The Modern Marriage
By: Becca Mervine
There are a lot of people who believe that the institution of marriage has declined over the years. Many people think that in the past people used to have closer family ties and less of the issues we see today in family life. But I don’t necessarily think that’s true. Yes, divorce rates have gone up. But society has also become more accepting of the idea of divorce. In the middle ages, there was no divorce. However, there were plenty of affairs and failed marriages. Kings held mistresses, popes had promiscuous parties, and women had lovers. There were always issues in the family; it was just less apparent because of people being forced to stay together until they died. I think we have to realize the differences of society today and compare them to what life looked like in the past before we can truly decide whether or not the modern marriage is in decline.
People live longer today. On average people in the past weren’t living beyond the age of 50, so people were married for less time. Now, we live into our 80s and 90s and can spend 40-60 years married to the same person. That’s a long time! Modern society makes it easy to meet people though social networking so we marry young and expect these marriages to last; and if we died at age 40, a lot of them would. However, now we live till 80 and we get sick of the people we are with, resulting in many “failed” marriages.
Maybe it’s not that our values are declining or that society is becoming less moral, but that we’ve always been that way, and now we hear about the “immoral” more than we hear about the good, loving marriages. We have many ways to publicize interesting and scandalous stories. The internet and modern media has created easily accessible and widespread news. We find the negative stories more interesting than the positive ones, so they are reported more frequently. Maybe we haven’t changed as much as we thought.
In Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Persuasion,” and “Sense and Sensibility” we can see examples of family problems. Elopement, bad marriages, incest, affairs and promiscuity all come up in these novels from the 1700-1800s. In “Mansfield Park” we see examples of unhappy marriages, unfilled expectations of spouses, affairs, and family turmoil and it all seems to be shocking to the characters. These couldn’t have been “ideas” purely generated by Austen’s mind. She was obviously drawing from what she saw in society and the interactions of people in her time. In “Pride and Prejudice” the main character’s sister elopes and causes a scandal. But we also see that there were some good marriages then, too. Elizabeth’s (the main character) parents fight like cats and dogs, but you can see why they are together for the moments of love they share. In the end of the story, both Elizabeth and her sister end in happy marriages. Today, we have good, happy marriages too, but the bad ones are just more publicized. Perhaps, we haven’t changed as much as we thought.
The illusion that at one point marriage was perfect is a lie. If Jane Austen was able to write about it without causing scandal then it obviously wasn’t a radical thought. It was the average life of the mainstream reader in Austen’s time. I think that people today are not really less moral than they used to be. As a people, we live more complex, longer lives. It’s difficult to find someone you are willing to spend the rest of your life with when your life may be twice as long. We are human and we make mistakes. Why can’t we apply that understanding to marriage?
Short URL: http://redhawkreport.com/?p=1738
Posted by Becca Mervine
on Nov 21 2011. Filed under FEATUREmE, Life and Times.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
