Environmental factors which can contribute to marital disorder

There is very substantial agreement among those who come into close contact with marital disorder that the intra-personal and inter-personal difficulties already considered, and possibly others related to them, are frequent factors in marital disorder. But it is becoming more and more realized that they do not explain nearly all of the marital disorders. Some American sociologists are asking whether these factors can adequately explain the high rate of marriage dissolution in the United States as compared with that in other countries.

For example-does the neighboring country of Canada, with only one fifth the divorce rate of the U.S.A., have such a high standard of personal fitness and so high a quality of personal relationships that only one fifth of their people, proportionately, are unfit for marriage? Does Britain, another industrialized country, have only one quarter proportionately of people unfit for marriage as compared with the United States, where the divorce rate is four times as great?

One must of course allow for differences in divorce legislation in any such comparisons, but the difference would seem to be more significant than the actual differences in legislation would account for. (And, of course, this very difference may be regarded as an environmental factor to be reckoned with in marital disorder.)

But we have also to consider the great increase in the divorce rate over the last half century in many countries, and to ask ourselves whether this could be explained by any comparable decrease in personal fitness for marriage or any comparable corruption in people’s capacity for close personal relationships.

These interesting considerations have led to an increasing amount of concentration on the environmental factors, particularly the sociological, in marital disorder, in the realization also that marriage is a living relationship in two-way interaction with the environment, and therefore inevitably affected by it. The home and family in fact can be attacked by influences from outside in the same way as people can be attacked by germs and other noxious agents from outside.
The environmental factors may be considered from the point of view of the different aspects of the marital environment, physical, personal, social and cultural, and spiritual.

Tags: Counseling