It is no secret that marriage is popular. In Western culture, more than 90% of people marry by age fifty. Why? According to the Pew Research Center survey, most often, people marry for love (88%), followed by making a lifelong commitment (81%), companionship (76%), having children (49%), religious recognition of the relationship (30%), financial stability (28%), and legal rights and benefits (23%).
A healthy marriage is good for a couples’ mental and physical health. It offers protection from stress, lowers depression, decreases risk-taking behavior, increases medical treatment outcomes, improves sleep, and increases life span. A healthy marriage is also good for children: growing up in a happy home protects children from mental, physical, educational, and social problems.
If marriage is still popular and desirable, why is it so hard to maintain? After all, the divorce rate remains relatively high, still at around 39% in the U.S. The short answer is—marriage is enormously complicated.
In our culture, we romanticize finding “the one” and the myth of “happily ever after” but often neglect to highlight the reality of what it really means to link two individuals into a new whole that is much larger than its parts.
When two people marry, they join together two already complex systems—their families. This forces a significant redefinition of relationships and responsibilities. It’s not easy to find the ideal situation where both partners are connected but independent of their families before marriage and can establish the proper boundary that marriage requires.
Marriage brings together two people who suddenly must negotiate many issues they previously defined individually or in their families of origin. It should be easy to get two people on the same page to decide how and when to eat, clean, manage finances, sleep, talk, have sex, fight, work, and relax. RIGHT?
In addition to surviving a systemic merge, marriage faces a full-on arsenal of entirely unrealistic expectations. It’s the one relationship that is expected to be completely fulfilling and last forever while being the least likely to accomplish either.
Now that marriage is free to be about love rather than financial or social stability (as in previous centuries), people look for their partner to be the perfect lover, best friend, roommate, business partner, and co-parent. That’s a tall order and creates a lot of pressure!
Transition to parenthood also highlights the lack of community support that is often necessary for a healthy marriage. Usually, the romantic/marital portion of the relationship gets placed on the back burner while raising a young family. Unless couples have regular access to trustworthy childcare, they may find it hard to reprioritize their alone time. This can lead to challenges if the romantic neglect becomes extensive and long-term.
People often wait too long to address their marital difficulties with a professional. Luckily, that trend seems to be changing with younger generations. Some of the most common reasons for therapy include:
- Recurrent conflict and communication difficulties
- Conflicts with extended family
- Challenges at a particular life stage (getting married, having children, preparing to become empty nesters, retirement)
- Affairs
- Problems with sex life
- Partner threatening divorce
Having a designated time and space to address difficulties helps couples prioritize and work on improving their marriage consistently, rather than hoping it somehow finds a way to regulate itself. An objective, third-party mediator, can help facilitate communication by:
- Decreasing partner defensiveness
- Facilitating understanding of each other’s perspective
- Identifying underlying relational issues and patterns that individuals bring into the marriage
- Improving commitment to making actionable changes
- Helping problem-solve ways to define boundaries with family
- Negotiating time together and time apart
- Reducing power struggles
- Better regulating closeness and distance, both emotional and sexual
Maintaining a healthy marriage involves an investment of time and effort, but couples who succeed agree that the support and what they gain from it is well worth it!
Dr. Larisa Wainer is a licensed psychologist who specializes in providing psychotherapy to individuals, couples, and groups. She works with adolescents, adults, and older adults. With 20 years of experience in the mental health field, Dr. Wainer has training and interest in addressing a variety of issues related to anxiety, marital and family relationships, sexual functioning, affairs, divorce, life transitions, grief and loss, depression, anger, bipolar disorder, social difficulties, sleep problems and trauma.
