Marriage in the United States

Marriage in the United States

“What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to

minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable

memories at the moment of the last parting (George Elliott).” I believe that this statement by George Elliott is true, this is how a real marriage should last, but unfortunately this is not true about some marriages in the United States.

What is marriage? In my opinion marriage is about being in love and standing together as one, being best friends with your wife or husband, sharing the good times and bad, knowing that he/she will always be there no matter what happens. Marriage is supposed to last a lifetime, but in the United States it usually ends up in divorce.

People in the old days got married and had a family that stuck together. According to Stephanie Coontz, the ideal family usually consisted of a mother, a father, a child or children and maybe a grandparent/grandparents. Time has changed; today some families only consist of a mother and a child or children, a father and a child or children. Either way in some families one of the parents is absent.

In the United States today there are a lot of women who are single parents. “Although some people may lament the loss of the perceived ideal traditional family- father, mother, and children- others have come to accept, and embrace, a variety of new family configurations, including single parenthood (Stephanie Coontz).” According to Coontz some families are now accepting a single motherhood. In “Single Mothers: A Menace to society?” Coontz talks about how others often judge a single mother. “An unwed motherhood is not the major cause of our society’s problems, and eliminating one parent families will not fix out inner cities or end the need for welfare (Coontz).” Just because a woman is a single mother does not mean that she can be judged. There are a number of woman today who have professional jobs, and some earn more money then men. Today’s women are capable of rising a child all on their own, unlike in the past when woman were not allowed to work.

According to E. Mavis Hetherington there are five kinds of marriages. The first kind of marriage is the pursuer-distancer, these marriages are mismatches in which the wife wants to comfort and discuss problems and feelings and the husband, wants to avoid confrontations and either denies problems or withdraws. The second type is the disengaged marriages, in which couples share few interests, activities, or friends. Conflict is low, but so is affection and sexual satisfaction. The third type of marriage is the operatic marriage, in which couples like to function at a level of extreme emotional arousal. They are intensely