CONTENTS:

• JUST VISITING
• PEOPLE NEED MARRIAGE
• MIKAL'S MORSELS AND BYTES FOR THE FAMILY
  APPRECIATE OR DETERIORIATE

We have been watching Dr. Paul Faulkner's video series on "Raising Faithful Kids" on Wednesday nights at church. Paul interviewed a number of successful families and shares what he learned from them. It's all taken from his latest book. Achieving Success With Families. I highly recommend both the tapes and the book. You can order either from Howard Publishing Company; 3117 North 7th St.; West Monroe, Louisiana 71291.

This week's feature article includes the results of recent research concerning the increasingly popular practice of living together without marriage. Mikal shares some important thoughts about appreciation.

Do you remember John Hartford's song, "Gentle on my Mind?" It was about a guy who stashed his sleeping bag behind his lover's couch. He extolled the virtues of an uncommitted living arrangement. Just think of the advantages. No divorce court, no alimony, no responsibility, no questions asked. He dismissed marriage as nothing more than "forgotten words and ink stains that are dried upon some lines." Living together without marriage has become an acceptable standard in our culture.

This is not good news. The Bible clearly calls fornication a sin. You can rationalize your way around it, plead special circumstances and justify it in your own mind, but the Bible still says, ". . . he who sins sexually sins against his own body" (1 Corinthians 6:18). But then you expected me to say that. After all, I'm a preacher and preachers specialize in sour grapes.

Would you listen to some folks who don't have a theological axe to grind? Catherine Riessman and Naomi Gerstell reviewed the relationship between health and marital status, which they published in Social Science and Medicine. They said, "One of the most consistent observations in health research is that married (people) enjoy better health than those of other marital statuses." According to a study conducted by Debra Umberson at the University of Michigan, the mortality rates are consistently higher for the unmarried than for the married. Maybe there's a little bit more going on than "ink stains dried upon some lines." Her research suggests that marriage provides a sense of obligation which encourages people to practice better health habits. It's not just the ceremony that does it. It's an old fashioned and almost forgotten concept called, "commitment."

But there's more. People who live together still bring children into the world. Often the guy who stashes his sleeping bag behind the couch, develops a sudden hankering to hitch a ride with a cross country semi driver, leaving a single mom to raise the child. How does that work out? To begin with the infant mortality rate is higher in single parent families than it is among the children of married couples according to the National Center for Health Statistics. James Lynch at the University of Maryland Medical School, noticed that members of single-parent families experience more "headaches, backaches, tummy aches, listlessness (and) a host of other ailments." On top of that, such children are more likely to be reared in poverty, have grade problems at school and become addicted to drugs.

Living together without marriage may sound like a fun thing to do, but I don't know of any positive benefits from such an arrangements and researchers have identified a host of other social and psychological problems I haven't mentioned. Rather than calling it a current trend, I think we ought to label it a national disease.

The silence just hung there, heavy and heart-rending. I believed the task I requested of the father to be quite simple. His twelve-year old daughter sat facing him, expectantly. Surely the assignment was safe. I had observed one of our gurus in family thereapy, the late Virginia Satir, make the same request to a mother of five children. She had accomplished it with all five.

There was no way to reel my words back. We all just sat there. Finally the father turned to me and said, "I can't." This father could not come up with one statement of appreciation for his own flesh and blood. Needless to say, the family was in very deep trouble and this child's acting out behavior had become dangerous.

There have been numerous studies concerning what makes a healthy family. These studies consistently have very similar findings regarding the behavior of the members in these families. One characteristic which seems to lead the pack, is that the people in these families genuinely appreciate one another and are not afraid to regularly express that appreciation.

Perhaps a hindrance to expressing appreciation is a black-and-white mindset. Such an individual views situations as all bad or all good. The other person may have done well, but not perfectly. There is no in-between. An opportunity to enrich a relationship is lost.

Lori Gordon of PAIRS Relationship Training gives another scenario for not expressing appreciation in her booklet, "A Laundry List of Marital Mishaps". A possible mistaken belief she identifies is, "If I acknowledge how much you do for me, I feel beholden, burdened, and obligated to do for you. I don't want to, so I cannot acknowledge what you do. You feel unappreciated. You distance."

Since distancing is a possible result of not feeling appreciated, that good old fear of intimacy could be cropping up again. The thought might be, "If I appreciate you, you will move in to close to me."

A friend and colleague, Doyle Maynard, relates the following rendition of a story from history which reflects the importance of expressing appreciation:

In 1826, Jane Welsh met and married the late prose writer Thomas Carlyle. But hers was a tragic marriage, not that he ever mistreated her physically in any way, but as far as the record goes not one time in their entire married life did he ever tell her that he loved her. Having lived in loneliness she died of a broken heart in 1866 and he stood over her cold form and looked into her silent face and realized for the first time the place and position that she held in his life. He went home and he wrote in his diary what is considered the saddest sentence in all English literature, "Oh, if I had you yet for one hour, that I might tell you all."

Find the courage within yourself to focus on the positive aspects of your loved ones, and then tell them about it. You will not regret it.

(Mikal Frazier is a licensed family therapist with a private practice in Minden and Bossier City, Louisiana. Her e-mail address is frazier02@aol.com.)

NEXT WEEK'S FAMILY STUDY: The Real Key to Communicating Values