Social relationships that affect marriage

The social relationships. This is a fairly wide field, which may cover such matters as friends, sports and hobbies, business and professional associates, necessities of work (such as travelling or “working back” or “entertaining”), and involvement with church work or other kinds of voluntary social service. Any of these may be brought up in counseling as elements in the trouble, and as in previous cases there are many deeper but more influential factors in most of these problems than are immediately obvious.

In some cases the trouble has been felt from the beginning and then may stem from the fact that one or both of the partners have failed to adapt themselves from a comfortable individualism to the responsibility of marriage. Their “I” has failed to become in any real sense “We.” This is a kind of immaturity, often the product of “spoiling” by overindulgent parents in childhood, and such people may enter marriage with the naive idea that they will go on being coddled. They have never been able to develop a sense of responsibility to any but compulsory tasks, and not always even to them. This situation may involve considerable patience on the part of both partners and also of the counselor, because growth of any kind is always slow. The counselor’s task, having helped the partners to understand the realities of the situation, is to try to help them hold the marital relationship while the growth and the learning can have sufficient time to produce results.

Sometimes the undue preoccupation of a partner with many old friends of the same sex is a result of latent or even actual homosexuality, and in such cases there will almost always be quite obvious disturbances of the sexual relationship between the partners as well. When there is any indication of the possibility of this kind of trouble a referral is advisable.

Probably most of the social difficulties which are not the result of unavoidable duties are really symptoms of a deeper conflict between husband and wife, a slowly corroding indifference which has gradually made home less attractive and desirable. Many husbands who spend hours “with the boys” on the way home each evening, to the growing resentment of their wives, would come home much more readily if the atmosphere were more attractive. When the wife objects, which she feels quite justified in doing, it only tends to make the husband feel less anxious to come home, and the children suffer from both the absence of their father and the increasing peevishness of their mother.

In such cases it is essential to open up the deeper elements before any worthwhile healing of the marital situation can be expected. To tell such a husband that he ought to take more interest in his wife and his home, and to tell the wife that she ought to make the home more welcoming, will generally leave each of them quite unmoved. They will have had much of this kind of advice from interested relatives, and it will most likely have added to their feelings of despair. When the deeper elements are brought to the surface and many old “festering sores” are faced and dealt with the way may become open for a restoration of the deeper emotional communication and the recovery of mutual affection and confidence, and a new era may well dawn in the marriage. Unless the marriage and the home can be given a high priority in the feelings of each partner the situation will be in danger of such deterioration as we have been considering.

Keywords: Marriage, Marriage Counseling, Marital Relationship, Marital Disorder, Marital Conflict