Regular churchgoers, married people or those who enjoy harmonious social ties are most satisfied with their love life. This also goes for people who are currently in love or who experience the commitment and sexual desire of their partners, says Félix Neto and Maria da Conceição Pinto of the Universidade do Porto in Portugal. Their findings, published in an article in Springer’s journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, look at the influences on love life satisfaction throughout one’s adult life.
The researchers associate love with the desire to enter into, maintain, or expand a close, connected, and ongoing relationship with another person. In turn, love life satisfaction is a purely subjective, overall measurement of someone’s actual enjoyment of love. To investigate the factors that influence this across various age groups, 1,284 adult Portuguese women and men ranging between 18 and 90 years old were asked to evaluate and weigh specific facets of their own love lives by using the Satisfaction With Love Life Scale.
[…]While education does not impact a person’s love life satisfaction, religious involvement does. The finding that believers and regular churchgoers are positive about their love lives is in line with previous studies that associate religious involvement with better mental health and greater satisfaction with life and sexual relationships in general.
Previously, I blogged about a study reported in USA Today, which showed that people who attend church have lower divorce rates than those who don’t attend church.
Excerpt:
It’s been proclaimed from pulpits and blogs for years — Christians divorce as much as everyone else in America.
But some scholars and family activists are questioning the oft-cited statistics, saying Christians who attend church regularly are more likely to remain wed.
[…]The various findings on religion and divorce hinge on what kind of Christians are being discussed.
Wright combed through the General Social Survey, a vast demographic study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and found that Christians, like adherents of other religions, have a divorce rate of about 42%. The rate among religiously unaffiliated Americans is 50%.
When Wright examined the statistics on evangelicals, he found worship attendance has a big influence on the numbers. Six in 10 evangelicals who never attend had been divorced or separated, compared to just 38% of weekly attendees.
[…]Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, agrees there’s been some confusion.
“You do hear, both in Christian and non-Christian circles, that Christians are no different from anyone else when it comes to divorce and that is not true if you are focusing on Christians who are regular church attendees,” he said.
Wilcox’s analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households has found that Americans who attend religious services several times a month were about 35% less likely to divorce than those with no religious affiliation.
Nominal conservative Protestants, on the other hand, were 20% more likely to divorce than the religiously unaffiliated.
“There’s something about being a nominal ‘Christian’ that is linked to a lot of negative outcomes when it comes to family life,” Wilcox said.
Whenever I talk to atheists about marital satisfaction and marital stability, they always tell me these myths about how atheists divorce less and are happier in their marriages than religious people. But when I ask them for studies, they don’t have any, or they start to talk about the Discovery Channel or Star Trek or something. It’s like they believe things without any evidence at all. Meanwhile, one also has to note that atheists have much lower rates of marriage than church-attending believers.
Now clearly, there are going to be atheists with great marriages that never break up. But individual cases do not overturn peer-reviewed research studies. The fact is that marriage is an institution that is soaked through with moral values and moral obligations. If you think that morality is just arbitrary customs and conventions that vary by time and place, as is logically consistent with atheism, then the odds are that you won’t be able to stay married for long – if you even get married at all.
Heidi Cruz, a beautiful, intelligent, hard-working, successful woman
So, last week early Thursday morning, Donald Trump tweeted out a picture of his wife juxtaposed with a picture of Heidi Cruz that made her look very ugly.
In this post, I want to respond to Trump’s attack on Heidi, and urge Trump supporters to reconsider their support for Trump.
All about Heidi Cruz
Consider this Texas Tribune article about Heidi Cruz.
It says:
[Heidi] Cruz, 43, grew up in San Luis Obispo, Calif., the daughter of a dentist and dental hygienist who are Seventh-day Adventists.
[…]Cruz went to Claremont McKenna College and was active in the college Republicans and interested in appointive political office, said her mentor, Edward Haley. She also was intent on a career in business first. She moved to New York after graduation and worked on emerging markets at J.P. Morgan, an area in which she was interested after spending summers in Africa doing missionary work with her parents. She was put on the Latin America desk and taught herself to speak Spanish between 18-hour work days.
Cruz achieved her dream of attending Harvard Business School but turned down a job at Goldman Sachs to work on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.
She later met and married Ted Cruz, and she has now put her career on hold to help her husband run for President.
More:
She now holds her own campaign events, talking up her husband’s values and laying out what the campaign sees as a grass-roots path to victory.
[…]She remains the campaign’s top fundraiser, now making many calls from the road instead of from the campaign’s airy Houston headquarters, where she installed a playroom with pillows decorated with raspberry prints for the girls. Cruz said she aims to make 30 calls a day but typically averages about 20 to 25; she is calling from the campaign and super PAC lists and trying to persuade donors to give the maximum allowed under federal election law.
“I don’t want to say it’s easy, and I don’t close every deal,” she said. “I think people want to be a part of something that addresses the main issue of the day, number one, which is Washington versus the people.”
[…]Ted Cruz told an audience in Winterset, Iowa, on Monday that the couple’s decision to run for president was difficult for his wife.
“Heidi spent a lot of years building a very, very successful career. And when we were deciding whether to run, particularly when you’re parents of young girls, that’s not an easy decision. And she was struggling with it,” he said.
Ted Cruz said his wife was driving, listening to a CD of Christian music sent by her sister-in-law. She was struck by a song about seeking the face of the Lord and pulled over on the freeway and started crying, he said. That moment, he said, “changed her heart,” and she decided that the race was about God, the country and the future.
Now, Heidi Cruz says her main job is to bolster her husband’s candidacy.
“There are women who use their husband’s candidacies for their own” purposes, she said recently while being driven to yet another airport. “I love my life. I love my career. This is not for me. This is for our country.”
Here is one more quote from a 2013 article on Heidi Cruz, from the radically leftist New York Times, of all places:
In a glimpse into their marriage that Mr. Cruz called “illustrative,” he recalled saying to his wife in the weeks before his Senate primary, when he was still behind in the polls, “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.”
“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” said Mr. Cruz, who invested about $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” he added — into his campaign.
Here she is going door to door in New Hampshire in the winter:
Heidi Cruz waits for a New Hampshire voter to answer the door
Here’s a photo from the campaign trail that I’ve never shared. This is Heidi Cruz waiting in the cold to talk to a New Hampshire voter. She did this campaign work with me and three other kids. It was unglamorous: no media, no crowds, just a woman canvassing a neighborhood with a couple volunteers, trying to find someone to talk to about why she believed in her husband. Kind, genuine, humble: when the cameras she knows about are off, this is who Heidi Cruz is.
That’s a great wife.
Donald Trump’s attack on Heidi Cruz
It’s a shame that Donald Trump misses all the great things that Heidi has done and attacks her for her appearance. But this is what he values most in women, and this is why he keeps committing adultery on his wives as they age, and then divorcing them to trade them in for younger women. He thinks that a woman’s value is all in her appearance, so he thinks that Heidi is a loser.
Ted Cruz wasn’t born rich. He has had to work his way up to get where he is. Ted knows the value of a woman as a helper, so when it came time to get married, Ted chose the best helper he could find to help him do the big things that he wanted to do. Donald Trump inherited millions and millions of dollars. When it came time for him to choose a wife, he chose supermodel after supermodel. He has no idea what most wives really do to help their husbands, he doesn’t need the help of a woman, which is why he doesn’t value them as women.
“You know, it doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of *ss.”
“You have to treat [women] like sh*t.”
“A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10. Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world, I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, ‘Can you believe what I am getting?’”
The “top women” are the ones who are “10s”. And what do you do with these women? You have sex with them. You don’t commit to loving and serving a woman for life. You just use them, and throw them away. That’s his view of women. That’s his record.
Mona Charen wrote in defense of Heidi Cruz in National Review.
She says:
Heidi Cruz happens to be an attractive woman, but that’s beside the point. Trump is such a shallow, low human being that he cannot get beyond judging others on their appearance. Basic decent manners forbid commenting on others looks except in the mildest way. “What a lovely dress!” or “That color suits you.” Polite people remember to see others in full — as professionals, wives, mothers, sisters, volunteers, patients, teachers and so forth. Trump is obsessed with people’s looks. He has disdained countless formidable and impressive women for their looks (remember what he said about Carly Fiorina?), and even when searching for kind things to say about his late brother, he lingered quite a while on how handsome he was. At a meeting with the editorial board of the Washington Post, after being asked about using tactical nuclear weapons against ISIS, Trump offered that “this is pretty great looking group.” As with other Trump traits, this is disturbing.
When I first saw Trump’s tweet comparing Heidi Cruz against Trump’s third wife, my first response was to immediately unfriend all of the Trump supporting “friends” on Facebook. That’s how much I hate this idea that a woman has no value unless she is young and beautiful. For some reason, I regard this blindness / dismissiveness about the value of women as complementary to men as misogyny. I think deep down, there is something in me that recognizes that a man’s job is to give a woman security. And what security can a man give a woman when she knows that her value to him is all tied up in her youth and beauty? Trump is an adulterer. He divorced his two wives when they lost their youth and beauty, and he re-married younger women who had better appearances. But what security is there for a woman in a man who sees her contribution to the marriage as youth and beauty? I don’t want Trump’s example to become widespread.
Youth and beauty cannot last – women know that. If we as a society decide to communicate Trump’s message to women, that they only have value if they are young and beautiful, it creates a situation where women will disengage from marriage, because they know they will be abandoned. Trump’s attack on Heidi Cruz is especially devastating in communicating that message. What he is really saying is that women just need to look hot and be good at sex. He is saying that they don’t need to go to school, they don’t need to work hard, they don’t need to save money. These are all the things that Heidi did in order to make a difference, and to be a good helper to her husband.
The more that women get their idea of value from born-rich promiscuous womanizers like Donald Trump, the more women will be depressed that they cannot give anything to a man that will make him stick around. We need to be teaching women how much value they have as supporters, listeners, nurturers and teachers in the home. We need to be teaching men that women who understand male nature and know how to use their feminine gifts remain valuable through changes in age and appearance. Men have a deep need for women as companions. Ted Cruz chose Heidi Cruz because she had the knowledge, wisdom and character to be a suitable companion and confidante for him. We need to be celebrating women like Heidi Cruz, not attacking them for their looks.
The Wall Street Journal reports on a new analysis of problem solving skills.
Excerpt:
A new report finds U.S. workers rank dead last among 18 industrial countries when it comes to “problem solving in technology-rich environments,” or using digital technology to evaluate information and perform practical tasks. The consequences of that emerging competitive disadvantage is energizing the volatile undercurrent of this year’s presidential race, some observers say.
If the problem-solving deficit is bad, the reasons for it may be worse, said Stephen Provasnik, the U.S. technical adviser for the International Assessment for Adult Competency: flagging literacy and numeracy skills, which are the fundamental tools needed to score well on the survey.
[…]The results build off a global survey conducted in 2012 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. To better compare the skills of younger and older adults and the unemployed, researchers did additional surveys in 2014. The countries that scored the highest on the problem-solving with technology criteria were Japan, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Poland scored second to last, just above the U.S.
One stark revelation is that about four-fifths of unemployed Americans cannot figure out a rudimentary problem in which they have to spot an error when data is transferred from a two-column spreadsheet to a bar graph. And Americans are far less adept at dealing with numbers than the average of their global peers.
Why is that a problem? It’s a problem because the best jobs all require proficiency in math.
Consider these starting salaries and mid-career salaries for various majors:
Starting and Mid-Career salaries by profession (click for larger image)
The common denominator in all these degrees is mathematics, which is out of favor with many Americans. But clearly learning math would enable them to get the highest paying jobs – private sector STEM jobs. So why aren’t they learning math?
People drop math because it’s too hard
People who drop math typically do so because they want to focus on other things that are less difficult. Most of them just want to have fun… sometimes with watching TV all day, sometimes with premarital sex, sometimes with alcohol and drugs. Families break down as women choose hot, irresponsible men and have babies with them out of wedlock. And those kids learn less than their parents knew. There just isn’t any interest in much of America about learning hard things like math, so you can get those private sector STEM jobs that pay well.
Consider this post by Kevin Williamson in National Review magazine:
The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
Trump vs Hillary head-to-head: Trumpkins lack the math skills to make sense of this table
David French, who grew up in Kentucky, and then attended Harvard Law School, adds this in National Review:
These are strong words, but they are fundamentally true and important to say. My childhood was different from Kevin’s, but I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.
For generations, conservatives have rightly railed against deterministic progressive notions that put human choices at the mercy of race, class, history, or economics. Those factors can create additional challenges, but they do not relieve any human being of the moral obligation to do their best.
Yet millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. As I’ve related before, my church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement.
And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in. They were there, beckoning, giving men and women alternatives to gainful employment. You don’t have to do any work (your disability lawyer does all the heavy lifting), you make money, and you get drugs. At our local regional hospital, it’s become a bitter joke the extent to which the community is hooked on “Xanatab” — the Xanax and Lortab prescriptions that lead to drug dependence.
Of course we should have compassion even as we call on people to do better. I have compassion for kids who often see the worst behavior modeled at home. I have compassion for families facing economic uncertainty. But compassion can’t excuse or enable self-destructive moral failures.
Chart showing Trump vs Clinton: Trumpkins can’t read this chart, because it requires math skills
I have compassion for the kids, too. But not for the grown-ups, who seem to think that the world owes them a living even if they avoid learning hard things like math, and behave immorally. But there is no guarantee of success for people who don’t learn math, and who don’t behave morally. And it’s not anyone else’s fault.
WINTERY KNIGHT 