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These days so many marriages end in divorce that our most sacred vows no longer ring with truth. “Happily ever after‖”and “Till death do us part” are expressions that seem on the way to becoming obsolete. If statistics could only measure loneliness, regret, pain, loss of self-confidence, and fear of the future, the numbers would be beyond quantifying.
Even though each broken marriage is unique, we can still find the common perils, the common causes for marital despair. Each marriage has crisis points. And each marriage tests endurance, the capacity for both intimacy and change.Outside pressures such as job loss, illness, infertility, trouble with a child, care of aging parents, and all the other plagues of life hit marriage the way hurricanes blast our shores. Some marriages survive these storms, and others don‘t.Marriages fail, however, not simply because of the outside weather but because the inner climate becomes too hot or too cold, too turbulent or too stupefying (使人目瞪口呆).
When we look at how we choose our partners and what expectations exist at the tender beginnings of romance,some of the reasons for disaster become quite clear. We all select with unconscious accuracy a mate who will recreate with us the emotional patterns of our first homes. Dr. Carl A. Whitaker, a marital therapist and emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, explains,“From early childhood on, each of us carried models for marriage, femininity, masculinity, motherhood, fatherhood and all the other family roles.”Each of us falls in love with a mate who has qualities of our parents, who will help us rediscover both the psychological happiness and miseries of our past lives.We may think we have found a man unlike Dad, but then he turns to drink or drugs, or loses his job over and over again, or sits silently in front of the TV just the way Dad did. A man may choose a woman who doesn‘t like kids just like his mother or who gambles away the family savings just like his mother. Or he may choose a slender wife who seems unlike his obese mother but then turns out to have other addictions that destroy their mutual happiness.
A man and a woman bring to their marriage bed a blended concoction (混合) of conscious and unconscious memories of their parents‘ lives together. The human way is to compulsively repeat and recreate the patterns of the past.Sigmund Freud so well described the unhappy design that many of us get trapped in: the unmet needs of childhood, the angry feelings left over from frustrations of long ago, the limits of trust, and the reoccurrence of old fears. Once an individual senses this entrapment (圈套), there may follow a yearning to escape, and the result could be a broken,splintered marriage.
Of course people can overcome the habits and attitudes that developed in childhood. We all have hidden strengths and amazing capacities for growth and creative change. Change, however, requires work—observing your part in a rotten pattern, bringing difficulties out into the open—and work runs counter to the basic myth of marriage: “When I wed this person all my problems will be over. I will have achieved success and I will become the center of life for this other person and this person will be my center, and we will mean everything to each other forever.”This myth, which every marriage relies on, is soon exposed. The coming of children, the pulls and tugs of their demands on affection and time,place a considerable strain on that basic myth of meaning everything to each other, of merging together and solving all of life‘s problems.
What does the writer think of the basic myth of the marriage