[acb-hsp] Get Married - But to Whom? by Dr. Neal Clarke Warren

[Sharon]

Wow, It wasw a treat to see an article by my former professor at Fuller!
Sharon Hughey

-----Original Message-----
From: acb-hsp-bounces at acb.org [mailto:acb-hsp-bounces at acb.org] On Behalf Of
peter altschul
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 12:18 PM
To: Acbhsp
Subject: [acb-hsp] Get Married - But to Whom? by Dr. Neal Clarke Warren

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: When done right, marriage 
can be the greatest institution on earth.
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.
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