Let Mom Do It Herself

"We are looking for a nice gentleman for our mother. She is 55, slim, good-looking, and full of life and energy.........."
(From a "Women Seeking Men" posting on craigslist.org)


Because I write and lecture about post-divorce dating, I read a lot of personal ads. Many of them are bad, which in a way is good for me because the bad ones give me material to write about. In my book, I discuss various kinds of bad ads, such as ads that deliberately mislead, ads that say too little, ads that say too much, ads that are poorly written, and ads that are little more than wish-lists to Santa.

I also talk about ads that send unintended negative messages, an example of which is an ad that's written by a friend or relative, not by the person herself. (I say "herself" because in almost every example I've seen, the person in question is a woman, as are the friends and relatives).

I hate to criticize people who mean well and want the best for their mother, their best friend, or whoever, but people should write their own ads. If I were a single guy reading an ad placed by someone's daughters, my first thought would be why the mother didn't place it herself. Is she less than enthusiastic about the whole online dating idea? Does she even know what the daughters are doing on her behalf?

I might also wonder if she's capable of writing an ad. Is she like a modern-day version of the tongue-tied soldier in "Cyrano de Bergerac" who relies on the great Cyrano to put his thoughts into words? Or maybe she's computer-illiterate, which is no crime but is a distinct disadvantage if one is going to be carrying on e-mail correspondences or navigating a dating site.

And I'd also wonder who is actually going to receive my response: the daughters or the mother? Will the daughters be screening and evaluating the responses, before deciding which ones to forward to Mom? And then what? Will the daughters be looking over Mom's shoulder to make sure she follows up in a timely fashion? Unless Mom sounds like a one-in-a-million lady, the whole thing is way too much trouble.

Of all the prerequisites to writing a good personal ad, motivation is the most basic. If a person isn't sufficiently motivated to do it herself, you're not helping her by doing the work. In fact, by unwittingly turning off or scaring off most potential responders, you're ensuring that the project will fail. Your mother or friend may mistakenly think that it was her age or the qualities listed in the ad that were the turn-offs, when in reality the only turn-off was that the ad was written by someone else. She may become so discouraged that she never tests the online system again, which is hardly what anyone intended.

One corollary to the "do it yourself" rule is what I call the "describe yourself in your own words" rule. There must be a million personal ads out there that say, "My friends say I'm pretty" (or funny, or sexy, or whatever). People who write things like that are trying not to sound boastful or obnoxious, but unfortunately the message that's conveyed is that she doesn't truly believe what she's saying. She's saying, in effect, "I wouldn't necessarily call myself pretty, but I've heard my friends describe me as pretty, so maybe I am". This is not a positive message. Yes, it's possible to go overboard in one's self-description, but generally speaking a personal ad is not the place for undue modesty (as long as you're not deliberately distorting the truth).

As a young and brash Muhammad Ali once said to someone who accused him of excessive boasting: "It ain't braggin' if it's true". He was right. So, if it's true, say it as if you really believe it, and in your own words.

Poisoning the Waters

"I don't know who started what in their 'bitter' divorce, but...'bitter' takes two. Both parents squandered their right to act surprised at their reduced roles in future milestone occasions".
(Carolyn Hax, syndicated advice columnist)


The question that Carolyn Hax was responding to dealt with a young woman who chose to have her brother, rather than her father, walk down the aisle with her at her upcoming wedding. Apparently, the woman was still angry at both of her parents for the ugliness that surrounded their divorce a few years ago, and she decided---rightly or wrongly---to limit their participation at the wedding.

There's nothing like a wedding to stir up old quarrels, rivalries, and resentments. Like Carolyn Hax, I have no idea who did what to whom, although usually there is plenty of blame to go around in a case like this. The sad thing is that the current problem could have been avoided, even if the divorce itself was unavoidable.

As I've said more than once in these articles, I'm a big believer in divorce mediation. Not only does mediation allow the husband and wife to tailor the divorce laws to meet their unique needs and circumstances, it's good training for all the big and little post-divorce negotiations that inevitably arise, especially when there are children involved. No sensible person wants to keep running back to court every time the other parent is twenty minutes late in picking up the kids on Friday, and very few judges have the time or the patience to hear such disputes. Mediation gets the parties into the habit of working things out in a civil manner.

Even when the kids are grown and out of the home, there will be important life events to deal with---co-operatively or otherwise. A wedding is one of them, but there are also births, funerals, and everything in between. If you allow your divorce to be an exercise in spite and revenge, you're sealing your fate. Not only will you never feel comfortable being in the same room with your ex-spouse, but your adult kids may not let you be in the same room as him or her, even if that room is a church.

Having been involved as a lawyer or mediator in hundreds of divorce cases over the years, I can tell you that litigation rarely leads to a better result than the parties could have negotiated on their own, with the help of a skilled mediator. And litigation never satisfies the thirst for revenge that motivates so many divorcing couples, which is why litigation cannot give closure on a psychological level. The bad feelings just live on, poisoning the waters for years to come, and sucking your children and even your grandchildren into the seemingly-endless psychodrama of your divorce.

If you're seriously considering divorce, or even if you've already filed papers in court, talk to a mediator before you get waist-deep in litigation. You'll save money, move on with your life more quickly, avoid a lot of needless angst, and preserve at least a civil relationship with your spouse and his or her family. And, perhaps most important of all, your kids will thank you.

Yet Another Reason Not to Stray

"Steve B______Cheats on his Wife!!!"
(Posting in "Cheater News"---www.cheaternews.com)


Actually, the original posting lists Steve's full name, plus his age, hometown, and place of employment. I don't want to add to Steve's problems, so I'm going to keep his last name out of this article, along with the full names of the other people I refer to. But, for better or worse, they're there on the cheaternews site for all the world to see.

There's been a proliferation of websites in recent years devoted to "outing" those who supposedly lie and cheat in relationships. Probably the best-known one is dontdatehimgirl.com. As the name implies, it's pretty much a woman-to-woman site, the primary purpose of which is to warn one's sisters about jerks, players, sociopaths, and assorted losers of every type. Members can anonymously post personal accounts of their dealings with a particular guy, along with his picture. Other members can then weigh in with their own stories and opinions about him ("OMG, I thought I was the only one to fall for that piece of s**t").

Theoretically, these sites allow the accused to post a denial or rebuttal, but you rarely see one. (What is the person going to say---"No, I'm not a piece of s**t"?). There are apparently no barriers to posting even the most scurrilous charges. Hearsay is common ("...from what I hear, he's knocked up three other girls and just laughs about it"), as is the gratuitous injection of other people's names ("...and I'd also be careful about his buddy who works for AT&T Wireless in Anaheim, Joe McD_____, who's probably even worse...").

Unlike dontdatehimgirl, on cheaternews.com women are as likely to be the accused as the accusers. And when they are, the scorn heaped upon them is particularly vicious ("...that fat slut will f**k any married man within two miles of her....The word is she's got herpes and loves passing it on...").

I have no idea if the majority of allegations on such sites are true or false, but I do know this: even if something is a deliberate lie, it's next to impossible to get it removed from the site. Our libel laws were not designed to deal with websites whose owners are not identified, and whose "forum moderators" are named (in the case of cheaternews) "paisley", "robstock", and "VooDoo". Posting a denial is, as I've said, just making a bad situation worse. I suppose you could spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to try to get an injunction ordering the site to remove your name, or even shutting the site down, but then what? Two weeks later, they'd open up again under a different name.

I'm sure that at least some of the people who post these things sincerely believe that by exposing wrongdoing and warning potential victims they're performing a public service. All well and good, but at what cost? Our laws are based on time-honored concepts such as due process, good-faith dealings, and the ability to confront one's accuser. How can you confront an accuser when you don't even know who he or she is?

There's another legal concept, though, that comes into play here, at least where married people are concerned. And that is "assumption of risk". Adultery has always carried a risk of exposure, but the risk is infinitely higher today. If your lover becomes your ex-lover, you'd better hold your breath that she doesn't go on a late-night rant on some website. Or that she doesn't tell all to her best friend, who then decides to make the world safe from cheaters like you.

Fear of detection shouldn't be the only reason to avoid having extramarital sex, or even the main reason. But it should definitely enter into your thinking. As I say in my book, modern life has made affairs much easier to arrange, but modern technology has made them much easier to expose.

Pavlov in the Bedroom

"The more specific the stimulus, the more predictable the reaction".
(Ivan Pavlov, Russian scientist, 1849-1936)

We're all familiar with Pavlov's famous experiments involving a dog, a bell, and a plate of meat, which led to the development of the theory now known as Classical Conditioning. The general idea is that if a particular stimulus (e.g., the ringing of a bell) is repeatedly followed by a reward (the plate of meat), a dog will instinctively "associate" the stimulus and the reward, to the extent that the stimulus alone will soon be enough to activate the dog's salivary and digestive fluids.

Over the years, Pavlov's methods have been, in various forms, tested on humans, with pretty much the same results. It's quite clear that our subconscious minds respond to external stimuli, and can form strong and lasting associations between things that are not always logically connected. Because those associations are automatic and immediate, they can become lodged in our minds and bodies long before our conscious brains have had a chance to think about whether it all makes sense.

It hit me the other day that Classical Conditioning can explain why someone would want to have--- or continue---an affair, especially when the lover is someone who by any rational standard is less worthy than the person's spouse.

Think of it in terms of associations. The lover or would-be lover is associated in the person's mind with nothing but pleasurable stimuli: smiles, kisses, gifts, attention, affection, passionate sex. This is particularly true when the lover is someone new, someone without perceived baggage, someone without obvious faults. To hear the lover's name is to feel something good spread through your body; to see his car parked at the restaurant is enough to get the heart pumping. There is nothing to complicate the conditioning or cause it to fail. Every cell in your body is desiring this person.

A spouse, by contrast, will often evoke mixed associations. Some of them will be strongly negative (the way you felt when he humiliated you in public). Some are mildly negative (the way he leaves the bathroom a mess), or neutral (he tries to communicate but he's predictable in what he says). And some will be positive, but maybe not consistently so (he used to love sex but he doesn't seem to care much anymore). They can't compete with the 100% positive associations evoked by the lover.

I'm not saying we're powerless to resist the force of pleasurable associations---unlike animals, we do have free will---but those associations are not going to go away even if we don't act on them. In fact, they may only intensify if we don't have an affair, or we break it off before we get to truly know the lover as a three-dimensional person. It's normal to idealize the lover who got away and resent the person who (unknowingly) caused us to abandon the chance for a perfect love.

The only lasting solution I can think of is to create and continually reinforce positive associations in your spouse's mind by changing your own behavior. Whether you're a man or a woman, you have to learn to think and act like a lover. You have to learn to smile more, touch more, kiss more, complain less. You have to listen more attentively, converse more interestingly, and do the little things that make your spouse's life more fun and less stressful.

And if your spouse is clearly making an effort to please you, you have to train your mind to divest itself of all the negative associations that have taken hold over the years. It's not easy, but start fresh. Try to look at your spouse the way you looked at him or her when you first started dating, when all associations were still positive. They can be again, but only if both of you care enough to overcome the negativity that has crept into your relationship and taken hold of your mind and emotions.

Prenups---Part II: Late-in-Life Remarriages

"When I brought it up, [my future stepmother] was really mad at me. But the reality is that when a parent dies, you want your money. It sounds coldhearted, but it's true".
(Newton , Massachusetts C.P.A. Judith Ludwig, quoted in SmartMoney, concerning her insistence that her father have a prenuptial agreement before he remarried).


Ms. Ludwig is right on both counts: it does sound coldhearted to think of your father's or mother's money as your money, and it is true that people do it all the time. Of course, adult children can also be legitimately concerned that someone might be taking advantage of their parent, especially if the parent is widowed, lonely, in poor health, or otherwise vulnerable.

No matter what their motives, adult children are increasingly unwilling to sit on the sidelines hoping and praying that mom or dad's new spouse isn't a gold-digging con artist. One way or another, they're likely to make their feelings known, often to the annoyance of both the parent and the prospective stepparent. Family relationships can become strained, to say the least. Stepparents will sometimes get the silent treatment from suspicious stepchildren, and parents have been known to disinherit children for expressing their opinions too bluntly.

I'm not saying that older parents should necessarily take orders from their children, but they should anticipate that a late-in-life remarriage can trigger all sorts of fears, tensions, and even hostilities. The best way to defuse the tensions before they explode is to have a prenuptial agreement that specifies in no uncertain terms not only who gets what in the event of divorce, but who gets what in the event of death.

The underlying legal complication is that, without a prenuptial agreement to the contrary, a surviving spouse has a guaranteed, statutory right to inherit approximately one-third of his or her spouse's estate (the exact percentage varies from state to state, but one-third is the most common percentage). The law calls this the "elective share". It doesn't matter if the decedent had only been married a month, or had verbally promised his seven kids from his first marriage that they would get everything. It doesn't even matter if he had left a will leaving everything to his kids. The spouse still gets the one-third elective share---even more, if the decedent had a will leaving a bigger share to the spouse.

A properly-drafted prenuptial agreement can not only itemize all of the assets that each party is bringing into the marriage, but can specify that, upon a party's death, those "separate" assets that still remain intact will not be inherited by the surviving spouse. The prenup in essence specifies that each spouse waives in advance his or her elective share.

To ensure that the money or assets that are not going to the surviving spouse actually go to the kids (or to whoever the decedent wants them to go to), it's vital to have a will that is consistent with the prenuptial agreement. It may also be necessary to scrutinize life insurance policies, annuities, 401(k) plans, and anything else that has a payout procedure upon death. There may be additional forms or other documents needed to prevent the surviving spouse from automatically becoming the sole beneficiary of those policies and plans.

Because of the potential complexities, second-marriage prenups should not be drawn up in a vacuum, but should be part of a consistent estate plan. Thus, the parties need to consult attorneys who are experienced not only in domestic relations law, but in taxation, pensions, and other estate planning issues.

Once all of that is done, the new husband and wife will still have to decide what to tell their respective children about the documents they have just signed. My guess is that the majority of people would say nothing, unless the kids had clearly expessed their concerns; most people are simply uncomfortable discussing their finances with their kids. That's sad, because adult children aren't normally demanding to see tax returns, bank statements, and other financial specifics. They just want a general outline of what to expect when the parent dies. And that's what I would give them. I might also want to say that attorney so-and-so prepared the prenup and the other documents, and that he or she has either the originals or copies of them. That way, you're minimizing any fears of the documents being destroyed or conveniently misplaced by the stepparent.

Like any marriage, a late-in-life marriage will always have its challenges. But addressing the universal---if not always spoken---fears of the adult children will go a long way toward ensuring that the marriage gets off to a good start.

You Want a Prenup? Don't You Love Me?

"People think prenuptial agreements are the death of romance. But they're an opportunity to tell your partner everything, to broach delicate subjects and expose your respective vulnerabilities. You bare your soul and express an abiding love and trust for one another. What could be more romantic?"
(Atty. Arlene Dubin, author of "Prenups for Lovers")


Arlene Dubin is not only a respected New York family law practitioner and a very good writer; she's also a brilliant marketer. She took something with a notoriously unromantic image and made it the very definition of romance. She also debunks the notion that prenups are just for celebrities and billionaires; she argues convincingly that they make sense for just about any couple with assets acquired before marriage, children from a previous marriage, small-business ownership interests, or the expectation of inheritances. And given that many couples nowadays marry for the first time in their thirties and forties, prenups are not just for late-in-life unions (although they are so compelling in such cases that I would advise older people never to marry without one; I'll tell you why in my next blog article).

The basic principle of a prenuptial agreement is that, as Atty. Dubin puts it, people get to determine their own destiny. A couple can tailor an agreement to fit their own unique circumstances, and even, to some extent, override the laws of their state. If, for example, a couple agrees to a prenup provision that in the event of divorce no alimony will be paid to either party (or, conversely, that a certain fixed amount of alimony will be paid), such a provision would normally be enforced by the divorce court, even if state alimony standards would yield a contrary result.

However, not every clause in every agreement will necessarily be enforced. In particular, provisions related to child custody, support, and visitation (or "parenting time") will ordinarily not be binding on the court, if it appears that enforcing such provisions would jeopardize the welfare of the couple's children, or undermine state child support guidelines.

A court would also reject a prenup that appears to have been the product of fraud or duress. Thus, the "Here, sign this" approach on the night before the wedding is not likely to succeed, nor would a systematic attempt to hide assets, debts, and other potentially-crucial facts from one's future spouse (of course, that hasn't stopped a lot of people from trying).

If you're at all thinking of having a prenuptial agreement, raise the issue first with your future spouse before going to an attorney. Most people would be alarmed or resentful if you consult an attorney in such a delicate matter without their knowledge, especially if they get blind-sided by a letter from the attorney. Pushing too hard or too soon on the legal front can kill your chances for achieving what could have been a beneficial result for both of you.

Of course, at some point legal assistance is a must---please don't try to write your agreement yourself---and I strongly recommend that you each get your own attorney. In fact, most attorneys would probably refuse to represent both parties, even if you're both insisting that you agree on everything and you just need a lawyer to "put it in legal language". Lawyers are, for good reason, sensitive to even the possibility of a conflict of interest.

Having your own attorney allows that attorney to bring up matters you may not have considered, to educate you on what is or is not possible under your state's law, and, if necessary, to come up with a strategy to ensure that your future spouse is fully disclosing all assets. Although having your own lawyer may make the process seem like litigation, it's not. It's really nothing more than healthy negotiation and disclosure, akin to the due diligence you'd perform if you were forming a business partnership or making a major investment (which, of course, you are; maybe the biggest one of your life).

When Your Spouse Refuses to Take Responsibility

"How can I find affordable marriage counseling? My husband and I need help, but he won't go and he won't pay for me to go, either".
(From Sue Shellenbarger's Work & Family Mailbox column in the Wall Street Journal)

Although Ms. Shellenbarger answered this question in her usual helpful way (see if your employer has free counseling under an employee assistance plan; or perhaps your church has a free or low-cost program), I think she misses the bigger picture. Yes, there may be low-cost alternatives for those who cannot afford traditional marriage counseling, but what good can they do if one spouse refuses to participate?

A spouse who won't attend counseling sessions of any kind is saying, in effect, "This is your problem. Go ahead and fix it if you want to, but don't bother me about it". He or she (although usually it's a "he") is washing his hands of all responsibility in the matter.

In a situation like that, marriage counseling, in the usual sense of that term, is impossible, given that it's based on the notion that the marital relationship involves the participation and consent of both spouses. A spouse can unilaterally change his or her own expectations and behaviors, but cannot unilaterally change the marital system. Recognizing this, many marriage counselors will not accept individual spouses as clients, or, if they do, they will stress to the client that the counseling sessions will be more in the nature of individual therapy. In severe cases---where the non-participating spouse essentially has one foot out the door---the therapy may have to focus on the reality of divorce and prepare the client for her new life, whether she wants that new life or not.

Having said all that, though, I'll offer at least some hope. A lot of men instinctively avoid marriage counseling because they know in their hearts that they have contributed greatly to the problems in their marriage, but they don't want to have to defend their bad behavior to a stranger, especially if that stranger is a woman. The good news is that marriage counseling is normally not about assigning blame but about coming up with workable solutions. And although probably a majority of marriage counselors are women, there are thousands of men in the field, as well as a fair number of male-female counselor teams. There is no need for a husband to feel that he's going to be tried, convicted, and executed by an all-woman judge and jury.

But if logical reasoning fails to persuade and the husband refuses to budge, he's sending an unmistakeable signal that his wife can do whatever she wants, as long as it doesn't involve him. Whether he knows it or not, that's a dangerous signal to send. His wife may well interpret it as proof that the marriage is over, and she may skip the calls to the marriage counselors and start making calls to divorce lawyers.