Go Green. Stay Married.

Mother Nature feels the pains of divorce

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID,
AP Science Writer
Tue Dec 4, 6:48 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Divorce can be bad for the environment. In countries around the world divorce rates have been rising, and each time a family dissolves the result is two new households.

"A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household," said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University whose analysis of the environmental impact of divorce appears in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More households means more use of land, water and energy, three critical resources, Liu explained in a telephone interview.

Households with fewer people are simply not as efficient as those with more people sharing, he explained. A household uses the same amount of heat or air conditioning whether there are two or four people living there. A refrigerator used the same power whether there is one person home or several. Two people living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.
Liu, who researches the relationship of ecology with social sciences, said people seem surprised by his findings at first, and then consider it simple. "A lot of things become simple after the research is done," he said.

Some extra energy or water use may not sound like a big deal, but it adds up.

The United States, for example, had 16.5 million households headed by a divorced person in 2005 and just over 60 million households headed by a married person.

Per person, divorced households spent more per person per month for electricity compared with a married household, as multiple people can be watching the same television, listening to the same radio, cooking on the same stove and or eating under the same lights.

That means some $6.9 billion in extra utility costs per year, Liu calculated, plus an added $3.6 billion for water, in addition to other costs such as land use.

And it isn't just the United States.

Liu looked at 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002.

In the 11, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been a million fewer households using energy and water in these countries. "People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered," Liu said.
Liu stressed that he isn't condemning divorce: "Some people really need to get divorces." But, he added, "one way to be more environmentally friendly is to live with other people and that will reduce the impact."

Don't get smug, though, married folks — savings also apply to people living together and Shaker communities or even hippie communes would have been even more efficient.

So, what prompts someone to figure out the environmental impact of divorce?

Liu was studying the ecology of areas with declining population and noticed that even where the total number of people was less, the number of households was increasing. He wondered why.
There turned out to be several reasons: divorce, demographic shifts such as people remaining single longer and the demise of multigenerational households.

"I was surprised because the divorce rate actually has been up and down for many years in some of the countries ... but we found the proportion of divorced households has increased rapidly across the globe," he said.

So he set out to measure the difference, such as in terms of energy and water, land use and construction materials and is now reporting the results for divorce.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.

Back from Betrayal

I had an interesting call yesterday from Life & Style magazine. They've called a few times before for comments on celebrity splits. The topic of yesterday's conversation was a possible reconciliation between Britney Spears and her ex-husband, Kevin Federline.

As part of our conversation, we talked about controlled separation and couples who have made their marriages work after separation or divorce. She seemed shocked by the idea and it changed the course of our conversation. I was asked if I could think of any high profile cases of reconciliation after divorce, and I drew a blank. (Darn memory issues!)

Seems like a good list to compile. Any suggestions?

Along those lines, a very inspiring book for anyone considering divorce is Back from Betrayal by Suzy Farbman. I read it a few years ago and quickly added it to my list of books to keep in multiple copies.

From Amazon:
Though she describes herself as "Generation S"-one of the cultural "straddlers" who came of age in the 1960s-Farbman admits she was more into pruning her rosebushes "than marching for peace." A virgin when she married her real estate developer husband in 1967, Farbman was a faithful, supportive wife for 30 years. She set aside her own career to raise their children, turning down job offers outside her husband's Detroit base of operations. She thought she had a very good marriage. Then her husband admitted-after she'd become suspicious and brought him to "couples therapy"-that he'd been having affairs with other women. Farbman was devastated. But rather than go straight to a divorce lawyer, she decided to deal with her pain and confusion and see if her marriage could be salvaged. She went to Onsite, a crisis intervention center in Tennessee, and also to the Deepak Chopra Institute. She consulted "spirit guides" and an astrologist. She tried realignment by "cranio-sacral massage." Her husband went to The Meadows, an Arizona facility for behavioral disorders, and together they studied "A Course in Miracles." After much rethinking and revising of their interpersonal skills, the Farbmans were able to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary together stronger, wiser and happier. Statistically, it's uncommon for couples to recover from infidelity. Culturally, it seems even odder for middle-aged, upper-crust Midwesterners to consult New Age therapists for healing. Still, readers without the means to participate in such far-flung seminars may find inspiration from reading this story.

French President Divorces

PARIS (Oct. 18) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia, have divorced after 11 years of marriage and months of questions about their relationship, their lawyer said Thursday.

Patrick Kovarik, Pool / Reuters

Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy, here in 2006, are the first French presidential couple to divorce while in power. They separated briefly in 2005 and were married for 11 years.

Although previous leaders in France have had extramarital affairs, the Sarkozys are the first French presidential couple to divorce while in power.

"They were heard by a judge and the judge granted their divorce," lawyer Michele Cahen said on Europe-1 radio. "It went very well. There was not the slightest difficulty."

In a 15-word statement, Sarkozy's office said the two were separating by mutual consent and would not comment further on it. Sarkozy's spokesman said separation meant divorce.

Their split came as Sarkozy faced his first major political challenge: nationwide transportation strikes that caused bus, train and subway service to ground to a halt across France.

Sarkozy has not given any hint that his marital troubles will dent his determination to push ahead with his ambitious program of economic, political and social reforms for France. In the past week, as speculation about his marriage reached new heights, he continued to present an image of business as normal. He was to be in Portugal on Thursday for a summit.

Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy split for a few months in 2005, and she had seemed ill at ease as first lady since her husband's election in May. She did not cast a ballot in the runoff, and has rarely appeared with her husband in public recently.

Her one political venture came back to sting her: She raised her profile dramatically during a July mission to seek the release of five Bulgarian medical workers and a Palestinian doctor jailed in Libya. The stunned French media questioned her diplomatic credentials, and parliament is investigating arms deals signed soon after the release.

"She was shaken, murdered, wounded by the controversy," Isabelle Balkany, a friend of the couple, told France Inter radio.

"Cecilia is a woman of conviction who needs to do things, feel useful. She knew that she would have trouble tolerating the conventional side" of being a president's wife, she said.

Balkany predicted the divorce would not affect the president's job.

Even if he is "affected to his depths" by the "painful" decision, she said, "I sincerely think that it will have absolutely no impact on his mission as chief of state."

Cecilia Sarkozy accompanied Sarkozy through the recent years of his political career, acting as an aide, confidante and an ever-present figure at political events.

Dynamic and ambitious, they tried to buck conventions in French politics, she in designer denim and he jogging and speaking in straight, inelegant sound bites.

Their divorce also broke precedent and puts Nicolas Sarkozy apart from France's past leaders.

In 2005, photos of Cecilia hand-in-hand with another man on a Manhattan sidewalk were splashed across a magazine cover.

Sarkozy talked about it on national television, saying: "Like millions of families, mine has experienced some difficulties."

Observers wondered then whether Sarkozy could become president without her support and presence beside him. The question turned out to be moot, as she came back in time for his presidential push.

Both Sarkozys have been previously married. They have two children each from their previous marriages, as well as their own son, Louis.

Until the Sarkozys, French presidents' private lives remained largely private. But Sarkozy courted the spotlight for years in his long run-up to the presidency - and that has meant his marital troubles were front-page news.

"The couple was quite extraordinary, really fused together," said Christine Clerc, political journalist and author of "Tigers and Tigresses," a book about presidential couples in modern France.

"They became an ordinary couple, a couple like many others who don't get on well anymore after 14 years, but who have a child in common, who had many projects in common, who have a deep bond, and who have lived many things together," she said.

The timing of the announcement could help Sarkozy on another front, by knocking the nationwide strikes off front pages.

The daily Liberation devoted five pages and its front page to Sarkozy's marriage on Thursday, relegating the strikes to inside pages - even though the newspaper traditionally leans left and might have been expected to devote more attention to the labor unrest had the presidential couple not overshadowed it.

Protesters at a union-led march in Paris on Thursday had little sympathy for Sarkozy's personal woes.

"There are problems more serious than that," said Yvelle Franck, a 63-year-old marching to protect retirement benefits.

Associated Press writers John Leicester and Elizabeth Ryan contributed to this report.

Erin

Happy Birthday, Erin!

I have a few books in the hopper. One of the ones I suspect will be contracted soon is the relationship book, Getting to I Do After Mom and Dad Said I Don't. The book is a follow-up, in some sense, to Generation Ex, in that it's the same general topic (the long-term effects of parental divorce). But this one will focus on the granddaddy of all effects, our ability to form healthy attachments, especially romantic ones.

At 34, in West Michigan especially, I find myself in an odd predicament. Folks around here tend to marry young, between 22-27. Friends who are my age, for the most part, are married and parents of between one and four children. I do have single friends as well, but the majority are between seven and ten years younger than me. To be honest, it's a challenge at times. I love my friends, but I feel a wall of dissimilarity between us at times, like I missed life's boat somewhere along the line and I'm the 30-year-old high school senior. We're created for community and I think we miss out on something vital when we don't have someone on the same point on the path with us.

I recently realized something about myself. I think I can handle most anything if I can visualize a way I can write about it later. When I can view my situation as research, I can redeem it. There's a lot of change coming up in my life. A lot of it is out of my control, but the thing I can control is my response to each change.

I've often wondered why God has allowed me to experience two parental divorces. It doesn't seem fair and it's certainly made my life much more difficult. The road to wholeness has had more than its share of bumps and bruises. But I am a writer, and thousands of people have, in reading my book, been encouraged because they found another person on the same point on the path of life. We are comforted because we are not alone.

I have often wondered why God has allowed relationships to be so difficult for me. (I'm not saying I'm a victim. I am becoming increasingly aware of the mistakes I've made and am making!). It's just that this is not what I expected my life to look like, relationally, at this point. But again, the redemption for me comes in the writing. I'm excited to write about this next chapter, and as much as I hate the reality of it,--and acknowledge that acknowledging I'm writing this book to any single guy is pretty much the kiss of death for dating that guy!--I have hope, too.

When I was writing Generation Ex, I had to get to a certain point in the healing process before I could write. In fact, I didn't realize this until I was writing. I didn't want to write as an expert or present myself as someone who totally had her stuff together. At the same time, I needed to feel that I had covered a little bit of territory. My editor (the brilliant Liz) showed amazing discernment to let me write out my thoughts. She knew I needed to write them out to process them, and I had to process them--in all their unfiltered glory--so I could get to the good stuff, the redemptive stuff. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, my book is about 65,000 words. My first draft was 225,000!

In the same way, when it comes to Getting to I Do After Mom and Dad Said I Don't, I think there were a few emotional housekeeping tasks I had to take care of first before I could really say what needs to be said.

1. I had to lose my innocence. I don't mean this in a purity sense. Rather, there is a pervasive idea, especially in Christian circles, that marriage is something that just "happens," when the time is right. I'm not saying we should be obnoxious about dating or obsessive about our desires to be married, but we need to be active, even proactive (especially guys), at times. We don't tell the person who wants a job to sit on their duff and expect God to drop a job in their lap. We tell them to go to college, to get an internship, to network, to send out resumes, to make follow-up calls, go on interviews, send thank you notes. We don't tell the person wanting to dig out of debt to just keep doing what they're doing and wish and pray their way to debt-free living. No, we challenge them to cut back on expenses, make wise buying decisions, look for additional revenue, share expenses (like housing) with others. But when a single says he or she wants to get married, well-meaning folks say things like, "When you stop looking, it'll happen!" What?!? The sad thing is, I bought this lie hook, line and sinker. I barely gave marriage a thought before thirty. If anyone asked me why I was single (and you know they did), I said it was because God hadn't brought the right guy to me, or that I was focusing on my career, or that I was focused on other things. But I didn't take responsibility for the fact that I wasn't expanding my social circle, I wasn't letting people know what kind of guy I'd like to meet. I wasn't dating! Once I hit 30, I had a bit of startling revelation. Relationships don't just happen. That's also the age when friendships start changing to align more by stage of life than age of life. If I can make my career, my writing, my finances, and my faith a priority, I can certainly make relationships a priority, and I should be ashamed to do that. I had to take responsibility for the things I was doing--or not doing--to prevent me from meeting guys I would likely like.

2. God and I had to get real. I've been a Christian for fifteen years, and as time goes on, He reveals additional layers of His character to me. Gary Thomas' brilliant book, Sacred Marriage, rocked my world with its subtitle (and text): What if the purpose of marriage is to make us holy more than happy? What was extraordinarily freeing about this question was that I already knew marriage doesn't make us happy. It can, but when one person or two in a marriage make it the barometer of personal happiness, bad things happen. But, if marriage can be viewed also as a spiritual discipline--a means to draw closer to God and better reflect the character of God--I only needed to look at my own relationship with God to be confident that I was capable of marriage. (Before that, honestly, I avoided marriage to avoid divorce. I thought I was destined to repeat my parents' patterns). I could see that God and I had experienced relational extremes--times of intimacy and times of distance--but wherever we were at the moment, I knew our relationship was still permanent and we'd bounce back. That was a good first step. More recently, I've learned to have greater authenticity with God. Sure, before, I would share my frustrations with Him, but my perfectionistic complex prevented me from really being open. I would vent out my thoughts with some reserve, fearful that if I made God mad, He would maybe go away. Now I understand that God can handle my emotions. King David in the Bible let God have it more than once, and he was called a man after God's own heart. I want to want what God wants. And if David can be real, so can I. I'm not advocating regular shouting matches with God, mind you, I'm just saying that God can handle our anger, frustration, pain, disappointment and everything else. In fact, there's no One better to dump all that emotion on, so we can exchange it for something a bit more palatable (and helpful) for interacting with real people.

3. I had to get my heart broken. This is the one that really hurts. I had this optimistic hope that if I just "focused" on Jesus, that God would drop Mr. Wonderful in my life, and we would have this blissful courtship that would lead to marriage, free from doubts and disagreements. I wouldn't have to date a lot of different guys. The first guy would be the right guy, and we'd live happily ever after. Up til last year, I dated more with my head than my heart, so when things didn't work out, I could rationalize the reason. I liked him, but... Then this fall, I met an amazing guy who actually met and exceeded my list of ten character qualities. My friends liked him too, so the usual cautions and hesitations were gone. He pursued me, hard. I put up my usual walls and he busted them down, telling me exactly what I needed to hear. For once, I let my heart get involved. I could really see what life would be like with him, and for once, that--with all the challenges and adjustments it would require--was more desirable that what I had planned for myself. I liked him and he liked me. I had someone special in my life over what is usually the hardest part of the year--Christmas, New Years, my birthday, Valentines day...plus two weddings. It was wonderful. And then it ended. I don't get it. I don't like it. I don't understand it. But it is what it is. Over. And in my brokenness, I have been softened. Humbled. Ready to do the hard work of owning up the mistakes I've made, both with him and with others. Ready to fine tune the parts of me that tune out the kind of guy I want to marry. Funny, I thought I'd be getting married this fall. Instead I'll be writing about it. Redemption, I hope.

All this brings me back to Erin. She's been an amazing sounding board (if not a reluctant one, at times). She drags me out of my house to play golf, disc golf, Catan, go to the local Improv show, or just get out. She helps me celebrate the progress I can't always see. And because she's younger than me, she inspires me. She's learning these lessons now, at 27, so she won't be the slow learner that I have been. Redemption, I hope.

Happy birthday, Erin!

Journal Gazette | 04/30/2005 | Divorce is especially hard on the children

Have you heard of Google alerts? If you are frequently Googling something, you can simply set up an alert. Google will then search for the terms you want and send you an email with the list as they come up, daily or weekly. I have a few alerts set up to find stories, websites and other divorce related news. Not everyone hhas a huge public platform. I've found this feature to be a great way to meet those who share my passion.

Today I received I was alerted to this article in the Fort Wayn Journal Gazette. I always appreciate journalists willing to share the hard truth about divorce. Saneta Maiko brings up a needed challenge to the church, both little and big "C." What is your local church doing to not only prevent divorce, but to promote strong marriages? Pre-marriage counseling is important, pre-engagement counseling is better. Pre-marriage classes, mentoring, marriage enhancement opportunties...all good things. We need to change as a society in our erroneous view that only troubled couples need help? We take our cars to the shop for routine checks. Our physician gives us a physical once-over? What is so intimidating about seeking opportunities to upgrade our most primary relationships?

But I digress :-)

Journal Gazette | 04/30/2005 | Divorce is especially hard on the children

A Father's Reflection

This article ("Sometimes Divorce Hurts Children Long After the Fact") from Doug Mead appeared in the 5/1/05 edition of Inside Bay Area. I might re-title it, "MOST OF THE TIME Divorce Hurts Children Long After the Fact" Nonetheless, I appreciate the author's willingness to his feelings aside to provide the environment where his son felt safe to share his feelings. From the interviews and conversations I've had with other children of divorce, his son likely will continue to be affected by the divorce, even if he doesn't talk to his dad about, especially if he doesn't talk to his dad about it. It takes a strong child to talk honestly about divorce with their parents. What child wants to make their parent feel bad or guilty about something that happened long ago. And if mom and dad appear to have bounced back just fine, by remarrying and moving on, then it's even more difficult for the average young adult to pose the disturbing question, "If mom and dad got over the divorce, why is it still bothering me?" As this son approaches marriage, who other than his dad will provide his first picture of what a husband and father should be? And if he loves his dad, how intimidating will it be to talk about what now feels like ancient history to his father about what went wrong. No doubt that when this son is in love and thinking about marriage, his joy will be tempered by an unsettling fear that his dad once felt this way too.

But I give this dad HUGE props for this paragraph alone:

He was hurting, and he chose to talk about it at that moment. The ensuing discussion opened up his eyes to some of the truths of the divorce. I told him I was sorry we got divorced and asked him to forgive me.

My parents' generation was assured that kids were resilient and personal happiness was more important than family commitment. I think one of the most difficult (and respect-worthy) actions is for a parent to humbling seek their child's forgiveness.

Inside Bay Area - Bay Area Living

Colorado amends rules to accomodate children of divorce

I subscribe to theSmart Marriages newslist. Several times a week, the list manager compiles articles of interest to marriage educators and others passionate about family issues. When I was in college, the financial aid laws didn't really take into consideration the unique obstacles of those with divorced parents, so it's always good news when those in power to make these kinds of decisions do the right thing.

(testing BlogThis!)

Rocky Mountain News: Columnists