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发帖数: 2988 | 1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-neil-clark-warren/on-second-th
More than 2 million couples will get married in the United States this year
alone. Several hundred thousand of these couples should reconsider, postpone
their weddings or not get married.
Shocking new statistics released recently by the U.S. Census Bureau suggest
that Americans may no longer need marriage. For the first time ever, fewer
than half of the households in the United States are married couples. In the
past decade, the number of unmarried couples increased 25 percent as more
people chose to cohabitate. A Pew Research Center study last year put it
more succinctly, finding an increasing number of Americans now believes
marriage is "becoming obsolete."
This is a dangerous conclusion. It's true that far too many marriages, as
currently constructed, end up disastrously. But with some common sense
societal changes at the front end, marriage can still serve a vital purpose
for a vast majority of adults.
Interestingly, around the same time the Pew study came out, the National
Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, in their annual report on
the health of marriage and family life, affirmed that more than three-
quarters of Americans still believe marriage is "important" and that more
than 70 percent of adults under age 30 desire to marry someday.
So it's clear that a majority of us still crave to be married. It's like we
are hard wired to search after that person with whom we can spend the rest
of our lives -- even in the face of these dire marital statistics.
I'm not trying to say that marriage is not in trouble. I am trying to say
that there are some clear answers to the question of how marriage can get
uniformly more satisfying for the people involved. And this I firmly believe
In his best-selling book, The Social Animal, New York Times columnist David
Brooks says that "by far the most important decisions that persons will ever
make are about whom to marry, and whom to befriend, what to love and what
to despise, and how to control impulses." He cites multiple studies that
have found a strong correlation between the stability of good relationships
and increased life happiness.
But the skill of choosing a marriage partner has often been treated as
relatively unimportant in our society and a whole lot less complex than it
actually is. And herein lies the secret of why marriage has often turned out
so disappointingly for so many.
It's frighteningly easy to choose the wrong person. Attraction and chemistry
are easily mistaken for love, but they are far from the same thing. Being
attracted to someone is immediate and largely subconscious. Staying deeply
in love with someone happens gradually and requires conscious decisions,
made over and over again, for a lifetime. Too many people choose to get
married based on attraction and don't consider, or have enough perspective
to recognize, whether their love can endure.
When people choose a partner unwisely, it's a source of enormous eventual
pain. During my 35-year clinical career, I "presided over" the divorces of
several hundred couples. I never experienced a single easy one. If one or
both partners didn't get clobbered by the experience, any children involved
often felt deep emotional sadness and loss. Sometimes this sadness kept
impacting these people for years -- even decades.
A significant amount of research data, including an in-depth report by the
Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values,
buttresses my clinical impressions that parental divorce (or failure to
marry) appears to increase children's risk of dropping out of high school.
Moreover, children whose parents divorce have higher rates of psychological
problems and other mental illnesses. And ultimately, divorce begets divorce;
i.e., when you grow up outside an intact marriage, you have a greater
likelihood of having children outside a marriage or getting a divorce
yourself.
I have often suggested that more pain in our society comes from broken
primary relationships than from any other source. If we could ever reduce
the incidence of marital breakup from 40 to 50 percent of all marriages to
single digits, I suspect it would be one of the greatest accomplishments of
our time.
Of course, no one intends to be in an unhappy marriage. Bad marriages don't
just happen to bad people. They mostly happen to good people who are not
good for each other.
And inspiring marriages don't happen by accident. They require highly
informed and carefully reasoned choices. Commitment and hard work are
factors too. But after decades of working with a few thousand well-intended
and hardworking married people, I've become convinced that 75 percent of
what culminates in a disappointing marriage -- or a great marriage -- has
far less to do with hard work and far more to do with partner selection
based on "broad-based compatibility." It became clear to me that signs which
were predictive of the huge differences between eventually disappointing
and ultimately great marriages were obvious during the premarital phase of
relationships.
When two people have a relationship which is predicated upon broad-based
compatibility, there is every reason to be optimistic about their long term
prospects. A marriage of this type has virtually no chance of becoming "
obsolete."
If all of us together can focus on the challenge of getting the right
persons married to each other, it just might change our society more than
anything else we could do. Goodness knows, when marriage is right, little
else matters nearly so much.
Dr. Neil Clark Warren is founder of eHarmony and chairman of its Board of
Directors. eHarmony is an online dating website grounded in relationship
science that matches single men and women for long-term relationships. |
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