Marriages, like people, come in different shapes and sizes. Marriage can be custom made by the couple to an extent their grandparents never dreamed possible. Marriage styles can range from romantic, recuse, companionate (couple's commitment to two careers), and traditional types.
No marriage provides for all the wishes and needs the people bring to it.
Although every good marriage provides many satisfactions, each type maximizes different rewards and exacts a different price.
In each type the psychological tasks are resolved differently. The kind and degree of togetherness and autonomy very, as does the importance of children, work, and sexual passion.
The values on which the marriage is built differ among the types, although they overlap.
Children growing up in each kind of marriage have quite different experiences.
Moreover, the various types of marriage require different kinds of support from society. For example, for traditional marriages to succeed, society must offer jobs that pay enough money for one parent to support the family while the other raises the children.
For companionate marriages to flourish, society must ensure that workplace demands are not allowed to overwhelm the marriage and the family.
Companionate couples also need good quality child care and enlightened personnel policies so that they do not have to make anguished choices between the demands of work and of family, especially in times of crises.
The deepest satisfaction of the romantic marriage is that it gratifies the desire for passionate love, which in some cases is reinforced by the powerful wish to restore a beloved figure lost in childhood. By their nature, romantic marriages absorb most of a couple's emotional investment and one hazard is that the children may feel peripheral to the couple's relationship.
The rescue marriage is often less emotionally intense than the romantic marriage; its great contribution is in allowing people to revise their sorrowful expectations of life. People who have suffered severe traumas are freed to pursue their lives, because the marriage gives them strength.
A good marriage is transformative.
The prevailing psychological view has been that the central dimensions of personality are fully established in childhood. Men and women come into adulthood unfinished, and over the course of a marriage they change each other profoundly. The very act of living closely together for a long time brings about inner change, not just conscious accommodation The physical closeness of sex and marriage has its counterpart in psychological closeness and mutual identification.
The Good Marriage - Wallerstein & Blakeslee
No marriage provides for all the wishes and needs the people bring to it.
Although every good marriage provides many satisfactions, each type maximizes different rewards and exacts a different price.
In each type the psychological tasks are resolved differently. The kind and degree of togetherness and autonomy very, as does the importance of children, work, and sexual passion.
The values on which the marriage is built differ among the types, although they overlap.
Children growing up in each kind of marriage have quite different experiences.
Moreover, the various types of marriage require different kinds of support from society. For example, for traditional marriages to succeed, society must offer jobs that pay enough money for one parent to support the family while the other raises the children.
For companionate marriages to flourish, society must ensure that workplace demands are not allowed to overwhelm the marriage and the family.
Companionate couples also need good quality child care and enlightened personnel policies so that they do not have to make anguished choices between the demands of work and of family, especially in times of crises.
The deepest satisfaction of the romantic marriage is that it gratifies the desire for passionate love, which in some cases is reinforced by the powerful wish to restore a beloved figure lost in childhood. By their nature, romantic marriages absorb most of a couple's emotional investment and one hazard is that the children may feel peripheral to the couple's relationship.
The rescue marriage is often less emotionally intense than the romantic marriage; its great contribution is in allowing people to revise their sorrowful expectations of life. People who have suffered severe traumas are freed to pursue their lives, because the marriage gives them strength.
A good marriage is transformative.
The prevailing psychological view has been that the central dimensions of personality are fully established in childhood. Men and women come into adulthood unfinished, and over the course of a marriage they change each other profoundly. The very act of living closely together for a long time brings about inner change, not just conscious accommodation The physical closeness of sex and marriage has its counterpart in psychological closeness and mutual identification.
The Good Marriage - Wallerstein & Blakeslee
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