Not so long ago, most marriages were based on arranged marriage, two people were introduced by the family members, they got married and later maybe fell in love.
Well, let me make a correction that arranged marriages still exists in many cultures, they still exists in some cultures in the western world, but the percentage of the arranged marriages are much lower in today’s society.
There was one thing that gave those marriages a better advantage than today’s marriages and maybe that is why those marriages had much lower failure rates.
The couples who got married those days knew what they were getting into. They got married to start a family and have children. The men were the breadwinners and the women took care of the family chores and children.
Then the institution of marriage were evolved from arranged marriage to marriage for love. But I kind of see the huge flaw in this notion of “marriage for love”, because in reality “love could be blind”.
The big elephant in the room is that when two people get together, in today’s society, shortly after they meet, they start having intimate relationship, and for the most part, most people will confuse the sexual desire and the joy of bedroom fun with romantic love, and they ignore any negative traits of their seem-to-be-lover.
It seems that people confuse sexual desire with love, so they think they are getting married for love, but in reality, sexual desire is what brought them together and not love.
People get married and after the honeymoon phase is over, and sexual desire is depleted, they start noticing some really annoying negative traits in the person that they got hitched to.
Then the resentment kicks in, and the couple that at one point could not keep their hands off each other start to build resentment and hostility toward each other.
But the main issue is that in today’s society, the people rarely evaluated their core values and core beliefs before looking for relationship. The better approach would be to do some self-assessment before seeking love.
What are your core values and core beliefs?
The main purpose of self-awareness is to be better version of yourself and find someone that when combining your core values together, the values complement each other.
For example, if your top core value is peace and harmony, you want to stay away from someone whose top core value is power and control, but you want to seek someone that has the complementary top core values such as contentment in life, modesty, easy going, conformity…
Having said that, even if a couple have some conflicting core values, if they have high level of emotional intelligence, they have the ability to tolerate each other’s conflicting values. For example, couples who both have high level of empathy, kindness, agreeableness and flexibility will have much better chance of living in a lasting relationship.
One thing to note is that people with high level of emotional intelligence are less likely to have or exhibit negative personality traits.
There are also these major issues in our society today that is out of our control and these issues tend to cause stress in marriages and in some cases cause the couples to get divorced:
