Every year, psychologists discover more and more secrets of a happy marriage. Building strong relationships should be easier now, but the statistics say otherwise. It seems that following the recommendations is not enough and the secret is something else.
We are fascinated by these couples: they have been living together for a whole life, but they still hold hands. How do they do it? Maybe they know the special secret of a long-lasting marriage? But they only smile in response: no, we live as best we can …
It used to be easier. Not that it’s better, but simpler: the marriage of the spouses was neither the embodiment of love, nor a way of self-realization. A stronghold of the religious and social order, it was directly intended for procreation and the conclusion of property unions. That, in fact, is all. No special fervor of passion (well, unless you’re lucky), but convenience and, possibly, affection.
But only until love suddenly fell upon one of the spouses – as happened with Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and the heroines of other novels. At a certain stage in the development of society, the reasonable and boring device of marriage, which existed for centuries, could not withstand the blows that fell on it one after another: the legalization of divorce, the movement for women’s equality, the desire of women to enjoy sex, finally, effective contraception … So the dawn rose new era – the era of love marriages.
Looking for the perfect love
“Yesterday no one thought about it, but today love has become a duty for spouses,” writes the philosopher Pascal Brückner in his scathing essay “Marriage for Love Failed?”. – We have moved from one dogma to another: marriage of convenience is now “not right”, only mutual feelings are the key to prosperity. Marriage was a dungeon – we destroyed it and from now on we carry the prison of “ideal love” already inside ourselves.
Just do not think that we want to return to those times when the union was concluded by the families of the bride and groom! But the fact remains: love has introduced irrationality into the life of a couple, forced us to idealize the other and project our desires onto him. And after that, anxiety came: how to support this alchemy of feelings, over which we have no control? Anxiety will only increase if we realize that today love serves us, in fact, the only standard of happiness. Moreover, it depends on her whether we consider our whole life to be successful as well!
Psychological observations quietly turned into standards
According to VTsIOM data for January-February 2010, 70% of our fellow citizens are worried that it is difficult to find a life partner today. And based on the November 2011 Tiburon Research “Attitudes to Marriage” survey commissioned by Psychologies, it became known that 57% of divorced people hoped that “this is for life” when they got married.
To ease their anxiety, many have gone to seek answers from those who are willing to instruct and teach. Reveal to us techniques, recipes, secrets – they asked writers, psychologists, coaches … And they answered: of course! Here is marriage in the form of rules in a beautiful cover. Open a women’s magazine, or rather go to a bookstore and buy the bestsellers “Happiness Together”, “How to Become the Perfect Couple” or “Ten Steps to Family Paradise” … It would seem that everything is already clear, it remains only to use the right recipe.
The Secret Formula for Love and Happiness
But let’s leave the irony. We wanted instructions? Psychologists explained everything to us in detail. For example, that relationships in a lasting union always go through four stages. It’s like the stages in a child’s development: symbiosis (the merging of two), differentiation (defining boundaries), learning (when everyone’s attention is directed to the outside world), and establishing (finally!) relationships.
At each of these stages, the risk of parting inevitably arises. Note that these psychological observations imperceptibly turned into standards. Who did not comply – everything is out of the game. And then, please, you can try again, with another partner.
And this is very useful, since the entire modern world is literally saturated with the logic of consumption: if you don’t like it, we’ll change it to something else. “Why date the first person you meet when the second one is made for you!” – inspires advertising dating site.
Today, from this mixture of misunderstood (but often sounded) psychological terms and the hope that life in a couple brings eternal pleasure, many prejudices have arisen. On the basis of which we often build our married life – and this is not at all as harmless as it might seem.
The happy couple has only one secret to share: to invent the rules of the game with passion
There is a whole list of things that partners “should” if they want to live happily ever after: do not try to re-educate each other, always maintain sexual desire, beware of “fusion”, discuss their relationship, make sure that children do not violate their intimacy … And all this , of course, should be done easily, constantly and very sincerely!
“But no!” – object to us those who managed to maintain relationships for many years. Without caring too much about “the right way”, they managed to create alliances that last for seven years, and nine, and more than thirty … They are confident that they have found the best path – their own. Such as it is, but it is only theirs, and they walk along it, embracing, further and further.
And you know what? Psychologists seem to agree with them: each of us is able to create our own formula for love and happiness. Because a happy couple has only one secret to share: to invent the rules of the game with enthusiasm. Making every effort to refute the most harmful of common truths – that “love lives for three years.” Well, we argue, which is more?
“The idea that you can save a family simply by learning to communicate more empathetically is probably the most common misconception about happy marriages. But hardly the only one, writes Gottman in The Map of Love. – Over the years, I have discovered many other myths … Some researchers believe that successful marriages are distinguished from unsuccessful ones by the fact that one spouse responds positively to the advances of the other. When one person helps another with cleaning, the other person reciprocates, and so on.
In essence, the couple operates under an unwritten agreement to repay every pleasant word or deed. However, a truly unhappy marriage is one where compensation rules apply, that is, everyone feels the need to keep an account: who did what and for whom. Happy spouses don’t keep records such as whether the husband does the dishes as compensation for cooking dinner. They just do it because they have general positive emotions for each other and for their relationship.”