How we handle disagreements in our marriages makes all the difference

The ultimate goal in the marriage is happiness and peace for both, and if they have to fight, assert and compromise to get there, it is a part of it and must be appreciated.

Mike Ghouse
TheGhouseDiary.com
www.InterfaithMarriages.org 

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Courtesy : Newton Citizen

By Hal Brady

Whenever I do pre-marital counseling, I usually include the following: role expectations and whether or not they are realistic; a good theology of marriage; what the psychologists and sociologists say about marriage; the importance of communication; the necessity of commitment; and how to deal with conflict or disagreement.

Unless one of the marriage partners is a non-thinking robot, every marriage has disagreements. The only question is how we handle it.

Hear me now. Whether it’s in marriage, business, sports, politics, family life, religion, international affairs or personal relationships, every life situation has disagreements. Again, the important thing is how we deal with it. So, how do we deal with disagreements?

First, we can seek to understand the other person’s point of view. There can be no reconciliation if we do not seek to understand the other person’s point of view. And this understanding will always begin with listening.

A mother and her small daughter were looking at dolls in a department store one day. “What does it do?” the child would ask about each doll. The mother would answer, “it walks” or “it talks” or “it sleeps” or “it cries.”

The dolls were rather expensive, so the mother tried to direct her little girl’s attention toward an ordinary doll that was more reasonably priced. “But does it do anything?” the child asked. “Oh, yes,” the mother replied. ” It does one of the best things of all — it listens.” The little girl eagerly reached for that doll. And so do we.

In being open to another person’s point of view, it has been said that there are three necessary qualities that don’t come easily: honesty, objectivity and humility. We can seek to understand the other person’s point of view.

Second , we can disagree without being disagreeable. As a professor friend put it in a major address at the 17th World Methodist Conference held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, “Build a bridge and get over it.” You know, it’s amazing how many people have trouble getting over some perceived past injustice. They would rather keep themselves and others miserable than build a bridge and get over it.

It’s at this point that Samuel Johnson gives us one of the most liberating sentences he ever wrote: “Kindness is in our power, fondness is not. Kindness or charity is not felt, but willed. Kindness or charity is not passion or affection or friendship, but an attitude of unshakable and unwavered good will to others, whether we like them or not.”

Third, we can look carefully for a way of compromise. Some people look at compromise as a weak and cowardly thing. They mistakenly think that it has something to do with a lack of backbone.


Now, to be sure, there is a time to hold the line. We should never compromise sacred truth, principles or convictions. But simply to be unbending is another thing altogether.

In a recent issue of “The Christian Science Monitor Weekly,” Sarah Binder, professor of political science at George Washington University, was writing about restoring trust in Congress. She wrote, “What really turns off people about Congress is watching the sausage being made and all the reporting of bickering. People wonder why members of Congress can’t talk like reasonable people.”

I think Sarah Binder is talking about the need of members of Congress to find ways of compromise for the good of the nation and world. At any rate, compromise is a good way to deal with disagreement.

Fourth, we can trust that God can use everything, even our disagreements, for His purposes. In the narthex of the Cathedral of Belmont Abby near Charlotte, N.C., there is a baptismal font mounted on a big rock. The inscription reads: “From this stone, on which persons were sold into slavery, they now are baptized into freedom.” Only God can do that. God can transform any dead-end situation into a powerful force for good.

The Rev. Hal Brady is an ordained United Methodist minister and executive director of Hal Brady Ministries, based in Atlanta. You can watch him preach every week on the Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasting TV channel Thursdays at 8 p.m. For more information, visit www.halbradyministries.com or email hal@halbradyministries.com.

Mixed marriages are changing the way we think about our race

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Mixed marriages are changing the way we think about our race
Courtesy - Washington Post

By Jeff Guo February 17  

Actress Aubrey Plaza attends the 20th Annual Art Directors Guild Excellence In Production Design Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)

For all the talk about immigrants refusing to embrace American ways — a defining controversy of this GOP presidential race — the evidence has been scant.

The National Academies of Sciences deflated most of the myths in a definitive report last year. Today’s immigrants are more educated and better English speakers than their predecessors, and they are far less likely to commit a crime compared to the native-born. They are quickly becoming part of American communities.

In fact, new immigrants may be assimilating a lot faster than than we had ever thought. A new study this week from economists Brian Duncan, of the University of Colorado, and Stephen Trejo of University of Texas, Austin finds that the descendents of immigrants from Latin-American and Asian countries quickly cease to identify as Hispanic or Asian on government surveys.

According to the authors, these are mostly children of interracial couples that aren’t writing down their diverse heritages. Mixed marriages are increasingly common in America — Pew finds that about 26 percent of Hispanics marry a non-Hispanic these days, and 28 percent of Asians marry a non-Asian. To accommodate this trend, government surveys now allow you to check multiple boxes for your race and ethnicity.

But it turns out that many aren’t doing that.

The report from Duncan and Trejo has two major consequences. First, it casts some doubt on the government's projections of the future Hispanic and Asian populations. Famously, the Census Bureau has predicted that non-Hispanic whites will become outnumbered in America by as early as 2044. But as Pewhas pointed out, these calculations don’t take into account trends in how the children of mixed marriages report their own race. A fair fraction of people with Asian or Hispanic heritage actually consider themselves exclusively white (or black).

Second, the report may cause us to reconsider what we think we know about Hispanics and Asians. A lot of social science research relies on people to disclose their own racial and ethnic identities. If people who are part-Asian or part-Hispanic stop identifying that way, they, in a way, disappear from the statistics. What we think we know about Hispanics, for instance, may be wrong because a lot of people with Hispanic heritage don't consider themselves Hispanic.

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Duncan and Trejo focused on the Current Population Survey, a monthly study of American households that supplies much of what we know about earnings and employment in America. For instance, the CPS is what helps the government calculate the unemployment rate, and it provides data for reportson, say, the racial wage gap.

The CPS contains a number of questions about heritage. People are asked for their race, their ethnicity, where they were born, and where their parents were born. Using this information, Duncan and Trejo analyzed how first- and second-generation immigrants from certain countries self-identified.

They looked at four Latin-American nations (Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic) plus Puerto Rico; they also looked at five Asian nations (China, India, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines).

Among the first-generation Latin-American immigrants — people born in one of those five places — 98.6 percent checked the “Hispanic” box. Likewise, 96.3 percent of the first-generation Asian immigrants identified as Asian.

But the second-generation immigrants were less likely to identify as Hispanic or Asian. Only 93 percent of people with a parent born in a Latin-American country themselves identified as Hispanic. The difference was more dramatic for Asians. Only 79.1 percent of second-generation Asian immigrants identified as even part-Asian.

It’s important to remember that the CPS allows people to check multiple boxes for race. You can be any combination of black, Asian, white, Native American, and so forth. On top of that, the government also asks a separate question about whether you are Hispanic. This means you can be white and Hispanic, black and Hispanic, even white-black-Asian triracial and Hispanic.

The point is that it’s easy for people to indicate complex heritages on the survey form. Yet, many who are multi-racial are not doing this.

They might have Hispanic grandparents, but don't consider themselves Hispanic. They might have an Asian and a black parent, but only consider themselves black.

Duncan and Trejo also have some data on the children of second-generation immigrants, where the trend continues. The CPS asks parents to provide racial information about their kids. Of the kids with at least one Latin-American grandparent, only 81.7 percent were marked down as Hispanic. Of the kids with at least one Asian grandparent, only 57.5 percent were marked down as Asian.

These statistics highlight an overlooked way that immigrants assimilate in America — by literally blending in and blending families with the native-born. "In a lot of ways, intermarriage is the most intimate kind of assimilation," Trejo says.

But this phenomenon may also present problems for researchers looking to measure progress among minorities.

Duncan and Trejo have found that the second-generation Latin-American immigrants who refuse to call themselves Hispanic are more educated, on average, than their counterparts who embrace their Hispanic identity. It’s still unclear how big of a deal this is, but it seems that we have been underestimating the progress of Hispanic immigrants and their offspring because some of the more successful ones don’t mark themselves as “Hispanic” on government surveys.

A lot of this should have been obvious. Immigrants are everywhere in American public life. Countless celebrities, including Frankie Muniz, Aubrey Plaza, and Fergie, are second or third-generation Hispanic. Latina Magazine has a whopping list of 109 stars “you never knew were Latino!”

These are some of the faces that we may want to recognize in any debate about immigration and assimilation in America. The irony is that some have blended in so well, we hardly recognize them as the children of immigrants anymore.

Jeff Guo is a reporter covering economics, domestic policy, and everything empirical. He's from Maryland, but outside the Beltway. Follow him on Twitter: @_jeffguo.