Affluent Americans Are Expecting Too Much Perfection - Part 1
By Hara Estroff Marano for Psychology Today
Americans value marriage more than people do in any other culture, and it holds a central place in our dreams.
Over 90 percent of young adults aspire to marriage-although fewer are actually choosing it, many opting instead for cohabitation. But no matter how you count it, Americans have the highest rate of romantic breakup in the world, says Andrew J. Cherlin, professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins. Marriages are discarded often before the partners know what hit them.
"By age 35, 10 percent of American women have lived with three or more husbands or domestic partners," Cherlin reports in his recent book, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. "Children of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden."
With general affluence has come a plethora of choices, including constant choices about our personal and family life. Even marriage itself is now a choice.
"The result is an ongoing self-appraisal of how your personal life is going, like having a continual readout of your emotional heart rate," says Cherlin. You get used to the idea of always making choices to improve your happiness.
The heightened focus on options "creates a heightened sensitivity to problems that arise in intimate relationships."
Science has now shown that negative emotions get priority processing in our brains. "There are so many opportunities to decide that it's unsatisfactory," says Cherlin.
It would be one thing if we were living more satisfied lives than ever. But just gauging by the number of relationships wrecked every year, we're less satisfied, says Cherlin.
"We're carrying over into our personal lives the fast pace of decisions and actions we have everywhere else, and that may not be for the best." More than ever, we're paying attention to the most volatile parts of our emotional makeup-the parts that are too reactive to momentary events to give meaning to life.
Because our intimate relationships are now almost wholly vehicles for meeting our emotional needs, and with almost all our emotions invested in a relationship with only one person, we tend to look upon any unhappiness we experience-whatever the source-as a failure of a partner to satisfy our longings.
Disappointment inevitably feels so personal we see no other possibility but to hunt for individual psychological reasons to blame our partners for our own unhappiness.
But much-perhaps most-of the discontent we now encounter in close relationships is culturally inflicted, although we rarely interpret our experience that way.
Culture-the pressure to constantly monitor our happiness, the plethora of choices surreptitiously creating an expectation of perfection, the speed of everyday life-always climbs into bed with us. An accumulation of forces has made the cultural climate hostile to long-term relationships today.
Attuned to disappointment and confused about its source, we wind up discarding perfectly good relationships.
People work themselves up over "the ordinary problems of marriage, for which, by the way, they usually fail to see their own contributions," says William Doherty, professor of family sciences at the University of Minnesota. "They badger their partners to change, convince themselves nothing will budge, and so work their way out of really good relationships." Doherty believes it's possible to stop the careering disappointment even when people believe a relationship is over.
It's not going to happen by putting the genie back in the bottle. It's not possible to curb the excess of options life now offers. And speed is a fixture of the ongoing technological revolution, no matter how much friction it creates in personal lives.
Yet new research points to ways that actually render them irrelevant. We are, after all, the architects of our own passions.
Part 2 tomorrow.
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