Factors In Selecting a Mate
Unhappiness in marriage is largely a matter of personal relationships between husbands and wives which result in conflict-being too critical, too emotional, too impatient. Happiness centers on common interests, common friendships, and common levels of aspiration.
Selecting a mate is a decision-making process involving maturity of judgment. Some signs of such maturity include:
- Knowing the difference between romantic ideals and practical reality
- Freedom from adolescent kinds of behavior
- Understanding the realities of socioeconomic status
- Setting realistic goals
- Having insight into human relations.
- Freedom from being "other-directed"
The success or failure of a marriage is determined by the quality of adjustments husband and wife make to each other. The adjustive histories of childhood are important because the relationships in marriage have much in common with those experienced between a parent and a child. For example, the immature, dependent wife may expect the same kind of indulgence from her husband that she received from her father. The husband who had a rebelliously hostile attitude toward his parents may be overdominant with his wife.
Sexual compatibility is important in marital adjustment. Satisfactory sexual relations may be either a result or a contributing cause of a generally successful marriage. Married couples who are rela· tively free of anxieties and hostilities are usually compatible in sex.
Marriage involves both short-term and long-term decisions and factors of choice, personality, education, religion, age, and the stresses of living with children. There are several generalizations related to the success or failure of marriage.
- Young people who are socially well adjusted before marriage tend to enjoy successful marriages.
- Understanding the process of making choices increases the chances of success.
- Men and women with a high level of education have better· chances at success in marriage.
- Religious differences are not a major source of marriage failure.
- Sophisticated people have weighed this factor heavily in the selection process; this filtering has prevented some marriages from taking place.
- Most people marry someone of approximately the same age.
- However; it has been found that age differences do not contribute in any great degree to happiness or unhappiness in marriage.
- The optimum age for success in marriage (as seen from statistical studies) is between twenty-one and twenty-nine for women and twenty-four and twenty-nine for men.
- Early marriage may fail if the primary reason is fear of waiting too long to be married.
- Although the expressed desire for children increases the chance of happiness in marriage, the actual presence or absence of children is apparently not a factor.
- Being tied down by children too soon brings on frustration and conflict.
- Couples who communicate effectively at the emotional level as well as at the verbal level tend to be better adjusted than those who do not.
Difficulties In Marriage
One student of the psychology of divorce has said: "To expect marriage to last indefinitely under modem conditions is to expect a lot." Whereas divorce was once socially unacceptable, today it is tolerated m spite of the unhappiness it may cause. Yet, most people who marry say that they plan to stay married. A 1972 survey of a sample of 2,500 college-age students showed 97.8 percent said that they planned to 'Tlarry in spite of any difficulties that might be involved. Researchers seem to be toning 90wn their criticisms of romantic love as a primary basis for marriage.
Love is a strongly felt emotion, but it is an emotion. Among many couples it lasts a lifetime. In contrast is the statistic that roughly one-third of marriages contracted in our society end in iivorce. Added to the causes of difficulty in marriage discussed in the ast few pages are two new ones: increased individual autonomy and rapid social change. One sociologist suggests that the faulty initial perception of who would make an appropriate marriage partner may contribution to divorce, but that the divorce rate in America would hav climbed at least as rapidly without romantic love as with it, We hear so much about the negatives in marriage that we tend to forget the positives. And sometimes the positives have to wait for a "second time around."
