Chapter 10
(Marriage & Communication in Intimate Relationships)
Summary:
The chapter begins with a quick question to spark the reader: why do people get married? This seems like a pretty simple question, but its complexity takes the reader down the road we call marriage and all the detours it has acquired over time. The chapter discusses the right reasons for getting married: love, companionship, children, adult identity, commitment and permanence. While discussing the wrong reasons to get married: social legitimacy, social pressure, economic security and revenge.
What do we expect from marriage can be expanded as say a marriage ritual such as a wedding and/or an engagement. But prenuptial agreements cause strife sometimes since they are used for mainly financial protection.
types of marriage: Conflict-habituated, devitalized, passive-congenial, vital and total marriage.
Whats important for a successful and 'happy' marriage: compatibility, flexibility, positive attitude, commitment, emotional support and conflict resolution. There are also health benefits to marriage: selection effect andprotection effect. But there is a certain dichotomy that exists between husband and wives concerning happiness now-a-days. Sometimes wives are said to nurture much more than husbands which brings the term marital 'burnout' into play.
the chapter continues with life from early marriage, through children, when the children grow up and leave (empty nest syndrome), when/if they come back and eventually retirement. Also, the chapter elaborates on commitment and how it is vital o the rise or downfall of a marriage.
New and Interesting Info:
Domestic roles have changed over the past few decades and the factors are endless. Usually women would be in the house most of the times because of traditional roles, but now they are out in the workforce while men are staying at home with the children.
Question:
With prenuptial agreements on the rise, do you think they take the trust and commitment out of marriage or is it just a safety net that has been set before jumping the broom?
I think they definitely taken the trust out of marriage. By getting a pre nup you're assuming that the marriage is going to fail and end in divorce. You're basically saying "I'm not planning on this marraige lasting and I don't want to risk you getting half of my money and belongings."
ReplyDeleteIn light of divorce rates and how popular it is to cheat on one's spouse, I would not recognize that there is trust or commitment in marriage to begin with. I disagree with the book which says that rates of infidelity are surprisingly low -- as if all who cheat and are confronted with a national survey are going to fill in a bubble that discloses that about themselves. Furthermore, as the table on 190 shows, people cannot reliably determine what cheating even is (22% of men say that sexual intercourse outside of marriage is not cheating, 58% of men say that cybersex is not cheating). So generally speaking, there is little trust and little commitment in marriage. Prenuptial agreements cannot take out of marriage what is hardly there.
ReplyDeleteAlthough prenups are just supposed to be precautionary, I feel like people get them knowing that they will eventually divorce. I imagine they sign these agreements because of the 'what if' element to a partnership, but I feel like you still wouldn't necessarily get a prenuptial agreement unless there were doubt about something in the relationship. I look at prenups as insurance policies; you probably wouldn't get flood insurance if you lived in the Sahara, and you probably wouldn't sign a prenup if you were 100% sure about your marriage.
ReplyDeleteI don't know I would generalize the agreement to stating that trust/commitment are completely out of the marriage in which the agreement is used for. Though this is probably true for many of the cases, some individuals may simply be feeling the "after effects" of one (or multiple) bad marriages. Just as an example, with someone like my mom's boyfriend, he has been married multiple times, each time ending badly, and in all honesty, not once has he had an inclination that it would end like that until quite close to the time when it did. Now knowing him he would never use a prenuptial agreement due to his personality, but thinking from if I were in his shoes I would be half tempted to even if I was positive I wanted to get married simply due to a potential lack of belief in oneself rather than lack of belief in the marriage (though one could argue that a lack of belief in oneself is directly correlated to a lack of belief in the marriage). Now regardless, I would agree that it does entail that some aspect of either the marriage or oneself would need to be worrisome to warrant using a document like this, however.
ReplyDeleteKarl Wahlen