Via Mary Elizabeth Williams at Broadsheet:

Marital breakups are rarely easy, but for couples with children, they often come with the added nagging fear that you’re forever ruining your kids’ lives. But a new study (PDF) affirms what anyone whose own childhood resembled a Richard Yates novel suspects — that sticking together for the sake of the kids can backfire.

The study, provocatively titled “Are Both Parents Always Better Than One? Parental Conflict and Young Adult Well-Being” (from the California Center for Population Research at the University of California-Los Angeles), charts the progress of 1,963 households from teens to early 30s. While citing that “children tend to do better living with two biological married parents,” the study is a reassuring academic loogie in the face of self-sacrifice, an acknowledgement of the role of “poor quality marriage” in drinking and dropout rates.

Speaking about the study to Science Daily, the paper’s co-author, Cornell associate professor Kelly Musick, said, “the advantages of living with two continuously married parents are not shared equally by all children … Children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop out of school, have poor grades, smoke, binge drink, use marijuana, have early sex, be young and unmarried when they have a child and then experience the breakup of that relationship.”

An intact marriage isn’t automatically a successful one — for anybody. (The study also helpfully cites previous findings that “although marriage confers benefits to adults on average, those in poor quality marriages are no better off than the single and, indeed, may fare worse on some measures.”) Despite our continued cultural insistence upon equating divorce with failure, for parents whose relationships have become unbearable, the best way to save the family may be to dissolve it.

How fitting that the quickie-wedding chapel that recently popped up on New York’s Lower East Side — the real one, not this one — is itself a fly-by-night operation. In fact, it’s still looking for backers. Small-time backers, in case you’re interested.

Wackadoo design/consulting firm GrandOpening has a performance-arty habit of opening-then-closing a number of businesses in its Norfolk Avenue storefront space. Over the past year and change, that’s included a ping-pong lounge and a drive-in movie theater. (Fer rills! Chex it!) The nameless chapel is its latest incarnation.

Getting hitched here includes an ordained dude at the ready, some Vegas-y Elvis backdrops and stuff, live, streaming vid of your nups and a few snapshots. In addition, you can book an hourlong reception to follow, complete with DJ and, I might assume, gawking manorexics.

But, according to the firm’s site, they’re hoping to find another $2k of funding before July 1 in order to really get the party started.

Who’s gonna bet on love?

Only 44 more to go! (We’re talking to you, New York.)

Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., went on Fox News to discuss the war the economy the First Date Night. Rick’s tips for keeping the spark alive (and being married at all): keep the dates simple, focus on the sweet little things, and don’t be black.

Read the transcript at Salon. More at Kos.

Mr. and Mrs. Kris Allen are cute and all, but this is way more exciting.

Quoth our tipster: “Ruins dress, saves lives!”

It’s a peculiar political marriage between a man and a man: “Eight and a half years after their epic partisan battle over the fate of the 2000 presidential election, the lawyers David Boies and Theodore B. Olson appeared on the same team on Wednesday as co-counsel in a federal lawsuit that has nothing to do with hanging chads, butterfly ballots or Electoral College votes,” today’s New York Times reports. “Their mutual goal: overturning Proposition 8, California’s freshly affirmed ban on same-sex marriage. It is a fight that jolted many gay rights advocates — and irritated more than a few — but that Mr. Boies and Mr. Olson said was important enough to, temporarily at least, set aside their political differences.”

Here’s what Olson had to say at a news conference: “If you look into the eyes and hearts of people who are gay and talk to them about this issue, that reinforces in the most powerful way possible the fact that these individuals deserve to be treated equally.”

Yep. For a man with a lot of penance to take care of, it’s really a pretty good start.

Update: Oh, wait.

Apparently, the teens are doing way too much texting sexting whoring hugging.

Greetings, classmates. Can you believe that ten years have passed since we last walked the hallowed halls of our beloved high school? True, we blew up those same halls on Graduation Day and bonded together to battle a giant snake, but who among us doesn’t look back in fondness at those glory days of Sunnydale High?

– Michelle Blake-West, Sunnydale Class of 1999 co-Homecoming Queen

Tonight (and next week) in New York!

Each attendee will be assigned their own Sunnydale student identity kit at the door. Then we’ll party like it’s 1999 with with an evening of dancing to music videos from the end of the century, challenging Buffy trivia contests, our always popular Buffy-oke competition, and other Buffy related party games. Over the course of the evening, our alumni will be going head-to-head in all these activities, with one student selected at the end of the night to win our custom “Class Protector” award (and a ton of Buffy schwag).

Of course, now that snake will totally have two kids, a dumb job, and a paunch.

And speaking again of parents, from the New York Times:

Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change.

/snip/ Students of both races say that interracial friendships are common at Montgomery County High School. Black and white students also date one another, though often out of sight of judgmental parents. “Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”

Interesting corollary, from the same issue of the Times magazine:

According to the group Freedom to Marry, about 13 percent of Americans now live in a state that allows gay marriage or recognizes marriage licenses issued in other states, and that percentage is certain to rise. The gist of the disagreement now isn’t partisan or theological as much as it is generational. Unlike their parents, younger Americans and those now transitioning into middle age have had openly gay friends and colleagues all their lives, and they understand homosexuality to be a form of biological happenstance rather than of emotional disturbance. They’re less inclined to restrict the personal decisions of gay Americans, even if they don’t necessarily want the whole thing explained to their children as part of some politically correct grade-school curriculum. In a sense, the gay rights movement of an earlier era was so successful in changing social attitudes that the movement itself can now seem obsolete, in the same way that younger Americans who have grown up with the premise of environmentalism in their daily lives consider Greenpeace to be a kind of hippie anachronism.