Betrothal, Wedding & Divorce
Engagement, Affair & Separation
|
Our behavioral functionality can be judged by the amount of friends we have and by the success of our family life. The most socializing people are also often among the most productive ones and the less problematic to our society. Wedding or AffairScientific studies have revealed that there may be some positive correlation between mental health and being married. There can be two explanations to this:
Whatever the explanation is, this studies have pointed to one thing: personality can blossom in a family environment, since family life is a good way of socializing. Separation or DivorceWhile breaking with a loved partner is always painful, it is also less dramatic if it happened before the couple began to live together and before it has built a family. Statistical surveys have shown that loving partners who broke had often more significative differences between themselves in regard to their ages. their education, their intelligence, their physical appearance, their morality and their hobbies. Moreover, and overall, one of the partner was accusing the other of giving less of himself than he/she, whether he/she is true or not. Couples who are breaking apart are often in search of alibis to have them separated such as a trip abroad, at the end of the year or during the summer vacation, or a visit to the grand parents. Very often, only one partner is willing seriously to end the mutual life and, in many cases, it is the woman, while the man is willing to keep, at any cost, his affair going on with his female partner. That might well explain why polygamy is often polygyny (a man with many wives) and less often polyandry (a woman with many husbands); however, this distinction might well be due to other realistic and convenient reasons, since the man has a greater strength and is almost always available for the hard duties to support his family, having no childbearing period. Another important remark is that, on the Rubin�s scale of love, there was no correlation between the frequency of the sexual contacts between the two partners and their decision to end the mutual life; this means that, in a true loving affair, sex is only secondary to personality traits while still being attractive to both partners. Courtship & WeddingThe adjustment to marital or family life is preceded by a selection and a training and accompanies the adjustment to a career life. This selection is, for the man or the woman, to choose freely a home companion--her or his loving partner among many others. The training is the courtship--how to build intimate interpersonal relationships, followed by the engagement or the betrothal. As revealed by some surveys, there seems to be a positive correlation between the length of the courtship and the length of the mutual life thereafter, while many couples think in our days that a long courtship is obsolete. A good wedding often means finding a "good" mate; but it means also adapting one�s Self to another Self1, something that is often forgotten. This adaptation of the Self requires some cut in the Ego in order to assimilate part of the other�s Ego (if that can be), some change in one�s Ego in order to adjust to the Ego of another. I could not stress more than that how the cooperation between the partners is essential for die family life, and marital life can be justly compared to true friendship where both partners should reciprocally give and be able to receive. Wedding & AgeWedding is for adults, not for children. Although there is no age for two adults to be married, there seems to be some negative correlation between the partners being wed at a precocious age and the failure of the marital life. Some surveys have even gone farther and have suggested that it is better for the young couples to wait till they are about 21 or 23 years of age to be wed. It has been observed also that many couples who engage late in mutual life have built strong and happy families. Fortunately, it is also the period when the woman is better-off with childbearing. However, this is not a rule for a happy marital life. Wedding & Religion - Wedding & EducationNo survey has found any relationship between a good marital life and the religious denomination. It has been also found that transreligious or transcultural wedding does not affect significantly the relationship between two partners after their betrothal. "At least one at a time." This singular sentence means that, in doing his/her choice, a loving partner has been testing many possibilities and many other Selfs to make up finally his/her mind on one possible choice. Precipitation does not lead to a happy result either there is or isn't any religious or cultural congruence. Wedding & Divorce - Affair & RuptureUsually, you want to marry somebody who loves you and whom you love, somebody who will be your best friend and whom you trust, somebody with whom you will have not only uncompromising sexual relationships but also the best of your time. In the richest nations of our days, those immaterialistic attributes, those fair criteria of the good choice have been vanishing and are often replaced by others more materialistic, if not more realistic ones, that have been the rules in more primitive societies. These "new" criteria are the wealth of the spouse, his social statute and his relationship to the ruling families or his kinship. However, features such as resemblance, affinity and, at most, what some psychologists call physical attraction - a poorly understood and relativist concept - always prevail and seems to be the first criterion which motivates our choice of our loving partner, since, a man, for ex., prefers a woman, the female of the humans, to any other female animal, primarily because she looks like him ("the ribs of Adam�, to quote the Christian bible) and can reproduce with him. This particularity is also the only one that can preserve the purity of a race or, at least, the quality of a kinship (Dr. Qualo R.; Les Grandes Notions Contemporaines de Biologie - The Great Contemporary Notions of Biology). The other attributes, such as those mentioned above, and others which are essential to a good cohabitation, such as personal charm, equity in relationship, reinforcement or Skinner�s conditioning (a cherished psychological concept) that can root in an increased sexual satisfaction and/ or finally the material gifts are only secondary to that ultimate, biological feature. At last, the age�s difference among the loving adults come into play, but this characteristic has not shown a good correlation to a good wedding of the adults in all human societies. What is Charm?Sigmund Freud , the father of psychoanalysis, has observed that some very seducing ladies begets a high degree of self-love, of narcissism. Those ladies provide also for their friends and for their lovers the lost narcissism of their infancy. Remember that we have seen before that, during the Oedipal period, the child directs his prior self-love towards loving objects, other than himself, i.e., he begins to exteriorize this love as an evidence of his growing personality and he starts to fulfill a fundamental biological need (sex, to preserve the specie). His first love was then his/her parent of the opposite sex--the father for the little girl and, inevitably, the mother for the little boy. It is therefore not surprising, at all, to find that the histrionic personality is also a very seducing one, since his/her hysteria exists to draw the attention of the others2. Often also the doctor who treats a histrionic person can fell in love for this person, thus realizing some counter-transference. However, and in any case, while the transference of the client upon his provider cannot be avoided, the countertransference of the physician upon his client is to be avoided in such a relationship. Socializing with Others (friends, lovers, husbands, clergymen, bosses, etc.)We have seen a few lines ahead what bring people most often together. Those factors, (I am reminding you them) are:
Another but no less important factor that plays a role in bringing people together is that they may be living close to each other. However, being together for a day or a short time is one thing, living or staying together is another one. Other personal attributes come into play for those people who stay friends, lovers, husband and wife, and, even, boss and employees; those attributes are: balance in the relationship, reciprocity or exchange of feelings, and sincerity. We, all, have many friends who suit our many social needs, for we are mostly social animals. We have comrades whom we see at school or at the stadium; we have good friends with whom we go to the night club or to die party; we have very good friends on whom we can rely in any occasion or in most occasion; we have also intimate friends whom we trust and confide to. What is an Attribute?To conclude this chapter, let us understand more what is an attribute (which I have been speaking about since the beginning). Can an attribute exist without being two or without being together? In the American Heritage Dictionary, an attribute is defined as "A quality or characteristic inherent in or ascribed to someone or something." The people here, in the U.S., "waste"3, each year, millions of dollars to get dressed, to put on one�s make up, to have their hair cut or ironed, and to buy all what will make them look prettier. While those expenses seem, at the first sight, to be futile, they are not really so. Some surveys have indeed unveiled that those people who are good looking are also those who are the ones most looked for, the most respected and the most considered ones. Is it therefore startling to know that this ardor last a life span? What is clear is that physical attraction is linked to social approval and thus to coupling. This is explained by the theory of the attributions. Its major hypothesis is that we assign positive quality to those people and things that look pretty in our eyes and negative one to those that look ugly to us. And it is not all. What is indeed pretty and what is ugly? I have pointed earlier to the fact that what look pretty to us is what we have learned to be pretty, what we have been modeling for. If such is the case, what is pretty for one may not be pretty for another. However, some surveys have shown that a majority of people in a human society agreed on what is pretty and what is not. But it is not all, again. What may be pretty or, to put it in better words, what may be look convenient for a culture may look inconvenient for another. The Asian ladies, for example, do not have such a large breast as their American counterparts. While a big: breast is showy, here, in the U.S., and may be essential for survival in Africa (where the infant�s only daily meals might well be the milk of his/her mother), in Asia it may be a heavy weight and will not be appreciated. That may have lessened the chance of the women with large breasts to be naturally selected in Asia. However, such a factor, like the alimentation of the girl, might be also at stake, since it has been proved that there is a positive correlation between puberty at an earlier age and the wealth of a nation. The oestrogens, the hormones that build the secondary female sexual characteristics, such as her large breasts, her external sexual organs, her charming lips (mouth and vagina), her wide pelvis*, have a cholesterol lowering effect and there might be a feedback mechanism between them and the amount of saturated fat in the diet (� Ganong W F; Review of Medical Physiology). Nevertheless, in the countries or during the periods respectively where and when bottle feeding prevails over breast feeding the women might show naturally less voluminous breasts than where and when the latter are overvalued. (� Mayer J.; Human Nutrition: its physiological, medical and social aspects; part III; Is breast-feeding coming back? In short, the importance of the female breast in a human society seems to be linked to its culture**. Friendship & Behavioral FunctionalityA friendship can last more than a love�s affairs, although love and cohabitation of two loved partners are the climax of any interpersonal relationship (I insist on that between a man and a woman, although I recognize it. happens also between two people of the same sex). Nevertheless, let us not underestimate the importance of friendship since good friends become often good lovers. Friendship allows the future lovers to "taste" each other, it allows them to know each other better before living together. Since living with another person requires some sacrifice of the Self, it is not ordinarily an easy thing. Friendship, like betrothal, can thus be conceived as an apprenticeship for the future lovers. Making friends is socializing and friendship helps us to understand each other better. Many lovers fear that a new friendship outside their own can hurt their love�s affairs, and it is often seen that one of the lover tries to push away the friends of his/her partner. While this is a normal animal reaction it should not make us forget that we are also the most social animals on earth. Therefore, jealousy is an inadequate behavior and an unfit feeling among the humans. Of course, the friendship of one the partners of a couple- with an outsider can also be the harbinger of a future break or can have a negative aspect on the loving affair. However, we should also be aware that friends help often marital or loving couples to stay together and play the role of shock absorbers instead of catalysts. Indeed, many lovers are relieved after speaking about their feelings or their conflicts in their love�s affairs, and a good friend can often be a good counselor, if not a good a good "safety valve." Evidently, there is this feeling of flirting which is inherent to any friendship. After all, it is the zest of our life! --------------------------- 1 I distinguish the Self from the Ego. The Self is a more vast part of the personality comprising the Ego, the Super-Ego, and part of the Id. 2 I have even known an histrionic prostitute who might have been using her hysteria to get her clients. 3 They could have stayed in their "original costume�-- naked! *The wide, deep and flexible pelvis of the women are ideal characteristics for natural birthgiving. ** I have also noticed here, in U.S.A., that many white women have a straighter (less deep) pelvis but their is also wider. Whether or not it is due primarily to racial difference or to cultural effects (better alimentation and later birthgiving, for example), natural selection and natural choice, therefore, an attribute is there. |