Article
This is pretty long. I was going to post just the link, but it's a newspaper site so it probably won't be up for long.
Basically, it's an article in favour of marriage, which points out some of the 'why bothers' that the people who it seems to work for have found. The most interesting stat to come out of it is that while 32% of marriages end in divorce, on the raw data 68% don't.
It offers some responses to some of the questions I've seen put on this thread.
Marc
’Til death do us part
September 10, 2003
After more than five decades of marriage, Pauline Robertson is emphatic that the best years with her husband, Jack, are still to come. And he agrees, with gusto: “We’re friends, closest friends, there’s a lot of love there.”
Pauline and Jack, who both grew up in Mordialloc, met at a dance at the Malvern Town Hall in 1947. She was a 20-year-old secretary and he was 24 and working in a bank. They started going to the local cinema where, Jack confides, “if you took a girl upstairs to the dress circle you were very serious”. Within 18 months they were married.
There was no down-on-the-knee proposal or solitaire diamond ring. In fact, neither of them can remember much about the decision at all. “In those days it was the thing to marry, not to have a fling,” Pauline explains. “It was after the war and everyone wanted to settle down. It was the logical thing to do.”
Sitting in their modest home in Ormond, where they’ve lived all their married lives, the Robertsons talk passionately about their time together, their four children born in the first five years of their marriage and their 10 grandchildren. “A lot of pride goes into marriage — the thrill of slowly building a life together. You never want to admit it’s rocky. It’s about respect,” Pauline says.
It wasn’t easy. When the first of their three sons was born prematurely a year after they married, both the baby and Pauline were extremely unwell and an aunt had to move in for several months to help out.
Within two years their only daughter was born, and then two more sons. Pauline says the year she had four children under six was a blur.
Meanwhile, Jack confesses he wasn’t around much and sometimes wasn’t the best father in the world. “It’s easy to use work as an excuse, but I regret I didn’t have more understanding about what Pauline and the children needed,” he says.
"A lot of pride goes into marriage. You never want to admit it’s rocky. It’s about respect." - Pauline Robertson
“It was a matter of battling through,” Pauline adds.
But now we live in an age where marriage is the least popular it has ever been. According to the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the crude marriage rate — the annual number of marriages per 1000 people — was 5.3 in 2001, the lowest number on record.
Nonetheless, 56 per cent of men and 58 per cent of women will marry at some time in their lives. And while 32 per cent of these marriages will end in divorce, 68 per cent will succeed.
Julie and Hayden Bickett.
Picture: Rob Banks
So what makes for a successful marriage? Robyn Parker is a senior researcher at the Australian Institute of Family Studies and the author of the report Why Marriages Last, which canvassed research from Australia and overseas on couples married for more than 20 years.
Parker says “it’s the overriding commitment to the commitment” that keeps marriages intact, combined with the ability to adapt to the changes that life throws up: the birth of children and the joys and pressures they bestow; short-term and chronic illness; the demands of work and the impact of sick and ageing parents.
Long-married couples generally regard emotional dependence as a strength, not a weakness. They also trust each other and enjoy each other’s company. And it’s OK to fight, but you have to do so fairly, she says.
“Couples who have been together a long time know the patterns of fighting. They have learnt not to push the wrong buttons. If you fight ‘dirty’ you threaten the core being of the relationship. If you fight fairly, the relationship is protected.”
Parker says the long-married couples discussed in the research undertaken for the report did not have the same materialistic goals as couples from subsequent generations.
“You didn’t need the house, two cars and job promotion prior to marrying,” she says. “If you didn’t have the whitegoods you still stayed together. It was the creation of a life together which long-married couples value most.”
Jan and Anthony Smith married 15 years ago and have two children aged 12 and nine. “I wasn’t one of those brides who needed to have a man, but the marriage was an expression of how we both felt, and it was fun,” Jan says. “We didn’t sit down and work out what we wanted from the marriage. But it’s nice to belong to each other and have the companionship. We also had faith in the idea of marriage being the best way to bring up the children.”
The actual decision to marry was spontaneous. They had known each other a couple of years, moved in together for a year and thought they’d go to Europe for a holiday. Somewhere in the planning they decided to marry first and treat the trip as a honeymoon.
They were in their early 30s; it was a simple afternoon wedding at an historic Melbourne home with 60 guests and Jan wore “a white, short party dress”.
Jan, who is a hospital technician, and Anthony, a builder, live in a terrace house in Port Melbourne. Except for when the children were babies, Jan has always worked about 35 hours a week, which, she says, has made their marriage “a team effort”.
“Because I work, Anthony is encouraged to take more responsibility for the children; if I didn’t work, he wouldn’t be as involved and I think that’s important.”
Anthony says they don’t put expectations on each other but “take it as it comes”. The Smith’s have an added emotional strain: their younger child has a chronic illness that requires constant monitoring and frequent trips to hospital. Also, next year their older child will go to a private school, which will add $12,000 to their annual costs and create more financial strain.
“We both have to work, there’s no option. The disadvantage is that every hour is accounted for and there’s no room for something to go wrong; but we’re no different from most couples,” Jan says.
“Sometimes it’s not easy being married. You have to be resilient, compromise a bit, sometimes a lot. We don’t always have great conservations, sometimes we’re just too tired, but we are best friends and we never think it will ever be any different. You have to believe that,” she says.
Rosalie Pattenden, a Melbourne-based clinical psychologist with Relationships Australia, says that despite the increasing complexity of most people’s lives, 90 per cent of people want a long-term committed relationship, often marriage.
“Marriage is about the belief system and the ability of both partners to commit to it.” She says most marriages break up when something about the belief in the commitment has broken for one of them.
Pattenden says some people fear marriage because they perceive it as an institution in which they can lose their identity. And children, while they can consolidate a relationship, can also complicate it.
“A woman who has worked in a highly-paid, highly-charged job may find herself at home with a baby feeling lonely, stressed and unsupported while her husband now feels more obliged to work harder ‘for the family’.
“He, on the other hand, is feeling neglected both personally and sexually because she’s tired and preoccupied with the baby. Then, maybe, more children are born, while others are growing up, and they realise they’ve left communication too late.”
Pattenden says there is also an imbalance of parenting duties within many marriages which she calls ‘the burnt chop syndrome’.
“Women still tend to see themselves as responsible for the emotional well-being of the family and as a result they look after everyone else first and keep the burnt chop for themselves.”
Pattenden says it’s “the little things — talking, listening, even going to the supermarket together” that keep marriages intact.
“The bottom line is people marry because they want to feel loved, they want a sense of belonging, they want to feel safe and they want psychological well-being. To lose those things is to lose the most primitive of needs — someone to share a life with.”
In keeping with her dream of a romantic wedding on a perfect day, Julie Bickett walked down the aisle at St James Catholic Church, Brighton, 18 months ago in a magnificent, sequined ivory-colored gown and married Hayden. There were four bridesmaids and groomsmen, a flower girl and, later, a grand reception at Melbourne’s Windsor Hotel for 130 guests.
Their wedding album is filled with images of that perfect day, but Julie is quick to distinguish between the ceremony and the marriage.
“The wedding itself was a celebration which showed our family and friends how we felt about each other. Our marriage is the commitment which we work at, to spend the rest of our lives together,” Julie says.
“We already communicate better, tolerate each other habits, we’ve grown on each other. We know when we fight it’s not the end of the world.”
Hayden adds: “It’s made us both feel very secure, which frees you up.”
Julie, a kindergarten teacher at Melbourne Girls Grammar School, and Hayden, a builder, met at a birthday party when they were both 21; they began going out, moved in together within a year and married five years later.
Both agree that coming from what they describe as “stable, happy families”, where both sets of parents have been married for more than 30 years, gave them added confidence in their decision to marry.
While they want to have children, Julie says there’s no rush. “We want to enjoy being married. It’s fun and we’re happy. I know babies are forever.”
They’ve bought a car and are renting a house while they save a deposit for their own home.
Julie envisages that house repayments and the costs of raising a family will mean she will probably continue to work, but when the children are small she hopes it will only be part-time.
“I keep thinking that the world is such a complicated place and Hayden and I are so lucky to have each other. It’s safe, secure.”
The Bicketts are not alone in their belief that their marriage is, in part, a safe haven removed from the rigours of an increasingly complicated world.
David De Vaus, an associate professor in sociology at La Trobe University, says that while post-World War II generations sought refuge in marriage after the tumultuous events of that era, young people are now marrying for exactly the same reason, though in a different time and place.
“Marriage today is seen as offering monogamy, the expectation of intimacy as well as companionship. People like being important to someone else. It’s a point of stability in an ever-changing world.”
So why are there eight pages devoted to relationship counselling in the Yellow Pages? And why is the “marriage” section of any book of quotations dominated by cynical quips not declarations of love?
Quite simply, De Vaus argues, it’s complicated: “Marriage works for some and not for others; there’s a lot of tension between social values such as individualism and the commitment involved in keeping a marriage going.”
With five decades of marriage to their credit, Pauline and Jack Robertson reflect that they didn’t have a whitegood, let alone a car, until their last child was born, and they didn’t have a family holiday for a decade after that.
And it wasn’t until 1975, when they’d been married 26 years, that Pauline returned to work as a medical secretary, which, she says, she loved. Also, that year Jack went to university and studied arts part-time. It was also about then that they started travelling.
Jack, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease three years ago, says he’s lucky it’s not lethal, and is determined to start reading more. Pauline, who is in a book club, a water aerobics addict and a keen gardener, is about to start Pilates.
“You need lots of stamina, a sense of humour and to give each other space,” Jack says. “We’re always talking, about the world, current affairs and politics, it’s never about mundane things,” Pauline says.
This story was found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/09/1062902051616.html
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
Oh well.
