SM34's Post

[Accuray]

SM34,

You've obviously done a lot of thinking about this, and that's great, but you're making huge generalizations based on poor sample sizes.

My MC explained it to me like this -- some people are emotionally healthy enough to carry on mature relationships and make them last, and some people are not.

The causes for this are many and varied, some of it may be culture, a lot of it is parenting, a lot of it is circumstance, some is probably genetic, etc. etc. The point is, you can look at a very complicated situation, an intricate system of long-term feedback loops, find a simple explanation for how it works that seems to fit, and them completely miss all the richness and detail that truly describes the system.

In my example above, two emotionally healthy people can have an emotionally fulfilling long term marriage. Two people who are not emotionally healthy will likely not be able to maintain a long term relationship, and will likely have a pattern of failed relationships. One emotionally healthy person paired with an emotionally unhealthy person will have a challenging relationship. They may be able to make it work through effort, or at some point the suffering may become too great and one or the other will have to leave.

I have a large exteneded family of cousins etc in my home country which I stay in contact with. Most of them graduated from college either feom UK or USA so they are westernized to some degree. they all dated (from a distance) several people during their high school years, followed by choosing someone, then a one year engagement where they get to know each other (in a non sexual way). Then, they got married. Now, most of those people have two or more kids and seem very happy and fulfilled.

First of all, you're making a HUGE assumption that their marriages are happy and fulfilling. You really wouldn't know unless you lived under their roof for a prolonged period. I can tell you that when I had marriage trouble, I confided in some friends and was shocked to learn what went on in marriages that I had also considered to be happy and fulfilling as an outsider looking in. The point is, you don't know what goes on behind closed doors.

However, let's pretend that they are 100% happy and fulfilling. They are all from the same extended family. Chances are they were raised with similar parental styles, have similar financial circumstances, etc., so that is not a very good sample -- it's far from random, so you can't use that to represent a culture, a country, or even a town. It's just one family, and that is statistically insignificant.

Consider this though. A couple of days ago, my parents (who had no prior souses or even sexual relationships) celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary. My wifes mom is in gwr second marriage (to her AP) aand her dad never remarried. her mon was sexually abused by her step dad. My father in law never remarried. He has 7 brothers and sisters and from 8 siblings only two marriages are still going. A couple of his siblings have been married twice and have blended families, put those kids through all that trauma only to divorce later. Baggage baggage baggage....

Once again, ONE FAMILY, completely insignificant when representing a culture or a society.

So if one set of people can seem to make a good choice of spouses with just one choice, while another group needs to try a whole selection of people, then something is not right. And then when the same people who dated and had long term relationships with lots of people are then getting divoeced multiple times,.isnt this weird?

No, it's not weird at all, your data set is meaningless. It's like you walked down the street and saw a woman with blue eyes and blonde hair and concluded that all American women have blue eyes and blonde hair.

You can't make these generalizations based on a few examples -- you have to look at real data, and in the area of marriages, it's very very hard to understand what trends may account for anything, because individual situations are so complicated.

I will say this -- in the marriage counseling community, (as covered by Michelle) there are two schools of thought. One is that you should try to save your marriage at all costs (in the absence of abuse), and the other is that if you have taken reasonable efforts to preserve a marriage that continues to make you miserable, then you should leave it. Even in the case of children, there is an argument that divorced but happy parents are better than married but miserable parents.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest which philosophy is the right one, it's a matter of belief and faith.

Now in my opening scenario, I referred to people either being emotionally healthy, or emotionally unhealthy. Obviously that's ridiculous, because "emotional health" is a giant multi-faceted thing, and people are more or less "healthy" on a spectrum. No one is just 100% self-actualized on all dimensions, we all have strengths and weaknesses, and marital success seems to be to be a function of the degree to which your strengths and weaknesses are complimented or exacerbated by those of your spouse. Do your gears mesh or grind when you come together?

That said, pretend you are 100% "emotionally healthy" and you are married to someone who is "emotionally unhealthy", and their unhealthy behaviors are a huge negative influence on you and preclude your ability to be happy. Pretend you were married to a woman who flirts openly with other men, spends money recklessly, gambles compulsively, and abuses drugs. Pretend you have children together and she's not a great parent. Pretend that you have raised these issues to her attention, done your best to support her, tried to help her and encourage her to get help, but she will not, and just blows you off. Her behaviors have driven you to bankruptcy and are a source of continued embarrassment and frustration.

With your Eastern Culture ideology, do you stay in that marriage? She not abusing you or your children, she's not cheating on you, she's willing to stay married to you, but every day is a living hell. Do you stay?

If you leave, are you being selfish? Are you being entitled? Are you the result of a bad upbringing and have emotional baggage? Are you being shallow?

Accuray