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From: haas@utah-gr.UUCP (Walt Haas)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Committment and marriage
Message-ID: <1333@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Feb-85 20:45:44 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1333
Posted: Thu Feb  7 20:45:44 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Feb-85 05:09:13 EST
Organization: Univ of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 68

Greg's remarks about the importance of committment in marriage, combined
with the fact that I have been through two divorces myself, combined with
the fact that half the married couples I know are getting divorced right now,
leads me to think that it might be worthwhile for somebody if I shared my
hard-earned experience with some of the issues that must be overcome in
order to have a marriage survive.

I am assuming that everybody who reads this realizes that living together,
with or without marriage, implies compromise and acceptance.  For example,
you have to negotiate where the toothpaste tube gets squeezed, and live
with the result.  So much I consider obvious.

When you decide to marry somebody, you base your decision on your perception
of them.  You may later find out that this perception is not accurate, for
one reason or another.  This puts you into a dilemma.  The dilemma exists
because we live in a society that makes choices available to us.  For example,
let's suppose you and you beloved grew up together in East Peoria, and shared
a desire to travel and eventually settle in someplace more, shall we say,
cosmopolitan.  After marriage, you travel a little, and after about six months
your beloved announces that s/he can no longer live more than two miles from
his/her family.  You are thunderstruck, since one of the common bonds and
common goals in your marriage has just vanished.  What do you do?  Well, in
a primitive society, you would probably spend your entire life within two miles
of your beloved's family, so the question doesn't arise.  In this society,
you have a choice: you can abondon your goals, abandon your marriage, or try
to satisfy the goal within the marriage in some compromise fashion.  People
in this situation try all three, with varying degrees of satisfaction.  If you
make an absolute committment to your marriage, this implies that you are ready
to sacrifice everything else.  If your committment to some other goal is
important, however, then you must necessarily have to deal with the issue of
sacrificing your marriage.

One way to improve the odds of having an accurate perception of the other
person is to live together before marriage.  This at least gives you a better
idea of how big the roommate hassles are, and whether they can be resolved
readily.  For example, your beloved might have drastically different house-
keeping standards than you do.  I'm so orderly that everyone who comes into
my house remarks on it.  I got thoroughly sick and tired of picking up my
second wife's underwear in the living room during the three years we were
married.  We didn't live together before marriage, and so I never got a good
taste of the full effect until the die was cast.

One fly in the foregoing ointment was pointed out by the psychiatrist
Eric Berne, inventor of Transactional Analysis.  Berne noticed that people
follow "scripts".  Some people, for example, act out a "loser" script.
Given any situation, these people follow their script and find a way to
be losers.  There are numerous scripts which individuals can follow.  The
relevance to marriage is that, according to Berne, people tend to have one
script to perform when they're single and another script to perform when
they're married.  Berne suggested asking single people questions such as
"What happens to people like you when they get married?" in the hopes of
predicting what their script will be after marriage.  For details, read
Berne's books and those of his students.

One last point concerns Why get married?  An amazing number of people get
married because It Seems Like The Thing To Do.  This generally boils down
to some type of peer pressure.  However, it's not the peers that are getting
married, it's YOU.  You're the one that has to live with the compromises,
whatever they are.  Marriages based on peer pressure seem, in my experience,
to have a particularly terrible track record.  Incidentally, if you are
interested in reading about the track records of various kinds of
relationships, marriage included, you might like to read /American Couples/
by Blumberger and Schwartz.

Good luck  -- Walt Haas

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