I have been asked several times on my opinion about marriage, I can only respond that the traditional way of what it once was, is dead. Some argue that I need to look around and see many people married but I can only ask for how long? Divorce rates have heightened and I think several other things come into play as this new generation settles down. My research and sources follow.
“Sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland.
But lately, mostly, I feel like an endangered species.” (Hekker 414). Times change, as the years go by
technology advances, morals change, and what your parents used to have on a
regular basis no longer exists. Terry Martin Hekker was a stay at home wife.
Therefore she cared for the children, cleaned the house, made the meals and
made the house a home. Since the start of the world wars the ideal situation
for women was keeping up the house and the man working to support the family,
the traditional family has since diminished. Maybe this was expected. Maybe the
only factor was time before women started to do what all men do, but in a way
of speaking it is fair.
So where does that leave us now in society
today? Everyone knows times change but it’s just a manner of words, what
happens in the changing times? More and more marriages fail. They end in
divorce and people don’t even want to get married anymore. Due to this, traditional
marriages no longer can be successful. If you want a successful marriage you
need to drop tradition and do things for the marriage that have never been done
before. So what are the causes of
the changing times and the decline of marriage? It is said those who don’t know
their history is doomed to repeat it. So it is only appropriate to know what
has happened so far.
Around 1892 a female
author by the name of Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a short story of a woman
slowly going into psychosis—this story was supposed to reflect her life
currently. The title of this story was The Yellow Wallpaper. The story begins
when she and her husband move into a house for a summer—reasons are unknown.
Her husband is a physician and she is slowly starting to feel a nervousness
come over her body.
Her husband—John–says that she is just a
little sick and tells her that she will get better; all she needs to do is
sleep. Feeling that her husband knows best she does all he says, but in all
reality it only makes it worse. At this point I realized that John never really
believed his wife and looking at the year I understand why. At this point of
time men were dominant of society and women were just a mere luxury. Women had
no voice in society so they were more forced to marry in order to obtain that
voice. This became the “traditional” marriage—though it started way before
this.
Here is when Charlotte’s character is
starting to become mentally sick, her husband not willing to do anything
because she is a woman. Told just to rest John has his wife cooped up in a room
for most of the summer. She first just stairs out the window but then she
notices something peculiar, the yellow wallpaper that is within the room she
resides.
“I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those
sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough
to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and
provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little
distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy
themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost
revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly
irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly
then… But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so—I can
see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about
behind that silly and conspicuous front design.” (Gilman).
She soon sees a woman in the front design and at
night it’s as if the woman is trying to leave the paper. She then tries to not
have her husband think that anything is going wrong. She acts as if she’s
getting better and sleeps during the day but watches the woman at night. The main
characters sense of reality is now skewed and she starts to believe that she is
the woman that is stuck behind the paper. At this point I start to realize that
she is developing some mental disorders, mostly depression, schizophrenia and
paranoia—but most of the time all these disorders come hand and hand.
On the last day within the house she pushes herself
to tear off all the paper within the room to finally release the poor spirit
locked within the walls. After doing this, her husband walks into the room and
she claims that he can no longer put her back thus resulting in her husband to
faint and go unconscious. Not everything was so peachy as we are led to think.
The woman married “traditionally”—though at the time women really had no other
choice—only to sacrifice her own sanity.
A psychoanalysist by the name of Dr. Harriet Fraad
explains that the American dream and stable marriages are failing because of
four things. First is a transformation of economic life, second a
transformation of the formation of families, third is participation in social
groups and lastly we are numbing ourselves. She begins to explain roughly one
hundred later the United States becomes stricken with an event that people know
as modernization. In 1970 computers were introduced to the workplace thus
increasing productivity and eliminating jobs for the working class. Because of
this we were able to have others produce our products thus creating China to
become the manufacturing leader. Women soon realize that because of the lack of
income they too—along with their husbands—need to work too.
Women soon had no time to do what they originally
did on a regular basis—like maintaining the household and preparing meals—thus
forcing them to purchase goods that could be made at home with no cost like
fresh baked bread. This made the woman’s work outside of the house void so
families then became dependent on credit cards. Knowing that you will be in
debt no matter what hurt everyone emotionally, especially women. Women
themselves worked their own job to go home to attend to children’s social lives
and kept the home a comfortable place to live. Women soon became as anxious and
depressed as they were before. “For the first time in American history, the
majority of women are (now) abandoning marriage (Fraad 203).”
Today majority of women are now single thus
creating men and children to become lonely, stressed and disconnected from day
to day life. “Men have depended on
women’s emotional labor for their psychological sustenance. When men’s
emotional relationships with women break down, they have little intimate
emotional support (203).” Most social connections between Americans now have
declined due to this loneliness.
In order to dull the pain—on both sides—Americans do one thing, which is
to find anything to dull the pain.
Women easily count on other women to maintain each
other on such a level that they could form a sports team and they would never
loose a world series—though they would never do that. Men on the other hand, is
another case. Men find it hard to communicate with each other on a personal
level whether it is our hard hearts or social norms saying we have no feelings.
Either way we as Americans have lost a sense of a comfortable home. Women’s now
increasing work time reduces all the free time for social participation. But
what do Americans now do on their free time? On average every American watches
up to eight hours a day watching television. “Extensive television viewing may
be responsible for the largest part of the drop out rate (of social
groups). More people relate to
their television sets than each other (204).”
This excessive viewing of television leave
Americans unsatisfied with themselves and is becoming a faulty way to escape
from day to day life. Thus forcing
us to find other ways to numb our pain, psychotropic drugs. “In 2006,
Americans, who are approximately 6% of the worlds population, consumed 66% of
the worlds supply of antidepressants…The anti-depressant Zoloft is so widely
prescribed, that in 2005, the $3.1 billion dollars in sales of Zoloft exceeded
the sales of Tide detergent (205).” To add to that we are the only nation
without a price cap on our drugs, which creates a bigger debt, which creates a
bigger void.
Eric Bartels lives in our present day marriage but
there seems to be a complication in his relationship. It seems that women now
are getting more and more prideful than in the past. No longer can everything be split 50/50 in a
marriage. Though women do have to
work a job along with maintaining a household, as long as the other partner
does everything, nobody should have the superior complex that they are entitled
to more in a relationship. Eric’s wife seems to think otherwise. “One night she
stomped into the kitchen as I was cleaning up after a dinner that I may well
have cooked and served and announced in angry tones that she needed more help
getting the kids ready for bed than I had been providing, as if she had just
found me drinking beer and playing video games (Bartels 438).”
From how Eric makes it sound it seems like his wife
is an ungrateful bitch who doesn’t understand when someone is doing as much as
they can. I would like to say that this is how all women are like in society
today but there are always some exceptions—so we wont go with that stereotype
right now. As far as I can tell, the well-mannered wife –who keeps to the
house—and the hard working husband—who brings home all the income—is no longer
what it used to be.
Fraad continues to make her points by switching to
religion. Fraad explains that evangelical groups claim that a family’s success
is through God but then they separate everyone into specific groups. Men’s
groups, women’s groups and children’s bible study which defeats the point.
Evangelical groups can show us economic and political ethics and morality for
everyone, but that alone won’t save a marriage.
Now today, if we start to look at the other
countries and we start to realize they are beginning to go through the same
problems that the United States has been going through. Can you help but think that
if you have a successful marriage, this would no longer happen? But us alone
cannot just fix the problem, the problem all started with debt. Every country
is in debt, so how can we solve it?
We can start to go back to our roots, since
tradition always works right? We can start an excursion as men to put women
back into their place, since women are better being barefoot and pregnant while
we as men do whatever the hell we want to do. Just like the good old times that
our fathers, fathers lived. That would soon create a civil war between males
and females thus boosting our economy, again, and when everything is said and
done we can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya around a fire and everything would
be peaches and cream until we realize were just going to get ourselves back
into debt because during the war we burnt all our books—due to the female Nazi
party—because we never learned from history, going back to tradition would
never work.
What we need to do is something new, something that
will keep us happy. The solution is right in front of our faces. First we need
to get out of debt, as unrelated as it sounds this will affect all marriages
and not just as a family, we need to obtain this as an entire country. Thus
making us more social which fills our “void” that we have been filling with
pills and meaningless objects, which, therefore, will get us even more out of
debt.
As soon as we become happy with ourselves we then
can be happy with a significant other, who will create a successful marriage
but heading back to a traditional marriage will not help anything. Women are
just as equal as man and if a man wants to stay home and a woman want to work
then so be it. It never was written down that a marriage had to be just one
concrete thing. Marriage needs to be full of compromise and as long as you both
are happy, there is no reason to have an unsuccessful marriage.
References
Page
Bartels, E.
(2004) My problem with her anger. In L Behrens, & L. J. Rosen (Eds) Writing
and reading across the curriculum (11th ed.) (436-442). New York:
Longman. Fraad,
H. (2011). Economy and psychology: A marriage in trouble. The Journal
Psychohistory, 38(3), 198-212. Retrieved from EBSCOhost
Gilman, C.
(1892, January) The yellow wallpaper. The New England Magazine 11(5).
Hekker, T.
(1977). The satisfactions of housewifery and motherhood/paradise lost (domestic
division). In L Behrens, & L. J. Rosen (Eds) Writing and reading across the
curriculum (11th ed.) (412-417). New York: Longman.
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