I think our society these days is inclined to see marriage itself as a cause of problems in marriage. For example, it is not uncommon to hear people blame their marriage for the deterioration in their sexual relationship: ‘I think I just got bored with the same old routine, Doctor!’ Likewise, people may blame their communication problems on ‘becoming bored with the same person’, or ‘We just grew apart.’
Therefore, people who blame the marriage for some of their relationship difficulties tend to see trial separation as an answer. Similarly, some people see divorce as an answer to problems of personal self-acceptance and personal worth. The tendency to think this way reflects primarily the philosophy of our post-war Western democracies, described ably by Paul Vitz as ‘selfism’.
Vitz contends that what our culture has done in relation to its views on the rights and responsibilities of the individual self, is to take the Christian concept of the self – each person intimately loved by God, unique, with specific gifts and talents to be used for God’s service – and then take God out of the picture. Thus we are left with the concept of each individual as unique and important, each with a specific destiny to fulfill, but there is no God, and there is no evil. Therefore our society, once it did away with the concept of sin, was left without anything to explain why we, who begin life as beautiful, innocent children, can grow up to be selfish, greedy, power-hungry, dissatisfied adults.
The response of our society was predictable. We discovered new devils and new bad influences to explain why we human beings always seem to create problems in getting along with one another. I find that people now tend to blame marriage, commitment to love relationships in general, family influences and society, as prime causes of their own unhappiness.
I believe if I stood on the street, asking all the people who walked past, whether society has a good or a bad influence on the individual person, that a lot of the people answering would say it had a bad influence. Many of these people answering my question would be healthy and fit, protected by this same society against catching all sorts of diseases, fed, clothed and entertained by the very system which they think is the basis of a lot of our interpersonal difficulties.
Similarly, marriage as a concept has come in for a great deal of criticism in recent years, particularly from younger people, who tend to see the solution to their fears of rejection in not signing up for life in marriage, but instead negotiating limited contractual agreements, mainly for the sake of the orderly disposal of shared property once the relationship breaks down.
Therefore people experiencing stress breakdown symptoms and relationship problems, if they are to save their marriages, need to resist a general society tendency to drift into divorce. In this climate of peer-group pressure in favour of splitting up, it almost seems as if it takes more psychic energy to stay together and face problems than split up and start again.
However, the people who have opted for divorce often find that divorce hasn’t solved their problems, but in fact, magnified them. Ex-husbands don’t become ex-fathers, nor do ex-wives become ex-mothers of children whose big problems begin when parents become divorced. Often people, who find themselves divorced as the result of stress breakdown affecting the marriage, find that when they lose their ex-partner, they lose their best friend.
It might sound an unexpected thing to say, but I believe from my experience in psychiatry, that divorce solves the problems of very few people. Easy divorce is associated with an increasing number of people being raised in one-parent families, in real poverty. I believe that stress breakdown is a major reason for divorce in this country, and the majority of those divorces are unnecessary.
*55/129/5*
STRESS AND MARRIAGE BREAKDOWN: BLAMING MARRIAGE ITSELF FOR MARRIAGE BREAKDOWN
I think our society these days is inclined to see marriage itself as a cause of problems in marriage. For example, it is not uncommon to hear people blame their marriage for the deterioration in their sexual relationship: ‘I think I just got bored with the same old routine, Doctor!’ Likewise, people may blame their communication problems on ‘becoming bored with the same person’, or ‘We just grew apart.’Therefore, people who blame the marriage for some of their relationship difficulties tend to see trial separation as an answer. Similarly, some people see divorce as an answer to problems of personal self-acceptance and personal worth. The tendency to think this way reflects primarily the philosophy of our post-war Western democracies, described ably by Paul Vitz as ‘selfism’.Vitz contends that what our culture has done in relation to its views on the rights and responsibilities of the individual self, is to take the Christian concept of the self – each person intimately loved by God, unique, with specific gifts and talents to be used for God’s service – and then take God out of the picture. Thus we are left with the concept of each individual as unique and important, each with a specific destiny to fulfill, but there is no God, and there is no evil. Therefore our society, once it did away with the concept of sin, was left without anything to explain why we, who begin life as beautiful, innocent children, can grow up to be selfish, greedy, power-hungry, dissatisfied adults.The response of our society was predictable. We discovered new devils and new bad influences to explain why we human beings always seem to create problems in getting along with one another. I find that people now tend to blame marriage, commitment to love relationships in general, family influences and society, as prime causes of their own unhappiness.I believe if I stood on the street, asking all the people who walked past, whether society has a good or a bad influence on the individual person, that a lot of the people answering would say it had a bad influence. Many of these people answering my question would be healthy and fit, protected by this same society against catching all sorts of diseases, fed, clothed and entertained by the very system which they think is the basis of a lot of our interpersonal difficulties.Similarly, marriage as a concept has come in for a great deal of criticism in recent years, particularly from younger people, who tend to see the solution to their fears of rejection in not signing up for life in marriage, but instead negotiating limited contractual agreements, mainly for the sake of the orderly disposal of shared property once the relationship breaks down.Therefore people experiencing stress breakdown symptoms and relationship problems, if they are to save their marriages, need to resist a general society tendency to drift into divorce. In this climate of peer-group pressure in favour of splitting up, it almost seems as if it takes more psychic energy to stay together and face problems than split up and start again.However, the people who have opted for divorce often find that divorce hasn’t solved their problems, but in fact, magnified them. Ex-husbands don’t become ex-fathers, nor do ex-wives become ex-mothers of children whose big problems begin when parents become divorced. Often people, who find themselves divorced as the result of stress breakdown affecting the marriage, find that when they lose their ex-partner, they lose their best friend.It might sound an unexpected thing to say, but I believe from my experience in psychiatry, that divorce solves the problems of very few people. Easy divorce is associated with an increasing number of people being raised in one-parent families, in real poverty. I believe that stress breakdown is a major reason for divorce in this country, and the majority of those divorces are unnecessary.
*55/129/5*