Chapter 10

Summary:

Marriage is a major right of passage, or transition into adulthood, in almost all cultures. If Susie walked into your office today and told you that she was getting married you would not ask her why, but most likely you would congratulate her. However, if we asked some couples why they got married we would get answers like:

• Love and Companionship: the couple enjoy and look forward to spending time together
• Children: the couple wants to have children
• Adult Identity: marriage marks becoming an adult; adulthood
• Commitment and Personal Fulfillment: couples say that they help each other, spend time together, and feel emotionally close
• Continuity and Permanence: marriage promises stability by establishing one’s own family
• Social Legitimacy: getting married to legitimate and out-of-wedlock baby
• Social Pressure: pressure from parents to get married; as well as friends who are married
• Economic Security: marrying just to get the spouses money
• Rebellion or Revenge: marrying to get away from parents or to get back at ex-spouses
• Practical Solution to Problems: marrying to solve a problem; marriage provides an escape hatch from problems

For marriages in the United States, there is a routine that is follow when a couple gets married; there is the engagement and the wedding ceremony. The engagement formalizes the couple decision to get married, but the engagement serves many other purposes. These purposes are:

1. Sends a hands-off message to other interested sexual partners
2. Both partners get a chance to get to know their future in-laws, and to build their identity as a couple
3. Gives the couple time to learn about each others potential/current health problems
4. Gives the couple time for secular or religious counseling
5. Sends the message that the couple plans on making union legal if they have been living together or had a child out of wedlock.

During the engagement period there is usually a bridal shower / bachelorette party and a bachelor party. Bridal showers are when the friends and family of the bride “shower” her with gifts for herself, as well as the household. A bachelor party is when the groom and his friends get together and grieve over their friend’s loss of freedom and have one “last fling”. A bachelorette party is the female version of a bachelor party; both may include strippers. After the engagement period, there is a wedding ceremony, which takes place in front of family and friends. The ceremony is put in place to reinforce the idea that the marriage is sacred, and a permanent bond between the bride and the groom.

After a couple is married, there are five different types of marriages that their marriage could fall into; some of these marriages are happy ones, and some of them are not so happy.

• Conflict-Habituated Marriage: the partners fight (physically and verbally), but they don't think that fighting is a good enough reason for them to get a divorce.
• Devitalized Marriage: the partners are deeply in love when they first get married, but as time goes on they only spend time together out of obligation instead of love.
• Passive-Congenial Marriage: the partners have a low emotional investment in the marriage and few expectations of each other
• Vital Marriage: the partners’ lives are closely intertwined, they spend a lot of time together, compromise to resolve conflicts, and often make sacrifices for each other.
• Total Marriage: it is similar to a vital marriage, but the partner’s participate in each others live at ALL levels and have few area of tension or unresolved hostility.

When it comes to measuring the success of a marriage, we normally look at marital stability and marital satisfaction. Marital stability is whether the marriage is intact and whether the spouses have ever considered divorce. Marital satisfaction is whether a husband of wife sees the marriage as a good one. there are no certain steps that a couple can take that will make there marriage success, but there are some things that associate with marital success.

• Compatibility
• Flexibility
• Positive Attitudes
• Communication and Conflict Resolution
• Emotional Support

No matter if a couple has these characteristics in their relationship, the marriage will still take a toll on their healths. Married men tend to have better health than their unmarried counterparts, because they have wives to take care of them and offer emotional support one hundred percent of the time. On the other hand, married women have worse health than their unmarried counterparts, because they are often caring for their husbands, children, family members, and doing household chores. Married women tend to not pay much attention to their health because they are worried about everything else in within the family.

Some couple experience marital burnouts, or the gradual deterioration of love and ultimate loss of an emotional attachment between partners. Signs of this are:

• You have no desire for physical touching of any kind
• You avoid each other
• You find yourself making family decisions alone
• You have lost interest in each other
• You seem to have little in common

Problems can arrive when married couples are not communicating properly. Common communication problems are:

• not responding to the issue at hand
• not listening
• blaming, nagging and criticizing
• scapegoating
• coercion or contempt
• the silent treatment

Each partner can take these steps toward strengthening the communication:

• ask for information
• do not generalize
• stay focused on the issue
• be specific
• keep it honest
• make it kind
• express appreciation
• use non verbal communication
• LISTEN

Lastly, all marriages are not perfect, as depicted above. There are some factors of the marriage that are going to warrant an argument at some point or another, whether the couple is happy or not. They are:

• money
• housework
• fidelity and sex
• children

New Things Learned:
I found it interesting that thing like the amount of time the couple will have sexual intercourse, the number of kids that they want, and who buys and wraps certain gifts for certain relatives were all thing that people include in prenuptial agreements.

Discussion:
In the section "Why Wives Are Less Healthy", the book only talks about why it is that African American wives are less healthy. I want to know if we as readers are supposed to use this information and then apply it to wives of all races? Wouldn't that be over generalization? My question is: are the things that cause African American wives to be less healthy exactly the same as the things that cause wives of other races to be less healthy? Or are there any other contributing factors?

Also, I want to know the class's opinion on prenuptial agreements.