Our kids should never be more important than our marriage, and they should never be less important. If they’re more important, the little rascals will sense it and use it and drive wedges. If they’re[…]
Young Orthodox men and women today come into marriage confused. Sexual images pervade their magazines, billboards, and phones informing them of things we never imagined and elevating their curiosity. They are taught to avoid sexual[…]
…there is no such concept [of “falling in love”] in the haredi world (and in traditional Jewish societies, in both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic worlds, such a notion was hardly found at all). Any love[…]
I want to sort of debunk a myth. I think people assume that, when somebody has an affair, that the marriage was bad or that there was a problem in the marriage. And that’s kind[…]
Since people’s psychology has changed over the centuries, I don’t think that the reasons offered by medieval authorities operating in a completely different environment can determine what modern women will regard as “deal-breakers” when it[…]
Today, half of all married Reform Jews have non-Jewish spouses, and 80 percent of those who married between 2000 and 2013 wed non-Jewish spouses. Concomitantly, the movement has moved away from discouraging intermarriage and has[…]
Marriage in the classical sense is a commitment to sustainability. Continuity is not an end in itself, but a culture’s purpose is not to be an ephemeral work of performance art. When continuity becomes its[…]
Dignity is a rather elusive and malleable concept compared with more concrete qualities such as race and sex. Which relationships are sufficiently dignified to warrant protection? What about couples who do not wish to marry[…]
The most frequent dynamic I encounter among straight people, both in pop culture and in couples I know, is that of the annoyed wife and the clueless husband. I’ve heard female acquaintances lament — to[…]
Among the many popular misconceptions about grief and its trajectory, one that particularly rankles widowed people is the assumption that if you’ve found a new love relationship, you’ve “moved on” from your grief. How very[…]