The last few days have unleashed a torrent of reactions  to Elizabeth Edwards’ decision to go on Oprah and talk about her husband’s affair.

Some are outraged; some defend her; others are simply confused.

But the main reason that everyone is so fascinated by Elizabeth’s “coming out” is that until the advent of Rielle Hunter, we all thought that the Edwardses were incredibly happily married. That was, in fact, their “brand.”

So it’s worth asking: what makes for a happy marriage?

Gretchen Rubin had a lovely post earlier this week on The Happiness Project about meeting her husband. For her, the central mystery is how she and her husband  – who are perfectly suited to one another – fell in love before they knew each other at all?

One recent study suggests that the single best predictor of whether or not you’ll marry happily is – wait for it – how much you smile in photos when you’re younger. The implication, I suppose, is that happy people become happy partners. (I can just hear the Ricardo Montalban character from Fantasy Island in the background: “Smiles, Everyone. Smiles!”)

But what about a happy dynamic between spouses? What explains that?

There are lots of possible answers.

For Ayelet Waldman – of Bad Mother fame – it clearly has a lot to do with a good sex life.

A friend of mine here in London says that the key to his happy marriage is sharing the same “emotional temperature” with his wife.

I’ve always thought that happy marriages (or enduring partnerships) have a lot to do with shared interests – that both partners actually like to do the same things in their free time. That sounds pretty mundane, I know. But I’m always shocked at how many couples fall into some version of the “He likes the mountains; She likes the beach” dichotomy.

Perhaps the most egregious case was an old friend of mine whose husband’s idea of the ideal New Year’s Day was to watch four different football “bowls” on four different televisions (simultaneously). His wife, meanwhile, was busily re-reading George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in the other room. (They’re now divorced).

In my own case, I realized that my husband and I were meant for each other when – on a recent vacation – he was re-reading Anne Frank’s Diary and I was reading Sophie’s Choice. I recognize that holocaust literature isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. But to me, it said a lot about why we’re well suited to one another.

How about you? What do you think makes for a happy long term marriage/partnership?

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Further to Tuesday’s post about whether or not there’s a relationship between young children growing up too fast and young adults growing up too slow, this blog – Slouching Towards Adulthood -  has one answer to that question.

Image: Bride and Groom by Sharon Goodyear via freedigitalphotos.net.

I’m a sucker for movies about politics. Reds, Julia, and All the President’s Men count among my favorites.

So it was with a great anticipation that I rented Steve McQueen’s movie Hunger this past weekend. The movie is about the Irish Republican Army’s hunger strike in a Belfast prison in 1981, famously led by Bobby Sands.

I was not disappointed. It’s a harrowing, visually compelling film that got me thinking (again) about The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

But the movie also got me thinking about the life cycle of political movements. In the movie’s most famous scene (and I spoil nothing here), Sands squares off against a priest over the best way to advance the Irish Republican cause. Sands claims that his suicide (he calls it murder) is warranted because he believes in his cause even more than he believes in his own life. The priest, in contrast, doesn’t see why you’d kill off vital young members of a political movement in order to secure the movement’s future. Rather, he argues, the future lies in negotiation.

Fast forward 28 years or so and the priest’s view seems to have won out. While there is still plenty to worry about in Northern Ireland (including sporadic killings), the IRA leadership has put down its guns and embraced a power-sharing agreement with its former Protestant enemies. (For a quick primer on the peace process, look here.)

It’s the same story (with a different political context) that Philip Gourevitch tells in last week’s New Yorker about Rwanda. Only 15 years ago, there was a full-scale genocide taking place in Rwanda. Today, former enemies live together relatively peacefully.

So I’ve been wondering whether political movements like the IRA undergo a life cycle which is very similar to our own. They begin with a violent infancy (assassinations, protests, hunger strikes etc.), move into the fits of adolescence (oscillating between cease fires and renewed violence), and then land, finally, in an adulthood marked by realism and negotiation.

I have no idea whether this is a fair assessment of violent political movements and will leave that to the sociologists and political scientists to sort out. But I’m always pleased when something forces me to think about adulthood in an entirely new way.

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If, like me, you have a quiet obsession with The Troubles, I’d highly recommend a small but powerful film that flew a bit under the radar screen called Nothing Personal.

Image: Irish Republican Army by Sherber711 via Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Today’s post builds on yesterday’s post about whether or not kids are growing up too quickly. Today, in a nod to my own early years, I post about five signs that you’re feeling nostalgic for your childhood:

1. You have an inappropriate attachment to Monopoly. You know it’s bad when you hold up Monopoly as the paragon of a “real game” to your kids (unlike that “junk” they play on the computer). As a recent article in Wired magazine points out, Monopoly is actually a really stupid game because the only strategic question is “buy or not buy” and you spend the whole time trying to reduce your opponent to dust. And yet, I still find myself oddly drawn to the role of deeder (or whatever you call that person who hands out the properties). Then again, my conception of a video game doesn’t extend much beyond Pacman, so maybe that’s what I really ought to be concerned about.

2. You still buy candy necklaces. And eat them. What? Am I the only one who does this?

3. You tear up at children’s concerts. Worse, you sing along. Especially when someone plays Puff the Magic Dragon. The worst part is, it doesn’t have to be my kids who are singing. I was at a farmer’s market a few years back when this pudgy 11 year old girl from the local junior high got up and sang Tomorrow (from Annie). Before I knew it, tears began to slowly fall across my face. Someone next to me asked if the little girl was my child. “Um…no,” I was forced to reply. “I just like this song.”

4. You wish you had a mood ring. Remember those? The ones that told you what mood you were in by the color of the ring? Mine always seemed to be black, which I think meant “nervous.” Pretty much tells you all you need to know about my childhood.

5. You still find yourself attracted to Luke Skywalker. My son had a play date recently with another little boy and they started arguing over whether or not Anakin Skywalker was ugly. (Read here for a great article by Slate’s Emily Bazelon about the enduring appeal of Star Wars for little boys.) I suddenly felt compelled to jump in and defend Luke’s looks. The little boy turned to me and said: “Oh! Do you fancy Luke? He looks very smart.” At which point I had to admit begrudgingly that, yes, I do in fact fancy Luke.

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In case you missed it – and because it’s already making the rounds of the Mommy Blog circuit – here’s a link to Ayelet Waldman’s remarkably candid interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where she talks about her new book, Bad Mother.

Image: New Monopoly Board by Vinduhl via Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

I read two articles over the weekend that seemed, at first glance, completely contradictory.

The first, on the New York Times Motherlode blog, was a piece discussing the oft-heard complaint that kids these days are being forced to grow up too quickly. (As one person cited in the article puts it: “How did 5 become the new 7, anyway?”)

The second article, from the Washington Post, was on so-called boomerang kids -  “children” between ages 18 and 34 who move back home to live with their parents. According to the article, the number of Twenty Somethings now living at home with their parents has grown by 50% since the 1970s (a trend that is only being  accentuated by the current recession).

So…which is it? Are kids growing up too fast or too slow?

With a little digging, I found the answer is…both.

On the one hand, through things like homework in kindergarten, we do seem to be encouraging kids to prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood at an earlier and earlier age. I live in the U.K., and if you think childhood is on the wane in the States, try living over here. Good luck finding a playground for children over 5. I’m not kidding!

And yet, as studies like this one suggest, a host of economic, social and cultural factors mean that young adults are also meandering much more than they did a generation ago:  delaying marriage, changing careers several times, failing to achieve economic independence and other milestones of adulthood. (For a quick summary of these trends, have a look at the Network on Transitions to Adulthood website at the MacArthur Foundation.)

It’s hard to read these two articles side by side and wonder if there isn’t a relationship between their claims:  Is it possible, in other words, that in encouraging young children to grow up too fast, we induce a backlash later on in older children that slows that process down?

I don’t know the answer to this question. But it certainly seems like a paradox worth exploring.

In the meantime, if you’re already a bona fide adult looking to lessen your load, swing by the Escape Adulthood blog where Kim and Jason offer tips for ridding yourself of adultitis.

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When I first launched this blog, a cousin of mine, Jeremy, wrote me an email: “Depressing to learn that I won’t have this all figured out by the time I’m 45. That was my last best hope for adulthood.”

A former colleague of mine with three grown children of his own also wrote: “Your blog reminds me of a distinction my kids used to make. They’d say that you become an adult when you’re 21, but you don’t ‘grow up’ until you’re 65 or beyond.”

So there you go, Jer. You’ve still got 20 years to go!

Image: Race on the Beach by Mr. Thumpz via Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

Today is a bank holiday over here in the U.K., so I’ll be back posting tomorrow.

In the meantime, and further to Friday’s post about the road not taken, a friend sent me a link to this website where you can register a regret and see how many people share it or search for one of your own. Fun stuff!

“Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.”

–Frank Sinatra, My Way.

What a great quote that is.

I’ve been thinking about regret lately. It all began with this touching piece by David Sedaris in The New Yorker a few weeks back. Sedaris writes movingly about a near-hook up he almost had in his early 20′s with a Lebanese guy whom he met on a train in Italy. Although the guy invites Sedaris to get off the train and join him, Sedaris passes on the opportunity. But he still thinks about that guy – and what might have been – all these years later. The essay is a giant homage to that great question of adulthood: What if?

The Road not Taken is also the subject of Mamma Mia, which – for my sins – I watched with my kids last weekend at their behest. (I fully own up to my abiding love of musical theatre, but even I balk at Abba.)

Mamma Mia – and I’m not spoiling anything here – is about a young woman on the brink of getting married who doesn’t know who her father is. So (unbeknown to her mother) she invites the three likely candidates to her wedding. Passion, longing, anger, resentment (and far too many Abba songs) ensue. The movie is all-out camp, but nestled within all the cheese are a few touching moments that actually work (Meryl Streep singing The Winner Takes It All to a love-struck Pierce Brosnan was my own personal favorite).

What Sedaris’ essay and Mamma Mia have in common is wistfulness, which is a huge part of adulthood. In Sedaris’ case, it’s not that he regrets whom he ended up with. (He makes a subtle nod to his long-time partner, Hugh, at the end of the essay.) It’s just that he’s wondering if -  in turning down that handsome Lebanese guy all those many years ago – he missed the boat. Not necessarily the boat, but a boat nonetheless. And in so doing, he articulates that great fear of adulthood:  which is that once we make a choice, everything else becomes path dependent.  Which in turn forces us to come to grips with the fact that we may never go round again.

This can be a fear about your personal life, as it was in these two instances. But it’s also a fear that we bring to career choices and to where we live and to the schools we attend (or don’t). What I find moving about wistfulness is that you can’t really escape it. You need to just live with it and perhaps, even, embrace it by – say – writing a short story in the New Yorker.

On a lighter note, midway through the movie – which is shot on the Greek islands – I commented that I’d like to go to Greece. To which my daughter replied: “OK, but let’s not go to Latin.” No, indeed. Let’s not.

Please tell me that you, too, are now singing “The Winner Takes It All”…

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Speaking of musical theatre, is anyone else as excited as I am that they’re making a movie about the making of A Chorus Line? OK, anyone who isn’t my sister?

Image: Two Roads Diverged in a Non-Yellow Wood by Msmail via Flickr under a Creative Commons License