11/6/2002: 85th anniversary couple
 

http://cellar.org/2002/85anniv.jpg

Just what is it that makes old couples look like each other? And how can we make it stop?

From this Ananova story comes the details. They're Taiwanese; Liu Yung-yang and his wife Yang Wan were married in April 1917.

Is it just me, or is that guy doing Billy Crystal's "old Jewish guy" character?

Ah yes ... the secret to a long and happy marriage.

She's blind and he's deaf.

We had some fun discussions awhile back in Quality Images with old Bill & Lil, who are mentioned in that Ananova article.

wow, those two are OLD. wow. i can only hope that i die before i reach 100.

okay, i can probably count on it.

i think this is great. i mean, the chances of them divorcing in their 70's, 80's, or 90's were probably slim, but i think it's good that they have been together so long.

people these days are terrible. they go into a marriage thinking "oh well, if it doesn't work out, there's always divorce. that'll clean it all up." yeah, except for the fact that you were the moron who went into the vows with that in mind. it's really sad that there are people who will get married if there is any doubt that they really want to be in the relationship in sickness and in health, as long as they both shall live. it's awful. there aren't any excuses, either. "irreconcilable differences" my ass. i don't think anything in love is impossible if you ever thought you cared enough about the person to promise them your life. i can understand filing for divorce if your spouse is a constant infidel, but even then your spouse shouldn't have gotten married if he or she was going to be the dumbass to take that security for granted.

i needed to rant about this because many people these days are complete idiots about marriage. i don't need to quote national statistics for anyone to understand how many marriages end in divorce. out of me and my 5 friends, only two of the six sets of parents are still married. those being paul's and jenno's (i'm not counting david, being as we have the same set of parents). that's horrible.

I respect your opinion, but hey, i'm going to go ahead and say the complete opposite of what you just said. Not trying to flame, I just like to give my opinions. :)

The proliferation of divorce is one of the best things that's happened to the human race. It's a direct result of the womens' sufferage movement. Life before divorce was not a bed of roses. People would get married with the best of intentions, then find out that they utterly hated the person. Then what? Can't get divorced, it's ungodly. Guess i'll just have to be miserable for the rest of my life. I don't really think that's any way to live. Sometimes people just can't get along. It's sad, but it's true. The average person changes completely every 20 years or so. Theyr'e just a completely different person. What happens when a couple grows apart? Or just falls out of love? It doesn't fit into the dreamers' ideas of love, but it does happen.

Anyways, divorce: A difficult solution to a difficult problem. :)

possibly both right?
 

divorce *can* (ie won't always) offer an out from an otherwise untenable position.

however, there is a certain blase with which people treat marriage at the outset with the knowledge of said out. so....maybe it is important to be sure of things at the beginning. check that - it is VERY important to be sure from the get-go.

also.

what is an 'average' person?
what is 'complete' change every 20 years?

The secret to a happy marriage in Japan ...
 

Momo Kokikuchi ;)

I agree with juju, if people can make it work, great, but they should not be punshed for a mistake a long time ago or be stuck in something past its useby date. I don't think its such a terrible thing, even for the kids. Better one happy parent than two unhappy ones (i'd know).

The daughter of a friend of mine referred to her husband as a "starter husband". Apparently her friends did also. Needless to say, she got divorced and has remarried.

Well then, in your case, it wasn't so bad.

But I'm sure thousands of kids are traumatized each year by divorces. It can be pretty tough on someone - I have a few friends whose parents are divorced and it has <b>directly and profoundly</b> affected the child <b>for the worse</b>. Who was once a stable and happy girl is now an emotional nutjob because her parents are separated and she's convinced it's her fault.

So maybe the proper thing to say is "I got lucky that it wasn't so bad for me, but I can understand and appreciate the fact that it's pretty traumatic for a lot of children."

Ok sorry I didn't qualify that nearly enough. To work I think it requires open and clear communication between the kid and both parents. It can be extremely traumatic for some, but I think (and the reason you proposed for that case shows) that communication is the key, obviously its not always easy and almost always the fault of at least one of the parents, kids become weapons. I belong to a generation of divorcee kids, most of my friends parents are divorced, well over 60% easily. ‘In fact i know of only one truely happy marriage, that’s out of a lot of families. I think most kids it effects in at least subtle ways but hell, growing up is never a smooth ride and in the scheme of things it often is better than the alternative.

Hey, there wouldn't be any divorce if people would just stop getting married.

If the parents don't get along, the kid is going to be tramatized whether the parents get divorced or not. Contant yelling and a mood of bitterness, anger, and chaos is what the household will most likely be like forever if the parents stay together. I don't think you can say that divorce is the cause of the tramatization, although i'm sure it seems that way to the child.

i hated both my parents for the longest time after they divorced. its only now that im older that i realize the really bad stuff happened when they were married and that getting a divorce was the best thing they could have done for me and my siblings.

thats not to say the divorce didnt hurt. it did, especially when my mother moved to colorado and my father moved to ohio and i was forced to choose. when i met casey i made for damn sure i wanted to be with her forever before we even began dating. i dont want to put my children through any of it, pre- or post-divorce.

i think the secret to a long-lasting marriage is to behave like newlyweds from the day you marry to the day you die.

~james

On the other hand, I do see that you folks are arguing against a totally different set of people than I am -- those who don't take marriage seriously.

I'm just saying that this is a sad side-result of a change in our society for the better. You people have in your heads that marriage is noble because it's forever, and it's somehow worth less if it's not. That concept of forever was forged on a road of pain by men who beat women into submission when they acted up. Sure it's feasible to have lifelong marriages if one of the partners is submissive to the other. An equal-rights marriage is much harder to maintain. As a resut of this, the concept of marriage is changing, because people know that they don't have to take shit. Holding us up to the standard of those who did have to take shit just isn't fair.

I'm going to call you on this. I'd like to see your sources and scientific backup.

Hmm. It was taught in my General Psychology class a few years ago. I no longer have the book, so i can't cite an immediate reference. I don't mean to say it's an immutable law by any means. Just a guideline. Are YOU the same person you were twenty years ago?

No, but do I fit your scientific criteria as having "changed completely"? Probably not. And I probably won't "change completely" over the next 20 years either.

I have a hard time believing more than 50% of people "change completely" every twenty years, as you suggest. And I'd just like to see some evidence that this is more than wild speculation by some nutball professor.

Re: possibly both right?
 

I just mean that life experience changes a person. I think your personality is built on your experiences. After a person has accrued a certain amount of experiences, it's safe to say that they're very different than they were before. 'Complete' and '20 years' were probably poorly chosen words.

I didn't mean to suggest that I was using scientific criteria. I haven't done any research at all. It's just a phrase I picked up from the class that seemed to jibe with my own personal experiences. I didn't really mean for my language to be 'exacting'. I'm just speaking in general terms.

those parents that fight with their children in earshot are just the people i am talking about. divorce is traumatizing for children, just as seeing their parents fight is. trust me, i've been through that. my parents did NOT fight around my brother and i. if anything they would bicker about normal things, like dessert or television. but they did not yell and scream back and forth. unless i've completely blocked that out...my parents did argue and fight, but they made sure to hold off until dave and i were not around. when they separated, i was devastated. i did not show it for quite some time, but i would cry a lot because of it. i missed my dad, i missed living away from him, and i missed eating together as a family. i still miss all of this stuff and while i believe my parents have a better reason for separating than most people, i still think it's stupid and i regret that it had to happen that way. it leaves a person without a true sense of belonging. at least it left me that way. i know that my parents care for each other, and they get along fine as friends now. and i know that they love me, but it totally ripped me apart when i was little. that was the divorce, not the fighting.

no, because he was one year old at the time.

I'm guessing we'll get more insight about "different every 20 years" from those who are over 40?

I'm old enough to know I'm not old enough to know.

Well, they fought around me all the time. I don't recall whether or not you were around, but I definitely was. Dad was an ass and mom was too. Just the way it goes, I guess. Neither of them ever wanted to defuse the situation, so it would always escalate. I don't think mom really ever had any intention of making it work anyway. She admitted to me once that she married dad "to get out of Oakland". Which is kinda shitty. And sort of the thing we're talking about here.

I'm gonna try and parse this a bit. In the Bad Old Days, marriages lasted a long time because women had been trained to ignore grievances (sp?) or they would be beaten? That divorce is more common now because women are no longer physically compelled to remain married? That if a woman decides to live with something that bothers her about her husband, for the sake of the marriage, it's probably because she's been oppressed by years of violence into thinking she has to?

Though I can't back this up by facts, I imagine a significant number of divorces are initiated by men. Even more unscientifically, I would like to put forward that men have frequently put up with shit from their wives without divorcing them. Is this because men have been beaten by their wives in the past? Doubt it. Although, they do say that 52% of spousal abuse victims are men...

I'm not trying to flame you, Juju, just trying to better understand what you're saying.

whos 'they'? while im not informed enough to disagree right out, i find it suspicious. one thing ive noticed around here is that you cant throw numbers like that around without backing it up. :)

~james

Okay, I admit it, "they" is a couple of random Internet people I've since forgotten. Thought I could get away with it since it wasn't really related to my main point. Shoulda known better ;) Anyhow, I can't find anything that directly references the 52% statistic, but here's a couple of related links: a reasonable-seeming FAQ with a bibliography, an iFeminist article with quotes and statistics, and a compelling but somewhat florid Salon.com feature.

This is quite a bit off-topic. If anybody wants to discuss it further, perhaps a thread in some other forum is in order?

EDIT: found the link for the Salon article

Well, first, I didn't really eat very well today. So I imagine my mind has just been very muddled. It's funny.. when i'm in this state, I often feel like I'm making perfect sense. "These posts are gold!" I'll say to myself. Heh heh. Then i'll read it the next day and just be really confused. Hmm... OTOH, maybe that is just my natural state?

With that said, you do make a very good point. I'm not sure how that would fit into my theory. Certainly the stigma against divorce is much less that it was in the 50's, so most men probably feel like they won't be ostracised in the community if they do get a divorce. It's possible the cause of this relieved stigma was an increase in women's rights. Though I fear I may just be connecting the dots to fill in my own theory.

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com...an_cabm101.jpg

Rita Rinna touches he forehead of her aunt, 113 year-old Mary Christian Thursday, Nov. 7, 2002, in San Pablo, Calif. Christian is believed to be the oldest American alive. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

The only grammatical explanation possible for the last sentence is that she is believed to be alive, otherwise the word "alive" is redundant.

In this photo Rita's explaining to her aunt that she's been fitted with a microphone because she's going to be on Larry King, the world's oldest live talkshow host. ;)

Larry King will finally be interviewing his target demographic.

This is kinda off topic, and for that I apologize, but it is the best link I have on the violence of women.

http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cb/.../cm99/cpt3.htm

(I hope I got the syntax right, this is my first post to this board).

In American divorce courts, children are property. They are fought over in the same way the house or car is fought over. If I was emporer of the world then I would decree that children would have a advocate in the court in every divorce.

From 16 to 18 I went from being property fought for to being thown out by each parent in turn. Now past 40, I understand so much more than I did at the time about why and about the consequences, and how to deal with it, but the experience does not go away just because time passes. It colors everything I am; I could no more escape it than I could escape the sun on a cloudless day.

This be the Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
they may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
and add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn,
by fools, in old style hats and coats,
who half the time were sorry stern,
and half at one anothers' throats.

Man hands on misery to man,
it broadens like a coastal shelf.
So get out as quickly as you can,
and don't have any kids yourself.

Wow. That study shows that women are more likely to physically abuse a child than a man.

Perhaps that's just because women are typically around their children more? Still, it does suggest that when presented with someone who's physically and socially inferior to them, women will resort to physical abuse just as much as men will.

<hr width=20% noshade>(<I>Disclaimer: the author of this document does not imply or infer that he or she has conducted any scientific research on the above comments. Comments are in fact wild speculation and have been pulled out of said author's ass.</i>)

Lots of first posts happening lately. That's really cool.

Incidentally, we now have two Hermits. For people who prefer to be alone, you hermits seem awfully social. What's up with that?

two ... I thought we must have 22 ... ;)

I have had very little experience with divorce. The only kid I know who's parents are divorced was doing fine until his dad married again.

But regarding old age, my Great Grandma lived to be 102 the cool thing about that was that she had the same birthday as me only she was born 90 years earlier. So when she turned 100 I turned 10.

My parents divorced in 1977...I wasn't even 2 yet.

From what I've heard, my father was incredibly abusive, both physically and mentally. Fortunately, I don't remember any of the physical shit.

The mental abuse though...that continued through childhood. My father was, and probably still is, an incredibly mean-spirited individual. As a child, he would say some horrible things about my mother...it would cause rifts to the point where we wouldn't talk for 2 years in a couple of spots.

Finally, things came to a head in late '94. My father got pissed over something incredibly silly, and decided to disown me. We've exchanged a few barbs here and there since, but haven't had any contact in over 5 years.

Fortunately, since Rho and I have decided not to have children, that issue won't be a factor should we ever divorce. Of course, Rho and I have to get married first before we can divorce. :)