Money for nothing

Munish Dalal and his wife, Preeti. Photo: Simon De Trey-White

Munish Dalal was once the most detested man in India. In 2003, his then fiancee, Nisha Sharma, told police he had arrived at her house on the eve of their wedding and asked for 1.2 million rupees ($A23,000) and a car as dowry. In a country where demanding dowry is illegal Sharma was hailed for standing up to a greedy bridegroom, while Dalal spent two months in jail before being released on bail.

Over the next few years Dalal lost his reputation and his job. His mother, too, lost the teaching position she had held for 36 years. Meanwhile, the case was used in school textbooks to illustrate the social evil of dowry, with Dalal portrayed as the villain and Sharma as a courageous woman who took a principled stand.

But then everything changed. In February, a court acquitted Dalal of the charge. The judge found that Sharma had been in love with another man and wanted to marry him. So by falsely accusing Dalal of demanding dowry she was able to get out of the marriage to Dalal without angering her parents.

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Money, power...adultery? (Canada)

By Marina Adshade  | September 08, 2011

The standup comic Chris Rock famously said that a man is only as faithful as his options. Despite media portrayals to the contrary, a higher income doesn’t increase the likelihood of a man’s infidelity; men rich and poor cheat on their wives. Instead, the evidence suggests, that what really predicts infidelity isn’t money, but power. And if that’s not a completely new revelation, you might be surprised to learn that powerful women are just as likely to be unfaithful as powerful men.

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TIME Cover Story: Why Men and Women Should End the Chore Wars (USA)

Big news, ladies! Turns out your husbands haven’t been slackers all along.

TIME’s cover story this week (available here for subscribers) examines the “Chore Wars” that take place in most modern marriages, where women have long felt the burden of being overworked. Ever since women entered the workforce en masse in the 1970s, they’ve felt the pressures of paid work on top of their pressures of unpaid work such as chores around the house and childcare. Their husbands, by contrast, seemed to move at a glacial pace to increase their fair share. This pressure on working women has caused, NewsFeed imagines, many a marital spat.

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Kisses and cuddles make for happy men

Contrary to conventional wisdom, cuddling and caressing are more important to men than women in a long-term relationship, according to a new international study.

Researchers studied responses from adults in the United States, Brazil, Germany, Japan and Spain, and discovered that men were more likely to be happy in their relationship and that frequent kissing or cuddling was an accurate predictor of happiness for men.

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Fathering in Australia among couple families with young children

There has been growing recognition of the importance of fathers to families in recent years. Societal trends, such as rising levels of employment among mothers of young children and recognition of the importance of the father–child relationship, have given more prominence to the contribution that fathers make to family life. Governments are increasingly interested in creating conditions that can foster fathers’ involvement in families; for example, through promoting more flexible working arrangements or by ensuring that children maintain contact with fathers following family breakdown. This growing interest in the role of fathers has been mirrored in the scientific community. However, there has been a limited amount of research on fathers in Australia, with the result that there remains much to be learnt about the ways that Australian fathers contribute to families and how they feel about themselves as fathers.

This report aims to increase understanding of the many ways in which fathers in couple families with young children contribute to family life, through the study of their time investment with children, their supportiveness as partners, their financial contribution, their parenting behaviours and styles, and their perceptions of their own adequacy as fathers. The impact of fathers on children’s wellbeing is also examined.