Chapter 10 Blog

My Summary:

The chapter starts off talking about what is marriage’s role is in society. It stressed about how it is seen as a passage into adulthood. It is associated with many traditions, rituals, and rules. These rituals reflect historical customs. There are many issues that go into what makes up the different types of marriage. They are parenting communications, finances, sex, and religious attitudes. People decide that many factors help to create a successful marriage. These very important things haven’t changed over the years. These factors are love, sexual fidelity, and the ability to discuss feelings to be the most crucial elements. It has been proven to increase a person’s physical and mental health. Even though married women are less likely than married men. The perspective of marriage from men and women is different. These differences appear in the gender roles of men and women in the organization of household and child care tasks.

Marriage goes through different stages throughout life. These different stages mainly depend on the factor of children and whether they are in the house or out of the house. It seems that marital satisfaction increases when children leave the home and decreases when children are born. This being said the different stages of marriage over the years families adjust to raising young children, communicating with adolescents, and enjoying the empty-nest and retirement stages. It has been stated many times that communication is a key to any intimate relationships. Couples have to recognize that being able to self- disclose oneself is an important element for effective communication, but might possibly be detrimental rather than helpful.

The reason that most relationships end or start to deteriorate is not because of disagreements it’s not knowing how to resolve conflicts. There are negative ways people cope with this and it comes in the form of complaining, criticizing, being defensive, and stonewalling which can lead to the isolation or withdrawal of a partner. Because people have to realize that conflict is normal and unavoidable. Communication is not always the solution to solve all problems in a marriage, but it does decrease the power struggles and hostility that can lead to failing relationships. Now today there are a lot of marriages and relationship education programs these programs are effective, but are debated whether the costs outweigh the benefits.

My Opinions/ Questions:

When I read about the relationship programs it reminded me of the Twogether Pittsburgh ads that you can see throughout the city. It seems that the government is trying to put an initiative into keeping marriages together because of the U.S’s high divorce rate. Here is an example of a cartoon that the program uses.

This is the link to the website it not only is for married couples, but for people preparing for marriage. http://www.twogetherpgh.org/

I also found the part where they talked about the change throughout the life course interesting. Because I feel that marriage almost has to go through different stages or otherwise you cannot have a progressive relationship. I do wonder when throughout the relationship when you decide that children are more of a priority than your own relationship? Do you truly have to put priority over one or the other or can you split your time and affection equally? I also found the LAT topic to be very intriguing that some couples have better relationships when living apart then being together a majority of the time. I feel that the reason for living apart for economic reasons makes sense, but I do not know how people move away from each other to save the relationship. What does the rest of the class think? Does it makes sense to live apart in order to have a healthy, intimate relationship?