Marriage is a puzzle that not many manage to solve. And with today’s divorce rates, one can only wonder where that old sense of stability and trust has gone. And really, if you thought that marriages in the past were easier than today, you were right all along.
Today’s marriage is not as simple as it once was, and there are so many reasons for it. But perhaps the main reason is the way we look at the world today, and how this affects the way we connect and bond with people.
Eli J. Finkel, a psychology professor at the Northwestern University and author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work, explains that today’s marriages are nothing like those in the past.
“We have arrived at a moment in history where the best marriages are better than the best marriages of the earlier eras while, at the same time, the average marriages are getting a little bit worse,” he says in a Tech Insider video.
The first era of marriage had the role of helping people meet their basic, physiological, survival needs, like food, clothing, and shelter. “The spouses were workmates rather than soulmates,” he explains.
The second era involved marriages out of love, where people refused to marry others because they didn’t love them.
However, the third era (although it includes the element of love) is much different than just marrying out of love. It’s much more complicated, trickier, and with a lot of requirements to be met.
Watch the video below to hear the full explanation and tell us: Do you agree that this is a solid reason for marriages to be harder than ever?
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