Lesbian couple with child a family, Irish High Court rules

Ireland's High Court has ruled that a lesbian couple living together in a long-term committed relationship with a child can be regarded as a de facto family enjoying rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, says this report in The Irish Times.

The ruling, I suspect, will have wider implications than are inherent in the case itself. For instance, how will it affect the position of same-sex couples, whether gay or lesbian, who have children, in relation to tax, social welfare and employment benefits? I expect this will be working its way through the system for the next few years

The court denied guardianship and access rights to the child's biological father who had donated sperm to the mother, says the Irish Times report.

Mr Justice Hedigan said there was nothing in Irish law to suggest that a family of two women and a child "has any lesser right to be recognised as a de facto family than a family composed of a man and a woman unmarried to each other".

He said the rights of a man who acted as a sperm donor were at least no greater than those of an unmarried father. In considering his application for guardianship the child's welfare was the paramount consideration, the Irish Times report says.

He believed there existed such personal ties between the couple and the child as to give rise to family rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which do not conflict with Irish law.

For more details, see this report in The Irish Independent.

And here is the rest of it.

Caring not only a female role - four out of every ten carers is a man

Photo by Sea Frost (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men column which appeared in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 25th March 2008. A collection of That's Men columns will be published by Veritas this summer.

What’s your image of a typical carer? It’s probably of a woman looking after a family member and in most cases you would be right.

But census figures show that about almost 40 per cent of carers are men. For these, as for their female counterparts, caring has certain negative consequences but some of these consequences may be different for men.

For instance, research in Northern Ireland has shown that 24 per cent of men looking after a dependant at home suffer “a severe lack of support” (the quote is from a booklet published by Derry City Council) compared to 15 per cent of women.

This suggest to me that women are more likely than men to keep in touch with a friend who has had to get heavily involved in caring. Perhaps it also means that men’s friendships are more likely than women’s to be linked to the workplace – if so, then a man who has to give up work to care for, say, his wife or a parent loses not only his income but also his social network.

Maybe we men need to follow the example of women and do more to stay in touch with friends who disappear into the world of caring.

The research from Northern Ireland shows that both male and female carers experience “a great deal of stress” to a greater extent than those who are not involved in caring – 17 per cent as against 9 per cent. Note that we’re not just talking about stress here, but “a great deal of stress” and we could expect general stress levels among carers to be higher than 17 per cent.

In Northern Ireland, 49 per cent of those caring for someone at home have a long-standing illness themselves, possibly an indication that these carers tend to be older.

Illness contributes to stress, of course, but I suspect there are many other sources of stress for carers, male and female. For instance, family members have a tendency to leave the carer to get on with it – it’s so much more convenient to say “Sure isn’t he great?” and to maintain a safe distance than to help out. The carer notices this and resents it but often lacks the assertiveness to insist that other family members play their part.

Then there are the endless battles with authority to get social services – a nursing or home help service, for instance. And there are the long hours in A&E waiting to be seen, waiting for an X-ray, waiting for a bed.

And the person being cared for may not help. If you were a contrary, awkward, impossible so-and-so all your life you’re probably not going to change when you need long term care. And some previously reasonable people can actually get contrary and demanding when confined to bed. Pity the poor carer who bears the brunt of it. (Memo to my kids: cut out this article and read this paragraph to me if I ever get like that. Better still, go live in Manhattan and keep out of the way).

Because women are seen as more capable and caring than men, I suspect that male carers are in a better position to get help from the social services. I also suspect that men are more reluctant than women to ask for such help, which cancels out the advantage they would otherwise have.

Caring can be based on love, duty or both. I expect that caring based on love can be very fulfilling, though tinged with sadness if the person being cared for is not going to recover. Caring based on duty is, it seems to me, a far more stressful proposition.

Love or duty, men or women, carers get only a fraction of the support and recognition that is owed to them by our society. I wonder if this is because caring is perceived to be something that is done by an army of invisible women who can be ignored?

And I wonder would this change if caring also began to be seen as a men’s issue? Perhaps it would – but whether it would or it wouldn’t, caring is, indeed, a men’s issue too and this will increasingly be the case as our life expectancy goes up.

Got an opinion? Comment here.

All the world's a stage

This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 11th March 2008. A collection of That's Men columns will be published by Veritas this summer.

Have you ever spotted a young man and woman walking along of an evening and realised that they were on their first date? Assuming you were right, how could you have known that?

it is because they were playing a role you recognised. They were well scrubbed up. Although they were talking to each other and perhaps even joking there was a slight formality and unease about them. Each was on parade, under scrutiny by the other.

If such a couple goes on to get married, they often begin to play different roles. One may take on the role of being feckless, or domineering for instance. The other may nag or be compliant. One may be playful and the other may be serious. One may drink too much and the other may play the part of caretaker.

Neither necessarily enjoys his or her role and neither necessarily realises what is going on.

Then perhaps something fundamental changes. One goes off on a personal development course, or maybe just off the rails, and begins to play a completely different role. Maybe the compliant person becomes assertive. Maybe the nagging person quits giving out and leaves the other to get on with it. Maybe the drinker gives up the booze and becomes a health freak.

Changes like this can shake up a relationship no end - sometimes terminally.

The roles we play with each other are described by a theory called Transactional Analysis. According to this theory each of us, right now, is probably playing one of three roles: parent, adult or child.

You are behaving like a parent when you give out or lay down the law or act in a nurturing and loving way. You are behaving like an adult when you are logical, and reasonable. And you are behaving like a child when you are mischievous or playful or sulky or whiney.

If you and your partner are sitting there giving out about the bus service or Bertie or the HSE you are having a parent to parent conversation.

If one is talking down to the other, accusing them of being irresponsible, of wasting money, of never keeping the house tidy, then you are having a parent to child conversation.

So given are we to role-playing that if you are being treated like a child, there is a good chance you will behave like one – so you might respond to your bossy partner by storming off or whinging or whining or sulking. Similarly, if one partner actually wants to behave like a child, the other may very well take on the role of parent.

How would you stop this game playing? The advice from the Transactional Analysis people is to drop the complementary role.

So when you are being talked down to by someone in parent mode you could respond, not like a child, but like an adult talking to an adult. "If you have something to say to me I would be grateful if you would address me like an adult,” could be an adult response to someone in full parent mode. And when they say, as they will, “I’ll talk to you like an adult when you start behaving like one,” you could walk very calmly out of the room saying something like, “I’m behaving like an adult right now and when you’re ready to do the same, let me know.” By the way, if you’re in a relationship in which it’s dangerous to act like an adult, you might be in the wrong relationship.

But couples also get locked into parent to parent communications with each other and that can be stultifying, especially if the kids have grown up.

Their main topic of conversation is still the children who may be off on the other side of the planet. Worse, the “children” or one of them may be in the living-room on a permanent basis, having taken out a 99-year lease on the family sofa. The parents may grumble about this but actually the son or daughter who refuses to leave may be helping them, the parents, to continue their parenting role. If they want something better for themselves they need to step out of that role.

In that case, one of the partners might need to start acting like a child by coming up with fun things to do or just by refusing to take life quite as seriously as before.

They might even consider dating each other again. They might consider getting scrubbed up and walking out like they did on that first date. If reviving your winning performances works for ageing rock stars, it can work for you.

High time to end the trek for the morning-after pill

This is the text of my article in The Evening Herald on Saturday, 1st March 2008:

Every Sunday, women make long journeys to Dublin to attend clinics run by the Irish Family Planning Association. Their purpose is to get the morning-after pill.

Emergency contraception is available in this country only on prescription, though you can get it over the counter in the UK. So in Ireland, the woman who has unprotected sex or who fears that her long-term contraception may not have protected her, must find a GP, and fast.

But there are many rural areas in which it is very difficult to find a GP on a Sunday morning – and many a woman would be embarrassed to go to her family doctor looking for the morning-after pill.

For the morning-after pill to be at its most effective it should be taken with 24 hours of unprotected sex. If that is done, there is a 95 per cent likelihood that it will prevent a pregnancy which would otherwise have occurred.

Within 24 and 48 hours, the pill is 85 per cent effective. And it is 60 per cent effective if taken within 48 and 72 hours.

So time is crucial when it comes to the use of the morning-after pill.

In the UK and elsewhere the woman can go down to her local chemist and buy the morning-after pill without prescription. In Ireland, we make them go through the embarrassment and expense of visiting a GP.

If you can’t find a GP on first thing on a Sunday, then too bad. You should have thought of that before you got yourself into this fix. You have had your fun and now you must pay for it.

This is not a view any reasonable parent would want to inflict on, say, their teenage daughter.

When the Irish Pharmaceutical Union commissioned a survey of 1,000 people on this issue, 75 per cent favoured making the morning-after pill available without prescription. Nowadays we accept that people have sex and that we should not punish them for by forcing them to make penitential journeys to family planning clinics.

The Irish Medicines Board is the key body when it comes to deciding whether the morning-after pill should be sold over the counter or not.

It takes the view that requiring a prescription for emergency contraception is “appropriate” because it means the GP can “monitor” the reactions of patients using it. What a load of old tosh. Either emergency contraception is so potentially dangerous that it should only be given out on a doctor’s prescription, or it is not.

The fact is that the UK, with a regulatory system just as good as ours has found nothing to suggest that the morning-after pill should be a prescription-only drug.

It seems to me that somebody in power should lean on the Irish Medicines Board to help them to take a difference view. Why should women have to go on paying the price of this policy?

Is the morning-after pill an abortifacient, as some have suggested? It isn’t, and if it was, it wouldn’t be available here even on prescription. So far as in known, the pill works by preventing ovulation or delaying it or by preventing a fertilised egg from settling in the womb. It doesn’t appear to cause an embryo already implanted in the womb to abort.

We live in an era in which you can buy condoms in your local Spar. Why should this other form of contraception involve, for some women, a penitential journey of 100 miles or more to a family planning clinic at the weekends?

We really do need to end this nonsense and we need those in authority to take note of the fact that most people want to end it.

Beware the joy of text

This is the text (!) of my That's Men column in The Irish Times on 26th February 2008:

“God, yes I….” began a text message I got on my way through JFK Airport after Christmas.
The gist of the message was that I was a fantastic lover and that the sender was, er, thinking about me and missing me already.

Clearly the text was not meant for me (my wife agrees). Sneakily, I looked up the number on my computer and nobody came up. Darn.

Naughty text messages sit in phones like unexploded grenades. The explosion comes when a nosey partner spots an unattended phone, reads the messages in the inbox and gets a shock. The result, needless to say, is rarely pleasant for anyone involved.

The text message is a sort of gremlin in the world of relationships. Gremlins are mischief makers which delight in tormenting the afflicted. So it is with the illicit text.

Now, there is nothing wrong with sending loving or even saucy texts to your loved one. It’s when the relationship ends that texting takes on a different complexion.

If one of the partners didn’t want the relationship to end, the texts are likely to keep on coming in a bid to reverse the break-up. If the two parted by mutual consent, the texts may still keep flowing, much to the discomfiture of new parties who, sooner or later, will take a peek into the inbox.

In other words, texting has meant the end of the clean break – splitting up is even harder to do.

There’s another side to texting and it’s linked with control. The day the mobile phone was invented was a red letter day for control freaks everywhere. The mobile provided them with the almost perfect tool for tracking another person’s movements. The control freak will ruin a partner’s evening out with friends by sending text after text demanding to know “where are you now?” “who are you with?” “what are you doing?” “when are you coming home?” and so on. Failure to respond to these texts can lead to a lot of unpleasantness later on.

And when the person who is at the receiving end of this nonsense decides to call a halt to the relationship, the texts and voicemails multiply like rabbits, necessitating an inconvenient change of numbers not once but perhaps a few times. This is because control freaks can be good at finding out your new number, especially if your friends are gobshites who can be plámásed by said control freak.

Needless to say, texting also offers a cowardly means of breaking up with someone. This can add to the pain of the person who has been dumped especially if that person’s texts elicit no response. And when the person who was dumped eventually forms a new relationship, a resumption of texts from the one who did the dumping – and who has now changed his or her mind – can create havoc.

If you’re not used to texting, this may all seem rather laborious. How can people have the patience to do all these things by text? Well, have you ever watched a dedicated texter – a teenager, say – texting? The really good ones do not even need to look at the letters on the keypad. They are like touch typists – their fingers know where to go. A secondary school teacher once lamented to me that she suspects the school’s anti-texting policy is frustrated by girls who are able to text without taking their phones out of their pockets. Needless to say, any attempt by the teacher to remove said phones from pockets could result in a costly trip to the High Court.

There’s something very human about all this carry-on. People stop and coort in cars which were designed to get them from place to place quickly. People use computers for playing games when, really, they could be using them to work out complex mathematical theorems. And people send dirty messages to each other on mobile phones when they could be exchanging uplifting lines of poetry.

We could be perfect. We could be uplifted. But, once again, humanity gets in the way.

And all I can say to that is, “God, yes I….”

Grieving the death of a child - help from parents who have had the experience

Photo by ericadwoodson (Flickr)

If your child has died, the only person who can really understand your loss is someone who has experienced such a loss, according to Anam Cara, a new website set up by bereaved parents. The website is full of information of people going through this dreadful experience and has links to good, international websites.

"There are no solutions or answers to your grief or pain on this website, but there is a huge amount of understanding and empathy. Everyone copes with the loss of their child in different ways," it says.

"No matter how your child has died, through an accident or long term illness, at Anam Cara we respect that your grief is your own. It also does not matter how old your child was, they could have only been minutes on this earth or grown up to be adults with a family of their own. What matters is that they are your child and the bond between a parent and child is the strongest bond of all and the breaking of that bond the hardest grief to come to terms with and accept."

Anam Cara means "soul friend" in Irish.

(This is the complete post. Ignore "Continue reading" link below.)

Bringing up teens - a tough call for separated Dads

Photo by .Tatiana. (Flickr)

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008:

Adolescence, to put it mildly, is a time when teenagers separate out from their parents.

Consider, then, the difficulties which non-resident fathers have in maintaining relationships with their teenage children.

Not only have the teens reached the stage where Dad is no longer perfect but Dad isn't there to give them the attention they want.

It is, of course, very easy to criticise fathers in this situation for not spending enough time with their teens.

But Dad probably has a job to do, complete with commuting and may have another household to go home to as well.

On top of this the teenagers themselves have to fit in study, drama, football, dancing and time out with their friends.

So co-ordinating the contact is not easy and takes an effort. It is especially difficult to do if the teens' mother and father are not on speaking terms.

A study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family gives some idea of how the sense of closeness between teenagers and a divorced father suffers in this situation.

I am assuming here that it is the mother who has custody of the children.

The research was derived from a national, long-term study of adolescents in the United States.

Young people were interviewed at the beginning and end of a five year period. Their parents were together at the start of the five years but, by the end, some had divorced.

At the start, 57 per cent of the young people said they were very close to their fathers.

By the end, this had fallen to 48 per cent where the parents were still together and to 25 per cent where they were divorced. Closeness to the mother was unaffected by the divorce.

Three things strike me as important about these figures.

The first is that closeness between father and teenagers suffered whether the parents were divorced or together - though to a greater extent, of course, where there had been a divorce. This, I expect, is part of the usual war of independence that goes on between adolescents and the old folks.

The second striking point is that, given the way the study was done, all the divorces had occurred relatively recently when the teenagers were interviewed the second time. At this stage emotions would still be very raw and the father's 'rating' could, perhaps, be expected to suffer as he is the absent parent.

The third point is that we do not know how long this absence of closeness might last. The storms of adolescence die down and are generally followed by a greater closeness between parents and 'children'.

There is no reason why this should not also occur where the parents are divorced.

Nevertheless, the findings underline the fact that separated fathers have to make a special effort to keep involved with teenage children.

For this they need to be able to cooperate with the mother. That is easier said than done. Parents who are still together often fight over how to handle their teenagers. Such fights, I suspect, are just as likely to occur when the parents are apart.

But unless they are able and willing to cooperate, the scene is set for major conflict.

Other research suggests that once teenagers become fairly independent, they may shuttle between parent and parent to get what they want.

If Mammy is being a pain in the neck, then a few days with Daddy seems like a good idea. If one parent won't shell out for tickets for Oxegen, then maybe the other one - alright, Daddy again - will.

This again points up the necessity for separated parents to talk to one another about these issues and to try to reach some sort of accommodation about them.

Parents living apart, whether married or unmarried, can get help with with reaching such an accommodation from the Family Mediation Service which is part of the Family Support Agency and has centres around the country.

Its website is at www.fsa.ie and the telephone number is (01) 611 4100. They're worth a call if you're living apart and fighting over the teens.

See also: Staying close to teens is harder for separated Dads.

"Running away money" - when couples marry should their money stay apart?

Photo by emdot (Flickr)

Women in certain parts of Dublin used to have - and maybe still have - what was known as "running away money." This was a little stash of cash that the husband knew nothing about. It was meant to fund the wife's escape if life with himself should become intolerable.

In practice, I suppose, it got dipped into for various expenses and treats. If "running away money" exists today it probably vanishes on shopping trips to New York.

I thought about "running away money" when I read that couples in the UK have become a more secretive with each other about how much money they really have. One symptom of this is that fewer couples have joint bank accounts.

In the first flush of romance, the joint bank account may be seen as an expression of undying love. But in the divorce era, when love is far from undying, it appears that couples getting married now doubt if it is wise for their bank accounts to marry as well.


The issue of joint control over money also raised its head last week when the Liveline on RTE Radio 1 addressed the question of child benefit or the children’s allowance as it used to be called. Listeners heard stories of bad behaviour by both genders. On one side, there was the man who kept his wife and children on a subsistence allowance because money had to be prioritised for his drinking. On the other, there was the woman who left her husband and children and went to live in England a couple of decades ago. The husband was told he could not get the children's allowance; so whenever the wife came home to Ireland from England she popped into the post office, collected her children's allowance and used the money to help to fund her new lifestyle.

Even in the absence of such extremes, it is not all that unusual for each partner in a long-term relationship to have a different attitude to money. Perhaps one is cautious and the other is of the Spend! Spend! Spend! mentality, for instance. If they could talk about money matters in a rational way, they could avoid a great many problems. But how many of us are capable of talking to our partner in a rational way about money? Suppose you divide a page into two columns and note on one side the times you have had a rational, logical conversation about money with your nearest and dearest and on the other side the times you fought over money. Which column would be the longest? Unless you’re living with Eddie Hobbs, I suspect it would be the second one.

The emotions and, sometimes, bad behaviour that accompany money are, needless to say, carried into relationship breakdown. Separating partners have an interest in hiding from each other their true financial status. Money may be removed from bank accounts, for instance. If one partner gets a pay rise it may be kept very quiet. In mediation between separating couples, the point at which the mediator puts up on a flipchart the expense of running two households can be an early breaking point.

In a discussion on the topic on BBC Radio 4’s Woman's Hour last week, Jonathan Self (author of The Teenager's Guide to Money) suggested that attitudes to money should be discussed with anybody you are thinking of having a relationship with. He even suggested that the topic is sufficiently important for a first date.

That’s fine if your first date happens to be an accountant, a revenue official or a banker. For the rest of us, though, it strikes me as a bridge too far, too soon – the sound of first dates running very fast in the opposite direction could become a familiar one. Best confine yourself to trying for a kiss and park the money issue until the next time.

And if the relationship flourishes and you end up together until death or irreconcilable differences do you part, I hope each of you will be wise enough to have your own little stash of "running away money" hidden in the post office.

Love and maintenance

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday 8th January 2008:

A poem by the late Detroit poet Robert Hayden brings home the importance of recognising a sort of love that that has little to do with romance but which deserves to be acknowledged and praised nevertheless. Called Those Winter Sundays it begins:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

The image of the father who gets up in bitter cold to light the fires for the family before they, too, arise is probably somewhat dated in the central heating era but the principle remains: that such acts can be, in their own way, acts of love.

They are also, very often, unacknowledged. Hayden talks of getting up in the now warm house and

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Note: Click here for the full poem.

A few weeks ago, on Sarah Carey's GUBU blog, I came across a poem by the British poet UA Fanthorpe which expresses the same idea. It begins:

"There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget the milkman, which remembers to plant bulbs;"

Note: Click here for the full poem.

(WD40, if you don't know, is a type of oil good for rust prevention and other purposes.)

And it's not all sweetness and light. Hayden was raised by foster parents who had a very troubled marriage and the effects stayed with him throughout his life. Indeed, in the poem mentioned above he talks about "the chronic angers of that house." Nevertheless, he recognised in later life the value of the practical things done for him by the foster father whom he often had reason to fear.

It seems to me that for people who have had a harsh upbringing there can sometimes be a kind of healing in this realisation. A parent might be unexpressive about love but might nevertheless build his or her life around the needs of the child or the other parent.

This realisation is also part of the Japanese Naikan meditation which I have mentioned before in this column. To do Naikan, you call to mind someone who was or is important to you even if - perhaps especially if - you have a big resentment against that person. You then ask yourself three questions and reflect on each in turn: What has this person given me, what have I given this person and what troubles have I caused this person?

You are encouraged to be very specific in your answers. Maybe all you can think of is that this person put food on the table, ironed your clothes and saw to it that you went to school. You may be full of justifiable anger towards them but there are, nevertheless, these things that they did for you. And there are, after all, parents who don't do even these things for their children.

All of this is a million miles removed from romantic love which involves doing things for the other person simply because they are romantic and without much regard to whether they are useful. A bouquet of roses hasn't got a lot of utility to it but it can get a guy out of trouble because it appeals to the romantic side of love. So if you want a flourishing relationship with your significant other, don't rely on the "love called maintenance" but throw a little romance into the mix as well.

But never underestimate the importance of the "love called maintenance" either. In some people it can simply be a sour expression of a resented duty. But in others, it can be as true an expression of love as the roses and the box of chocolates and the diamond ring, or maybe even truer. That it so often goes unappreciated and unacknowledged -as by Robert Hayden as a child - does nothing to alter this fact.

Staying close to teens is harder for separated Dads

While fathers are often criticised for having insufficient contact with their children following a separation, it seems to me that the logistics of holding down and job and living elsewhere can make it tough for separated fathers to keep the level of contact they - or most of them - would like. Both the children and the (usually) mother they are living with have their own routines around work, school and extra-curricular activities and navigating around these is difficult especially if the relationship between the parents is one of hostility.

Now a piece of research reported on Psych Central News shows that there is a particular danger of separated Dads finding themselves distanced from their teenage children unless they are able to make an extra effort to keep up contact. The US research, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that 48 per cent of teenagers questioned said they had a consistently close relationship with their father where the parents were still together. But if the parents were divorced that percentage fell to 25 per cent. Divorce did not significantly affect the relationship with the mother.

This suggests that separated men need to work extra hard on their relationship with their teenage children. As I mentioned above, that can be a very tall order indeed and it requires the cooperation of all concerned.

(This is the complete post. Ignore "Continue reading" link below.)

Sometimes togetherness is just too much!

Photo by papalars (Flickr)

Togetherness between men and women is to be encouraged - but sometimes it goes too far. I first came to this conclusion in Captain America's in Grafton Street when I observed a couple who not only wore the same pullovers but ordered the same dish. Fair enough, you may say, but this pair ordered their burgers and chips on the same plate with two sets of knives and forks and continued to tuck in, totally together, totally sharing. Well, at least they ordered separate knives and forks.

A couple of years ago in Lanzarote I saw another example of togetherness. We discovered to our amazement that the apartment complex we were in allowed residents to eat all they could at its restaurant for the whole week at no extra cost. This deal had attracted loads of obese people. Obese couples and, indeed, entire obese families, moved back and forth from food counter to tables with an odd, floating motion as if they were in an aquarium. It was remarkable to see Mum, Dad, sons, daughters, all going around like large dolphins - togetherness indeed.

In both these examples - I could come up with others but you get the idea - I reckon togetherness can be tyrannical. If loving hubby or loving wifey had decided they wanted to have their own goddam burger on their own goddam plate mightn't they have been spending the rest of the day, and night, in the doghouse? And what of the families in Lanzarote? Imagine being the one who wants to slim down, run ten miles a day, get slim and muscular? FREAK!

Now, I'm a chap who likes his space. I get twitchy at a crowded dinner table. At parties, I get bored around midnight. So I'm never going to be into the levels of togetherness I've described above - but would you?

(This is the complete post. Ignore "Continue reading" link below.)

Campaigns target domestic violence by men and women

Photo by Ulisseya (Flickr)

Report from Women's Health Council, book by Amen founder

Some years ago I met a group of people with physical disabilities and, in the course of conversation, I asked if all of them had been born with their disabilities.

All had except one, a woman who had been so badly beaten by her husband that he had left her disabled for life and unable, ever again, to live independently.

I thought of her when I read, in a new report from the Women’s Health Council, that in Europe more women die or are seriously injured every year through domestic violence than through cancer or road accidents.

The report acknowledges that men suffer violence at the hands of women– but all the evidence, I’m afraid, suggests that men carry out most of the violence that occurs between the genders.

What’s going on with men who are violent towards their female partners? A few, I suspect, don’t know any better. It’s what they grew up with. Most people who see violence at home avoid repeating it in their own relationships later on. Some, however, may think it’s the thing to do.

Others, though, seem to have a pathological need to control their partners. Everything: what she wears, who she sees, how much make-up she puts on, who she talks to at work, who she telephones, when and how she does housework, has to be controlled in detail.

I suspect that behind this pathological need for control is a dread of losing the other person, a certainly that she will leave unless she is put on the very tightest of reins. The irony, of course, is that these control freaks generally end up losing their partners anyhow – by holding on to them so oppressively they drive them away.

New book by Mary T Cleary
Women who are violent and abusive to their male partners may have similar motivations. A new book, That Bitch – protect yourself against women with malicious intent, written by Mary T Cleary, founder of Amen, and journalist Roy Sheppard, describes instance after instance of such behaviour.

I don’t like the title, which was chosen to shock, because I think it creates an unnecessary barrier between men and women on this issue. That said, the book does a good job of highlighting one big problem concerning violence by women towards men. This is the reluctance of men to speak out because they have a realistic fear of not being believed or of being sneered at.

No slap, just tickle
An interesting campaign to bring together both of these aspects of domestic violence – men as perpetrators and men as victims – has been launched in the UK. The No slap, just tickle campaign aims to help men speak out against, and overcome, domestic violence, whether they are victims, perpetrators or bystanders.

The inclusion of perpetrators may seem odd but many violent men go through periods of remorse and this is something that can be built on by a campaign like this. The campaign urges men who perpetrate violence to have the courage to seek help and to understand that domestic violence is never acceptable. There are programmes to help such men, run by MOVE Ireland in ten locations around the country and contact numbers are given on the website.

The No slap, just tickle campaign encourages men who are victims of domestic violence to “have the courage to seek help – even if you have the impression that it will make matters worse. As a man you are no different to the countless women who have spoken out about domestic violence and freed themselves from it.” Amen can be a helpful resource to men in this situation.

And the campaign encourages men who are aware of situations of domestic violence to “urge the person in question to seek help – whether as a victim or as a perpetrator.”

Domestic violence is a choice. The men and women who perpetrate it do not, for example, have uncontrollable urges to beat up their bosses at work. Therefore if they beat up or torment one person and not another they are exercising a choice. That is a fact we need to bear in mind at all times.

Breaking up is so undignified to do say Tubridy Show guests

(This is the text of my RadioScope column which appeared in The Irish Times on 20th November, 2007):

How to break up and how not to break up

The cover of a magazine at our local newsagent’s proclaims: “Ziggy – why I dumped Chanelle.” The cover of the magazine beside it screams: “Chanelle – why I dumped Ziggy.” (That's Chanelle above right.)

The aftermath of breakups is not always edifying. After model Katy French got dumped by her boyfriend when he walked in on her doing a perfectly legitimate lingerie photoshoot, she allowed his subsequent text messages to her to be published in a newspaper.

She probably shouldn’t have done, it she told the nation on the Tubridy Show, but she felt good about it at the time and, actually, she still feels good about it today.

The programme was exploring the whole business of breaking up and what happens afterwards.

The grieving process
All agreed that a break-up is followed by a grieving process for at least one of the two people involved – but the grieving seems to work differently for men and women. Men think the way to grieve is to follow the principle that “the best way to get over one woman is to get under another,” said John Breen, whose play “Falling out of love” is touring Ireland at the moment.

Women, said counsellor Betty Drury, grieve by networking with other women and talking through their feelings over two-hour lunches.

Starting again
Afterwards, there is the question of meeting someone new. Like many another person whose relationship has broken up, Katy French can’t stand the thought of going through the motions of the dating game again. She has learned through therapy that it’s ok to be with herself, alone, for a while and that she doesn’t have to be in a relationship, or surrounded by people, at all times.

John Breen believes that having your heart broken is not an entirely negative experience: it makes you value true love all the more when you eventually find it.

And breaking up can be liberating for a person who is escaping from attempts by the other person to change them, Betty Drury observed.

The programme did a vox pop in which opinion seemed divided between those who believed breaking up should always be done face to face and those – mostly women – who advocated doing it by text.

Which prompted Katy French to observe that women “don’t give a hoot” about the process of breaking up once they’ve decided to do it. Men are far more likely to be cautious and to mumble and mutter their way through the whole thing.

How and how not to do it
And what’s the best way to break up? Do it honestly and without delay, advised counsellor Betty Drury. Otherwise you steal the other person’s precious time for weeks, months or years as you string them along.

But don’t do it like the guy who rang his soon-to-be-ex girlfriend, said he was out of credit and asked her to ring him back – and then dumped her at her own expense.

You can hear the programme again at http://www.rte.ie/radio1/thetubridyshow/

25 ways to approach a woman at work and not get sued

Cautious note a sign of the times

These tips on the Bootstrapper blog are pretty good on all the ways to approach that person who has caught your eye - and heart - at work. I guess it's a sign of the times that the tips are couched as ways to "not get sued". Is the average female really that ready to call a lawyer? Is it really true that you shouldn't ask someone out more than once if they refuse the first time? I knew someone who asked a girl - this was back when there were girls - out several times, politely, before she reluctantly agreed. Then she married him. Then she divorced him. Gee, maybe Bootstrapper is right.

Link:

Bootstrapper » 25 Ways to Approach A Woman At Work And Not Get Sued

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How the Family Mediation Service helps separated Dads and Mums negotiate Christmas and other issues

Service also helps parents who have never lived together

(This is the text of my article on the Family Mediation Service which appeared in The Irish Times on 13th November 2007)

Christmas is more than a month away but for parents who don’t live together there is just a short time left to work out who will see the children and when, during what ought to be a joyful occasion.

What presents should be bought? Who should buy them? Should one parent buy an expensive present which the other parent has already told the children they cannot have? If the children are young enough for Santa to visit, who will be there when they open the presents, or will Santa have to visit twice?

Issues such as these can exceptionally emotional, difficult and painful at times like Christmas.

“I never saw my youngest child coming down the stairs to find her present,” said one father. “And I never had the opportunity to bring my children to my parents’ grave on Christmas Day.”

These are the sort of problems which the Family Mediation Service, part of the Family Support Agency, deals with all the time. The mediation service aims to help couples – married or unmarried – to settle issues between them when they are separating. These include the important issues of finance and property but also the important issue of the future relationship with the children.

The service also helps people who have never lived together to sort out parenting problems.

Parenting flashpoints
Potential flashpoints which parents living apart would do well to work out in mediation include communions, confirmations, holidays and even children’s parties, says Polly Phillimore, the service coordinator for the Family Mediation Service.

People working on separation or maintenance agreement may want to deal with these things later, but “later” could come sooner than they think and could find them unprepared.

In general, it is better to make agreements about such issues in the relatively calm atmosphere of a mediation session than on the other parent’s doorstep.

What works now?
The first step, says mediator and area-coordinator Sheila Healy, is often to “look at what’s working at the moment.” Who is involved right now with bringing the kids to school and getting them home? Who brings them to and from their extra-curricular activities? Seeing what contribution each parent can make to this in the future may allow the whole process to flow more smoothly.

Indeed, says Polly Phillimore, where parents make plans in this way, the children sometimes get to see more of both parents after the separation than they did before.

The same principle, of seeing what already works, can be helpful in looking at the issue of Christmas.

“It’s helpful for the parents to ask what are the family traditions?” says Sheila Healy. Do the children and the family always go to granny in the morning and then somewhere else in the evening? Do they always go to the graveyard at a particular time of the day?

“Can we build something around this?” asks Ms Healy.

“Families often have certain things they do that are key to their Christmas Day,” she says. “Perhaps all the family gets together in a particular house.” In such a situation might it be feasible for both parents to be there?

It can also help separated parents enormously if the grandparents can put to one side their feelings about one or other of the parents and can make them welcome at Christmastime.

On the question of Santa and presents, parents sometimes agree that both of them will be in the house when the children open their presents, says Sheila Healy.

Where there are two families and two sets of children involved parents may need to be aware of the potential for jealousy over presents between the two groups of children.

They need to work out issues such as how a parent will feel if the other parent’s new partner is there when presents are delivered. Again, these issues are better handled in the mediation room than on the doorstep.

Ray Kelly of Unmarried and Separated Fathers of Ireland talks of fathers who have no visitation rights on Christmas Day simply because the visitation days laid down in a court order don’t happen to include the day of the week on which it falls. If these matters can be sorted out in mediation, an enormous amount of conflict and pain can be avoided.

Always parents
The work which the family mediation service does in relation to children is based on the premise that the parents, even though apart, will always be parents.

The service was set up in 1986 and has over 14 offices around the country. Many of its offices have waiting lists and it may be difficult to get an appointment before Christmas at some of them – but issues concerning separation and parenting don’t vanish at Christmas.

There is more information on the family mediation service at www.fsa.ie and its headquarters telephone number is 01-6344320.

See Tips for making Christmas better for separated parents (below) for summary of points from this article.

Tips for making Christmas better for separated parents

Start early and see what worked before, mediators advise

• Parents need to talk to each other soon rather than later about Christmas arrangements.
• It can be helpful to look at what has worked for the family in the past. What is the usual Christmas routine? What “makes” Christmas for the children?
• Has there been a tradition in which the extended families meet on Christmas Day? Can this occasion be continued and can both parents be present?
• If there are small children, is it possible for both parents to be together when they are opening their presents from Santa?
• Parents may need to agree in advance on what presents will be given. It can create difficulties if one parent gives the children an expensive present to which the other parent has already said No.
• If there has been a tradition of visiting family graves, can a way of doing this be worked out for both families?
• Can grandparents or other members of extended families put their feelings about one of the parents to one side to facilitate them to be present, for a time at least, on Christmas Day?
• 8. If one parent is delivering Christmas presents will, or should, the other parent’s new partner be there? It may be wise to discuss this in advance or at least to be sensitive to the issue.

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Family goes for potential son-in-law bald-headed

Police in India's Assam state have received a complaint from a prospective groom against his would-be in-laws for allegedly thrashing him for not disclosing that he wore a wig to conceal his baldness.

Link:

ireland.com - The Irish Times - Tue, Nov 20, 2007 - Family goes for potential son-in-law bald-headed

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Net veteran Grohol's five tips for a successful marriage

This is the text of my That's Men for You column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 13th November, 2007:

There are lots of people out there promoting products which will purport to tell you how to have a successful marriage – but when the advice is relayed by John Grohol (pictured above right) it’s worth our attention.

Dr Grohol, a clinical psychologist, is one of the pioneers of useful information on the internet. He launched his Psych Central website at www.psychcentral.com in 1995 at a time when relatively few homes anywhere had an internet connection.

Since then, Grohol has published thousands of articles based on mainstream research and has made them available, at no charge and in plain English to anybody who wants to read them.

Grohol reckons he’s cast an eye on about a thousand articles on how to have a long-term successful relationship or marriage. None of them, he complains, seem to capture the core ingredients he has found important in long-term relationships.

He believes there are five such core ingredients. Here they are:

First: Compromise. You may have found your soulmate but that doesn’t mean you’ll agree on when to put out the bins, how to discipline or reward the children or what time you should be home from work on a Friday night. So unless you both learn to compromise, your day to day disagreements could turn into something much worse.

Second: Choose your battles carefully. Once you accept that you and your nearest and dearest are never going to see eye to eye on everything – because that’s the way people are – then the wisdom of this piece of advice becomes obvious. Is it really worth fighting over the cap being left off the toothpaste or the toilet roll being turned around the “wrong” way? Mightn’t it be better to reserve your fighting time for more important issues, such as family finances or children?

Third: Communicate, preferably not in the middle of a row. The notion that “If you really loved me you’d know how I feel” is, to put it politely, bull. Even a psychologist would not know how you felt about anything unless you actually told him or her. So tell. And if you want to be heard, do it when you’re at peace, which hopefully is most of the time, and not when you’re fighting.

Fourth: Don’t hide your needs from yourself or your partner. If you’re unhappy with working too much, or not working enough, with the amount of affection or sex in the relationship or with anything else that really matters, you need to admit this to yourself and to discuss it with your partner. Otherwise these unexpressed needs can corrode the relationship.

Fifth: Recognise the importance of trust and honesty. People in long-term relationships need to be able to depend on each other. This is why betrayals of trust hurt so much and why the worst aspect of an affair, for instance, is that betrayal of trust.

If you do these things will you have a peaceful relationship? No, of course not. Much of the advice above is based on the recognition that permanently peaceful relationships are not a human possibility. And, curiously, once you recognise that, your relationships can become deeper and more loving than before because you are accepting the reality of the other person.

It is as though we are shut into a room and each is allowed to look out through one of the windows in that room – but not the same window as the other. So you’re both in the same room alright, but what you see and what your partner sees are different. Each needs to accept that the other person’s reality is different, sometimes radically so. And who knows which ‘reality’ is the right one?

So to me, what is important from Grohol’s five points (Click here for original article) is for each partner to accept that, in many ways, they are as different as chalk and cheese. Each needs to give up on the effort to turn them both into chalk and chalk or cheese and cheese.

That said, please don’t ask me to put the bins out when I’m watching I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Thanks.

• Note: John Grohol has written a generous response to this post on his blog here.
  

Is abuse risk higher with non-biological live-in boyfriends?

US data suggests that the risk of child abuse grows when a man who is not the children's biological father moves in, says this story from Associated Press.

Link:

Newsvine - Abuse Risk Seen Worse As Families Change

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Male And Female Adolescents Equally Victims Of Physical Dating Violence, Study Shows

Physical dating violence affects almost one in every 11 adolescents, with males and females equally affected, according to research presented at the American Public Health Association’s 135th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Link:

Male And Female Adolescents Equally Victims Of Physical Dating Violence, Study Shows

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