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Anyone who has been in a long-term marriage or partnership can tell you it’s a long and windy road. Sometimes, things go as smooth as can be. Other times, it can feel like nothing is working. There are years when you and your partner evolve together. Other years it might feel like you’re going in completely different directions.
Psychologists will tell you that this is completely normal. Relationships are dynamic entities—as much as we’d like to bottle the initial love and excitement and make those feelings last forever, that’s not the reality of marriage. There are highs and lows, ups and downs, and sideways and backward. The only predictable part of marriage is the change you will both inevitably experience as time goes on.
Relationship scientists have devised various assessments to take stock of the current state of your marriage or long-term relationship. One such test, called the Marital Satisfaction Scale, is shown below. Think about how much you agree/disagree with each statement to see if your relationship might need extra care….Continue reading….
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Source: A Psychologist Explains The 6 Stages Of Marriage
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Several cultures have practised temporary and conditional marriages. Examples include the Celtic practice of handfasting and fixed-term marriages in the Muslim community. Pre-Islamic Arabs practiced a form of temporary marriage that carries on today in the practice of Nikah mut’ah, a fixed-term marriage contract. The Islamic prophet Muhammad sanctioned a temporary marriage – sigheh in Iran and muta’a in Iraq – which can provide a legitimizing cover for sex workers.
The same forms of temporary marriage have been used in Egypt, Lebanon and Iran to make the donation of a human ova legal for in vitro fertilisation; a woman cannot, however, use this kind of marriage to obtain a sperm donation. Muslim controversies related to Nikah Mut’ah have resulted in the practice being confined mostly to Shi’ite communities. The matrilineal Mosuo of China practice what they call “walking marriage”.
In some jurisdictions cohabitation, in certain circumstances, may constitute a common-law marriage, an unregistered partnership, or otherwise provide the unmarried partners with various rights and responsibilities; and in some countries, the laws recognize cohabitation in lieu of institutional marriage for taxation and social security benefits. This is the case, for example, in Australia.Cohabitation may be an option pursued as a form of resistance to traditional institutionalized marriage.
However, in this context, some nations reserve the right to define the relationship as marital, or otherwise to regulate the relation, even if the relation has not been registered with the state or a religious institution. Conversely, institutionalized marriages may not involve cohabitation. In some cases, couples living together do not wish to be recognized as married. This may occur because pension or alimony rights are adversely affected; because of taxation considerations; because of immigration issues, or for other reasons.
Such marriages have also been increasingly common in Beijing. Guo Jianmei, director of the center for women’s studies at Beijing University, told a Newsday correspondent, “Walking marriages reflect sweeping changes in Chinese society.” A “walking marriage” refers to a type of temporary marriage formed by the Mosuo of China, in which male partners live elsewhere and make nightly visits. A similar arrangement in Saudi Arabia, called misyar marriage, also involves the husband and wife living separately but meeting regularly.
There is wide cross-cultural variation in the social rules governing the selection of a partner for marriage. There is variation in the degree to which partner selection is an individual decision by the partners or a collective decision by the partners’ kin groups, and there is variation in the rules regulating which partners are valid choices. The United Nations World Fertility Report of 2003 reports that 89% of all people get married before age forty-nine.
The percent of women and men who marry before age forty-nine drops to nearly 50% in some nations and reaches near 100% in other nations. In other cultures with less strict rules governing the groups from which a partner can be chosen the selection of a marriage partner may involve either the couple going through a selection process of courtship or the marriage may be arranged by the couple’s parents or an outside party, a matchmaker.
Some people want to marry a person that is older or younger than them. This may impact marital stability and partners with more than a 10-year gap in age tend to experience social disapproval In addition, older women (older than 35) have increased health risks when getting pregnant. Some people want to marry a person with higher or lower status than them. Others want to marry people who have similar status. In many societies, women marry men who are of higher social status.
There are marriages where each party has sought a partner of similar status. There are other marriages in which the man is older than the woman. Some persons also wish to engage in transactional relationship for money rather than love (thus a type of marriage of convenience). Such people are sometimes referred to as gold diggers. Separate property systems can however be used to prevent property of being passed on to partners after divorce or death.
Higher income men are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce. High income women are more likely to divorce.Societies have often placed restrictions on marriage to relatives, though the degree of prohibited relationship varies widely. Marriages between parents and children, or between full siblings, with few exceptions have been considered incest and forbidden. However, marriages between more distant relatives have been much more common, with one estimate being that 80% of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer.
This proportion has fallen dramatically, but still, more than 10% of all marriages are believed to be between people who are second cousins or more closely related. In the United States, such marriages are now highly stigmatized, and laws ban most or all first-cousin marriage in 30 states. Specifics vary: in South Korea, historically it was illegal to marry someone with the same last name and same ancestral line.
An Avunculate marriage is a marriage that occurs between an uncle and his niece or between an aunt and her nephew. Such marriages are illegal in most countries due to incest restrictions. However, a small number of countries have legalized it, including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Malaysia, and Russia. In various societies, the choice of partner is often limited to suitable persons from specific social groups.
In some societies the rule is that a partner is selected from an individual’s own social group – endogamy, this is often the case in class- and caste-based societies. But in other societies a partner must be chosen from a different group than one’s own – exogamy, this may be the case in societies practicing totemic religion where society is divided into several exogamous totemic clans, such as most Aboriginal Australian societies.
In other societies a person is expected to marry their cross-cousin, a woman must marry her father’s sister’s son and a man must marry his mother’s brother’s daughter – this is often the case if either a society has a rule of tracing kinship exclusively through patrilineal or matrilineal descent groups as among the Akan people of West Africa.
Another kind of marriage selection is the levirate marriage in which widows are obligated to marry their husband’s brother, mostly found in societies where kinship is based on endogamous clan groups. Religion has commonly weighed in on the matter of which relatives, if any, are allowed to marry. Relations may be by consanguinity or affinity, meaning by blood or by marriage. On the marriage of cousins, Catholic policy has evolved from initial acceptance, through a long period of general prohibition, to the contemporary requirement for a dispensation.
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