In which case, it seems Wynette was a forerunner of a trend that has, according to new research, taken root today. One hundred and one family lawyers, interviewed by the consultancy firm Grant Thornton, concluded that intolerance – that is, boredom – has become the greatest threat to couples staying together. Infidelity, which formerly topped the list of reasons for marriage breakdown, has been surpassed by couples saying they no longer felt in love and had “grown apart”.
As a sign of the times, this appears depressing beyond words. Can we really have reached the stage where an erstwhile commitment to love and to cherish until death do us part has come down to so casual and seemingly frivolous a reason for walking out on the union, and quite possibly children, too? Have the past money-obsessed, self-indulgent decades really created such narcissism that we will not put up with a relationship that doesn’t give us perpetual bliss?
Divorce statistics, although they appear to have levelled out after rising steadily for decades, suggest that sticking with marriage is yesterday’s game. On average, marriages end after 11 years, with little heed, it seems, for Leo Tolstoy’s wise words: “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with that incompatibility.”
Rather, the sentiments given prominence today come from people such as Malcolm Brynin, co-author of Changing Relationships, a five-year study of research into family life published by the Economic and Social Research Council, who says that people come together and stay together only when this is to their individual advantage.
Meanwhile, Rachel Morris, psychotherapist and author of The Single Parent’s Handbook, has come up with the idea that modern culture is counter-intuitive to sticking with marriage through the long haul, saying that to do so is “totally at odds” with modern messages of choice and freedom and ambition. “People realise that they grow and change every 10 years,” she says.
Romance and courtships in which, like cartoon characters, we have stars circling around our heads, are what we are encouraged to want. In films, television and popular magazines, you find couples trilling on about how romantic their mate is, how they are cherished, adored, admired – and hey, who wouldn’t like a bit of that? The trouble is that not everybody shows their ardour that way. The wife of one of the happiest couples – after 45 years – that I know, says her husband used to call her “mate” and treat her like an old friend while they were courting.
Yet while couples apparently believe romance is what makes them happy, they very quickly give up on making the effort. On average, a study by One Poll managed to show, couples give up on romance just two years, six months and 25 days into marriage.
It all adds up to what I call chic nihilism – a belief that living according to the fashionable ethos of the age is more important than sticking with something that, at times, may feel less than rewarding. And yet if we do pursue this me-first approach doggedly, we may actually forfeit far more than we gain.
Penny Mansfield, director of One Plus One, a relationship research organisation, agrees. “There is, in our culture, a powerful expectation that your partner should provide all kinds of satisfaction for you,” she says. “But we also find a lot of people coming to our website wanting help with making their relationships work when they don’t feel good, or when they worry they are not in love any more. One of the important things is helping people to understand what it means to work on a relationship and to withstand periods of adversity.”
At which point I shall get personal. My husband Olly and I hit the classic “down” time for a relationship when our children left home. We didn’t seem to be any good at changing the shape of our life together to suit the new circumstances, and we seemed to get more and more irritated with each other, to drift further and further apart. Indeed, we reached the stage of wondering whether we should separate.
But at this point we stopped and realised what would be lost if we parted. It was not just that we might actually miss each other after two and a half decades, we would also lose the family home we had so lovingly built up, fashioned to our taste, and which was our children’s home even though they had become adults.
We could easily lose all of the history of our lives together, we realised. And so we discussed what we needed and decided it was a bit of separate togetherness – private spaces in our home to retreat to, allowing us to choose when we wanted to be together.
It was the best thing we could have done. We went back to behaving as we had much earlier in our relationship, making special meals for each other, going on dates to the cinema, organising short holidays à deux and initiating Sunday lunches with our children once a month. And as we grew closer, we were able to talk about having felt we’d grown apart and the pleasure in growing together again.
This is something that Dr Janet Reibstein, Professor of Psychology at Exeter University and a marital therapist, understands. She set out to discover what it is that makes marriage work for her book The Best Kept Secret, interviewing couples who had stayed together over decades. She is very clear that there is no such thing as the perfect match and finds that these days people tend to assume that there is something mundane about long-term love. But she is distrustful of the new research which suggests that couples simply split up because they have fallen out of love, and that marital infidelity is less important.
“Almost always, you will find that people cite irreconcilable differences as the reason they are breaking up when it comes to divorce,” she says, “and it will usually be the end of a process, not a frivolous discarding of a relationship. So perhaps there has been an infidelity and they have tried to work through it, but that hasn’t worked and at the end of it all, the couple feel they have grown apart.
“Or it could be some other event in the marriage that has been part of a narrative leading to the feeling they cannot stay together. It is certainly not as simple as falling out of love versus infidelity.”
Shouldn’t we, she suggests, be asking why, in a climate when it is widely seen to be acceptable to separate, be making a far greater effort to help people understand what they lose when they leave, perhaps in search of new thrills?
There is now so much research demonstrating that if people can manage to survive their tough patches, and make time and energy to focus on what they have together rather than what is missing, the hidden psychological and physical benefits are enormous. It’s not a question of morality versus narcissism – making your bed and lying on it, rather than heading for the hills – but understanding what will ultimately make us happiest.
The actress Simone Signoret expressed it beautifully, I think: “Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.”
Source:- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/divorce/8733385/Why-marriage-is-worth-the-effort.html
