Some facts about married people

Married people have better mental and physical health.

Working women still have more housework than men.

Many married men are not in a hurry to go home after work. They prefer to stay at their work place longer. Workplace is a kind of refuge for them.

Middle aged women whose children left home enjoy life better than those women living with their children.

Women tend to link sex and love, men do not. That is why husbands do not look at infidelity as something serious or risky for their families. In contrast, for wives infidelity may lead to a serious love affair and disrupt her family.

The wife’s higher salary than that of her husband may lead to disruption of her family. Lower salary is bad for their husbands’ self-esteem and can lead to sexual problems and other conflicts.

Divorce

Current trend suggest that close to two-thirds of new marriages will end in divorce. Most divorced people remarry within three years. Second marriages end in divorce even more often than first marriages. On the other hand, the second marriages that endure are usually more satisfying, on average, than the first. Even those who failed twice at marriage usually try again.

Divorce is usually initiated by women. More and more wives are economically independent of their husbands, so they are less likely to remain in an unhappy marriage for financial reasons.

The more children a family has the less likely it will break up. Every second one-child family ends in divorce. The stability of a family with two kids is three times as high as that one with a single child. A family with three or more children breaks up very rarely.

Husbands and wives who were virgin before their marriage usually have stable families. In contrast, a promiscuous life style before marriage usually leads to divorce.

Families where wife and husband have different professions are usually more stable than when they have the same profession.

Different levels of education can lead to divorce; especially when a wife is more educated than her husband.

Authoritarian families (where man or woman dominates) are often more stable than egalitarian families. Families with dominating wives are usually not happy since women subconsciously want to respect and even obey “strong men.” Dominating wives usually lose sexual desire for their weak husbands. They often regard their husbands as additional big children and thus usually do not feel a desire to have sex with them. Such unsatisfied women may look for lovers whom they would respect. That may lead to divorce.

Many couples do not get divorced only for the sake of their children, but it is not always helpful. Seeing abuse and hatred in their parents can damage the children’s psychological health.

The most prominent sociologist of the family in the United States, Andrew Cherlin, has argued that the general effects of divorce on children are:

1) Almost all children experience an initial period of intense emotional upset after their parents separate.

2) Most resume normal development without serious problems within about two years after the separation.

3) A minority of children experience some long-term problems as a result of the breakup that may persist into adulthood.

The likelihood of divorce is highest when:

1. The husband and wife live in an urban area.

2. They both work, but their incomes are not high.

3. They have not been married long.

4. The wife has egalitarian attitudes about division of labor in the home and the husband does not.

5. Neither husband nor wife has strong religious convictions.

6. Both husband and wife are liberal in their attitudes.

7. Both husband and wife are rather pessimistic about life.

8. One or both have parents who are divorced.

9. Marriage at an early age (people who marry as teenagers have a higher divorce rate).

10. A childless marriage (couples without children are more likely to divorce).

11. Premarital cohabitation (people who cohabitate before marriage have a higher divorce rate).

12. Premarital childbearing (people who marry after having children are more likely to divorce).

Having children appears to have mixed effects on a marriage. Marital stability tends to increase when the couple has one preschool-age child, but the odds of divorce tend to increase when the children are older or were born before the parents got married.

Families and family stability are strongly influenced by social class. The probability of a first marriage ending is substantially higher for couples that live in poorer communities.

Married women also have higher rates of mental illness than do single, widowed, and divorced women. In short, the benefits of marriage tend to favor men over women.

If fathers do not reveal proper love to their daughters (because of separation, divorce, spending too much time at work, or some other reason), the daughters may lead promiscuous sexual life in their adolescent years (because of their need to be loved by men), and finally get troubles or divorce in their married years.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 884