Rachel’s Musings

A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times is a good example of the dangers of breaking down the wall of separation between religion and state. In their proposal of a compromise on gay marriage, David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch, suggest that civil unions for same-sex couples “should appeal to cooler heads on both sides.” Especially, because they throw in a bizarre religious exemption: Basically, if a church doesn’t want to recognize the civil union, they don’t have to.      Continue reading this post » » »

The Chicago Sun Times commissioned an online survey to find out what younger adults think of marriage. What did they find? “Marriage? Most believe in it.” Their findings in detail (and a bit more information on the survey).

The National Healthy Marriage Resource Center commissioned the Chicago youth-research firm TRU to get inside the heads of 18- to 30-year-olds. Through online surveys of 3,672 men and women over the summer, its researchers identified five groups:

14 percent who express strong sentiments against marriage.

22 percent who aren’t ready but say they eventually plan to wed.

23 percent who have a practical view of marital unions and often live together first.

19 percent who are enmeshed in the magic of love.

22 percent who have a strong belief in the institution of marriage.

The first thing to note: This is not a representative sample, so all the percentages cannot give us information on 18- to 30-year-olds in general. All we know are the percentage of people in the sample who felt a certain way.

Then, let’s take a closer look at the percentages even if this isn’t representative of the age group. The percentages sum to 100%, so the categories are not overlapping. So, if you’re “against marriage,” for example, you can’t be “enmeshed in the magic of love.” It also looks like the assumption is unless you’re against marriage, you believe in it, thus 86% believe in marriage. Is that really true? You can be “enmeshed in the magic of love” but want to express your love outside of marriage. If you have a practical view of marriage, maybe you realize that forgoing the 1,000+ benefits marriage brings might be shooting yourself in the foot. Hence, you marry for practical reasons even if you don’t like it. Only the 22% “who have a strong belief in the institution of marriage” can really be categorized into the “believe in marriage” category. That’s 8 percentage points higher than those who are strongly against marriage. Not an overwhelming difference in my opinion… Nevertheless, there clearly is a lot of matrimania out there, even in the young generation.

It would be interesting, though, to see similar numbers from a representative sample, especially if the categories aren’t mutually exclusive. Also an international comparison would be interesting.

Thanks to Bella DePaulo, I learned that the federal government is funding an ad campaign to promote marriage because it makes people healthier, happier, and wealthier. Or so they claim. Read how DePaulo takes those claims apart. They’re myths. And then contact your Congressperson and send them something like this:

I was appalled to find out that the federal government is founding an ad campaign to promote marriage. What a waste of $5 million! Almost all the claims of marriage promoters are based on faulty research: There is no evidence that marriage makes people healthier or happier, though thanks to the 1,138 rights and privileges, married folks do tend to be wealthier. Thus, the ad campaign is not based on sound evidence but is perpetuating myths that are based in religion and ideology.

Please prevent such wasteful spending in the future by voting against funding any marriage promotion ad campaigns.

I’ve been trying various running programs for a while. I love to walk and somehow running just doesn’t seem to fit my body. Plus, I don’t like the idea of “pounding the pavement.” So, a couple years ago, after yet another unsuccessful attempt at running, I decided that in order to get my heart rate up, I’d just needed to learn to walk faster! That’s how I stumbled onto race walking. Since it avoids the pounding, it has a much lower injury rate than running. I loved the way it felt: There’s nothing like gliding along fast! I was hooked. When done properly, race walking also burns more calories than running. Yupp, that’s right: Going at the same speed, a race walker burns more calories than a runner. At 5 mph, a runner burns about 480 cals; a race walker burns 530. At 7 mph, the difference is 270 calories! You don’t think one can walk so fast? With the right technique you can!

Unfortunately, I quickly ran into a problem: Shin pain. I realized that I had started out way too quickly, not allowing my shins to adjust to the new strain. Apparently, this is a rather common problem for new race walkers. I found a lot of exercises to strengthen the shins (some of them I can highly recommend!). But as much as I looked, there was no sample workout schedule for absolute beginners out there. I could find oodles of programs for getting off the couch and running a 5K. No such luck with race walking. Since the shin exercises didn’t seem to do much good, I gave up – on the race walking, not the exercises.

I kept in touch with the people from the Golden Gate Race Walkers, though, and during a recent fitness walk, I ended up doing some race walking. I loved it! And I noticed no shin pain! We had been walking for more than an hour before starting the race walking, so I figured my legs were just well warmed up. The experience rekindled my interest in race walking but I still didn’t know how to slowly start to race walk, allowing enough time for my body to adjust to the technique. And then, I looked in that old book the founder of GGRW had given me. There it was: a training schedule! I was excited and ready to try again.

I just came back from my first race walk. My shins were screaming at me after 5 minutes, so I stopped and stretched. I remembered from the Dave McGovern article that it’s important to watch the stride: Reaching out too far up front can cause shin pain. So, after my stretching I started out slowly watching my stride, pushing off with a long leg in the back but only taking a small step in front. When my shins said something again, I counted my steps. According to the Howard Jacobson schedule, I am supposed to take 90-120 steps per minute. I was way faster! I slowed down and soon was smiling: no shin pain!

Lessons learned: Watch proper form and start out slow! There are plenty of resources on technique. And thanks to Howard Jacobson’s book published in 1980, I now have a schedule for easing into race walking.

Here’s a letter that I just sent to the Washington Post’s health desk:

I found Bob Brody’s “prescription to marry” offensive. It perpetuates the myth that marriage makes people healthier and happier. There is no scientific research to support that claim. Yes, there is plenty of research that seems to indicate that married folks are happier and healthier than unmarried but all of that research is highly flawed. Most importantly, it fails to show causation, something that can only be shown scientifically with properly designed experiments, which would not be ethical in the case of marriage. However, a close approximation can be longitudinal studies, studies that follow people over a long period of time and assess, for example, their health and happiness every 5 years together with their marital status. Based on those studies, it turns out that there is little support that married people are happier and/or healthier because they are married. The evidence is just not there. Clearly, Mr. Brody’s suggestion mixes up correlation with causation. Is he going to prescribe next buying an expensive luxury car to increase wealth? Well, his prescription for marriage to extend our life span is just as absurd.

I look forward reading an apology to all unmarried people from Mr. Brody together with an explanation of why there is no evidence supporting his prescription!

You can reach the health desk at health@washpost.com

Can’t resist… I received an email from Unifem about their Say no to Violence against Women campaign. I wouldn’t have known about the email, though, if I didn’t have the habit of checking my spam filter. Apparently, fighting violence against women is considered spam…