By Lida Prypchan
Few people experiment (in matters of love); most cling to the ways of the past. As for the conventional idea of marriage or the usual family structure, the majority of people will refuse to dispense with them. They will continue to look for happiness within an orthodox setting that presupposes a union “till death do us part.” Eventually, however, they will have to make changes, since the probabilities against a successful outcome of their attitude may become overwhelming. These expectations are deeply rooted in our culture.
Love is defined in terms of a notion of shared growth. It is a charming network of complementary needs which generate satisfaction, security, affection and tenderness. This theory of the “parallel development” of love states that the quality of the relationship between husband and wife depends upon “the extent to which their different, but comparable, phases of development coincide.”
But if love is the product of a shared development and if we are to measure the success of marriage by the degree to which the development of each partner coincides, we have to make a firm and portentous prediction about the future. It can be shown that, even in a relatively stable society, the statistical probabilities are against either partner’s achieving this ideal parallel growth. An American writer has said, “To expect marriage to last indefinitely, under today’s conditions, is expecting a lot; to ask love to last indefinitely is asking a lot more.” Transitoriness and the need for novelty have conspired against it.
This shift in statistical probabilities against love explains the high proportion of divorces and separations in the majority of technological societies. In fact, something has been lost already, i.e., the former desire for permanence. These days millions of men and women adopt the strategy of getting married in the conventional manner and trying to make it work, but get divorced or separated when their relationship turns too sour for them to bear. As human relations become more transitory, the search for love acquires a more frenetic rhythm. Consequently, people have opted for “temporary marriage” or serial marriages.” Serial marriages – a string of successive temporary marriages – seem to be made to measure for this Era of Transience, in which all human relationships, all bonds people have with society, are for the short term. This will be the main pattern of marriage in the future. A family sociologist has observed, “Today plural marriage is more common in our society than it was in societies that permitted polygamy. The main difference is that instead of allowing simultaneous plural marriage, we have institutionalized plural marriage into a series or sequence of marriages.” It is so common that an employee of IBM relates a curious incident of a divorced woman who, upon filling out an employment application form, paused when she got to the box asking for marital status. She bit her pencil, thought for a moment, and then finally wrote: “Single again.”
