One of the noticeable features of our society in recent years is the high divorce rate and the increasing number of one-parent families. I believe that stress breakdown is responsible for the failure of many of these marriages. In many cases, seemingly rock-solid marriages fail to withstand the effects of excessive stress, even where the stress was external to the relationship.
Of course, divorce and separation operate in our society as potent stressors, and are actually contributing towards causing stress breakdown.
The love relationship which forms the basis of marriage needs to be strong enough to withstand stresses and strains on the relationship in order for a marriage to last. Let us look first at some aspects of married love.
While we recognize that marriages between people who hold widely differing moral, cultural and political beliefs are not likely to last, nevertheless we are aware that love relationships are built partly on differences in personality. In stress breakdown these differences can become, instead of a basis for mutual attraction, the expressed reasons for seeking separation and divorce.
We tend to fall in love with people who have some of the qualities we lack, and the children that result from that union have the advantage of both sets of qualities. If this were not so, if instead we married people who were just like ourselves, we would soon lose that great variety of personalities and talents which are required to run a complex, co-operative society.
The tough, cruel people would beget tough, cruel kids, and the soft-hearted, weak people would beget soft-hearted weak kids. It would not be long before the cruel, tough ones would destroy the others, leaving us to try to run our country with a uniform batch of Nazi clones. Luckily we tend to be attracted not to opposites, but to people who have qualities we lack.
A moment’s reflection on the happily married couples we all know will reveal that this statement is generally true. Strong, mannish women seem to be happily married to round-shouldered ‘Walter Mitty’ types, who love their wives dearly. The tough, rugby second-row forward who seems to lack any trace of femininity in his make-up, usually seems to be, in my experience, married to a woman who seems to have very little in the way of masculinity in her make-up. I have been observing people for many years, and it always appeared to me that both husband and wife together seem to form a sort of basic unit. There seems to be in each person a kind of appetite, or longing, for some person who will provide in the relationship the qualities that each of them lack.
This isn’t to say that this mutual satisfaction is totally complete. The unit, the ‘one flesh’ (as described in the Bible) which results from that love relationship, may be only partly satisfying to both, but nevertheless, the concept of the two partners in a married relationship forming a basic unity is generally valid and real.
Therefore, in a situation where ‘both husband and wife are suffering from stress breakdown symptoms tending to interfere with their ability to accommodate the personality differences between them, the very basis of their love relationship can be threatened. Third stage stress breakdown produces an inability to tolerate previously tolerated differences.
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