I thought that California domestic partnerships now carried with them all the rights of marriage under state law. So, since this is in the Cali. courts, shouldn't a partnership be considered legally equivalent to marriage in this case?

Of course, the couple in question may not be domestically partnered, I suppose. Or perhaps its a retroactive thing (i.e. the actions in question happened before the partnership law went into effect). But it would be interesting to see how future cases like this will go down for domestic partners. I guess the central question is: does the partnership law mean that only the *government* needs to treat domestic partnerships the same way it treats marriages, or that private individuals and companies cannot distinguish between the two either?

jf

Wow, interesting discussion here, with a lot of gusto. I'm the non-yeller in my marriage, but I can't entirely agree with the sweeping statements here that all yelling is violence. Someone upthread pointed out that there are two very different kinds of raising your voice -- there's real abuse, and then there are those who have short little peaks of anger or just frustration from which they pretty quickly come down .

I think that there are two very different ways of processing anger/frustration, and when they come together it can results in personality clashes like this. Basically, for those of us who don't yell, the way yellers act when they do yell seems like unforgiveable anger: you would only express such strong negativity about someone that you really despise. Or so it seems to us at a gut level, even though over the years I've received plenty of evidence that in fact people get exactly that mad at people they love all the time. In fact, I get that mad too, I just don't express it that way.

As a side note, when I have outbursts of anger, they tend to be internally directed: when I've done something stupid (like the other day when I spilled water on myself by accident) or when I can't get something to work that I think I should know how to do (usually comptuer-related, as I'm the geek of the household). I find such minor temper tantrums to be good ways to work out my frustration, but my wife finds them werid and scary and self-abusive.

This isn't a major issue in our marriage because we've been very open about talking about both why we act the way we do and how each of us react to the other's style. We both try to respect the other person's personality and are quick to apologize if we upset each other. But for some people it really is just the way they've dealt with the world for their whole life and it's hard to just change like that.

And, as a conclusion to this rambling letter, I do think that the original letter-writer is overpathologizing things a bit by focusing on a potentially abusive past as the origin of her boyfriends yelling aversion. People just have different styles, and relationships need to accommodate those styles. Sometimes I think it's as simple as the difference between introverts and extroverts. Even if therapy "reveals" parental abuse as the "origin" of her boyfriend's discomfort with raised voices, he's not going to magically take up yelling with gusto once he realizes this. They're going to have to figure out how to accommodate each other if they plan to stay in the relationship.

jf

For those who don't know, a merkin is a "public wig" -- according to wikipedia, originally "worn by prostitutes after shaving their genitalia to eliminate lice or to disguise the marks of syphilis." I believe that modern versions are worn by actors doing nude scenes so that they appear to be naked but their genitals are actually covered.

In other words, the author's name is almost certainly a pseudonym.

jf

Could this trend be less about gender and more about class? To wit: fewer and fewer Americans these days have any of the prolonged social contact necessary for courtship with people with whom they don't share an income/education band. Just a thought...

jf

King mentions in passing that the Cards won a "third-place game" (not a "meaningful playoff game") in 1964. Whaaa? Did the NFL used to have a consolation championship like the (Soccer) World Cup does?

jf