Publications

RELATEWELL Journal

The objectives of the RELATEWELL Journal are to promote the quality of all marriages, all domestic relationships and family life in all their diversity. It aims to strengthen the community by making people aware of current social, economic and political issues and developments which can have a powerful impact on family well being.

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Regular Features:

Editorial
Making Marriage, Domestic Relationships and Family Work Series
Eureka
Current Trends / Research
Topical Articles
Reading between the Lines
Issues families need to be informed about

Feature Article:

Taken from: RELATEWELL Journal, June 2001, Volume 5, Number 2

Making Marriage Work
By Don Burnard

Conservatives have been buoyed up by recent research findings indicating that marriage is making a comeback in contemporary society. Columnists such as Bettina Arndt enthuse over statistical data showing that men and women who marry live longer than those who do not.

But the enthusiastic pro-marriage movement seems as little concerned about debating the meaning of marriage in post modernist society as the anti-marriage movement. When attending forums, seminars and workshops on relationships as the Director of the former Marriage Education Institute which grew into the Family Relationships Institute Inc., I never ceased to be amazed by the attitudes of both the conservative pro-marriage lobby and the “marriage is unfair to women” lobby. The fundamentalist pro-marriage lobby assumed I was their knight in shining armour ready to defend the institution of marriage against the moral dissolute, the rabid feminists, the groupies and the gay movement. Those who saw marriage as obsolete sneered at a distance. Their interpretation was that the Institute was the bastion of patriarchy defending marriage for the privileges and advantages it guaranteed to men.

The greatest challenge faced by our society is not deciding to defend or attack marriage. The challenge is to determine whether marriage has a meaning and purpose in a world which constantly challenges fixed beliefs, meanings set in stone and purposes defined by powerful elites.

In a series of articles beginning in this edition of the RELATEWELL Journal, I attempt to face the challenge of defining a meaning for marriage to meet the post modernist challenge which first found expression in the writings of Jean Francois Lyotard.

Post modernist thought cannot be ignored. It challenges the core of all the institutions of society. It has impacted on Art Literature, Cinema, Theatre, Politics, Economics, social, couple and family relationships.

For the post modernists, meaning is not the result of philosophical inquiry. Meaning is constructed not discovered. There is no outside authority to finally determine meaning. In the post modernist thinking, the word marriage signifies nothing. Various elites and establishments may compete with each other to ensure their meaning remains supreme. But in most modernist thinking, meaning is constantly being constructed and therefore constantly changing. Dogmatised meaning eventually leaves a values vacuum and sends people searching for meaning relevant to current realities.

Marriage has meant many things over time – financial security, respectability, social stability, a bastion of male privilege, the supreme expression of patriarchy, personal fulfilment, sexual fulfilment, pathway to family, personal maturity, a developmental landmark, proof of heterosexuality or the end of individuality as two become one.

This series will attempt to construct a meaning relevant to our current psychological, social and political stage of evolution.

Any constructed meaning needs to consider the place of the individual partner in marriage. Does marriage require the denial of self or is its goal self-fulfilment? To appreciate the concept of self we need to consider other key concepts of person, individual, ego and identity.

For marriage to have any meaning in today’s world it must cater for people as persons, as individuals, as having egos and as real selves.

A person has rights, inalienable rights. Marriage must respect these rights not take them away. Marriage cannot give one partner rights over another nor family give parents rights over children. Each person is unique in their own way and marriage needs to preserve each partner’s individuality and value differences. People have egos and ego is not a dirty word. Marriage needs to acknowledge ego.

However, neither of these three important concepts gives us a clue to the identity of a person. The fact that two people have rights does not tell us much about either person. The fact that the two partners are individuals in their own right tells everyone that they are different but not much more about each individual. Ego may be important to a person. A person may be proud they play AFL football, were a member of a women’s Olympic swimming team, drive a BMW, make $100,000 a year, have a superb physique, have written four novels, raised two healthy children or started a successful business. But, ego only tells us a persons achievements not who they really are.

If marriage is about intimacy both partners need to reveal who they really are, their true selves. The self is the core of a person. To thine own self be true. If I do not know my self I cannot reveal my self to another and I will struggle to appreciate the other’s self. Intimacy becomes elusive.

For marriage to have meaning today it needs to acknowledge the centrality of self in today’s society and build on this foundation. The beginning of everything worthwhile is the self. Marriage has meaning when it is an acknowledgement of the fact that if the journey ends with an emphasis on self, the resulting self-absorption will be a life of misery.

For marriage to have meaning in post modernist society, it needs to promote intimacy and end isolation and alienation.

The path to marriage in the recent past began with romantic love as the basis of choice. In working with engaged couples an effective strategy is to involve them in exercises and activities which help define where they stand on important relationship issues. When asked what they have uncovered, a common response is “we have the same goals, ideals and attitudes”. In romantic love, similarity is identified as intimacy.

Marriage can only have meaning when it enables partners to negotiate the critical transition from being in love to connecting two very distinct selves and different individuals. Marriage takes on meaning if it is a recognition that the most exciting stage in a relationship is negotiating the gap that opens up between lovers as they try to come in terms with their very real and different selves. Marriage has meaning when partners cease to maintain the effort to be the person their partner imagined them to be and cease trying to force their partner to be the person they imagined them to be. Marriage can have no meaning if it seeks to maintain the romantic dream that excitement is a necessary and permanent feature of the relationship.

Marriage has meaning when it acknowledges that life is a series of transitions, each one calling for new strategies if partners are to continue to grow in their relationship.

Marriage can have meaning if it enables people to recognise the challenge in bonding two selves who are constantly faced with the reality of how different they really are. Marriage has no meaning if partners believe their task is to re-shape the other person into the fantasy that grew out of their initial chemistry, attraction and comfort with each other.

Romantic love is based on a projection into the object of one’s desire of qualities which the lover values rather than learning to appreciate and enjoy qualities at the core of the other self. In reality based love as relationships grow and develop, the reality of the partner shifts dramatically from the early fantasy and projection.

If marriage is seen as an opportunity of reshaping the self of the partner, the relationship will lead to bitterness and isolation and become a vicious circle of pursuit followed by withdrawal leading to more determined pursuit leading to further withdrawal. Marriage in an age of self has meaning if it is seen as building a bridge between two selves. The Sydney Harbour Bridge provides an excellent model for marriage. For marriage to prosper, the bridge must be sound. Step on in constructing a bridge is to find solid rock. Step two is to build strong pylons on each side of the gap on the solid rock base. Step three is to construct a strong span which reaches out from each pylon. Step four is to ensure that the two spans connect. Step five is to suspend a solid roadway or passage from the completed span. Step six is to recognise that a bridge only achieves its purpose if it provides two-way traffic.

The solid rock is reality and reality bites. The solid rock of marriage is a recognition that the two partners, despite their initial attraction and despite some shared interests, goals, values and attitudes, are very different people. The strong pylons represent the need to have a strong sense of self and an ability to be true to oneself. The strong pylon is the real self not the phoney self, which is adopted to please parents, family, friends, nation, culture, church or partner. The span is the period of getting to know each other through disclosure and feedback. The span is the connecting to two very distinct selves by this process of getting to know each other. The bridge which is suspended from the span offers the ultimate meaning for marriage.

To construct a bridge for one way traffic only would be an absurdity. For the marriage relationship to have meaning there needs to be two-way traffic in feelings, thought and action. The two-way passage of thoughts and feelings is communication. The two-way passage of actions is what is meant by mutual support.

In the next journal, I shall attempt to construct a further contemporary meaning for marriage.