Similar Spouses Stay Married

A new study by Mikhila Humbad and colleagues at Michigan State tested whether spouses converged in their basic personality over a long marriage.

They don't.

This is not really so surprising, though. Our basic personality characteristics are one of the most stable parts of us. We may come to look and sound more like our spouses as we come to imitate one another's facial expressions and speech. But personality mostly stays put.

What this study really shows, I think, is that people with enduring marriages were similar in values, and complementary in personality, to begin with. The researchers note that they do not have many recently married couples in their study - not surprising, since they were piggybacking on the long-running Minnesota Twin Study to find their couples.

I would expect that couples with dissimilar values and non-complementary personalities would be less likely to make lasting marriages.

But neither the couples in the real study, nor the couples in the hypothetical study, would be likely to show much personality change.

American Tolerance Tradition Triumphs Over Know Nothings

Nicholas Kristoff has a fine column arguing that that fear of the Ground Zero mosque, and other expressions of Islamic life in the United States, is not driven by sheer bigotry. Rather, it is driven by the desire of well-meaning people to protect the nation from what they imagine are unassimilable aliens and the possible physical and moral danger they might bring. Like the anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement of the nineteenth century, this impulse is not new in American history. But Kristoff offers a hopeful answer:

But we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse.

Most Americans are Tolerant of Mosques, Even Now

The good news is that most Americans are tolerant of mosques even in the middle of the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy.

A Pew poll in late August asked which of these two statements you agreed with more:

"Muslims should have the same rights as other groups to build houses of worship in local communities"

OR

"Local communities should be able to prohibit the construction of mosques if they do not want them."

62% agreed with the first statement, versus only 25% with the second.

I Need to Want Less

I thank Good, the most gruntled of magazines, for pointing me to Erin Hanson's project, "Need to Want Less."

I think this is a wonderful personal discipline, and a real help in simplifying your own life.

I think wanting less is a likely path to happiness. I am more confident that it is, at least indirectly, a path to meaningfulness, because it helps you weed out the unnecessary things in your own life.

Single Young Women Earn More Than Men

Single, childless, young women earn more than comparable men.

This is good: it shows that more education and more persistent work reap better pay.

This is also good because it helps chip away at the myth the women, on average, earn less than men because of sex discrimination.

Women earn less than men, on average, because women who are not single, childless, and young tend to make choices that trade earning for control of their time for family life and for doing only work that they want to do.

Exploring the Happy Society

Five years ago today I began The Gruntled Center: Faith and Family for Centrists.

Today, to celebrate that anniversary and to mark the broader path I want to chart, I am changing the subtitle of the blog. Hereafter I will post to The Gruntled Center: Exploring the Happy Society.

I am developing a new course, "The Happy Society," which will explore the philosophical and empirical roots of happiness in the institutions of society, and in society as a whole. I think the core dynamic of what makes for happiness and unhappiness in social life as a whole is trust versus fear.

As part of this class, as well as for my continuing teaching on family life, I envision a book on Happy Families. This book would explore the seeming paradox that having children usually diminishes a couple's happiness in their marriage, but at the same time gives them the greatest sense of meaningful accomplishment.

I think the relationship between happiness and meaningfulness is the deepest and hardest puzzle that we will explore in studying the happy society.

I welcome your participation in the adventure.

Spreading Fear is Bad for Democracy

A comment on my post of yesterday offers this version of diplomacy:

Suppose we told the Iranian Mullahs that they are an evil, backward, dangerous, ignorant bunch of theocrats, and that nothing will help that unhappy land until they are gone. Suppose we told them we were going to do everything in our power, short of war, to consign them to the dustbin of history where they belong. That has my vote for candor. But perhaps it is not in our interest to say so?

I tend to think that, at least with adversaries, a little studied ambiguity is often the best. If the bad guys think you might just be crazy enough to send them all to where they get the 72 virgins, or whatever, maybe they will behave themselves.

I believe this whole approach to our adversaries - both the candid and the ambiguous versions - makes the world worse, and does not serve the interests of the United States or, in this case, the Iranian people. Striking fear in others makes them worse, makes them less rational, less open to persuasion about where their true interests lie. And it does the same to us, too. Moreover, approaching the leadership of another nation as children who we have to make behave - who we have a right to make behave - makes even the most reasonable people in that nation reject us for our arrogance. We would feel the same way if other nations treated our leaders that way, even when strongly oppose our own leaders.

In the particular case of Iran, I am very hopeful about the future of democracy in Iran - more so than in just about any other Muslim nation except Turkey. Iran has an elected government and a constitution that, on paper, vests power in that elected government. They have plenty of pragmatists who want to have peace and get on with business, as every government does. Right now they have a group of unelected religious authorities who overrule that elected government, and keep its most strident and dangerous party in power. Yet, as the stolen election showed, there are already cracks in the religious establishment.

How can we promote the rule of law in Iran? How can we get the religious authorities to back off and let the electoral process proceed? I believe we are more likely to strengthen the moderate elements in Iran, and throughout the Muslim world, by being reasonable, by finding common ground wherever we can, by communicating to the Muslim world that Americans are not their enemies. This will be a rocky process, and will be strongly resisted by religiously pugnacious elements (in both countries). Making Iranians, in power and out, believe that we are crazy and should be feared strengthens the worst elements there and makes peace and freedom less likely.