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<h1>The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss</h1>
<p class="">Research finds that same-sex unions are happier than
heterosexual marriages. What can gay and lesbian couples teach straight
ones about living in harmony?</p> <h5 class="">By <span class=""><span class="">Liza Mundy</span></span></h5>
</div>
<div class="">
<p>
<span class="">It is more </span>than a little ironic that gay
marriage has emerged as the era’s defining civil-rights struggle even
as marriage itself seems more endangered every day. Americans are
waiting longer to marry: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median
age of first marriage is 28 for men and 26 for women, up from 23 and
20, respectively, in 1950. Rates of cohabitation have risen swiftly and
sharply, and more people than ever are living single. Most Americans
still marry at some point, but many of those marriages end in divorce.
(Although the U.S. divorce rate has declined from its all-time high in
the late ’70s and early ’80s, it has remained higher than those of most
European countries.) All told, this has created an unstable system of
what the UCLA sociologist Suzanne Bianchi calls “partnering and
repartnering,” a relentless emotional and domestic churn that sometimes
results in people forgoing the institution altogether.</p>
<p>
Though people may be waiting to marry, they are not necessarily waiting
to have children. The National Center for Family and Marriage Research
has produced a startling analysis of data from the Census Bureau and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that women’s median
age when they have their first child is lower than their median age at
first marriage. In other words, having children before you marry has
become normal. College graduates enjoy relatively stable unions, but for
every other group, marriage is collapsing. Among “middle American”
women (those with a high-school degree or some college), an astonishing
58 percent of first-time mothers are unmarried. The old Groucho Marx
joke—“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a
member”—applies a little differently in this context: you might well ask
why gays and lesbians want to join an institution that keeps dithering
about whether to admit them even as the repo men are coming for the
furniture and the fire marshal is about to close down the clubhouse.</p>
<p>
Against this backdrop, gay-marriage opponents have argued that allowing
same-sex couples to wed will pretty much finish matrimony off. This
point was advanced in briefs and oral arguments before the Supreme Court
in March, in two major same-sex-marriage cases. One of these is a
constitutional challenge to a key section of the Defense of Marriage
Act, the 1996 law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a
woman, and bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex
marriages. The other involves California’s Proposition 8, a
same-sex-marriage ban passed by voters in 2008 but overturned by a
federal judge in 2010. Appearing before the high court in March, Charles
J. Cooper, the lawyer defending the California ban, predicted that
same-sex marriage would undermine traditional marriage by eroding
“marital norms.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<div class="">
Liza Mundy and Hanna Rosin discuss what same-sex couples can teach straight couples about marriage and parenting.</div>
<hr>
<p>
The belief that gay marriage will harm marriage has roots in both
religious beliefs about matrimony and secular conservative concerns
about broader shifts in American life. One prominent line of thinking
holds that men and women have distinct roles to play in family life;
that children need both a mother and a father, preferably biologically
related to them; and that a central purpose of marriage is abetting
heterosexual procreation. During the Supreme Court arguments over
Proposition 8, Justice Elena Kagan asked Cooper whether the essence of
his argument against gay marriage was that opposite-sex couples can
procreate while same-sex ones cannot. “That’s the essential thrust of
our position, yes,” replied Cooper. He also warned that “redefining
marriage as a genderless institution could well lead over time to harms
to that institution.”</p>
<p>
Threaded through this thinking is a related conviction that mothers and
fathers should treat their union as “permanent and exclusive,” as the
Princeton professor Robert P. George and his co-authors write in the new
book <i>What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense</i>. Marriage, seen
this way, is a rigid institution that exists primarily for the rearing
of children and that powerfully constrains the behavior of adults (one
is tempted to call this the “long slog ’til death” view of marriage),
rather than an emotional union entered into for pleasure and
companionship between adults. These critics of gay marriage are, quite
validly, worried that too many American children are being raised in
unstable homes, either by struggling single parents or by a transient
succession of live-in adults. They fear that the spread of gay marriage
could help finally sever the increasingly tenuous link between children
and marriage, confirming that it’s okay for dads, or moms, to be deleted
from family life as hedonic fulfillment dictates.</p>
<p>
In mounting their defense, advocates of same-sex marriage have argued
that gays and lesbians who wish to marry are committed to family
well-being; that concern for children’s welfare is a chief reason many
do want to marry; that gay people are being discriminated against, as a
class, in being denied rights readily available to any heterosexual. And
to the charge that same-sex marriage will change marriage, they tend to
argue that it will not—that married gays and lesbians will blend
seamlessly with the millions of married straight Americans. “The notion
that this group can somehow fundamentally change the institution of
marriage—I find it difficult to wrap my head around,” says Gary Gates, a
demographer with the Williams Institute, a research center affiliated
with the UCLA School of Law.</p>
<p>
But what if the critics are correct, just not in the way they suppose?
What if same-sex marriage does change marriage, but primarily for the
better? For one thing, there is reason to think that, rather than making
marriage more fragile, the boom of publicity around same-sex weddings
could awaken among heterosexuals a new interest in the institution, at
least for a time. But the larger change might be this: by providing a
new model of how two people can live together equitably, same-sex
marriage could help haul matrimony more fully into the 21st century.
Although marriage is in many ways fairer and more pleasurable for both
men and women than it once was, it hasn’t entirely thrown off old
notions and habits. As a result, many men and women enter into it
burdened with assumptions and stereotypes that create stress and
resentment. Others, confronted with these increasingly anachronistic
expectations—expectations at odds with the economic and practical
realities of their own lives—don’t enter into it at all.</p>
<p>
Same-sex spouses, who cannot divide their labor based on preexisting
gender norms, must approach marriage differently than their heterosexual
peers. From sex to fighting, from child-rearing to chores, they must
hammer out every last detail of domestic life without falling back on
assumptions about who will do what. In this regard, they provide an
example that can be enlightening to all couples. Critics warn of an
institution rendered “genderless.” But if a genderless marriage is a
marriage in which the wife is not automatically expected to be
responsible for school forms and child care and dinner preparation and
birthday parties and midnight feedings and holiday shopping, I think
it’s fair to say that many heterosexual women would cry “Bring it on!”</p>
<p>
Beyond that, gay marriage can function as a controlled experiment,
helping us see which aspects of marital difficulty are truly rooted in
gender and which are not. A growing body of social science has begun to
compare straight and same-sex couples in an attempt to get at the
question of what is female, what is male. Some of the findings are
surprising. For instance: we know that heterosexual wives are more
likely than husbands to initiate divorce. Social scientists have
struggled to explain the discrepancy, variously attributing it to the
sexual revolution; to women’s financial independence; to men’s failure
to keep modern wives happy. Intriguingly, in Norway and Sweden, where
registered partnerships for same-sex couples have been in place for
about two decades (full-fledged marriage was introduced several years
ago), research has found that lesbians are twice as likely as gay men to
split up. If women become dissatisfied even when married to other
women, maybe the problem with marriage isn’t men. Maybe women are too
particular. Maybe even women don’t know what women want. These are the
kinds of things that we will be able to tease out.</p>
<p>
In the past few years, as support for same-sex marriage has gained
momentum, advocates have been able to shift their strategy away from
fighting bans on it (on the books in 38 states as of this writing) and
toward orchestrating popular votes in its favor. In 2012, voters in
Maine, Maryland, and Washington state passed measures legalizing
same-sex marriage, joining the District of Columbia and the six states
that had already legalized gay marriage via legislatures or courts.
Similar measures are moving forward in four other states. In the coming
weeks, the high court is expected to issue its rulings on gay marriage.
After oral arguments in the two cases concluded, many Court observers
predicted that the part of <span class="">DOMA</span> in
question might well be struck down as a federal intrusion on states’
ability to decide family law, thereby forcing the federal government to
recognize the marriages of same-sex couples. As for Prop 8, any number
of outcomes seem possible. The Court could decide that the case should
not have been heard in the first place, given that the ban isn’t being
defended by California state officials but instead by the original
supporters of the initiative. Such dismissal on “standing” could have
the effect of legalizing same-sex marriage in California. Alternatively,
the Court could deliver a narrow ruling (whether upholding or
overturning the ban) that does not apply to every state. Among other
feasible, if less likely, outcomes: the Court could use Prop 8 to
declare all such bans unconstitutional, legalizing gay marriage
everywhere.</p>
<p>
Whatever happens with the high court, it seems likely that gay marriage
will continue its spread through the land. So what happens, then, to
the institution of marriage? The impact is likely to be felt near and
far, both fleetingly and more permanently, in ways confounding to
partisans on both sides.</p>
<p>
<big><b class="">RULES FOR A MORE PERFECT UNION</b></big></p>
<p>
<span class="">Not all is broken</span> within modern
marriage, of course. On the contrary: the institution is far more
flexible and forgiving than it used to be. In the wake of women’s
large-scale entry into the workplace, men are less likely than they once
were to be saddled with being a family’s sole breadwinner, and can
carve out a life that includes the close companionship of their
children. Meanwhile, women are less likely to be saddled with the sole
responsibility for child care and housework, and can envision a life
beyond the stove top and laundry basket.</p>
<p>
And yet for many couples, as Bianchi, the UCLA sociologist, has pointed
out, the modern ideal of egalitarianism has proved “quite difficult to
realize.” Though men are carrying more of a domestic workload than in
the past, women still bear the brunt of the second shift. Among couples
with children, when both spouses work full-time, women do 32 hours a
week of housework, child care, shopping, and other family-related
services, compared with the 21 hours men put in. Men do more paid
work—45 hours, compared with 39 for women—but still have more free time:
31 hours, compared with 25 for women. Betsey Stevenson and Justin
Wolfers, economists and professors of public policy at the University of
Michigan, have shown that happiness rates among women have dropped even
as women have acquired more life options. One possible cause is the
lingering inequity in male-female marriage: women’s at-home workload can
become so burdensome that wives opt out of the paid workforce—or sit at
the office making mental lists of the chores they do versus the chores
their husbands do, and bang their heads on their desks in despair.</p>
<p>
Not that everything is easy for fathers in dual-earner couples, who now
feel afflicted by work-life conflict in even greater numbers than their
wives (60 percent of men in such couples say they experience this
conflict, versus 47 percent of women, according to a 2008 study by the
Families and Work Institute). And men face a set of unfair expectations
all their own: the Pew Research Center found in 2010 that 67 percent of
Americans still believe it’s “very important” that a man be ready to
support a family before getting married, while only 33 percent believe
the same about women.</p>
<p>
This burden, exacerbated by the economic realities facing many men
today, has undoubtedly contributed to marriage’s recent decline. As our
economy has transitioned away from manufacturing and industry, men with a
high-school education can no longer expect the steady, well-paying
union jobs that formerly enabled many to support their families.
Outdated assumptions that men should bring something to the table, and
that this something should be money, don’t help. Surveying their
prospects, many working-class mothers reject marriage altogether,
perhaps reasoning that they can support a child, but don’t want a
dependent husband.</p>
<p>
It’s not that people don’t want to marry. Most never-married Americans
say they still aspire to marriage, but many of them see it as something
grand and out of reach. Getting married is no longer something you do
when you are young and foolish and starting out; prosperity is not
something spouses build together. Rather, marriage has become a “marker
of prestige,” as the sociologist Andrew Cherlin puts it—a capstone of a
successful life, rather than its cornerstone. But while many couples
have concluded that they are not ready for marriage, they have things
backwards. It’s not that they aren’t ready for marriage; it’s that
marriage isn’t ready for the realities of 21st-century life.
Particularly for less affluent, less educated Americans, changing
economic and gender realities have dismantled the old institution,
without constructing any sort of replacement.</p>
<p>
As we attempt to come up with a more functional model, research on
same-sex unions can provide what Gary Gates of the Williams Institute
calls an “important counterfactual.” Although gays and lesbians cannot
solve all that ails marriage, they seem to be working certain things out
in ways straight couples might do well to emulate, chief among them a
back-to-the-drawing-board approach to divvying up marital duties. A
growing body of scholarship on household division of labor shows that in
many ways, same-sex couples do it better.</p>
<p>
This scholarship got its start in the late 1960s, with a brilliant
insight by the sociologist Pepper Schwartz, then a doctoral candidate at
Yale. Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval—including changes at the
university, which had just begun to admit female undergraduates—gender
was, Schwartz says, “all we thought about.” Like many of her peers, she
was keen to figure out what women were and what men were: which traits
were biological and which social, and where there might be potential for
transformational change. “It occurred to me,” she says, that “a
naturally occurring experiment” could shed light on these issues.
Actually, two experiments: the rise of unmarried heterosexual
cohabitation, and the growing visibility of gay and lesbian couples. If
she surveyed people in three kinds of relationships—married; straight
and cohabiting; and gay and cohabiting—and all showed similarity on some
measures, maybe this would say something about both men and women. If
the findings didn’t line up, maybe this would say something about
marriage.</p>
<p>
After taking a teaching position at the University of Washington (where
she remains a faculty member), Schwartz teamed up with a gay colleague,
the late Philip Blumstein, to conduct just such a survey, zeroing in on
the greater San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle metropolitan
areas. It was a huge effort. Unmarried cohabiting couples were not yet
easy to find, and gays and lesbians were so leery of being outed that
when Schwartz asked a woman who belonged to a lesbian bridge group
whether she could interview the other players about their relationships,
the woman said, “We don’t even talk about it ourselves.” Schwartz and
Blumstein collected responses to 12,000 questionnaires and conducted
hundreds of interviews; at one point, they had 20 graduate students
helping tabulate data. The project took about a decade, and resulted in a
groundbreaking piece of sociology, the book <i>American Couples: Money, Work, Sex</i>.</p>
<p>
What Schwartz and Blumstein found is that gay and lesbian couples were
fairer in their dealings with one another than straight couples, both in
intent and in practice. The lesbians in the study were almost painfully
egalitarian—in some cases putting money in jars and splitting
everything down to the penny in a way, Schwartz says, that “would have
driven me crazy.” Many unmarried heterosexual cohabitators were also
careful about divvying things up, but lesbian couples seemed to take the
practice to extremes: “It was almost like ‘my kitty, your litter.’ ”
Gay men, like lesbians, were more likely than straight couples to share
cooking and chores. Many had been in heterosexual marriages, and when
asked whether they had helped their wives with the housework in those
prior unions, they usually said they had not. “You can imagine,”
Schwartz says, “how irritating I found this.”</p>
<p>
There were still some inequities: in all couples, the person with the
higher income had more authority and decision-making power. This was
least true for lesbians; truer for heterosexuals; and most true for gay
men. Somehow, putting two men together seemed to intensify the sense
that “money talks,” as Schwartz and Blumstein put it. They could not
hope to determine whether this tendency was innate or social—were men
naturally inclined to equate resources with power, or had our culture
ingrained that idea in them?—but one way or another, the finding
suggested that money was a way men competed with other men, and not just
a way for husbands to compete with their wives. Among lesbians, the
contested terrain lay elsewhere: for instance, interacting more with the
children could be, Schwartz says, a “power move.”</p>
<p>
Lesbians also tended to discuss things endlessly, achieving a degree of
closeness unmatched by the other types of couples. Schwartz wondered
whether this might account for another finding: over time, sex in
lesbian relationships dwindled—a state of affairs she has described as
“lesbian bed death.” (The coinage ended up on Schwartz’s Wikipedia page,
to her exasperation: “There are other things that I wish I were famous
around.”) She posits that lesbians may have had so much intimacy already
that they didn’t need sex to get it; by contrast, heterosexual women,
whose spouses were less likely to be chatty, found that “sex is a
highway to intimacy.” As for men, she eventually concluded that whether
they were straight or gay, they approached sex as they might a sandwich:
good, bad, or mediocre, they were likely to grab it.</p>
<p>
<strong><big>RULE 1: Negotiate in advance who will empty the trash and who will clean the bathroom.</big></strong></p>
<p>
<span class="">Other studies </span>have since confirmed
Schwartz and Blumstein’s findings that same-sex couples are more
egalitarian. In 2000, when Vermont became the first state to legalize
same-sex civil unions, the psychologist Esther Rothblum saw an
opportunity to explore how duties get sorted among a broad swath of the
same-sex population. Rothblum, now at San Diego State University, is
herself a lesbian and had long been interested in the relationships and
mental health of lesbians. She also wanted to see how legal recognition
affected couples.</p>
<p>
As people from around the country flocked to Vermont to apply for
civil-union licenses, Rothblum and two colleagues got their names and
addresses from public records and asked them to complete a
questionnaire. Then, they asked each of the civil-union couples to
suggest friends in same-sex couples who were not in civil unions, and to
identify a heterosexual sibling who was married, and wrote those people
asking them to participate. This approach helped control for factors
like background and upbringing among the subjects. The researchers asked
people to rate, on a scale of one to nine, which partner was more
likely to do the dishes, repair things around the house, buy groceries.
They asked who was more likely to deal with the landlord, punish the
children, call the plumber, drive the kids to appointments, give
spontaneous hugs, pay compliments. They also asked who was more likely
to appreciate the other person’s point of view during an argument.</p>
<p>
They found that, even in the new millennium, married heterosexual
couples were very likely to divide duties along old-fashioned gender
lines. Straight women were more likely than lesbians to report that
their partner paid the mortgage or the rent and the utility bills, and
bought groceries, household appliances, even the women’s clothing. These
wives were also more likely to say they did the bulk of the cooking,
vacuuming, dishes, and laundry. Compared with their husbands, they were
far, far more likely to clean the bathroom. They were also more likely
than their husbands to perform “relationship maintenance” such as
showing affection and initiating serious conversations. When Rothblum
and her colleagues held the heterosexual husbands up against the gay
men, they found the same pattern. The straight guys were more likely to
take care of the lawn, empty the trash, and make household repairs than
their partners. They were the ones to fix drinks for company and to
drive when the couple went out. They cooked breakfast reasonably often,
but not dinner. On all these measures and more, the same-sex couples
were far more likely to divide responsibilities evenly. This is not to
say that the same-sex couples split each duty half-and-half. One partner
might do the same chore regularly, but because there was no default
assignment based on gender, such patterns evolved organically, based on
preferences and talents.</p>
<p>
Rothblum’s observations are borne out by the couples I interviewed for
this piece. “I’m a better cook, so I take on most of that
responsibility,” said Seth Thayer, who lives in a small coastal town in
Maine. His husband, Greg Tinder, “is a better handyman.” Others spoke of
the perils of lopsided relationships. Chris Kast, a Maine newlywed,
told me that he and his husband, Byron Bartlett, had both been married
to women. In Bartlett’s first marriage, it was tacitly assumed that he
would take out the garbage. Now the two men divide tasks by inclination.
“I’m more of a Felix Ungar—I notice when something’s dirty—but we both
clean,” Kast said. “With Chris and I,” Bartlett added, “we have to get <i>everything</i>
done.” Isabelle Dikland, a Washington, D.C., business consultant who is
married to Amy Clement, a teacher, told me about a dinner party she
recently attended with a group of mostly straight parents. Dikland and
Clement, who had just had a second daughter, were extolling the virtues
of having two children. The straight mother they were talking with
seemed dubious. “If we had a second kid, guess who would do all the
work,” she told them. “I’d have to give up my career; I’m already doing
everything.” The woman glanced surreptitiously at her husband, at which
point Dikland “dropped the subject really quickly.”</p>
<p>
<strong><big>RULE 2: When it comes to parenting, a 50-50 split isn’t necessarily best.</big></strong></p>
<p>
<span class="">Charlotte J. Patterson</span><b><span class="">, </span></b>a
psychologist at the University of Virginia, has arresting visual
evidence of the same egalitarianism at work in parenting: compared with
husband-and-wife pairs, she has found, same-sex parents tend to be more
cooperative and mutually hands-on. Patterson and a colleague, Rachel
Farr, have conducted a study of more than 100 same-sex and heterosexual
adoptive parents in 11 states and the District of Columbia; it is among
the first such studies to include gay fathers. As reported in an article
in a forthcoming issue of the journal <i>Child Development</i>, the
researchers visited families in their homes, scattered some toys on a
blanket, invited the subjects to play with them any way they chose, and
videotaped the interactions. “What you see is what they did with that
blank slate,” Patterson says. “One thing that I found riveting: the
same-sex couples are far more likely to be in there together, and the
opposite-sex couples show the conventional pattern—the mom more
involved, the dad playing with Tinkertoys by himself.” When the
opposite-sex couples did parent simultaneously, they were more likely to
undermine each other by talking at cross-purposes or suggesting
different toys. The lesbian mothers tended to be egalitarian and warm in
their dealings with one another, and showed greater pleasure in
parenting than the other groups did. Same-sex dads were also more
egalitarian in their division of labor than straight couples, though not
as warm or interactive as lesbian moms. (Patterson says she and her
colleagues may need to refine their analysis to take into account male
ways of expressing warmth.)</p>
<p>
By and large, all of the families studied, gay and straight alike, were
happy, high functioning, and financially secure. Each type of
partner—gay, straight; man, woman—reported satisfaction with his or her
family’s parenting arrangement, though the heterosexual wife was less
content than the others, invariably saying that she wanted more help
from her husband. “Of all the parents we’ve studied, she’s the least
satisfied with the division of labor,” says Patterson, who is in a
same-sex partnership and says she knows from experience that deciding
who will do what isn’t always easy.</p>
<p>
Even as they are more egalitarian in their parenting styles, same-sex
parents resemble their heterosexual counterparts in one somewhat
old-fashioned way: a surprising number establish a division of labor
whereby one spouse becomes the primary earner and the other stays home.
Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
told me that, “in terms of economics,” same-sex couples with children
resemble heterosexual couples with children much more than they resemble
childless same-sex couples. You might say that gay parents are
simultaneously departing from traditional family structures and leading
the way back toward them.</p>
<p>
In his seminal book <i>A Treatise on the Family</i>, published in 1981,
the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker argued that
“specialization,” whereby one parent stays home and the other does the
earning, is the most efficient way of running a household, because the
at-home spouse enables the at-work spouse to earn more. Feminists, who
had been fighting for domestic parity, not specialization, deplored this
theory, rightly fearing that it could be harnessed to keep women at
home. Now the example of gay and lesbian parents might give us all
permission to relax a little: maybe sometimes it really is easier when
one parent works and the other is the supplementary or nonearning
partner, either because this is the natural order of things or because
the American workplace is so greedy and unforgiving that something or
somebody has to give. As Martha Ertman, a University of Maryland law
professor, put it to me, many families just function better when the
same person is consistently “in charge of making vaccinations happen,
making sure the model of the World War II monument gets done, getting
the Christmas tree home or the challah bought by 6 o’clock on Friday.”
The good news is that the decision about which parent plays this role
need not have anything to do with gender.</p>
<p>
More surprising still, guess who is most likely to specialize. Gay
dads. Using the most recent Census Bureau data, Gary Gates found that
32 percent of married heterosexual couples with children have only one
parent in the labor force, compared with 33 percent of gay-male couples
with children. (Lesbians also specialize, but not at such high rates,
perhaps because they are so devoted to equality, or perhaps because
their earnings are lower—women’s median wage is 81 percent that of
men—and not working is an unaffordable luxury.) While the percentage
point dividing gay men from straight couples is not statistically
significant, it’s intriguing that gay dads are as likely as straight
women to be stay-at-home parents.</p>
<p>
Gay men’s decisions about breadwinning can nonetheless be fraught, as
many associate employment with power. A study published in the <i>Journal of GLBT Family Studies </i>in
2005 by Stephanie Jill Schacher and two colleagues found that when gay
men do specialize, they don’t have an easy time deciding who will do
what: some stay-at-home dads perceived that their choice carried with it
a loss in prestige and stature. As a result, gay men tended to fight
not over who got to stay home, but over who didn’t have to. “It’s
probably the biggest problem in our relationship,” said one man
interviewed for that study. Perhaps what Betty Friedan called “the
problem that has no name” is inherent in child-rearing, and will always
be with us.</p>
<p>
<strong><big>RULE 3: Don’t want a divorce? Don’t marry a woman.</big></strong></p>
<p>
<span class="">Three years after </span>they first gathered
information from the couples who received licenses in Vermont, Esther
Rothblum and her colleagues checked back to evaluate the condition of
their relationships. Overall, the researchers found that the quality of
gay and lesbian relationships was higher on many measures than that of
the straight control group (the married heterosexual siblings), with
more compatibility and intimacy, and less conflict.</p>
<p>
Which is not to say same-sex couples don’t have conflict. When they
fight, however, they fight fairer. They can even fight funny, as
researchers from the University of Washington and the University of
California at Berkeley showed in an article published in 2003, based on a
study of couples who were navigating potentially tense interactions.
Recruiting married straight couples as well as gays and lesbians in
committed relationships, the researchers orchestrated a scenario in
which one partner had to bring up an area of conflict to discuss with
the other. In same-sex couples, the partner with the bone to pick was
rated “less belligerent and less domineering” than the straight-couple
counterpart, while the person on the receiving end was less aggressive
and showed less fear or tension. The same-sex “initiator” also displayed
less sadness and “whining,” and more affection, joy, and humor. In
trying to make sense of the disparity, the researchers noted that
same-sex couples valued equality more, and posited that the greater
negativity of straight couples “may have to do with the standard status
hierarchy between men and women.” Which perhaps boils down to something
like this: straight women see themselves as being less powerful than
men, and this breeds hostility.</p>
<p>
When it comes to conflict, a crucial variable separates many gay and
lesbian couples from their straight counterparts: children. As Rothblum
points out, for married heterosexual parents, happiness tends to be
U-shaped: high at the beginning of marriage, then dipping to a low, then
high again. What happens in that low middle is child-rearing. Although
the proportion of gay and lesbian couples with children is increasing,
same-sex couples are still less likely than straight couples to be
parents. Not all research comparing same-sex and married straight
couples has done an adequate job of controlling for this important
difference. One that did, a 2008 study in the <i>Journal of Family Psychology</i>,
looked at couples during their first 10 years of cohabitation. It found
that childless lesbians had a higher “relationship quality” than their
child-free gay-male and heterosexual counterparts. And yet a 2010 study
in the same journal found that gay-male, lesbian, and straight couples
alike experienced a “modest decline in relationship quality” in the
first year of adopting a child. As same-sex couples become parents in
greater numbers, they could well endure some of the same strife as their
straight peers. It remains to be seen whether the different parenting
styles identified by Charlotte Patterson might blunt some of the ennui
of child-rearing.</p>
<p>
As for divorce, the data are still coming in. A 2006 study of Sweden
and Norway found higher dissolution rates among same-sex couples in
registered partnerships than among married straight people. Yet in the
United States, a study by the Williams Institute has found that gay
unions have lower dissolution rates than straight ones. It is simply too
soon to tell with any certainty whether gay marriages will be more or
less durable in the long run than straight ones. What the studies to
date do (for the most part) suggest is this: despite—or maybe because
of—their perfectionist approach to egalitarianism, lesbian couples seem
to be more likely to break up than gay ones. Pepper Schwartz noted this
in the early 1980s, as did the 2006 study of same-sex couples in Sweden
and Norway, in which researchers speculated that women may have a
“stronger general sensitivity to the quality of relationships.” Meaning
maybe women are just picky, and when you have two women, you have double
the pickiness. So perhaps the real threat to marriage is: women.</p>
<p>
<img alt="" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/newsroom/img/2013/05/14/0613-WEL-Mundy-table_V1.jpg" style="width: 570px; height: 380px;"></p>
<div class="">
Rob Hardies wonders whether straight women notice him when he takes his
son to the park. Do they see a man doing this and gently point it out
to their husbands? (Gail Albert Halaban)</div>
<p>
<big><b>THE CONTAGION EFFECT</b></big></p>
<p>
<span class="">Whatever this string of studies </span>may
teach us about marriage and gender dynamics, the next logical question
becomes this: Might such marriages do more than merely inform our
understanding of straight marriage—might their attributes trickle over
to straight marriage in some fashion?</p>
<p>
In the course of my reporting this year in states that had newly
legalized same-sex marriage, people in the know—wedding planners,
officiants, fiancés and fiancées—told me time and again that nuptial
fever had broken out around them, among gay and straight couples alike.
Same-sex weddings seemed to be bestowing a new frisson on the idea of
getting hitched, or maybe restoring an old one. At the Gay and Lesbian
Wedding Expo in downtown Baltimore, just a few weeks after same-sex
marriage became legal in Maryland, Drew Vanlandingham, who describes
himself as a “wedding planner designer,” was delighted at how business
had picked up. Here it was, January, and many of his favorite venues
were booked into late summer—much to the consternation, he said, of his
straight brides. “They’re like, ‘I better get a move on!’ ” It was his
view that in Maryland, both teams were now engaged in an amiable but
spirited race to the altar.</p>
<p>
Ministers told me of wedding booms in their congregations. In her years
as the pastor of the Unitarian church in Rockville, Maryland, Lynn
Strauss said she had grown accustomed to a thin wedding roster: some
years she might perform one or two services; other years, none. But this
year, “my calendar is full of weddings,” she said. “Two in March, one
in April, one in May, one in September, one in October—oh, and one in
July.” Three were same-sex weddings, but the rest were heterosexual.
When I attended the church’s first lesbian wedding, in early March, I
spoke with Steve Greene and Ellen Rohan, who had recently been married
by Strauss. It was Steve’s third marriage, Ellen’s second. Before he met
Ellen, Steve had sworn he would never marry again. Ellen said the
arrival of same-sex marriage had influenced their feelings. “Marriage,”
she said simply, “is on everyone’s mind.”</p>
<p>
Robert M. Hardies, who is a pastor at the Unitarian All Souls Church in
Washington, D.C., and who is engaged to be married to his longtime
partner and co-parent, Chris Nealon, told me that he has seen “a
re-enchantment of marriage” among those who attend same-sex ceremonies:
“Straight folks come to [same-sex] weddings, and I watch it on their
face—there’s a feeling that this is really special. Suddenly marriage is
sexy again.” We could chalk these anecdotes up to the human desire to
witness love that overcomes obstacles—the same desire behind all
romantic comedies, whether Shakespeare’s or Hollywood’s. But could
something a bit less romantic also be at work?</p>
<p>
There is some reason to suppose that attitudes about marriage could, in
fact, be catching. The phenomenon known as “social contagion” lies at
the heart of an increasingly prominent line of research on how our
behavior and emotions affect the people we know. One famous example
dates from 2008, when James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis
published a study showing that happiness “spreads” through social
networks. They arrived at this conclusion via an ingenious crunching of
data from a long-running medical study involving thousands of
interconnected residents—and their children, and later their
grandchildren—in Framingham, Massachusetts. “Emotional states can be
transferred directly from one individual to another,” they found, across
three degrees of separation. Other studies have shown that obesity,
smoking habits, and school performance may also be catching.</p>
<p>
Most relevant, in a working paper that is under submission to a
sociology journal, the Brown University political scientist Rose
McDermott, along with her co-authors, Fowler and Christakis, has
identified a contagion effect for divorce. Divorce, she found, can
spread among friends. She told me that she also suspects that tending to
the marriages of friends can help preserve your own. McDermott says she
readily sees how marriage could itself be contagious. Intriguingly,
some of the Scandinavian countries where same-sex unions have been legal
for a decade or more have seen a rise, not a fall, in marriage rates.
In response to conservative arguments that same-sex marriage had driven a
stake through the heart of marriage in northern Europe, the Yale
University law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. and Darren Spedale in
2006 published an analysis showing that in the decade since same-sex
partnerships became legal, heterosexual marriage rates had increased
10.7 percent in Denmark, 12.7 percent in Norway, and 28.8 percent in
Sweden. Divorce rates had dropped in all three countries. Although there
was no way to prove cause and effect, the authors allowed, you could
safely say that marriage had not been harmed.</p>
<p>
So let’s suppose for a moment that marital behavior is catching. How,
exactly, might it spread? I found one possible vector of contagion
inside the Washington National Cathedral, a neo-Gothic landmark that
towers watchfully over the Washington, D.C., skyline. The seat of the
bishop of an Episcopal diocese that includes D.C. and parts of Maryland,
the cathedral is a symbol of American religious life, and strives to
provide a spiritual home for the nation, frequently hosting interfaith
events and programs. Presiding over it is the Very Reverend Gary Hall,
an Episcopal priest and the cathedral’s dean. Earlier this year, Hall
announced that the cathedral would conduct same-sex weddings, a
declaration that attracted more attention than he expected. Only people
closely involved with the church and graduates of the private schools on
its grounds can marry there. Even so, it is an influential venue, and
Hall used the occasion to argue that same-sex couples offer an image of
“radical” equality that straight couples can profitably emulate. He
believes, moreover, that their example can be communicated through
intermediaries like him: ministers and counselors gleaning insights from
same-sex couples, and transmitting them, as it were, to straight ones.
Hall says that counseling same-sex couples in preparation for their
ceremonies has already altered the way he counsels men and women.</p>
<p>
“I have a list of like 12 issues that people need to talk about that
cause conflict,” said Hall, who is lanky, with short gray hair and
horn-rims, and who looks like he could be a dean of pretty much
anything: American literature, political philosophy, East Asian studies.
As we talked in his office one morning this spring, sunlight poured
through a bank of arched windows onto an Oriental rug. Over the years,
he has amassed a collection of cheesy 1970s paperbacks with names like <i>Open Marriage</i> and <i>Total Woman</i>,
which he calls “books that got people into trouble.” The dean grew up
in Hollywood, and in the 1990s was a priest at a church in Pasadena
where he did many same-sex blessings (a blessing being a ceremony that
stops short of legal marriage). He is as comfortable talking about
Camille Paglia and the LGBT critique of marriage as he is about Holy
Week. He is also capable of saying things like “The problem with genital
sex is that it involves us emotionally in a way that we’re not in
control of.”</p>
<p>
When Hall sees couples for premarital preparation, he gives them a list
of hypothetical conflicts to take home, hash out, and report back on.
Everybody fights, he tells them. The people who thrive in marriage are
the ones who can handle disagreement and make their needs known. So he
presents them with the prime sticking points: affection and lovemaking;
how to deal with in-laws; where holidays will be spent; outside
friendships. He talks to them about parenting roles, and chores, and
money—who will earn it and who will make decisions about it.</p>
<p>
Like Esther Rothblum, he has found that heterosexual couples persist in
approaching these topics with stereotypical assumptions. “You start
throwing out questions for men and women: ‘Who’s going to take care of
the money?’ And the guy says, ‘That’s me.’ And you ask: ‘Who’s
responsible for birth control?’ And the guy says, ‘That’s her
department.’ ” By contrast, he reports, same-sex couples “have thought
really hard about how they’re going to share the property, the
responsibilities, the obligations in a mutual way. They’ve had to devote
much more thought to that than straight couples, because the straight
couples pretty much still fall back on old modes.”</p>
<p>
Now when Hall counsels heterosexuals, “I’m really pushing back on their
patriarchal assumptions: that the woman’s got to give up her career for
the guy; that the guy is going to take care of the money.” Every now
and then, he says, he has a breakthrough, and a straight groom realizes
that, say, contraception is his concern too. Hall says the same thing is
happening in the offices of any number of pastors, rabbis, and
therapists. “You’re not going to be able to talk to heterosexual couples
where there’s a power imbalance and talk to a homosexual couple where
there is a power mutuality,” and not have the conversations impact one
another. As a result, he believes there will be changes to marriage,
changes that some people will find scary. “When [conservatives] say that
gay marriage threatens my marriage, I used to say, ‘That’s ridiculous.’
Now I say, ‘Yeah, it does. It’s asking you a crucial question about
your marriage that you may not want to answer: If I’m a man, am I
actually sharing the duties and responsibilities of married life equally
with my wife?’ Same-sex marriage gives us another image of what
marriage can be.”</p>
<p>
Hall argues that same-sex marriage stands to change even the wedding
service itself. For a good 1,000 years, he notes, the Christian Church
stayed out of matrimony, which was primarily a way for society to
regulate things like inheritance. But ever since the Church did get
involved, the wedding ceremony has tended to reflect the gender mores of
the time. For example, the Book of Common Prayer for years stated that a
wife must love, honor, and obey her husband, treating him as her master
and lord. That language is long gone, but vestiges persist: the
tradition of the father giving away the bride dates from an era when
marriage was a property transfer and the woman was the property. In
response to the push for same-sex marriage, Hall says, the General
Convention, the governing council of the entire Episcopal Church, has
devised a liturgy for same-sex ceremonies (in most dioceses, these are
blessings) that honors but alters this tradition so that both spouses
are presented by sponsors.</p>
<p>
“The new service does not ground marriage in a doctrine of creation and
procreation,” Hall says. “It grounds marriage in a kind of free
coming-together of two people to live out their lives.” A study group
has convened to look at the Church’s teachings on marriage, and in the
next couple of years, Hall expects, the General Convention will adopt a
new service for all Episcopal weddings. He is hopeful that the current
same-sex service will serve as its basis.</p>
<p>
The legalization of same-sex marriage is likely to affect even members
of churches that have not performed such ceremonies. Delman Coates, the
pastor of Mt. Ennon Baptist, a predominantly African American
mega-church in southern Maryland, was active in his state’s fight for
marriage equality, presenting it to his parishioners as a civil-rights
issue. The topic has also led to some productive, if difficult,
conversations about “what the Scriptures are condemning and what they’re
confirming.” In particular, he has challenged his flock over what he
calls the “typical clobber passages”: certain verses in Leviticus,
Romans, and elsewhere that many people interpret as condemnations of
homosexuality. These discussions are part of a long-standing effort to
challenge people’s thinking about other passages having to do with
divorce and premarital sex—issues many parishioners have struggled with
at home. Coates preaches that what the Bible is condemning is not modern
divorce, but a practice, common in biblical times, whereby men cast out
their wives for no good reason. Similarly, he tells them that the
“fornication” invoked is something extreme—rape, incest, prostitution.
He does not condone illicit behavior or familial dissolution, but he
wants the members of his congregation to feel better about their own
lives. In exchanges like these, he is making gay marriage part of a much
larger conversation about the way we live and love now.</p>
<p>
Gay marriage’s ripples are also starting to be felt beyond churches, in
schools and neighborhoods and playgroups. Which raises another
question: Will gay and lesbian couples be peacemakers or combatants in
the “mommy wars”—the long-simmering struggle between moms who stay at
home and moms who work outside it? If you doubt that straight households
are paying attention to same-sex ones, consider Danie, a woman who
lives with her husband and two children in Bethesda, Maryland. (Danie
asked me not to use her last name out of concern for her family’s
privacy.) Not long after she completed a master’s degree in Spanish
linguistics at Georgetown University, her first baby was born. Because
her husband, Jesse, works long hours as a litigator, she decided to
become a full-time parent—not an easy decision in work-obsessed
Washington, D.C. For a while, she ran a photography business out of
their home, partly because she loves photography but partly so she could
assure people at dinner parties that she had paying work. Whenever
people venture that women who work outside the home don’t judge
stay-at-home moms, Danie thinks: <i>Are you freaking kidding me?</i></p>
<p>
She takes some comfort, however, in the example of a lesbian couple
with whom she is friendly. Both women are attorneys, and one stays home
with their child. “Their life is exactly the same as ours,” Danie told
me, with a hint of vindication. If being a stay-at-home mother is “good
enough for her, then what’s my issue? She’s a huge women’s-rights
activist.” But while comparing herself with a lesbian couple is
liberating in some ways, it also exacerbates the competitive anxiety
that afflicts so many modern mothers. The other thing about these two
mothers, Danie said, is that they are so relaxed, so happy, so present.
Even the working spouse manages to be a super-involved parent, to a much
greater extent than most of the working fathers she knows. “I’m a
little bit obsessed with them,” she says.</p>
<p>
Related to this is the question of how gay fatherhood might impact
heterosexual fatherhood—by, for example, encouraging the idea that men
can be emotionally accessible, logistically capable parents. Will the
growing presence of gay dads in some communities mean that men are more
often included in the endless e‑mail chains that go to parents of
preschoolers and birthday-party invitees? As radically as fatherhood has
changed in recent decades, a number of antiquated attitudes about dads
have proved strangely enduring: Rob Hardies, the pastor at All Souls,
reports that when his partner, Chris, successfully folded a stroller
before getting on an airplane with their son, Nico, he was roundly
congratulated by passersby, as if he had solved a difficult mathematical
equation in public. So low are expectations for fathers, even now, that
in Stephanie Schacher’s study of gay fathers and their feelings about
caregiving, her subjects reported that people would see them walking on
the street with their children and say things like “Giving Mom a break?”
Hardies thinks that every time he and Chris take their son to the
playground or to story hour, they help disrupt this sort of thinking. He
imagines moms seeing a man doing this and gently—or maybe not so
gently—pointing it out to their husbands. “Two guys somehow manage to
get their act together and have a household and cook dinner and raise a
child, without a woman doing all the work,” he says. Rather than setting
an example that fathers don’t matter, gay men are setting an example
that fathers do matter, and that marriage matters, too.</p>
<p>
<strong><big>THE SEX PROBLEM</big></strong></p>
<p>
<span class="">When, in the 1970s</span> and early 1980s,
Pepper Schwartz asked couples about their sex lives, she arrived at
perhaps her most explosive finding: non-monogamy was rampant among gay
men, a whopping 82 percent of whom reported having had sex outside their
relationship. Slightly more than one-third of gay-male couples felt
that monogamy was important; the other two-thirds said that monogamy was
unimportant or that they were neutral on the topic. In a funny way,
Schwartz says, her findings suggested that same-sex unions (like
straight ones) aren’t necessarily about sex. Some gay men made a point
of telling her they loved their partners but weren’t physically
attracted to them. Others said they wanted to be monogamous but were
unsupported in that wish, by their partner, gay culture, or both.</p>
<p>
Schwartz believes that a move toward greater monogamy was emerging among gay men even before the <span class="">AIDS</span>
crisis. Decades later, gay-male couples are more monogamous than they
used to be, but not nearly to the same degree as other kinds of couples.
In her Vermont research, Esther Rothblum found that 15 percent of
straight husbands said they’d had sex outside their relationship,
compared with 58 percent of gay men in civil unions and 61 percent of
gay men who were partnered but not in civil unions. When asked whether a
couple had arrived at an explicit agreement about extra-relational sex,
a minuscule 4 percent of straight husbands said they’d discussed it
with their partner and determined that it was okay, compared with
40 percent of gay men in civil unions and 49 percent of gay men in
partnerships that were not legally recognized. Straight women and
lesbians, meanwhile, were united in their commitment to monogamy,
lesbians more so than straight women: 14 percent of straight wives said
they had had sex outside their marriage, compared with 9 percent of
lesbians in civil unions and 7 percent of lesbians who were partnered
but not in civil unions.</p>
<p>
The question of whether gays and lesbians will change marriage, or vice
versa, is at its thorniest around sex and monogamy. Private behavior
could well stay private: when she studied marriage in the Netherlands,
Lee Badgett, the University of Massachusetts economist, found that while
many same-sex couples proselytize about the egalitarianism of their
relationships, they don’t tend to promote non-monogamy, even if they
practice it. Then again, some gay-rights advocates, like the writer and
sex columnist Dan Savage, argue very publicly that insisting on monogamy
can do a couple more harm than good. Savage, who questions whether most
humans are cut out for decades of sex with only one person, told me
that “monogamy in marriage has been a disaster for straight couples”
because it has set unrealistic expectations. “Gay-male couples are much
more likely to be realistic about what men are,” he said. Savage’s own
marriage started out monogamous; the agreement was that if either
partner cheated, this would be grounds for ending the relationship. But
when he and his husband decided to adopt a child, Savage suggested that
they relax their zero-tolerance policy on infidelity. He felt that
risking family dissolution over such an incident no longer made sense.
His husband later suggested they explicitly allow each other occasional
dalliances, a policy Savage sees as providing a safety valve for the
relationship. If society wants marriage to be more resilient, he argues,
we must make it more “monagamish.”</p>
<p>
This is, to be sure, a difficult argument to win: a husband proposing
non-monogamy to his wife on the grounds that it is in the best interest
of a new baby would have a tough time prevailing in the court of public
opinion. But while most gay-marriage advocates stop short of championing
Savage’s “wiggle room,” some experts say that gay men are better at
talking more openly about sex. Naveen Jonathan, a family therapist and a
professor at Chapman University, in California, says he sees many gay
partners hammer out an elaborate who-can-do-what-when sexual contract,
one that says, “These are the times and the situations where it’s okay
to be non-monogamous, and these are the times and the situations where
it is not.” While some straight couples have deals of their own, he
finds that for the most part, they simply presume monogamy. A possible
downside of this assumption: straight couples are far less likely than
gay men to frankly and routinely discuss sex, desire, and the challenges
of sexual commitment.</p>
<p>
Other experts question the idea that most gay males share a preference
for non-monogamous relationships, or will in the long term. Savage’s
argument that non-monogamy is a safety valve is “very interesting, but
it really is no more than a claim,” says Justin Garcia, an evolutionary
biologist at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and
Reproduction. Garcia points out that not all men are relentlessly sexual
beings, and not all men want an open relationship. “In some ways,
same-sex couples are healthier—they tend to have these negotiations
more,” he says. But negotiating can be stressful: in many cases, Garcia
notes, one gay partner would prefer to be monogamous, but gives in to
the other partner.</p>
<p>
So which version will prevail: non-monogamous marriage, or marriage as
we conventionally understand it? It’s worth pointing out that in the
U.S., same-sex unions are slightly more likely between women, and
non-monogamy is not a cause women tend to champion. And some evidence
suggests that getting married changes behavior: William Eskridge and
Darren Spedale found that in the years after Norway, Sweden, and Denmark
instituted registered partnerships, many same-sex couples reported
placing a greater emphasis on monogamy, while national rates of HIV
infections declined.</p>
<p>
Sex, then, may be one area where the institution of marriage pushes
back against norms that have been embraced by many gay couples. Gary
Hall of the National Cathedral allows that in many ways, gay
relationships offer a salutary “critique” of marriage, but argues that
the marriage establishment will do some critiquing back. He says he
would not marry two people who intended to be non-monogamous, and
believes that monogamy will be a “critical issue” in the dialogue
between the gay community and the Church. Up until now, he says,
progressive churches have embraced “the part of gay behavior that looks
like straight behavior,” but at some point, churches also have to engage
gay couples whose behavior doesn’t conform to monogamous ideals. He
hopes that, in the course of this give-and-take, the church ends up
reckoning with other ongoing cultural changes, from unmarried
cohabitation to the increasing number of adults who choose to live as
singles. “How do we speak credibly to people about their sexuality and
their sexual relationships?” he asks. “We really need to rethink this.”</p>
<p>
<span class="">So yes, marriage </span>will change. Or rather,
it will change again. The fact is, there is no such thing as
traditional marriage. In various places and at various points in human
history, marriage has been a means by which young children were
betrothed, uniting royal houses and sealing alliances between nations.
In the Bible, it was a union that sometimes took place between a man and
his dead brother’s widow, or between one man and several wives. It has
been a vehicle for the orderly transfer of property from one generation
of males to the next; the test by which children were deemed legitimate
or bastard; a privilege not available to black Americans; something
parents arranged for their adult children; a contract under which women,
legally, ceased to exist. Well into the 19th century, the British
common-law concept of “unity of person” meant a woman <i>became</i> her husband when she married, giving up her legal standing and the right to own property or control her own wages.</p>
<p>
Many of these strictures have already loosened. Child marriage is today
seen by most people as the human-rights violation that it is. The
Married Women’s Property Acts guaranteed that a woman could get married
and remain a legally recognized human being. The Supreme Court’s
decision in <i>Loving v. Virginia</i> did away with state bans on
interracial marriage. By making it easier to dissolve marriage, no-fault
divorce helped ensure that unions need not be lifelong. The recent
surge in single parenthood, combined with an aging population, has
unyoked marriage and child-rearing. History shows that marriage evolves
over time. We have every reason to believe that same-sex marriage will
contribute to its continued evolution.</p>
<p>
The argument that gays and lesbians are social pioneers and bellwethers
has been made before. Back in 1992, the British sociologist Anthony
Giddens suggested that gays and lesbians were a harbinger of a new kind
of union, one subject to constant renegotiation and expected to last
only as long as both partners were happy with it. Now that these
so-called harbingers are looking to commit to more-binding
relationships, we will have the “counterfactual” that Gary Gates talks
about: we will be better able to tell which marital stresses and
pleasures are due to gender, and which are not.</p>
<p>
In the end, it could turn out that same-sex marriage isn’t all that
different from straight marriage. If gay and lesbian marriages are in
the long run as quarrelsome, tedious, and unbearable; as satisfying,
joyous, and loving as other marriages, we’ll know that a certain amount
of strife is not the fault of the alleged war between men and women, but
just an inevitable thing that happens when two human beings are doing
the best they can to find a way to live together.</p>
<p>This article available online at:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/the-gay-guide-to-wedded-bliss/309317/">http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/the-gay-guide-to-wedded-bliss/309317/</a></p>
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