I’m fascinated by stories of my parents’ courtship, even though it was a bit pedestrian. Meeting in journalism class, the Under The Sea fraternity dance, my mom’s pixie cut. But now I’m fascinated by other people’s parents’ stories, thanks to an adorable piece by Peter Smith at nerve.com. While they were dating, his parents took a long walk — a really long walk, like from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin — and somewhere along this 1200 mile trek (Bucyrus, Ohio, actually) the two decided to get married.

How long had you known each other?

D: For three years. We were beginning to feel that we needed to make a decision of some kind. In fact, while walking, we did decide to get married.

M: Yeah, because we realized that we could do even something stressful – and it was stressful – like that and still want to be with each other most of the time, which is as good as it gets. We also got far enough away from home that it really felt like our decision. It didn’t feel like anybody’s parents peering over our shoulders.

Read the whole piece at nerve.com. Do you know your parents’ story? And have you ever used traveling together as a test of your relationship?

Let’s hope, just to mess with Dad, their next boyfriends are Democrats. Or women!

friends, more than friends, and family. Especially Adam Lambert’s mom. Have a lovely, restful, sweet-potato-casserole-with-marshmallows-ful holiday!

Further reading: Breakup Girl’s Thanksgiving files.

Via Broadsheet:

God! Would you just let me have a LIFE?! According to CNN — dateline: Opposite World — this is what some parents are, or need to be, saying to their kids. Specifically, parents (in the story, mothers) who are looking online for a new partner, and kids (mainly adults themselves) who are, true story, hacking into their mothers’ email and sending rejections to potential suitors. (Another reportedly drove back and forth yelling at her mom while on an outdoor date with an online beau. Check, please!)

Who knew that the “younger generation” — those perhaps most likely to be Tweeting/Facebooking/LiveJournaling about how gross it is that mom’s on eHarmony– would (along with CNN, just a bit) be the ones perpetuating the ancient-in-Internet-years canard that online dating is WhereYouMeetLyingWeirdos.com? Why is online so different from real life? Who says that guy/gal in a bar is telling the truth? How often does the person you meet in person come right out and say, “I enjoy snowboarding and film noir, and in about three months I’m going to start to pull away”? (or “Please enjoy my backyard compound?”) True, some parents, unseasoned daters and e-flirters, might be a tad fuzzy regarding red flags; fair enough. But at the same time, depending on the circumstances — and speaking of bars — their brick-and-mortar options for meeting people might be limited. Online seems ideal for second-timers (if not, like, everyone).

Of course, it’s pretty obvious that what’s really going on here is not “Yikes, mom’s dating online!” but rather, simply, “Yikes, mom’s dating!” — circa 2009. There’s no doubt that seeing a marriage end and a parent move on can be challenging, even devastating. But sometimes, I guess, we just have to let them grow up.

…they give their kids lameass, doofy-dad, tax-dollar-funded sex talks. The best the Obama HHS can apparently do, via Feministe:

Via Mary Elizabeth Williams at Broadsheet:

Marital breakups are rarely easy, but for couples with children, they often come with the added nagging fear that you’re forever ruining your kids’ lives. But a new study (PDF) affirms what anyone whose own childhood resembled a Richard Yates novel suspects — that sticking together for the sake of the kids can backfire.

The study, provocatively titled “Are Both Parents Always Better Than One? Parental Conflict and Young Adult Well-Being” (from the California Center for Population Research at the University of California-Los Angeles), charts the progress of 1,963 households from teens to early 30s. While citing that “children tend to do better living with two biological married parents,” the study is a reassuring academic loogie in the face of self-sacrifice, an acknowledgement of the role of “poor quality marriage” in drinking and dropout rates.

Speaking about the study to Science Daily, the paper’s co-author, Cornell associate professor Kelly Musick, said, “the advantages of living with two continuously married parents are not shared equally by all children … Children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop out of school, have poor grades, smoke, binge drink, use marijuana, have early sex, be young and unmarried when they have a child and then experience the breakup of that relationship.”

An intact marriage isn’t automatically a successful one — for anybody. (The study also helpfully cites previous findings that “although marriage confers benefits to adults on average, those in poor quality marriages are no better off than the single and, indeed, may fare worse on some measures.”) Despite our continued cultural insistence upon equating divorce with failure, for parents whose relationships have become unbearable, the best way to save the family may be to dissolve it.

Sean Gregory at Time.com:

The list of reasons to admire Barack Obama is longer than Pennsylvania Avenue. But please, and I’m begging here, let’s not hold him up as an exemplary husband simply because he takes his wife out on a date.

On Sunday, the New York Times did just that, with a story headlined “If They Can Find Time For a Date Night…” The gist: if the Obamas — with Mom committed to her various causes and Dad trying to save the free world — can still find time for each other, hey, lame husband sitting on the couch watching sports, time to step it up. /snip/

Yes, daily down time and date nights are cathartic and healthy: my wife and I, working parents with two young children, have strived, with varying amounts of success, to find the right moments to put out an APB for a sitter. But in the relationship department, no husband or couple should ever wonder why they’re not meeting a standard set by the Obamas.

Did you catch that NBC special on the White House? The Obamas happen to have some of the world’s smartest people working tirelessly on the dirty details of governance. Think those staffers working ’til midnight and grinding away the weekends spend a ton of blissful time with their wives? Chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel is killing himself while his wife and kids are stuck back in Chicago. Now there’s a guy I can relate to. /snip/

Air Force One makes romantic evenings in Paris a lot more possible.

The thing is, Obama is the first to acknowledge his enormous leg up when it comes to family life. He’s obviously working hard, and you can’t blame him for taking advantage of his situation to eat dinner with Michelle and the kids. I would do the same thing if I were President. But I’m not. And I’d thank the world to stop reminding me of that little fact, especially on date night.

Specifically, yesterday’s song Demo Disaster du jour.

From the New York Daily News:

What we saw Monday was rubbernecking, slowing down to gawk at a smoldering wreck. It doesn’t mean another 5.2 million people suddenly wanted to see a “reality” show about raising eight kids.

What happened Monday, in fact, took the focus away from what the show has always been about. What was envisioned as an irresistibly cute fifth birthday party for their sextuplets became a footnote to Jon and Kate’s simmering anger toward each other and the suddenly uncomfortable tabloid life they signed up for.

Now, sure, the fate of a “reality” TV show about a couple raising twins and sextuplets will not be the biggest long-term issue for those kids if their parents split up.

But being on TV is what Jon and Kate seem to do now, and it’s hard to see how Monday night’s sad, uncomfortable dance will create the kind of long-term television viewers really want to follow.

Sad and uncomfortable, most of us can get without turning on the TV. It’s not that we have any inherent problem with discomfort on “reality” TV. Watching supermodels eat maggots seems to be cause to tune in, not tune out.

We are intrigued by physical exhaustion on “Survivor,” we feel the frustration of the overweight on “The Biggest Loser,” and we love seeing Gordon Ramsay fillet his erring chefs on “Hell’s Kitchen.”

But watching an actual relationship deteriorate — the cold silence, the simmering resentment, the little cruelties — that’s not much fun.

Right. A lot of us can get that without turning on the TV, too. So when it comes to reality-TV couples, perhaps it’s time to look away — and maybe toward the genuinely charming (and even edifying) The Little Couple, whose honeymoon period, we hope, will last a good long time.

And speaking again of parents, from the New York Times:

Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change.

/snip/ Students of both races say that interracial friendships are common at Montgomery County High School. Black and white students also date one another, though often out of sight of judgmental parents. “Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”

Interesting corollary, from the same issue of the Times magazine:

According to the group Freedom to Marry, about 13 percent of Americans now live in a state that allows gay marriage or recognizes marriage licenses issued in other states, and that percentage is certain to rise. The gist of the disagreement now isn’t partisan or theological as much as it is generational. Unlike their parents, younger Americans and those now transitioning into middle age have had openly gay friends and colleagues all their lives, and they understand homosexuality to be a form of biological happenstance rather than of emotional disturbance. They’re less inclined to restrict the personal decisions of gay Americans, even if they don’t necessarily want the whole thing explained to their children as part of some politically correct grade-school curriculum. In a sense, the gay rights movement of an earlier era was so successful in changing social attitudes that the movement itself can now seem obsolete, in the same way that younger Americans who have grown up with the premise of environmentalism in their daily lives consider Greenpeace to be a kind of hippie anachronism.