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MARRIAGE COUNSELLING ARTICLE
A
Good Marriage begins with you!
During the period leading up to the wedding, most couples can find little time
to focus on their dreams and set goals for the future. However, we would
encourage you both not to loose sight of those dreams and goals that will take
place after the wedding guests have gone and the honeymoon is a beautiful
memory.
Dreams and Goals So easily Forgotten.
A
young couple came to seek counselling. Two people who were very talented and
beautiful. They met fell in love, He proposed, she accepted. They came from
similar backgrounds. She lived at home with her parents. They planned their life
together, set their dreams and planned their goals. Both were on good incomes.
They decided to build their dream home. They brought the land, built their large
modern home, and then came the wedding and the honeymoon. A very large Family
Wedding, afterwards a well planned overseas Honeymoon – “Perfect”.
Arriving home, after the Honeymoon, he inserted the key in the door of their
first home and carried his excited bride across the thresh hold, setting her
down on her feet she looked around her new home. Their parents had been in and
made sure everything was just so beautiful and perfect for them.The young woman
looked at the counsellor and said “Do you know what I thought as I looked around
at this lovely home.”
The
counsellor couldn’t guess.Taking a deep breath she said, “Excuse my language but
I thought Bloody Hell I have to clean, all of this.”
“What
did you do?” the counsellor asked.
The
young Bride quietly replied, “I picked up my honeymoon bag and went home to
Mum.”
They
separated and divorced. Why? I believe because the couple gave no thought to the
fact that after the Wedding and the Honeymoon is the reality of their Marriage.
The Bride and the Bride Groom forgot to prepare for their real life adventure
into the world of Marriage. They had put no thought or action into turning their
dreams into achievable marriage relationship goals after the wedding
celebrations were concluded.
I
hear you say to each other, “We will be alright, because we have lived
together.” Or “We know each other so well.”
Copyright 1993-2008
This page was last updated on
31st December 2008
AMERICAN RESEARCH;
James
Q. Wilson is an unusual social scientist.
In
his latest book, The Marriage Problem: How our Culture Has Weakened Families,
we are told makes the case that the institution of marriage, once thought of as
a reliable thread that held American society together, is falling apart and the
resulting growth in fatherlessness is devastating. ("The Age",
11-12-02)
Wilson
believes that, "the destructive features of a world without fathers are by
now so well-documented that they are beyond challenge."
The
US statistics show that: "children living with single mothers are five
times as likely to be poor as those in two-parent families. Growing up in a
single-parent family also roughly doubles the risk that a child will drop out of
school, have difficulty finding a job, or become a teenage parent. About half of
these effects appear due to poverty, but the remainder are due to non-economic
factors such as poorer supervision."
![[New!]](_derived/new_pa1.gif)
AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH;
" It is a
great pity that when ideology and reality collide, it is reality, not ideology,
that usually yields." So writes Anne Manne in an article in "The
Age" newspaper, (5-10-02) Manne was commenting that "the glories of
the Sex and the City single lifestyle may have been oversold." Manne
is concerned that recent research for the Australian Institute of Family Studies
by David De Vaus might be overlooked in favour of ideologically inspired popular
works.
Manne claims
that De Vaus' work is the largest study of mental health conducted in
Australia, of more than 10,000 people, and one of the most comprehensive in the
world. It includes men's distinctive ways of registering psychological distress,
such as alcohol and drug abuse. These are set alongside women's characteristic
patterns of depression and anxiety disorders.
De Vaus' study
shows that married men and women are the least likely of any group to suffer
mental health problems (around 13 per cent). far from being 'a risk factor for
depression' for women, marriage is a protective factor for mental health. Of
particular interest was the finding that married women do not have worse mental
health than married men. Their rates of disorder are the same, they simply
suffer from different types of gender patterns. They also have better, not
worse, psychological health than unmarried women. Manne goes on to say
that," In fact, working mothers have the best mental health of any group,
male or female."
Apparently,
"being single is the strongest risk factor for mental health problems for
both sexes. Singles, whether never married, separated or divorced, have much
higher rates of mental distress than married people. For example, twice as many
divorced women or 22.3 per cent, have an anxiety disorder, compared with 11 per
cent of married women. Single, childless working women have almost double the
rate of disorders as married working mothers. This led De Vaus to conclude that,
"workforce participation and the absence of of children and marriage is
associated with considerably greater risk of mood, anxiety, and substance use
disorders among women."
All of the
above is in startling contrast to Jessie Bernard's 1972 study which
resulted in her book entitled, The Future of Marriage." This influential
book, according to Manne has ,
"held
sway for more than a generation. Bernard argued that marriage was a creaking
archaic institution, whose crippling expectations afflicted women like a
low-grade but debilitati
ng
case of dengue fever. That was the best case scenario. At worst it was the
psychological equivalent of Chinese foot-binding."
Manne
tells us that Bernard's thesis was simple,. apparently Bernard's study led her
to believe that single women possessed better mental health than single men.
However, when women married, this position was reversed, resulting in women's
mental health declining.
Permission has been sought from
"TheAge" to reproduce the above two articles.
