1. Splitting? 79% of Marital Separations End in Divorce, USA Today

“Separation is very common and is more common than immediate divorce. . . Most separations last one year or less, but a few drag on a decade or more before ending in divorce. . . The decision to separate is driven by time spent in the first marriage, and for women, by the presence of young children.”

2. Should We Call It Quits? A New Kind of Couples Counseling, Today Health

“Around 30 percent of the couples coming into marriage counseling are mixed agenda couples,” he says. “Divorce is on the table for one of the parties. Traditional marriage counseling has no way to deal with those people. It’s been area of frustration for a lot of marriage counselors.”

3.  A National Trust, In the True Sense, The Marriage Foundation

“Our biggest problem when promoting  marriage in general and this Foundation in particular is one of presentation. Let me say, for the umpteenth time: This is not going to be a cosy club for the smug and self satisfied of middle England but, we hope, the start of a national movement with the aim of changing attitudes across the board from the very top to the bottom of society, and thus improve the lives of us all, especially children.”

4. Octomom: Her Children, Her Choice and Our Responsibility, Huffington Post

The problem is that Ms. Suleman, like many others, has chosen to view fatherhood as merely a biological transaction. In a culture where choice trumps all, who can “cast the first stone” at a woman who undervalues the need for children to have a physically and emotionally present father in their lives?

5. Who Says “I Love You” First in a Relationship?, Science of Relationships

But recent research demonstrates that in fact, it’s the men who are more likely to say “I love you” first in relationships. Not only that, but hearing “I love you” from a romantic partner for the first time makes men even happier than it makes women. And although this may not jive with gender stereotypes, it makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective.

6. Fathers Who Fail Costly for Families, Economies, but Dads Can Bounce Back, Deseret News

When fathers are involved in the lives of their children,” [The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse] notes, “especially their education, their children learn more, perform better in school and exhibit healthier behavior. Even when fathers do not share a home with their children, their active involvement can have a lasting and positive impact.”

7. New Research Finds College Grads More Likely To Get Married, Sociology Degree Programs

Generally, the results revealed that educated women did not marry as early in life as their lesser-educated counterparts, but soon caught up and surpassed their numbers following pursuits in higher education. Reasons for this vary, but one primary theory is that educated women in the past were not viewed as “marriageable” by men who were threatened by a partner as smart – or smarter than – themselves.

For more, see here.

Even as men have made great strides as fathers, however, they can find themselves rudderless as spouses. “We’re getting a new cultural script for a ‘new dad’ but not for a ‘new husband,’ ” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. “That married people with children now often refer to themselves as a ‘stay-at-home mom’ or ‘stay-at-home dad’ instead of as ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ signals that we now prioritize parenthood over marriage itself.”

For more, see State of Our Unions 2011, When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable.

…Although polls show that married women favor Romney over Obama, unmarried women are the most reliably Democratic voting group outside African Americans. They constituted a whopping 71-to-29 percent majority for Obama in 2008, earning them a place in what Democrats call their “rising American electorate”  — the people of color, the young and the unmarried women who helped deliver the presidency for Obama in 2008, and who Democrats desperately want back in 2012.

The problem is, the rising American electorate is a reliable Democratic vote only when it bothers to register and show up. And even though they show a current 44-point preference for Obama, unmarried women — especially those with children — register and vote at lower rates than married women.

The turnout of unmarried women is so unreliable that, until the 2000 presidential election, Democrats generally wrote off the single female vote as not worth the effort. But in that razor-thin contest, strategists noticed for the first time that 22 million members of their most reliable cohort of voters did not go to the polls. If single women had cast ballots in the same proportions as married women, Al Gore probably would have received the punched chads of an additional 6 million voters, more than enough to have won him the White House…

Any early aspirations I had about getting married and having babies were systematically diluted by listening to my mom’s conversations with her two best friends, Terri and Linda, for years, upon years, upon years. The three of them met in their early 20s and are inseparable to this day. The same cannot be said for the men in their lives. Though my parents are still married, my mom was married twice before she met my father (and even came close to divorcing him, but that’s another story). When I was little and could have been off playing during their get-togethers, I preferred to pull up a chair and sit with them at the table as they drank coffee (sometimes wine) and had “girl talk.” During those conversations, I absorbed their stories of first loves and wrong loves, separations and divorces, of failed attempts to change partners and tinges of regret for some of the things they sacrificed for the happiness of their families. It was 20 solid years of straight-up relationship repellant.

1. Population Association of America 2012 Annual Meeting Program, Princeton University

[Presentations include:]

2. Marriage Breakdown a Scourge, Says High Court Judge, BBC News

“We all know, all of us who have been in relationships – whether married or unmarried – for a long time… that the only way that they are made to work and the only way that they become really qualitatively good is by absolutely grinding away at it. . . That’s when people find that, actually, if they get through the difficulties and do get the help, they will in fact end up with a product that is really worth having.”

3. Women Say ‘I do’ to Education, Then Marriage, Chicago Tribune

“They marry later, but they catch up,” said England. “By age 40, 75 percent of college-educated women are married, compared to 70 percent of those who attend high school or some college and 60 percent of those who did not complete high school.”

4. Strategies for Building Healthy Relationship Skills Among Couples Affected by Incarceration, ASPE Report

“Even for lengthy periods of incarceration, communication and conflict resolution skills could result in more supportive relationships, improved co-parenting, and increased familial contact — all of which could be beneficial upon the individual’s eventual release.”[Excerpt from Summary]

5. Two Happy Marriages Help Get San Francisco Giants Pitcher Barry Zito on Track, MercuryNews

Zito confesses that his two “marriages” might be having a profound impact on his turnaround. . . “I have to put as much attention and focus off the field now as I do on the field, and I think that’s good,” he said. “You just need something to bring you down from the intensity of the job, and if you don’t have that in your life, it’s just going to be a lot more difficult.”

6. Catholic Parishes and the Marriage Crisis, CatholicVote

An independent study by the Institute for Research and Evaluation (IRE) found the organization reduced divorce rates by an average of 17.5% over seven years in a city/county, with nearly a tenth cutting divorce rates 48% to 70% (e.g., Austin, TX, Kansas City, Mo., Modesto, Calif. and El Paso, Texas).

7. Author: Integrity Is Most Difficult Part of Being Good Father, The Christian Post

The “seven M’s” are: makeup, master, mission, message, motive, method, and model. Each of these essentials has a chapter devoted to not only explaining what they are, but also offering advice on them and examples of notable fathers who excel in these areas.

For more, see here.

I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

And:

It’s interesting, some of this is also generational. You know when I go to college campuses, sometimes I talk to college Republicans who think that I have terrible policies on the economy, on foreign policy, but are very clear that when it comes to same sex equality or, you know, believe in equality. They are much more comfortable with it. You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

I admit, I’m a bit surprised to see him do this before the election (although perhaps he was cornered by Biden’s recent statement of support for SSM). Also, he’s still saying that this should be an issue decided by each individual state, not by the Federal government (a view I agree with, but only because I think it’s strategically the best approach for now).

Although the fight will continue mostly unchanged, this is still a landmark in the history of lgbt rights. Someone on my twitter feed (can’t find it now, so paraphrasing) wrote, “for the first time in my life, I have a President who thinks I should be fully equal.” That’s valuable. As David said in another context, we’re a bit more American today than we were yesterday.

…Unlike divorce cases, where the couple may have known each other a long time and have a shared history, never-married parents who show up in Peterson’s courtroom may not know each other well. And they now have an 18-year shared endeavor: raising a child…

In 2010, Judge [Bruce] Peterson and a team of partners created the Co-Parent Court using federal, county and foundation money. Similar to drug courts and DWI courts created in the 1990s to address recurring problems in the criminal justice system, Co-Parent Court is the county’s first problem-solving court in the family court arena. more

…while the overall rate of divorce is declining, data show that a growing number of women will be divorced and poor when they reach retirement, according to research by the Social Security Administration.

Around 20 percent of them age 65 or older live in poverty, compared with 18 percent of never-married women and 15 percent of widowed women.