The Role of Contributory Factors in Marital Disorders

MARRIAGE HAS BEEN DESCRIBED as the most intimate, delicate and far-reaching relationship between people; and the family as a living, growing, and self-reproducing organism in a two-way relationship with the total environment: physical, cultural, social and spiritual. Human nature and human feelings being what they are there will inevitably be tensions and conflicts in marriage and family life. Successful marriage is not measured by the absence of conflict but by the ability of the partners to find constructive and rational ways of dealing with their conflicts, and growing to greater maturity and harmony together through these experiences.

When there is difficulty in dealing with marital conflicts to the extent that the marital relationship becomes progressively disturbed, it is inevitable that the results will extend beyond the two people involved. Apart from the effects of such disorder on the health, happiness and efficiency of the partners, which are important to society as well as to themselves, there will inevitably be adverse effects on the health and the development of the children, and these may soon become irreversible. If marriage counselors and educators are to be of adequate help to people in marital conflict it is necessary for them to have some over-all concepts of the many inter-related contributory factors in marital disorders, so that they can have some familiarity with the terrain into which they are likely to be led.

For clarity of description it is helpful to think of the most common contributory factors under three headings, the intra-personal, the inter-personal, and the environmental. The intra-personal factors will include those which are concerned with the personalities of the two partners and their fitness in various ways for the stresses and strains of marriage and family life. The inter-personal factors are concerned with the living dynamic relationships between them, and their ways of dealing with tensions and conflicts. The environmental factors are concerned with the influence of the physical, cultural, social and spiritual realities-and unrealities-which bear on the two partners and on their marriage and their family life.

It is quite obvious that defects within the personalities of one or both of the partners will bring about disturbances in their relationships and also in their environment. Disturbances in their relationships will also have some effect, sometimes a profound effect, on their inner personalities and on their environment. And environmental pressures may be serious enough to disturb both their inner personalities and their relationships. It is generally unnecessary for the counselor to disentangle the relative influences of these three sets of factors to any detail-indeed, it would generally be impossible to do so in any case. But if he is aware of the general nature and extent of these three groups of factors and of the kind of influences they can exert on marriage and family living, he is less likely to overlook or disregard them when seeking to understand the feelings and attitudes of the people who come for his help.

One of the most significant facts about modern marriage and the disorders which may emerge in it is that with a few exceptions which hardly ever apply, people over 21 who are unmarried or whose marriage has been legally terminated are free to marry without any safeguards regarding their fitness or suitability for marriage. People under 21 and above a minimum age generally laid down by the law of their country can also marry under these conditions with no safeguard beyond the consent of their parents (which is often obtained under heavy pressure).

Once they are married, however, the doors shut and the exit is barred, even if they find to their mutual disillusionment that they have made a stupid mistake and have come to detest each other. It is of course essential that society should take all possible steps to safeguard its own stability without too much interference with the liberty of its members, and the only practical way to reconcile these two essentials would seem to be the fullest and most adequate preparation for marriage as a universal requirement.

The laws of any country concerning divorce, annulment and judicial separation are admittedly imperfect attempts to do what is basically impossible: to control human attitudes and human behavior by legislation. But every society has found it necessary to put such legal restraints on the dissolution of marriage because the community has an essential stake in its preservation wherever that is possible, and the courts are continually on the lookout for attempts to evade the law by mutual arrangement and the faking of evidence.

Tags: Counseling