Marriage is dead! The strong grasp of the law and prejudice has loosened. We are released from the obligation to preserve the horrible marriage for the sake of the children and for “the people.” The divorce rate has remained constant at around 50 percent in the last decade. The easy way we enter relationships and ruin them, often turns marriage into something like sports.
Once upon a time marriage as an institution was valued due to its practical distribution of roles: the dad that earns, the mother that takes care of the home.
Nowadays a partner who shares our taste and status, who sees us for who we are, who loves us, for all those reasons that we think are worth, who helps us become the person you always wanted to be …
We ran away from the rigid social order and instead adopted the more onerous mandate: to find a perfect match. And anything that we believe is not short of this ideal, it prompts us to ask: “Is that all you can find? Am I as happy as I should be? Could there be someone somewhere better for me? “And often by answering with “yes”to the last question we become victims of our own great expectations.
This “someone” is of course our “soul mate”, the man or woman who will rid us of our weaknesses, will provoke the best in us and will provide continuous support and respect, which is the essence of the contemporary relationship.
The truth is that few marriages or partnerships consistently follow this ideal. The result is a small hell, where we care about our partner but also – secretly – stepped one step at the door to our heart. By doing so we constantly revise our relationship: “Will I be happier, smarter and better person with someone else?”. This is a painful hesitation, characteristic of the modern world.
“Nothing else caused more unhappiness than the concept of the soul-mate” says the Atlanta psychologist Frank Peteman.
He gives the example of “John”, a social worker who married a business woman in his early 20s. He met another woman, a psychologist when he was 29 and after two agonizing years, left his wife – for her. But things did not work out – after four years of cohabitation and increasing pressure from her to marry him, he left her. Now John realizes that the relationship with his wife was strong and with future, but he thinks he was not able to understand that 10 years ago when he left her. “There was always someone better around the corner and it turned the safety and security of marriage in boredom and routine. It was hard to resist the attraction of women who seemed more exciting, “he said. Now 42 years old and still single, John realizes: “I hurt others, and I hurt myself.”
Like John, many of us don’t give up the commitment, but also the right to keep looking. Psychotherapist Terrence Real calls this behavior with the term “stable ambiguity.” “It means to walk along the edge of the relationship – you’re in it but not for it,” he said. There are a million ways to do that: to have a relationship, but not to be sure you want it, you want to keep your eye open for good “deals”, to choose someone that is impossible to be with or is far away.
In fact, commitment and marriage offer real physical and financial “rewards”.
Touting the benefits of marriage may sound like politically rhetoric, but nonpartisan social polls say it: people who have relationships have a lot more than singles, at least on average. Married people are more financially stable, according to Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. Both married men and married women have more “benefits” than those without a partner, for women, the differences are usually very big.
The benefits go beyond the piggy bank. Married people tend to live longer than those who are alone. Couples also live better: “When people expect to stay together, says Waite, they combine their resources and improve their standard of living. They also combine their skills – such as cooking or financial management and achieve better results. Women tend to improve the health of their men by banning stupid bachelor habits and bugging them to exercise and. .. to eat their vegetables. Also – people who do not compare their partner with someone else in bed, have fewer sexual problems and are more emotionally satisfied by sex. The relationship doesn’t have to be wonderful and exciting for a better life – statistics is the same as for mediocre marriages and for fervent as well.
- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
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