Sarah Jessica Parker's Secret for Successful Marriage: Hating Husband Matthew Broderick for 20 Minutes a Day

At London's Daily Mail, "Why I allow myself 20 minutes a day to hate my husband, by Sarah Jessica Parker":

So now we know how she does it.

Sarah Jessica Parker has discussed the unconventional secret behind the success of her 14 year relationship.

The 46-year-old star admitted that she coped with married life by allowing herself 20 minutes a [day] to 'hate' her husband Matthew Broderick.

The actress was chatting [to] Ryan Seacrest on his KISS FM breakfast show when he quizzed her about comments she made earlier this month about allowing herself moments of rage.

The I Don't Know How She Does It Star replied: 'I think that's healthy and I think it's realistic.'

'Some people have it down to 20 minutes a week. Other unfortunate people have it down to 20 minutes per hour.'

I don't ever "hate" my wife. And it's rare that I even allow myself to be angry with her. When we've had marital difficulties I felt both sad and somewhat resigned, but usually not angry. When I get angry I want to strike out, and that's not a healthy emotion for me, so I avoid it. And my wife and I are committed to our marriage through "better or worse," so separation has never really been an option for us. It would take something extreme, like a death of one of our children and a subsequent emotional and psychological implosion, to really sink our partnership. We live for family. (And of course there's never been questions of infidelity, which I imagine would be a deal-breaker, but cheating isn't part of our experience or even a considered possibility.) I think you have to take a deep breath every day and thank God for having someone who loves you (with all your faults), and who's there for you in "sickness and in health." Besides, I just don't think 20 minutes of hating your spouse is all that healthy, but it's Sarah Jessica Parker's marriage not mine.

Hillary Clinton Furious at Anthony Weiner's Betrayal of Wife Huma

Nice photo of Secretary Clinton and Ms. Abedin. At London's Daily Mail, "Hillary's fury over 'stupid' Weiner's cover-up and betrayal of Huma."

Prince William and Kate Middleton to Do Without Butlers, Household Staff

At Telegraph UK, "We'll manage without butlers or servants, say Prince William and Kate Middleton":

His father famously employs almost 150 staff to cater for his every need, but Prince William has insisted he and Kate Middleton have no intention of taking on butlers or household staff when they begin married life in April.

Check the full story at the link.

Prince William intends to serve in the RAF Valley until 2013, and he wants to "shield" Ms. Middleton from the media swarm that surrounded his mother.

And I'd add that while I haven't blogged about this, there's been talk that their nuptials are a godsend not just for the monarchy, but for the institution of marriage itself. A recent Time cover story raised the point explicitly, with reference to the royals: "Who Needs Marriage? A Changing Institution." And interestingly, given this whole weeks-long #MooreandMe production, I'm a bit surprised at how approvingly --- if not a bit cautious --- Sady Doyle speaks of the institution at her essay, "What a British Royal Wedding Says About Marriage in America." My sense, frankly, is that Ms. Sady held back, if her writing at Tiger Beatdown is any clue. (Let's just say that she doesn't seem like the marrying kind, in any case, and that's putting it nicely.) Now, in my exchanges at Twitter, I was reassured that these feminists were not monolithic, and that the old-style Andrea Dworkin man-hating wasn't the issue (marriage is rape, remember). No, today's feminists are enlightened but sensitive to questions of male power and privilege. No doubt these are complicated things, but it's gotten to the point where feminists today expect that rape charges won't be taken seriously unless a woman is "hit over the head in some back alley by some drugged-out crazy f**k with a criminal history" before being beaten senseless behind a dumpster and then savagely raped. Hmm ... maybe this kinda woman's still be a little standoffish on the traditional white wedding thing of 'till death do us part.

In any case, Kate Middleton's a knockout. Congratulations to the royal couple, and here's to a happy and long-lasting marriage.

Stop Calling Him Honey and Start Having Sex

Ha!

What a book: Stop Calling Him Honey and Start Having Sex: How Changing Your Everyday Habits Will Make You Hot for Each Other All Over Again.

Via Glenn Reynolds.

That's cracking me up because my wife and I call each other "honey" exclusively.

The Pill at 50

From LAT, "'The pill': 50 years after":

The thought of out-of-wedlock pregnancy struck terror in women in midcentury America, said Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard University who has studied the pill's effect on professional women. The proper course of courtship was to go steady, become lavaliered, pinned, then engaged.

"They were a set of steps that led almost irrevocably to marriage, and they were set down at an early age," she said. "The pill allowed us to get rid of all of those steps."

That first pill, Enovid, contained a mixture of the hormones estrogen and progestin that worked to prevent ovulation. Women took one active pill a day for 21 days, then a placebo pill for seven days to allow for menstruation, which the pill's inventors thought was necessary and would assure women they weren't pregnant.

In the post-pill era, the average age of first marriage began to creep up as women and couples no longer felt they needed to wait to become sexually active. The rate of women in professional schools rose from 18.4% of professionals in 1960 to 36.4% by 1998.

The pill also has been credited — or blamed — for overturning sexual mores, but there is less evidence that it caused or evenly greatly contributed to the sexual revolution, May said. The nation, she noted, experienced sharp changes in sexual behavior in the 1920s, during World War II, and during the 1960s and '70s.

Other predictions swirling around at the time of its debut did not come true, May said. The pill did not curb worldwide population growth, create happier sex lives for married couples or reduce rates of divorce.

More at the link.

Amazing to think that a scientific advance like this accelerated the collapse of traditional values and culture. Could've happened in any case, but the empowering effect of the pill certainly made options available for women outside of marriage, and that, along with the radical feminist interpretation of marriage as institutionalized rape pretty much sealed the deal.

The Rich Are Different...

That's the first thing that came to mind when reading this story of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt: Money's going to make them happier after their split. It turns out that Brad Pitt's purchased the mansion right next door to the couple's current residence (for "£800,000"). That sure makes things a lot easier. One thing about being married with children, at least as I've always thought about it, is that marital difficulties should always be considered in the context of the kids. That is, if things get so bad that you're thinking about walking, think twice, because a split is going to seriously impair the well-being and development of the little ones (both my wife and I are kids of divorce). But just think: If you were so damn pissed at your spouse, but could afford to buy another home next door, there goes the "kids excuse" for staying together. Of course, this raises all kinds of other problems for the no-divorce arguments of the sacrosanct marriage vows ("forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto him as long as you both shall live"...). And in that sense, the rich are really different. Perhaps there's a set of values for traditional people of modest means (and concern for their kids) and a second set of values for traditional people of exceptional means (and concern for their kids). In other words, the rich are different: They have a lot more money.

RELATED: "The Rich Are Different."

Postcards from the Wedding Industrial Complex

Rebecca Traister's a hardline feminist blogger at Salon. During last year's presidential campaign, Traister attacked GOP running-mate Sarah Palin in an essay published in September 2008: "Zombie Feminists of the RNC: How Did Sarah Palin Become a Symbol of Women's Empowerment? And How Did I, a Die-Hard feminist, End Up Terrified at the Idea of a Woman in the White House?"

Now here's your "die hard" feminist defending fellow (not-so die hard) feminist Jessica Valenti -- who broke with the pack and tied the knot earlier this year -- on her decision to marry TPM blogger Andrew Golis. After Valenti was featured in the New York Times this week, Traister doesn't sound so militant after all:

As life brings us all kinds of surprises and complications, I've found that many people who have strongly held opinions about marriage -- say, a lifelong desire to walk down the aisle in a Princess Di gown and stuff cake in someone's face -- can shift in a heartbeat after befriending one gay couple who can't marry, or falling in love with a partner who doesn't want to, or can't because they're the same gender as you. The personal is political is true in reverse, that the political becomes personal at some point, and can change rapidly. I know some women who talked and talked about weddings when we were younger, and who now find themselves single parents by choice, or in long-term relationships with men or women they don't plan to marry.

This clarifies for me why the Jessica issue is fraught for some people: They see her as trying to have both -- the staunchly held political view, the books about the evils of the Wedding Industrial Complex, the intersectionality-based approach to marriage as an exclusive institution and the Vows column, the bustle, etc. -- without admitting a shift on either side. In a funny way, I wonder if even her anti-wedding detractors would have been more satisfied if she'd just said, "You know, falling in love and getting sucked into the complexities of party-planning has made me feel differently about some aspects of the marriage business." I am not saying that that would have been a good idea, and I am not saying I agree with her detractors. Jessica is my friend and I am very happy for her. I'm just wondering aloud.

Be sure to go back over to Salon and read the other entries. One of the funniest protocols of leftists today is that they can't get married because gays can't get married. That is, a modern leftist heterosexual is required ideologically to substantiate the deviant norms to the radical gay fringe seeking a reengineering of society's institutions. And if for some reason an un-gay progressive woman decides that she'd actually like to, you know, excercise some of her God-given natural essences - like having children - she can expect to be demonized for selling out to the Wedding Industrial Complex. That concept in itself is Marxist-Leninist in its epistemology, and thus for leftists marriage serves to reproduce hieararchies of oppression, and by logical implication, systems of racism.

It's pretty convoluted, but what's especially good is how radical women really don't believe this sh*t after all. You know, as we see in Valenti's case, they might actually fall in love and "die hard" principles be damned! Notice where Traister was all too ready to excoriate Sarah Palin last year -- for example, "The pro-woman rhetoric surrounding Sarah Palin's nomination is a grotesque bastardization of everything feminism has stood for ..." -- now she's just "thinking out loud" at how nice it is for her good friend Jessica to walk down the feaking aisle. Oh, how awful that a fully independent (and rational) woman might actually find enrichment -- God forbid! -- by falling prey to the hegemonic "complexities of party-planning."

Really? Do these people even have a clue? Institutions such as marriage develop over time because social norms coalesce around workable functions of monogamy, economic stability, child-rearing, and the regeneration of values. While femininsts have long repudiated those norms -- just read Andrea Dworkin for some confirmation -- the fundamental crisis of feminism captured by the Valenti wedding should in fact be a point of celebration for conservatives and a victory for conservative values. It's pretty fascinating.

As it is, though, the postmodern truth reinvention complex will devise some new theory seeking to explain the sociological endurance of marriage traditionalism within a neo-radical paradigm of anti-faux feminist progressive praxis.

I can hardly wait!

Hat Tip: Pandagon (where else?).

Conservatives: Don't Give Up Marriage Fight!

Steve Schmidt, who was a top archictect of John McCain's campaign, and who served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Counselor to the Vice President in the Bush administration, has come out in favor of gay marriage. Schmidt is expected to call on the GOP to embrace the gay marraige agenda at the Log Cabin Republicans' convention today. Schmidt, according to the New York Times, "has a sister who is a lesbian, plans to say that there is nothing about gay marriage that is un-American or that threatens the rights of others and that in fact it is in line with conservative principles." Check the additional links at Memeorandum.

I don't know how the party's going to reconcile the "postmodern conservative" push by many top GOP officials and strategists, and as much as I love gay Republicans as fellow Americans, I see this ideological shift only strengthening the forces of sectarian radicalism on the left, and I'll continue to resist the gay marriage agenda.

Rod Dreher had a great interview with Maggie Gallagher earlier in the week, and she really captures what's happening on secular progressive gay rights front:

Rod Dreher: Maggie, you and I are on the same side of the gay marriage issue, but I am pessimistic about our chances for success. You, however, are optimistic. What am I missing?

Maggie Gallagher: Vaclav Havel mostly. "Truth and love wlll prevail over lies and hate." On that basis Havel took on the Soviet empire. Where is that invincible empire now?

Same-sex marriage is founded on a lie about human nature: 'there is no difference between same-sex and opposite sex unions and you are a bigot if you disagree'.

Political movements can--sometimes at great human cost and with great output of energy--sustain a lie but eventually political regimes founded on lies collapse in on themselves.

I don't think of myself as optimistic: just realistic. What does losing marriage mean? First the rejection of the idea that children need a mom and dad as a cultural norm--or probably even as a respectable opinion. That's become very clear for people who have the eyes to see it. (See e.g. footnote 26 of the Iowa decision).

Second: the redefinition of traditional religious faiths as the moral and legal equivalent of racists. The proposition on the table right now is that our faith itself is a form of bigotry.

Despair is gay marriage advocates' prime message point. All warfare, including culture war, is ultimately psychological warfare. You win a war when you convince the other side to give up.

So now you want to decide we've lost on an issue where, in the March 12 CBS News poll two-thirds of Americans agree with us. I mean, does this make sense?

Public opinion hasn't changed much at all. What's changed is the punishment the gay marriage movement is inflicting on dissenters, which is narrowing the circle of people willing to speak. This is a very powerful movement, no question. Nobody understands that better than I do.

But in the end--and this is not necessarily "optimistic" -I think civilizations that can't hang onto an idea as basic as to make a marriage you need a husband and a wife aren't going to make it in the long haul.

So I'm not worried about the progressive myth that 200 years from now gay marriage will be the new world norm. I'm somewhat more worried about the kind of cultures around the world that might survive. It's not clear to me they'll have the virtues of American civilization for gay people or anyone else.

Really, this marriage idea has been around for a long time. I think it has legs.

Finally there's a third reason I'm not in despair. I've learned from five years in this fight--especially the last two years--that there are many things I can do that make a difference. I was told--by good people who agree with me, really smart people too--that California was impossible; you can't raise the money, nobody cares about marriage, if you get it on the ballot, we'll lose anyway because there's a generational shift. And none of that turned out to be true. Here's the good news: as civilization collapses the opportunities for intelligent and committed people to make a profound difference actually increase.

People are flocking to the National Organization for Marriage (www.nationformarriage.com), not because we try to scare them about how bad things are going to be--but because we offer them a chance to come together with other people of all races, creeds and colors to stand up for a core and timeless good.

Here's what I know that maybe you can't see: There are enormous untapped energies out their waiting for someone to organize them effectively.

The entire interview is avaible at the link.