According to sociologists, after parting, Europeans find a new partner within one to four months, while in Russia this process often takes several years.
Moreover, many of those who have experienced a divorce once (half of the men and three-quarters of the women) never remarry.* How to explain this phenomenon? I believe that one of the main reasons is the desire for “serious” relationships characteristic of many of our compatriots and the readiness to devalue in advance any contact that does not correspond to this overestimated bar.
Compared to pragmatic Europeans, today we are to a much greater extent idealists and maximalists. We were all brought up in the traditions of “a pie in the sky, not a tit in the hands”, “all or nothing”, which are essentially built on dissociation, a rupture of two worlds – the ideal and the real. At the same time, the ideal world is extolled by us, while the real world, on the contrary, is belittled, denied, ignored. In this regard, let us recall at least the textbook literary antipodes — “not ours”, the resourceful practitioner Stolz and “ours”, Oblomov, his own couch potato dreamer.
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Probably, in the soul of every person lives a kind of inner Oblomov, aspiring not to reality, but away from it — to an unattainable abstract ideal. Sometimes (especially often this happens after a breakup) it can intensify, starting to dictate its will to us and imposing a certain type of behavior. As a result, many people live for years as if within a vicious circle, suffering from loneliness, but never daring to overcome the invisible barrier that separates them from others.
Meanwhile, there is nothing shameful in the very desire for a serious relationship. Outside of them it is difficult to imagine marriage, family, children. The problem arises when someone who has not had any relationship for a long time seeks to immediately enter into serious ones — and does not agree to any compromises. I will allow myself a metaphor: a person really wants to go to Tibet, or at least to Baikal, but he just can’t (and, most importantly, doesn’t want to) go beyond the threshold of his own apartment.
BE READY TO ESTABLISH WITH PEOPLE NOT «PROMISING», BUT NORMAL HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS. .
In my opinion, the only way to overcome the inner Oblomov is the willingness to establish and maintain relationships with the people around us. Not «romantic», not «promising», but the most ordinary human relationships. And then, if we do not rush, get ahead of ourselves and set ourselves obviously unattainable goals, it is very possible that some of them will actually grow into something more. After all, it is not so much we who make our relationship serious, but life itself.
* According to the European Social Survey (ESS), www.europeansocialsurvey.org