Understanding Values in Marital Problems

There are a relatively few basic social factors in American life which seem always to appear in the ultimate background of our marital problems. Some of these are common American practices in mate selection; others are characteristics of the national life as a whole, while still others concern emphases with existing families.

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There has been a curious reluctance in our current thinking to face the fundamental importance of values and value judgments. Hard-boiled scientists in particular shy away from values and value judgments. One of their common cliches has been that science has nothing to do with values and value judgments. But how, one wonders, can anyone study life, individual behavior, social achievement, and the whole gamut of human activity, and avoid these obvious mainsprings of conduct? How else can one understand human behavior except in terms of human values?

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It is in regard to these values that we differ from each other, that whole nations differ; it is in what people really accept as the desirable, the fitting, the good, the proper, and their opposites, that we have the keys to the ways in which they live and work and hope and pray. It is in these values in the field of family life that we must look for much of the explanation of America's record in family behavior. Three groups of values are particularly important.

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1. Some of our current values and practices make for bad marriages - marriages that never should have been consummated to begin with, and whose outcome seems almost destined to end in failure. We are reminded here of an elderly friend of much wisdom who has occupied himself for many years by forecasting the outcome of marriages of persons whom he knows. His forecasts are based on three criteria: (1) length of time the couple has known each other, (2) his knowledge of their families, and (3) the similarity or dissimilarity of their interests. He insists he seldom, if ever, fails.

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Many persons today insist that our record of marital failure is due to unwise marriages, and that divorce, desertion, and separation will not lessen until we learn better how to marry. With this conclusion, we find ourselves in substantial agreement. The simple fact of the matter is that we marry with fewer preparatory rituals and sobering ceremonial features than other and older nations employ to conserve the sanctity of the marital rite.

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It is our conviction that certain time-honored procedures in courtship are still essential, for courtship is the experimental prelude to marriage; that the prospective mate must not be viewed solely through the colored lens of romance; that marrying your own kind is still important, since marriage remains life's most intimate and pervasive relationship; and that marriage should occur at an age when there is sufficient experience and maturity to make a reasonably wise choice.

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2. Other values which are common to American life do not make for family continuity and stability. We are thinking here principally of our national devotion to individualism and the open-class system. Marriage above all is not a one-way street, leading only to one mate's comfort and satisfaction; and our open-class social system, geared to an individual social aggressiveness, runs counter to the goals of family continuity and responsibility.

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We do not mean to say that the values and practices which result in unwise marriages and which weaken successful adjustments in marital relations invariably destine marriages to failure. Rather do we think of them as creating hazards in marriage in the sense in which we have already defined that term.

3. Finally, there are the old-fashioned values of parenthood and family group living. These are positive values which have been underemphasized during the past several generations. There are some indications of a reverse trend in regard to these, but we still have a long way to go to give them an importance such as they had in past periods when family life flourished on a much broader scale than is the case today.

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About the author: Revealed: Step-By-Step Secrets On What To Say And Do To Stop Any Marriage Problem.