What do you think ?

Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass its about learing to dance in the rain and loving it. Go not where the path may lead go instead where there is no path and leave a trail " Ralph Emerson "

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Is marriage passe? After all, over sixty percent of them in the United States alone end in divorce?
I think not. Despite the discouraging statistics in these modern times, couples continue to marry and remarry, trying again and again to get it right. But what goes wrong?
It seems there has been an evolution in marriage that has taken place and most people don't have a clue that it has happened. They are busy trying to carry on in their daily lives in this ever changing world and when  the world crashes down around them they fall apart .
We have moved from a time when marriage was important just for our sheer survival and from there we moved into marriages of convenience.These were arranged marriages, from the poorest of society to the highest bred. Now we marry for dare i say it love . How do we get divorce to cease from happening when we know we want marriage? We must. Remember, we keep trying for the brass ring of marriage over and over but why ?  I cannot tell you how many times in my practice I have heard the romance went out of my marriage. It is the ecstatic "high" you feel when you first fall in love dare I say it sex or  the euphoria feeling ?

There are Three stages to a marriage.

Stage one is what I called the fantasy stage. This stage goes something like this: "Oh, we have found each other and it is so grand, so ecstatic! We can live together forever as one. Whatever happens, we can handle it, together."
Stage two of a marriage is what I call the counter dependent stage. This is the stage where suddenly you cannot tolerate the way he squeezes the toothpaste in the middle of the tube, or burps when he pushes his chair away from the table (signaling his meal is finished and you get the honor of cleaning up after him). Or, he cannot believe this shrew yelling at him as he walks away is the same sweet little thing who just a few months prior couldn't wait to show him what a great cook, wife, and everything else he ever wanted her to be. She doesn't even come close to offering to rub his back every night anymore!
God, she's just like my mother or Father  I cant stand being around him sometimes ," I hear. "I swore I did everything I could to avoid getting hooked up with one like that.
Stage Three here is where marriage counselling, if it is to take place, will show solid success. Here is where compromise and negotiation take place . This is the stage you unwittingly got married for in the first place. Is it worth all the effort of having to work through the other stages? You bet. Here is the stage of autonomy, of independence.  Most marriages end in stage two.

Commitment is the ONLY WAY you can move to stage three . Most couples these days never reach stage three they get divorced or separate in stage two sadly to say and then they try again with some one else .Want most people don't understand is that you will go through the same stages with the next person all your doing is trading in one model for the next . It could be a better model or it could be worse unfortunately most people tend to look at the same model in a different package.   

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