Oklahoma Family Law Blog

Strengthening Marriage Must Become a National Priority

Americans are always good at touting an issue as a state of emergency in order to establish a sense of urgency. And there are any number that we could highlight -- HIV/AIDS, gun violence, drug addiction -- but one that should be added to the list is that of the divorce rate in this nation.

The above is a quote from a recent commentary by Roland S. Martin, a nationally syndicated columnist and Chicago-based radio host. Read his entire commentary here and feel free to leave a comment with your personal opinion.

Source: CNN.com.

Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Married

Marriage and Taxes

Historically speaking, June tends to be the most popular month for weddings. In that vein, here's a recent article on a not-so-romantic subject -- taxes -- of which those who are marrying should be aware.

The ceremony was a success, the rings fit, and the vows were a hit: When it comes to planning their weddings, couples let no detail go unnoticed. If only they were as astute at preparing for a joint financial future, starting a life together might be a piece of cake.        

With wedding season in full swing, H&R Block reminds newlyweds that tying the knot means new tax issues that tax professionals can help couples manage:   

•         Marriage means choices. The IRS allows married couples to file using the “married filing jointly” or “married filing separately” status. Each has advantages that can be difficult to understand. For example, if a taxpayer claims medical expenses or other itemized  deductions that are limited by their adjusted gross income, filing separately may be the way to go. But if the person wants to claim most tax credits or deduct their IRA contribution, they’ll probably need to file jointly. Consulting a tax professional helps in determining the right choice for couples filing for the first time.       
•         Social Security numbers don’t change, but anyone who has changed their last name will need to apply for a new Social Security card. If the name and number don’t match, the IRS might delay processing of the return, which means a refund could take longer than usual to arrive.      
•         Marriage also means adjusting retirement savings. Besides changing filing status on an employer’s 401(k) account, newly married taxpayers also should consider increased limits for tax-deductible IRA contributions. If the couple’s income meets certain limits, they could qualify for more of a deduction. In some scenarios, one spouse also may “borrow” from the other’s earnings to meet the limits.       
•         Inform the IRS of a new address. If the IRS does not have the correct address on file for a newly married couple, it could take longer for a refund to arrive. Taxpayers shouldn’t count on mail to be automatically forwarded and should consider filing Form 8822 to inform the IRS.     

Source: BusinessWire.com.

Married with Children Becoming the Domain of the Affluent and Well-Educated

Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households -- a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.

As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.

Couples Fight The Most About Money

A recent survey by PayPal revealed that money trumps sex and housecleaning as the No. 1 issue about which couples fight. According to this survey, couples routinely lie about their spending. Eighty-two percent of respondents said they hide shopping bags and purchases from their partner. A majority of couples believe their spouse or partner is using money as a means of control in their relationship.

Couples considering marriage would do well to set aside time to discuss their views of money. More than likely, each person has very different views of money based on the likely differences in how their parents dealt with money issues.  Many couples spend a year or more planning their wedding ceremony and reception but less than a few hours — if that — figuring out how to deal with their money differences. Devoting some time to serious discussion regarding outlooks on spending, savings and debt will pay huge dividends in your future relationship.   

Having said that, another truth is that fights over money usually are about much more than just the money.  Usually they're a symptom of much deeper relational problems such as a failure to compromise, communicate and set common goals.

For more on this topic, read "Love is a Battlefield Over Money" by Michelle Singletary published in the Denver Post.

How to Affair-Proof Your Marriage

Emotional Infidelity: How to Affair-Proof Your Marriage and 10 Other Secrets to a Great Relationship.

“I don’t believe in ‘okay,’ ‘decent,’ or ‘solid’ marriages. I’m against them,” says M. Gary Neuman. “I believe only in great marriages, and that you should expect and reach for no less.”

In the last fifteen years, M. Gary Neuman, marital therapist and architect of the Sandcastles Divorce Therapy Program, has helped thousands of couples in crisis. Couples who fight. Who’ve grown apart. Who are stuck in relationships that run more on routine and rancor than love and understanding. What he’s found is that, contrary to popular belief, the problem is usually not poor communication. It’s the failure to put most of your focus into your marriage. You’ve only got so much energy. Are you spending it by being emotionally unfaithful?

Take a quick check: Do you send that funny e-mail to your friends at work—but not to your spouse? Do you chew over all the problems on the job so thoroughly with your colleagues that by the time you get home, you just don’t feel like going into it all over again? Do you get a secret thrill out of flirting with coworkers—thinking it’s safe because you know it’s not going any further? If so, you’re committing emotional infidelity—and you’re draining your marriage of the energy it needs to be great. Learning how to break this cycle is one of eleven secrets M. Gary Neuman shares in his provocative new book.

Based on the ten-week program he’s developed in his successful couples counseling practice, "Emotional Infidelity" offers guidelines that are often counterintuitive, even outrageous or shocking. But they work. Dare to limit contact with members of the opposite sex. Dare to need each other. Dare to put in writing the nitty-gritty realities of a marriage plan. Dare to put your marriage before your kids or job. Dare to make love in a whole new way. Dare to change your focus: make the commitment to focus on each of the eleven secrets (ten plus one bonus secret) for one week apiece and you’ll reap the rewards of a transformed marriage and a reconfirmed relationship.

M. Gary Neuman’s program is guaranteed to challenge you and make you reexamine the myths holding you back from true happiness and satisfaction. It will change your marriage forever.

Law And The Marriage Crisis In North America

Family law is on the front pages of our newspapers and is implicated in some of our deepest cultural conflicts, from no-fault divorce, to the status of cohabitation to, most recently, same-sex marriage. At their core, these ongoing disputes are fueled by competing visions of marriage and of the role of the state in making family law.
   
This report on the current state of family law holds up for clear public view the underlying, dramatically different models of marriage that are contributing to deep public clashes over the law of marriage, cohabitation, and parenthood. Obtaining conceptual clarity about marriage and its meanings will allow family law experts, scholars from other disciplines, judges, legislators, and the general public to make more informed choices among competing legal proposals now being advanced in the United States and Canada.

Chief Justice Makes The Case For Strengthening Marriage

For the first time in history, less than half of U.S. households are headed by married couples. And on Sept. 29, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data showing that almost 36 percent of all births are the result of unmarried childbearing, the highest percentage ever recorded.

In family law, as in the rest of American society, there is an intensifying debate about how we should respond to this kind of news. Should law and society actively seek new ways to support marriage? Or should family law strive to be marriage-neutral by providing more rights and benefits to its alternatives, such as cohabitation and single parenthood?

Some family law experts argue that our most pressing need is to find ways to equally support a wide variety of family forms. For example, the respected American Law Institute, an organization of judges, lawyers and legal scholars that periodically drafts model laws and other proposals for legal reform, has proposed a new set of laws that promotes this "family diversity model." In "Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution," some ALI scholars argue that family law should focus less on trying to channel people into marriage and more on being "fair" to people in different relationships -- in other words, that it should take families as it finds them.

I am not a law professor. But from where I sit as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, a family law that fails to encourage marriage ignores the fact that marriage has long been associated with an impressively broad array of positive outcomes for children and adults alike. Experts who contend that we need to move "beyond marriage" say they are only responding to the facts. But here is one major fact: High rates of family fragmentation hurt children.

Marriage and the Law

How should family law treat marriage? In this report, a group of family scholars and legal scholars come together to acknowledge some key propositions about marriage and family law in the United States. 

Marriage is a key social institution, with profound material, emotional, and social consequences for children, adults, and society. As marriage weakens, fewer men are committed to family life, more women are saddled with the unfair burdens of parenting alone, and children’s ties to both their parents (especially fathers) are weakened. Communities face increasing social and economic problems.

The most important benefits of marriage are not the sole creation of law. Social science evidence strongly suggests the prime way that marriage as a legal institution protects children is by increasing the likelihood that children will be raised by their mother and father in lasting, loving (or at least reasonably harmonious) family unions. Marriage in any important sense is not a creation of the State, not a mere creature of statute.               

For marriage to create these benefits, it must be more than a legal construct. Creating a marriage culture that actually does protect children requires the combined resources of civil society—families, faith communities, schools, and neighborhoods—public policy, and the law in order to channel men and women towards loving, lasting marital unions. In recent years more Americans, and more family scholars, are taking marriage seriously.

Unfortunately, the recent trend in family law as a discipline and practice has been just the opposite. Family law as a discipline has increasingly tended to commit two serious errors with regard to marriage: (a) to reduce marriage to a creature of statute, a set of legal benefits created by the law, and (b) to imagine marriage as just one of many equally valid lifestyles. This model of marriage is based on demonstrably false and therefore destructive premises. Adopting it in family law as a practice or as an academic discipline will likely make it harder for civil society in the United States to strengthen marriage as a social institution.                

As scholars and as citizens, we recognize a shared moral commitment to the basic human dignity of all our fellow citizens, black or white, straight or gay, married or unmarried, religious and non-religious, as well as a moral duty to care about the well-being of children in all family forms. But sympathy and fairness cannot blind us to the importance of the basic sexual facts that give rise to marriage in virtually every known society: The vast majority of human children are created through acts of passion between men and women. Connecting children to their mother and father requires a social and legal institution called “marriage” with sufficient power, weight, and social support to influence the erotic behavior of young men and women.

We do not all agree on individual issues, from the best way to reform unilateral divorce to whether and how the law should be altered to benefit same-sex couples. We do agree that the conceptual models of marriage used by many advocates are inadequate and thus contribute to the erosion of a marriage culture in the United States. We seek to work together across the divisive issue of gay marriage to affirm the basic importance of marriage to our children and to our society. We call on all the makers of family law—legislators, judges, the family law bar, and legal scholars who create the climate in which other players operate—to develop a deeper understanding of and commitment to marriage as a social institution.                

A prime goal of marriage and family law should be to identify new ways to support marriage as a social institution, so that each year more children are protected by the loving marital unions of their mother and father.

Source: Executive Summary of "Marriage and the Law: A Statement of Principles published by the Institute for American Values and the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.

The Proper Care & Feeding of Marriage

In a culture where marriage is so misunderstood that, in the minds of many, it no longer even means a union of man and woman, it’s no wonder that so many marriages struggle or fail. Unfortunately, most of what passes for marital “counseling” today is part of the problem -- because it reinforces many of the self-focused nostrums, feminist beliefs and politically-correct ideas that promote marital strife.  Not so of the advice you’ll find in Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s The Proper Care & Feeding of Marriage. In this follow-up to her bestselling The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, “Dr. Laura” -- America’s most popular radio counselor -- forces each partner in a marriage to take a hard look at themselves and each other, and reveals how to bring marriage back from the brink of disaster.

What I Wish I'd Known Before I Got Divorced

In an article from Marriage Partnership magazine, six divorced women sought to give advice to a married friend who was contemplating divorce.  The women compiled the following list of things they wished they had known before they got divorced:

• Life will change more than you realize.
• Your life won't be more carefree.
• You trade one set of problems for another.
• Feelings can be deceiving.

The article cited a study by the Institute for American Values chaired by sociologist Linda Waite of the University of Chicago, in which researchers asked, "Does divorce make people happy?"  They found that those who ended their troubled marriage in divorce weren't any happier than those who remained married.  In fact, two-thirds of those who stayed married reported happy marriages five years later.

Source:  "What I Wish I'd Known Before I Got Divorced" by Georgia Shaffer, Marriage Partnership magazine.

New Year's Resolutions for Your Marriage

About half of all Americans admit to making New Year's resolutions and the vast majority of those resolutions deal with weight loss, quitting bad habits, and getting out of debt.   But how many of us make specific resolutions regarding our marriages?

I recently came across an article that encouraged spouses to make resolutions that will strengthen their marital relationship, such as resolutions to:

• Spend at least one night a week on a date with your spouse - the kind of date you went on before you were married.
• Go for a walk together at least once a week.  Hold hands while you walk.
• Really listen when your spouse is talking to you.  Give him/her your undivided attention.
• Turn off the TV and have an uninterrupted conversation about world events.
• Enjoy your day-to-day time together.
• Recommit to your spiritual faith.

Source:  "New Years Resolutions Your Marriage Can Keep" by Gillian Markson on the Marriage blog at families.com.

Marriage Penalty for Low-Income Families

The government has lessened the marriage penalty associated with income taxes but it has not done much to offset the marriage penalty buried in public assistance.   When households combine, lower-income people may lose more benefits than they gain.  Just ask Dusty and Misty Amerine of Tulsa.  When they married six years ago, they had no idea that their taxes would increase and that their severely disabled son's Social Security payment would be jeopardized.  In this Tulsa World article, they say that if they had known, they would never have gotten married.

Source: "Tulsa Couple: Getting Married Carries Penalties"  by Leigh Woosley, December 26, 2006, Tulsa World.

Questions to Ask Before Marriage

Relationship experts report that too many couples fail to ask each other critical questions before marrying. Here are a few key ones that couples should consider asking:

1. Have we discussed whether or not to have children, and if the answer is yes, who is going to be the primary care giver?
2. Do we have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals, and do our ideas about spending and saving mesh?
3. Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
4. Have we fully disclosed our health histories, both physical and mental?
5. Is my partner affectionate to the degree that I expect?
6. Can we comfortably and openly discuss our sexual needs, preferences and fears?
7. Will there be a television in the bedroom?
8. Do we truly listen to each other and fairly consider one another’s ideas and complaints?
9. Have we reached a clear understanding of each other’s spiritual beliefs and needs, and have we discussed when and how our children will be exposed to religious/moral education?
10. Do we like and respect each other’s friends?
11. Do we value and respect each other’s parents, and is either of us concerned about whether the parents will interfere with the relationship?
12. What does my family do that annoys you?
13. Are there some things that you and I are NOT prepared to give up in the marriage?
14. If one of us were to be offered a career opportunity in a location far from the other’s family, are we prepared to move?
15. Does each of us feel fully confident in the other’s commitment to the marriage and believe that the bond can survive whatever challenges we may face?

Source:  "Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying" published in The New York Times as referenced by this post at the South Carolina Family Law Blog.