deliberations.

Cordell also tells men to clean up any evidence on the Internet, particularly social networking sites, that may reflect poorly on them, including communications with third parties who might be talking about the failing relationship.

He cautions men to think twice before moving out of the marital home. Leaving can be a huge factor in whether a divorcing husband retains the home in a property division. It can also disadvantage him in a custody battle. But Cordell admonishes men to avoid confrontations and altercations with estranged wives.

“Oftentimes,” he says, “women are awaiting a pretext to obtain an order of protection, and will try to provoke a husband to raise his hands or make a threat.” Once such an order is issued, attorneys say, it can influence who gets the kids and the division of property.

“We tell guys to walk away from all arguments,” says Cordell. “There’s nothing to be gained.”

In the course of such a custody battle, says Harry Prillaman of Alpharetta, head of the Georgia Chapter of the Childrens’ Rights Council, some parents are guilty of badmouthing the other party in front of, or to, the kids.

“Don’t destroy the other parent,” he warns, “because you’re going to harm your children.” SP
—Mark Woolsey and Diane Loupe