Marriage

[Gauracandra]

There was a really interesting program on PBS this evening hosted by Cokie Roberts (from This Week on ABC) about marriage.

 

Basically the program went through the history of marriage, its current breakdown, and talking with individuals as to when marriage works and doesn’t work.

 

Marriage was an institution that brought together church and state in a very interesting manner. Originally marriage was more or less the uniting of family groups for the sake of power/economic consolidation. It was the Catholic church that put forward the notion that marriage must be based on the choice of the man and the woman (not the parents).

 

From a western perspective marriage had 4 components: as a spiritual institution, as a social expectation, as a contract between two individuals, and as a natural association.

 

Some of the reasons for marriage decline highlighted include:

Economic – a single person can make it economically without getting married.

Feminism – more women want to be independent from needing a man

Sexual – the sexual revolution of the 1960s unleashed a surge in unplanned pregnancies and the result was many more were born outside of marriage

Psychological – the culture changed to view marriage as a “consumer lifestyle”. The individual’s self-fulfillment was more important than family obligations.

Legal – the passage of “No-fault” laws made it easier to get divorce.

 

What we are seeing now is a shift away from marriage, and to low-commitment relationships. Such low-commitment relationships have an even higher break up rate than do marriages. In fact, in such relationships, the person who has the least commitment to the relationship often has the power in the relationship, because they could care less one way or the other.

 

There is a great social cost to this. First, divorce is different for adults than for children. For adults it might be a remedy. For children it is a sense of bewilderment. Many will grow up with abandonment feelings. In addition, half of unwed mothers receive zero child support, and of the remaining half only half of them (25%) get full child support.

 

Between married and divorced individuals, both sets of couples disagreed with one another the same amount, and disagreed on the same topics. The key difference was in how the two sides handled disagreements. Thus there has been a growing movement to encourage marriage counseling before marriage in order for people to understand how to properly communicate. For instance, men tend to view activities as a way of communicating (doing things together), whereas women tend to view talking as the principle means of communicating their interests.

 

Anyways, that is more or less a summary of the program. It was very interesting the interviews they conducted with people and experts.