Modern Marriage Research Articles

Choosing love? Tensions and transformations of modern marriage in Married at First Sight

Anthropologists and sociologists frequently suggest that marriage is undergoing rapid, worldwide transformation. Yet, while trends in nuptiality and divorce are used to demonstrate its decline, heterosexual marriage based on romantic love remains a cultural ideal in many contexts. This tension is reflected in cultural products like television programmes, including the increasingly popular genre of reality romance television. In this paper, we focus on an Australian version of a recent programme format, Married at First Sight (MaFS), in which ‘singles’ are matched by ‘relationship experts’ and then meet for the first time at their wedding ceremonies. The show purports to document singles’ lives prior to, during and following their weddings. By considering the content and structure of the show, as well as public and media responses to it, we explore Married at First Sight Australia in the context of other reality romance programmes produced and popular in Australia. We propose that the show offers a discourse of marriage based on objective compatibility rather than individual choice, but nonetheless dependent upon scripts of romantic love. Further, MaFS reflects (uneven) realities and popular understandings of transformation in modern Australian marriage.

“Lady, Shall I Lie in Your Lap?”: Gender, Status, and Touch on the English Stage

“Lady, Shall I Lie in Your Lap?”: Gender, Status, and Touch on the English Stage

Marie Corelli’s “The Silence of the Maharajah”: Modern Marriage as Threat to Empire

Marie Corelli’s “The Silence of the Maharajah”: Modern Marriage as Threat to Empire

Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Egypt by Kenneth M. Cuno

<i>Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Egypt</i> by Kenneth M. Cuno

Modern Marriage: Labor Market Sorting, Genetic Output, and Children's Mental Health

This paper asks whether labor market sorting segments the marriage market, increases positive assortative mating, and shapes the transmission of genetics and mental health. I develop a model of marriage in which agents sort in labor markets based on their genetic type, thereby increasing the likelihood that they match with a genetically similar agent. Wages, the dispersion of skill, and moving costs can induce agents to directly change sectors and indirectly change the next generation's genetic composition. For additional motivation, I estimate the mental, physical, cognitive, and noncognitive skill composition within and across marriages using couples in the Current Population Survey and skill measures from the O*NET Content Model. I assume that these occupational-specific skill measures serve as a proxy for agents' genomes. There is more similarity by mental and cognitive skill, both of which enjoy a higher conditional correlation with earnings than physical and noncognitive skill. Finally, I ask whether children's mental health outcomes are driven, at least in part, by their parents' assortative mating by skill. Given data limitations, I employ two separate empirical strategies. First, I consider a development psychological theory that argues autism can result from an assortative match by the ability to systemize. Using the CDC's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, I find higher rates of autism in Census tracts with more systemizing strength. Second, I extend the theory to the other mental health disorders, including ADHD, anxiety disorders, and mood disorders. Using the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey, I find that parents' mental and noncognitive skill has a significant and negative relationship with the incidence of ADHD. Parents' physical skill is negatively associated with the incidence of mental disorders generally and ADHD specifically. Combined, the results of this paper suggests an unexplored research arc: as we play to our comparative advantage, are we also shaping public health?

Pragmatic tradition or romantic aspiration? The causes of impulsive marriage and early divorce among women in rural Malawi

1.IntroductionThe last decades of the 20th century have seen important shifts in the way young people meet, marry, and interact with their spouses in sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, social scientists have taken an interest in the rise of romantic courtship and companionate marriage (Cole and Thomas 2009; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006; Padilla et al. 2007). This spike in interest, however, should not obscure the fact that the defiant appropriation of romantic love by young generations has been happening for nearly a century and might have become an African tradition in itself (Thomas 2009). First through literature, then through photography (Behrend 1998), films from India (Fair 2009), and more recently through mobile phones (Archambault 2011), social media, and Nigerian blockbusters (Abah 2009), young Africans avidly consume narratives of romantic love and create their own.While unions based on love and companionship are highly desired in most young adult relationships in sub-Saharan Africa (Clark, Kabiru, and Mathur 2010), there is little consensus as to whether modern unions or traditional marriages are more stable. Goode (1993) and Takyi (2001) contend that unions with low involvement from kin are inherently less stable, while Jones (1997) believes that such unions are more stable as the couple is likely to be more mature and compatible. Changes in the nature of unions and their implications for divorce are of special concern in countries like Malawi, where divorce rates are high and where divorce and remarriage are linked to poorer health outcomes for both women and children (Boileau et al. 2009; Clark and Brauner-Otto 2015; Reniers 2003).In this paper we interrogate the phenomenon of early divorce as a primary component of overall union instability, and as a prism that reveals changes in the ways young people meet and marry. We explore three aspects of early divorce in Malawi. First, we show that much of this high divorce rate in Malawi is driven by early divorce, defined as unions ending within the first three years. Second, we use discrete-time survival analysis to identify which relationship characteristics are associated with early divorce. We find that couples who have known each other for only a short time and whose relationship is not embedded in family ties are much more likely to divorce early. Finally, we turn to qualitative data to make sense of these volatile relationships as part of young women's transition to adulthood.Although we set out to determine whether early divorce was driven by traditional or modern marriage practices, we instead find that early divorce most often results from impulsive marriages that correspond to neither fully traditional nor modern unions. Impulsive unions are not embedded in family and community ties, but neither are they rooted in deep affective ties between individuals. This kind of marriage, between people who are not particularly invested in each other and whose families have little or no stake in making the relationship work, are particularly fragile and tend to dissolve rapidly. They reflect hybrid patterns of courtship and spouse selection in which traditional ideas about what makes a good spouse collide with contemporary ways of knowing a person's character.2.BackgroundIn this section we provide information about marriage in Malawi, including definitions of what we mean by 'traditional' and 'modern' forms of marriage.2.1Defining 'modern' and 'traditional'Most discussions of romantic love and changes in affective patterns rest, more or less explicitly, on the opposition between a 'traditional' form of marriage and a 'modern,' romantic, or companionate alternative. Wardlow and Hirsch (2006) define companionate marriage as a relationship in which emotional closeness is the basis of a union, its mode of operation, and a key measure of its success. In companionate marriages the conjugal partnership is privileged over other family ties, and personal fulfillment takes precedence over social reproduction. …

‘Крейцерова соната’ и зарождение буржуазного брака

The silent revolution caused by the behaviour of the unfaithful Anna Karenina involved Russian readers in the second half of the nineteenth century, and later came into surface in ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. Anna showed a new possible way of union based on feelings and the Great Reform created the conditions to realize it. In this way the transition from the aristocratic marriage of convenience to the bourgeois marriage, represented in ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, was brought to fruition.In this late work, Tolstoi posed the sexual problem in new terms, as the modern marriage involved a new idea of love, sex and conjugal union. The first to pronounce this new word was Pozdnyshev, through a series of scandalous statements, which provoked violent reactions from all sides. Thus Tolstoi gave impulse to the rise of a new regime of sexual discourses connected with hygiene, medicine, pedagogy, criminality and demography.

A Modern Marriage for the Masses: Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, and the Cultural Front

When James Street, a reporter for Movie and Radio Guide, made his way onto the property of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable's San Fernando Valley, California, ranch in spring 1940, he was met by the ...

Master Bedrooms and Master Suites

Nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century house design situated a “parents’ room” within close proximity to other bedrooms, keeping the marital couple near their children. That placement comported with a concept of marriage as a shared enterprise focused nearly exclusively on child raising. But since the mid-twentieth century, the “master bedroom” has grown both in size—now encompassing a suite, as the master bathroom is now standard—and in importance. Modern marriages require sanctuary from the stresses of family life and must have privacy to achieve happiness and fulfillment.

Modern Marriage: Managing Conflict and Enforcing Compatibility

Modern Marriage: Managing Conflict and Enforcing Compatibility

Too young to date! The origins of zaolian (early love) as a social problem in 20th-century China

Zaolian (literally means “early love,” “zao” for “early”, “lian” for “love”) refers to courtship or dating among young people in elementary and secondary school systems. In today’s China, it is regarded as a serious social problem related to minors/adolescents. To safeguard their moral, hygiene and promising future, it is believed that zaolian should be prevented and controlled by school regulations, family pressures, and even state laws. This paper attempts to provide a historical explanation to origins of this specific juvenile delinquency in China’s long twentieth century. Firstly, it offers a critical discussion on current scholarships, which dismiss zaolian either as a Freudian sexual repression by the Chinese Communist regime since 1949 or as a product of this regime’s social control efforts in the early 1980s. Unconvinced by these explanations, it then presents a new approach to examine “moral, ideological and structural” origins of zaolian. The moral and ideological origins include traditional Confucian patriarchy and its sexual norms, a new regime of western medical sciences, and the sexual repressive regime of the Chinese Communist Party, and all of them could be traced at least in the early 20th century. Lastly, it turns to the more crucial structural origins, or the three institutional-buildings responding to globally circulating discourses since the early 20th century: modern marriage against zaohun (early marriage), family planning policy against zaoyu (early childbirth) and modern educational system. Zaolian as a social problem was fledged in the 1980s when the three institutions had been well-established in China.

Marriage and moral perfectionism in Siri Hustvedt and Stanley Cavell

Perfectionism is a moral outlook developed in the writings of the contemporary American philosopher, Stanley Cavell. In an idiosyncratic exploration of romantic relationship and modern marriage Cavell attends to perfectionism as he finds it in the film comedies and tragedies of 1930s' and 1940s' Hollywood. Foregrounding the Cavellian emphasis on ideal marriage as re-marriage this article explores relationship and repetition in Siri Hustvedt's The Summer Without Men (2011). I argue that Hustvedt's novel is directly relevant to Cavell's philosophical assessment of the self and its perfectibility within a marital union. Philosopher and novelist part ways, I argue, in the rigidity of Cavell's genre construction.

The Other End of the Bargain: The Socioeconomics of Marital Dissolution in Rural Northeast Brazil

Divorce rates globally are on the rise, and in rural Northeast Brazil increasing rates of marital dissolution index transformations in gender roles, marriage and kinship structures. Socioeconomic change—specifically a transition to an economy based in ecotourism—impacts gender roles and subsequent views on marriage and marriage dissolution. In a context of extreme social inequality and structural vulnerability women's employment combined with men's unemployment decreases women's incentives to stay in an unsatisfactory marriage. However, a women and men's ability or inability to make a financial contribution to the household is not the primary impetus for marital dissolution. Among other factors, marriage dissolution represents the breakdown of an emerging bargain between women and men based in the ideal of a modern companionate marriage.

Having It All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women's Magazines Invented the Modern Woman

Having It All is a study of two successful, glossy, middle-market women's magazines of the belle époque: Femina (launched February 1901) and La Vie heureuse (October 1902). These two publications, widely sold up to the First World War and finally merged in 1916, represent an important context for work on belle-époque women novelists, many of whom wrote for them and featured extensively in their pages. They have also elicited some interest in their own right, including Colette Cosnier's Les Dames de ‘Femina’: un féminisme mystifié (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). As her title suggests, Cosnier read Femina as a reactionary publication that peddled a very conventional view of female identity dressed up in fashionably ‘modern’ style. Rachel Mesch, on the other hand, sees both magazines as emancipatory, as offering readers, through the pleasures of copiously illustrated celebrity news, fashion spreads, and serialized fiction, a vision of women in the modern world that was subtly progressive. Mesch argues that, despite their explicit rejection of ‘feminism’ as a campaigning movement and their insistence on the traditionally feminine spheres of homemaking, maternity, and beauty, both magazines expanded their readers' horizons towards a more empowering vision of female identity. These were commercially driven publications owned by mainstream publishing houses: if their conservatism ensured that they did not scandalize the average reader, their embrace of modernity as offering women new roles and freedoms also appealed to many women at a period of rapid social change. In a non-polemical, taken-for-granted tone, the magazines featured women who were both ‘feminine’ and exemplified prowess in traditionally ‘masculine’ fields: mountain climbing, exploring, sport, studying, and, above all, writing. Like the middlebrow fiction of the women authors published and featured in their pages, Femina and Vie heureuse performed ‘imaginative work’ by offering an ‘airbrushed view of the present’ that expanded what the ‘chères lectrices’ might expect of themselves (p. 29). Without contesting the orthodox view of women as essentially wives and mothers, the magazines represented modern marriage as grounded in social equality, through their glamorous portrayal of celebrity literary couples, and through published debates that demonstrated a broad consensus affirming a woman's right and capacity to combine homemaking with a career. What is so worthy of attention in these publications is the fact that they brought a quietly radical vision of what a woman could do and be into the households and mentalities of women who may have shuddered at the very word ‘feminist’. The book could be accused of a slightly narrow focus, since it emphasizes the role of women writers — as contributors and role models — to the virtual exclusion of the magazines' other concerns. It also seems to overplay the distinction between the magazines' idealized model of the femme moderne, and the more familiar figure of the (feminine but feminist) femme nouvelle. However, with its rich array of reproduced pages to illustrate points, and nice attention to the magazines' visual as well as verbal discourse, this is a highly readable, enjoyable book that adds an important dimension to the study of how the vibrant feminist contestation of those years was mediated for and experienced by the majority of women.

Meaning in couples relationships

IntroductionThis research project studies the relationship between adult humans, an artificial historical product, which mediates a unique and singular relationship between hu­man adults -- marriage.A case study details a woman's subjective experience of remaining in a pro­longed marriage that has caused continued suffering.A semi-structured interview was used to collect data, and an Analysis of the Nuclei of Meaning for the Apprehension of the Constitution of Sense by Aguiar and Ozella (2006, 2013), segmented and deepened the qualitative material. This method applies a Relational-Historical Psychology theoretical framework, which is a privileged method for apprehending the uniqueness of a human being.Concept of family and marriageHistory has recorded various forms of relationships between humans, which has led to the emergence of new, metamorphosed intimate relationship formats.Engels (2012) notes that historical artifacts are a common inheritance of humanity that provide a perspective on the past and lead towards understanding progress over the course of time. Historical artifacts also demonstrate that phases of development run parallel to the invention of new subsistence and labor instru­ments.The democratization of personal relationships profoundly affected marriage re­lationships (Giddens, 1993). Modern marriages correspond to an epoch of crisis, that is, transformation, because they incorporate historical characteristics based on socioeconomic contracts between families and newer perspectives on relationships. In the modern sentimental marriage, passion is the motivation for an alliance.Marriage now finds its origin and reason in love. Society's development opened new possibilities for expanding consciousness and psychological development. In marriage, the individual and couple's projects are shared, and sex is a permanent indicator that maintains the relationship. Psychological marriage implies that tem­perament and personality are compatible and only accessible if two people are liv­ing together in a marriage. As such, intimacy becomes structured on new values, which no longer include only friendship and love but also sex (Aires, 2007).Meanings in the relationship between couplesLove embodies a conscious choice and provides personal fulfillment. However, the decision-making process is not natural or direct. It is necessary for society to devel­op and address several historical products (such as divorce and marriage for love) for these to become options. One should not conclude that culture provides an answer, but that it can make different choices available. Therefore, society needs to understand different historical products that act as alternatives, to develop a com­petency that implies will.Reality should be made clear for a person may deal with a problem, but it is equally necessary that culture makes alternatives available, thus opening the pos­sibility for choosing one of many ways of life. For example, divorce (as a love mar­riage) is a recent historical product in the progress of mankind. Divorce legalization was a step forward in Portugal, and it is now a less socially condemned option.Language is the gateway for socio-cultural heritage, and it channels an understanding of the present human world. Thus, studying expressed meanings and senses allows us to grasp the human essence. Language is the psychological tool that allows access to consciousness.MethodThe research project -- the interview methodThis qualitative research project used a semi-structured interview that was contextualized as a dialogue. This method demonstrated the socio-historical perspective in qualitative research. Reliability was obtained through associative exchanges and interactions. Therefore, in the interview, consistency was the discourse experience between the interviewee and the researcher (Bakthin, 1992).In the interview, the subject expresses oneself, but what he articulates reflects the culture in which he is immersed, revealing his socio-historical reality. …

SHORT STORIES IN THE BALKANS AND CONTEMPORARY - SHORT STORIES IN THE WORLD

A comparative analysis of selected short stories in the Balkan countries, as well as contemporary short stories of the world, will show us that the key themes of those stories are very similar to the short stories written during the period of transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995-2010). For example, the story of the Soul Operation by an Iranian writer Mohsen Mahmalbafa, The Falcons by a Dutch writer Kader Abdolaha and On the Kitchen Stairs by a Polish writer Witold Gombrowic zinter connect with short stories by authors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as The Secret of Raspberry jam by Karim Zaimović or The Devilish work of Zoran Riđanović. A common thread manifests itself in the aforementioned stories, more specifically, a common theme which focuses on the need for eradication of the seeds of submission and compliance with the political system. Most authors focus on their domestic political systems; however, some portray and analyze systems in other countries as they see it, such as a Dutch narrator who focuses on a potential threat of infringement of human freedom. Moreover, Bellow Hubei by an Argentinian writer Anhelika Gorodis her underlines the importance of humanization within a political order. Faruk Šehić examines the political system in Bosnia and Herzegovina from a slightly different perspective. His collection of stories Under Pressure emphases the issue of pressure in the above war model of short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These stories are the product of pressure and anxiety, with intent to latently promote new ways of spiritual survival, directly relating to the concept and the theme of the story The Past Age Man by Christian Karlson Stead. Further analysis of the alienation theme singled out short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Plants are Something Else by Alma Lazarevska and Dialogues by Lamija Begagić, and pointed out their connection with some recent international short stories such as The Last Defence by Mahdi Šodžaija a contemporary Persian author who indicates the inappropriateness of spousal relations and the crisis of modern marriage. The alienation theme present in many short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina also appears in a particularly impressive way in a short story Raggedy Africa by a Slovenian author Mark Švabič, which is clearly related to a short story The Seaside Fairy Tale by Miljenko Jergović from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Extremely interesting are the stories that suggest a crisis of legitimacy of culture and behavior, such as the story of Tito or Curriculum Vitae by a Slovenian writer Maja Novak, or Bankophobia by Ante Zirdum, demonstrating the individual culture of behavior and society in general in a regressive dimension manifested through addiction or phobia from banking institutions

Traditional Prescriptive Marriage versus Cross-Cultural Marriage System Among the Chothe of Manipur

This paper highlights the significant of popular cross-cultural marriage among the Chothe with the neighbouring communities that poses threat to their traditional endogamous prescriptive marriage system. However, it indicates that despite the declined the system is still ideal, stable and adaptable. The declined of their traditional marriage system does not mean that the system is totally breaking down but rather a deviation. It indicates that the increased in cross-cultural marriage was develop due to their exposure, liberal worldviews and flexibility in their socio-cultural norms influenced by the thoughts of modern education, Christianity, westernisation and modernisation, etc. This liberal attitudes impacted by such factors allow a person to have more options in choosing a girl or a boy outside his/ her tribe. On the basis, a new trend of love and arranged marriage becomes popular a blend of tradition and modern marriage, common even among other Northeastern tribes of India.

大正期における近代的結婚観の受容層 『讀賣新聞』「身の上相談」欄の結婚問題相談者の分析

大正期における近代的結婚観の受容層 『讀賣新聞』「身の上相談」欄の結婚問題相談者の分析

Spin-Doctoring Discourse: Ideological Debates around the Marriage of Lady Arbella Stuart and William Seymour

“Spin-doctoring Discourse” explores debates around Arbella and William’s marriage. While the law is held up as an authoritative institution, the il/legality of actions is contested. Arbella and William claimed their precontract and wedding were legal, but James declared their precontract and marriage illicit. Early modern marriages created factional, as well as legal, bonds. Arbella’s supporters argued that her similar status to William made them a suitable match, but opponents warned against combining their lineages. Discourses of love provide an alternative moral code. For supporters, the couple’s defiant marriage was excused as romantic, whereas opponents declared that the pair were not a “fit match.” Marriage contracts were typically accompanied by financial arrangements, which gave parents more influence over whom their children wed. James used the discourse of wardship to claim that he had legal rights over Arbella’s marriage, while Arbella posited that he had forfeited those rights through inaction.

Friends and Companions: Aspects of Romantic Love in Australian Marriage

Friends and Companions: Aspects of Romantic Love in Australian Marriage