Challenges abound
Marriage and divorce amid pandemic
For many U.S. couples yearning to be married, the pandemic has wreaked havoc on their wedding plans while bolstering their teamwork and resilience.
For couples already married, it has posed a host of new tests, bringing some closer, pulling others apart.
Spending more time together — a common result of lockdowns, furloughs and layoffs — has been a blessing for some couples who gain greater appreciation of one another. For other spouses, deprived of opportunities for individual pursuits, the increased time together “may seem more like a house arrest than a fantasy,” suggested Steve Harris, a professor of marriage and family therapy at the University of Minnesota and associate director of a marriage counseling project, Minnesota Couples on the Brink.
Gregory Popcak, a psychotherapist in Steubenville, Ohio, who specializes in marriage counseling for Catholics, says the pandemic has been particularly troublesome for spouses whose coping strategies have been disrupted.
“For couples who had a tendency to use their business to avoid problems, the pandemic has made things infinitely worse,” he said. “The lockdown has raised the emotional temperature a few notches. … Things that were provocative before are now catastrophic.”
Overall, people have become more cautious amid the pandemic, said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
“This caution is making them less likely to get divorced, less likely to get married, less likely to have a child,” he said.
Comprehensive national statistics on marriage and divorce during the pandemic won’t be compiled for many months, but the numbers available thus far from a few states suggest there’s a notable decline in each category.
In Oregon, divorces in the pandemic months of March through December were down about 24% from those months in 2019; marriages were down 16%. In Florida, for the same months, divorces were down 20% and marriages were down 27%. There also were decreases, although smaller, in Arizona.
One reason for fewer divorces: In many states, access to courts for civil cases was severely curtailed during the pandemic’s early stages. Another reason, according to marriage counselors, is that many couples backed off from a possibly imminent divorce for fear it would only worsen pandemic-fueled financial insecurity.
The Rev. Russ Berg, who runs a faith-based marriage counseling ministry in Minneapolis, tries to encourage that kind of hesitancy among the couples he advises.
“Some come in saying they’re overwhelmed, fighting over finances, their kids’ education,” Berg said. “Without going to work, they don’t have that buffer of being physically gone. They feel they’re on top of each other.”
“I try to put it in perspective, that everyone is stressed out right now and it’s not a good time to make decisions about the future of your marriage,” he said. “I say, ‘Let’s work on it for six months and make sure you don’t add the pain of regret to the pain of divorce. Explore all your options before you decide.”
For countless couples on the brink of marriage, the pandemic plunged fine-tuned wedding plans into disarray due to restrictions on large gatherings and wariness about long-distance travel.
In San Diego, Kayleigh and Cody Cousins initially planned an April wedding, postponed it after the pandemic took hold, rescheduled it for December, then had to shift gears again when a new lockdown was imposed.
“That was devastating,” said Kayleigh. “We said, ‘Let’s just do it on Zoom.’”
So they set up an altar at home, recruited a friend to officiate virtually, and had a wedding ceremony Dec. 27 watched remotely by about 40 of their friends and family.
Professionally, Kayleigh helps her husband run a tree-cutting service, so they understand each other’s work demands. For many couples, there’s work-related friction.
Danielle Campoamor, a freelance writer in New York City, says she and her partner of seven years find themselves arguing frequently as the pandemic complicates the challenges of raising their two children and earning needed income. She works from home; he commutes to an Amazon fulfillment center.
“He goes to work for 12-hour shifts,” said Campoamor, 34. “I’m left alone helping my 6-year-old with online learning, potty-training my 2-year-old, cooking and cleaning.
“There are days when I think, ‘Yes, we can do this,’ and other days I say, ‘No way that I can do this,’” she said. “We don’t have time to discuss our relationship, to work on improving it, or on separating. Sometimes, I don’t have the capacity to remember what day it is.”
Atlanta-based attorney Elizabeth Lindsey, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, says she and other divorce lawyers generally have kept busy, in some cases grappling with pandemic-related complications regarding child visitation rights.
She expects there will be pent-up demand for divorces once the covid-19 threat eases.
“Plenty of people I’ve consulted with were not ready to pull the trigger during the pandemic,” she said.
Recent months have been busier than usual for Louise Livesay, a lawyer in St. Paul, Minn., who specializes in collaborative divorce — a process in which the spouses are represented by attorneys seeking to negotiate outcomes fair to both parties.
Livesay said the stresses of the pandemic exacerbated existing strains in some marriages, pushing couples toward divorce. But she said many of her clients were eager to avoid contentious litigation and were open to equitable financial arrangements.
“I found people to be a bit more willing to work toward solutions when things are difficult,” she said.
For some couples, a jarring consequence of the pandemic has been the discovery by one spouse that the other was cheating on them.
“It has brought to light a lot of extramarital affairs that people couldn’t hide anymore,” said Harris, at the University of Minnesota. “Maybe they would meet on the way to or from work. Now they’re texting, and the other spouse asks: ‘Who are you texting?’”
For other couples, a key problem is loss of their pre-pandemic routines.
Harris described one troubled couple who entered marriage counseling a year ago, just before the pandemic took hold.
Now, the wife feels pressure to keep working, Harris said, while the husband tries to help their children with online schoolwork even though his teaching skills aren’t great. His beloved adult hockey league has shut down.
“They’re in this relationship that’s struggling, and all their coping mechanisms are stripped away,” Harris said. “My heart breaks for them.”
In the Catholic diocese of Arlington, Va., psychologist Michael Horne, who counsels couples on behalf of Catholic Charities, has observed one heart-warming development that he attributes partly to the pandemic. There are now 20 couples enrolled in the agency’s adoption program, up from seven a year ago.
“Having more time together has afforded couples time to have those really important conversations,” he said. “What does it mean to be a family?”
It’s as if the world has been turned upside-down, or at least its weather. You can blame the increasingly familiar polar vortex, which has brought a taste of the Arctic to places where winter often requires no more than a jacket.
Around the North Pole, winter’s ultra-cold air is usually kept bottled up 15 to 30 miles high. That’s the polar vortex, which spins like a whirling top at the top of the planet. But occasionally something slams against the top, sending the cold air escaping from its Arctic home and heading south. It’s been happening more often, and scientists are still not completely sure why, but they suggest it’s a mix of natural random weather and human-caused climate change.
This particular polar vortex breakdown has been a whopper. Meteorologists call it one of the biggest, nastiest and longest-lasting ones they’ve seen, and they’ve been watching since at least the 1950s. This week’s weather is part of a pattern stretching back to January.
“It’s been a major breakdown,” said Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center on Cape Cod. “It really is the cause of all of these crazy weather events in the Northern Hemisphere.”
“It’s been unusual for a few weeks now — very, very crazy,” Francis said. “Totally topsy-turvy.”
RECORD COLD IN WARMER PLACES
Record subzero temperatures in Texas and Oklahoma knocked millions off the power grid and into deep freezes. A deadly tornado hit North Carolina. Other parts of the South saw thunder snow and reports of something that seemed like a snow tornado but wasn’t. Snow fell hard not just in Chicago, but in Greece and Turkey, where it’s far less normal. Record cold also hit Europe this winter, earning the name the “Beast from the East.”
“We’ve had everything you could possibly think of in the past week,” said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, noting that parts of the U.S. have been 50 degrees colder than normal. “It’s been a wild ride.”
It was warmer Tuesday in parts of Greenland, Alaska, Norway and Sweden than in Texas and Oklahoma. And somehow people in South Florida have been complaining about record warmth causing plants to bloom early.
In the eastern Greenland town of Tasiilaq, it’s been about 18 degrees warmer than normal, which “is a bit of a nuisance,” said Lars Rasmussen, a museum curator at the local cultural center. “The warm weather makes dog sledding and driving on snow scooters a bit of a hassle.”
Several meteorologists squarely blamed the polar vortex breakdown or disruption.
These used to happen once every other year or so, but research shows they are now close to happening yearly, if not more, said Judah Cohen, a winter storm expert for Atmospheric Environmental Research, a commercial firm outside of Boston.
THE SPINNING TOP
GETS TOPPLED
The polar vortex spends winter in its normal place until an atmospheric wave — the type that brings weather patterns here and there — slams into it. Normally such waves don’t do much to the strong vortex, but occasionally the wave has enough energy to push the spinning top over, and that’s when the frigid air breaks loose, Gensini said.
Sometimes, the cold air mass splits into chunks — an event that usually is connected to big snowstorms in the U.S. East, like a few weeks ago. Other times, it just moves to a new place, which often means bitter cold in parts of Europe. This time it did both, Cohen said.
There was a split of the vortex in early January and another in mid-January. Then at the end of January came the displacement that caused cold air to spill into Europe and much of the United States, Cohen said.
Both Cohen and Francis said this should be considered not one but three polar vortex disruptions, though some scientists lump it all together.
While both the vortex and the wave that bumped it are natural, and polar vortex breakdowns happen naturally, there is likely an element of climate change at work, but it is not a sure thing that science agrees on, Cohen, Gensini and Francis said.
Warming in the Arctic, with shrinking sea ice, is goosing the atmospheric wave in two places, giving it more energy when it strikes the polar vortex, making it more likely to disrupt the vortex, Cohen said.
“There is evidence that climate change can weaken the polar vortex, which allows more chances for frigid Arctic air to ooze into the Lower 48,” said University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd.
PATTERN HAS BEEN OBSERVED FOR DECADES
There were strong polar vortex disruptions and cold outbreaks like this in the 1980s, Cohen said.
“I think it’s historic and generational,” Cohen said. “I don’t think it’s unprecedented. This Arctic outbreak has to be thought of in context. The globe is much warmer than it used to be.”
It also feels colder because just before the outbreak, much of the United States was experiencing a milder-than-normal winter, with the ground not even frozen on Christmas Day in Chicago, Gensini said.
The globe as a whole is about the same temperature as the average was from 1979 to 2000 for this time of year, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. That’s still warmer than the 20th century average, and scientists don’t think that this month has much of a chance to be colder than the 20th century average for the globe, something that hasn’t happened since the early 1980s.
One reason is that it will soon warm back up to normal when the polar vortex returns to its regular home, Cohen said.
As for people thinking this cold outbreak disproves global warming, scientists say that’s definitely not so.
Even with climate change, “we’ll still have winter,” said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello. “What we’re seeing here is we’re pretty unprepared for almost every type of extreme weather. It’s pretty sad.”
CARBONDALE, Ill. — Many people might not be excited to have two large ceramic dogs arrive at their home, but for the members of the R. Buckminster Fuller Dome Not-ForProfit, the dogs — and other artifacts that came with them — are quite exciting.
The foo dogs, or lion dogs, were owned by R. Buckminster and Anne Fuller and sat in the living room area of their dome home in Carbondale when they lived there. In Chinese culture, they are believed to protect the building and the people within it.
The dogs were part of a donation delivered recently to the RBF Dome NFP from the Fuller family, daughter Allegra Fuller-Snyder and her children, Alexandria Snyder and Jamie Snyder.
The donation was part of the R. Buckminster Fuller archives, better known as the Dymaxion Chronofile. The Dymaxion Chronofile was Buckminster Fuller’s attempt to document his life as completely as possible.
Fuller was an inventor and academic who taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in the 1960s. The RBF Dome NFP has been working to restore the geodesic dome-shaped house he built in Carbondale.
Included in the donation were 3,500 books Fuller had at his Carbondale “dome home” and office as well as numerous artifacts and furniture. The donation included Anne Fuller’s writing desk, a large woodcut that hung on the loft rails, a set of chairs designed by Charles Eames and a rustic wooden table. Some of the books are signed by the author with a note to the Fullers. Others have notations made by Fuller as he studied them.
Thad Heckman and Ed Cook held the large woodcut in the place it would hang to show others gathered to help move the artifacts.
“This is something because we didn’t think we’d ever get these,” Heckman said.
Heckman said the group knows where many of the items were in the home, based on the work of the late Ben Gelman, a photographer, editor and columnist for The Southern Illinoisan.
Gelman lived in the neighborhood when the Fullers built the dome and moved in. He documented the structure being built in 1960 and activities at the home, as well as the furnishings within.
“Ben Gelman took a bookcase photo. I can zoom in and read a lot of the titles. We’re going to put books back in their original position, thanks to the photo,” Heckman said.
Jon Daniel Davey, president of RBF Dome NFP, said opening the crates was kind of like opening King Tut’s tomb.
“There are many artifacts we never thought we’d get,” Heckman said.
Benjamin Lowder, director of the Center for Spirituality and Sustainability at SIU Edwardsville and member of the RBF Dome NFP, made several trips to Santa Barbara and drove the artifacts back to Carbondale. As he worked to transport the items, wildfires could be seen in the hills behind the facility.
“Some of the boxes still have soot on them,” he said.
Lowder took on the task of cataloging the books that were donated. Around 500 books will be placed on the curved bookcase that lines the loft. The remaining volumes will reside at Morris Library on the SIU campus in Carbondale.
“We’re hoping they will provide a great resource for scholarly research,” Lowder said.
Lowder believes the artifacts return a little of Fuller’s energy to the dome home.
“This helps people connect his legacy to Southern Illinois and to SIU,” Lowder said.
He added that Southern Illinois is the most important location in the Buckminster Fuller legacy. It is where he did his most important work. Fuller spent 12 years as a professor at SIU.
“This project has involved the City of Carbondale, Landmarks Illinois, the American Institute of Architects and now SIU. We will take 3,000 books to Morris Library this afternoon,” Davey said.
The group plans to have an open house when the restoration work on the home is complete.