I've had a sweet ladyfriend for over three years. She's divorced from a terrible marriage. She has a good time with me and I can hardly believe how lucky I am to have met her.

My father wasn't a good husband to my mother. I knew it from quite an early age and realised how difficult things were for my mother, in all sorts of ways. I used to tell her to either kick him out, or leave him. But this was England in the 1940s and that wasn't feasible, or so she used to tell me. He died in 1950, when I was 16. My mother got another man two years later. He was divorced from a very unsatisfactory marriage. A great guy, very good to my mother and appreciative of what my mother had for him. I was delighted for them both.

I avoided any unnecessary contact with my ex-wife after we parted. None of my business what she was doing and better for both of us that way. But I am aware that she had some good times which she would not have had with me and I'm happy about that. We both learned to move on.

My ladyfriend and I still go dancing regularly. We have lots of dancing friends, mostly in their 50s, 60s, 70s and some in their 80s. We would often have no idea who is married, who de-facto, who have been together for a lifetime and who are comparatively new together. And, of course, who have been through one [or maybe more than one] divorce. But they're certainly a fun-loving, lively bunch of people and their obvious happiness is infectious.

We know that some of our friends have been married for 50 or 60 years or more and they're still sweethearts. To me, they're the really lucky ones. The rest of us make our own luck, the best way we can.

Robert,
I’m not sure what you mean by independent studies. Here is one conducted with 30,000 Germans over 18 years.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=34970

Many other studies have been conducted in a number of other countries also, but I have yet to find one study that conclusively says that the majority of people are happier after their divorce. There may be individual cases where people are happier, but it does appear that the majority of people are not.

There is the danger that people will be encouraged to get a divorce rather than mend the problems in their marriage, and there is a danger that Family Relationship Centres will develop an end the marriage, but not mend the marriage policy.

The main people who would want to encourage divorce would be feminists or members of the divorce industry. Most feminist organisations have very few or no males in them, and people have already tested out a number of these Family Relationship Centres. They have been in them and had a look around, and in a number of Family Relationship Centres they could see many female staff but no male staff.

So having few or no male staff is a very good indication that there are already feminists in those Family Relationship Centres, and those Family Relationship Centres could simply become fronts for the divorce industry.

There could be a simple solution to the problem, but only if the Family Relationship Centres are paid by the federal government in a certain way. A Family Relationship Centres could be paid according to the number of clients that pass through the centre, but also paid according to the level of satisfaction of those clients.

The clients of a Family Relationship Centre could be surveyed 6 or 12 months after they went through the Family Relationship Centre, and if the level of satisfaction or general happiness of the client is low, then the Family Relationship Centre gets very little money from the government.

I think that would be a fair system.

HRS, independant would be one where those doing (or paying for) the research don't have some kind of vested interest in the outcome.

Sometimes that info is hard to find.

The article you referenced suggests that happiness declines in the lead up to a divorce and rebounds some of the way afterwards but not back to some previous point. What is not stated in the summary is what the baseline is.

I'd rather see a study comparing outcomes for those who divorced vs those who stayed in a conflict ladden marriage.

Back to the article I've dealt with both RA and Centacare and I think that I've dealt with 3 men out of about 15 staff I've dealt with. Two of those men were in a single meeting.

My overall impression is that most staff are quite sexist. I had one "councelor" being quite aggressive in her attempts to quiz me about involvement in mens groups and expressing some very negative views about them. We were given a mediator for a residency dispute who was a single mum with her own children in pretty much the same circumstances as my ex was seeking for our son. If nothing else the perception of bias should preculde that.

My impression is that both feminists and paternalists can be a problem in these industries. Remember that many paternalists believe that women are inherently better suited to the day to day care of children than men are.

Equality feminists are probably a safer option than ardent paternalists.

R0bert

Robert,

I have known a number of feminists, but I have never known an equality feminist. I don’t believe they exist, but if you type “divorce + happiness” into a search engine, you will likely find thousands of studies undertaken into divorce and happiness, and you could go through those studies.

In your case with mediation, it appears that you had low levels of satisfaction with the mediation process. This also means that the mediation process has failed in some way, and you or the taxpayer should not be funding something that fails.

So I am suggesting that the government pays a Family Relationship Centre according to the number of clients that pass through that centre, and also according to the level of satisfaction of those clients.

If an organisation running a Family Relationship Centre does not achieve high levels of satisfaction with their clients, then they get less and less money from the government, and eventually they would go out of business. Another organisation could then come in to run the Family Relationship Centre, and eventually the Family Relationship Centres would begin to function adequately and provide a high level of service to their clients.

Anyway, I have work to do.

Bye for now.

HRS, what you say makes a lot of sense. FRSs should of course have some sort of industry audited evaluation based on "client" satisfaction, but they will not. I guarantee it. No such commonsense logic in this area will exist, because no government has the courage to specify a family policy - at least for now.

Governments of today are so lacklustre, so afraid of tipping the balance of preferences, that they will not commit to any overtly un-PC values. They're all a gutless lot who WILL NOT STAND UP for any values other than vested interests in academia, unions or corporations, national or international.

In my opinion we have politicians who are the lowest, trashiest scum that have ever walked the face of the planet since Louis XVI. What we have is bourgeois mediocrity en-masse.

So how do you stop it?

Simple. Men have got to start being men again.

It really is that easy.

But where are the men? Have a read of this site and you'll quickly see that real men are far and few between - yourself excluded of course. The battle for humanity lies in re-inspiring natural masculinity.

I wonder if it would be of value to use either 'manliness' or 'manfulness' in lieu of 'masculinity'.

'Masculinity' and 'femininity' have become loaded terms. Likewise I see no purpose in continually being led by the nose and using the term 'gender' rather than 'sex'.

It is time for a new deal for men and women and that is not going to come from those bureaucrats and academics who get their bread and jam from the feminism industry. We can start by rejecting the labels they use to vilify and discriminate.