Nowadays, the concept of marriage is controversial indeed around the whole world. Still, the attitude to marriage demonstrated by the citizens of the United States remains to be one of the most interesting, unpredictable, and even paradoxical. In the article “The Changing Landscape of Love and Marriage”, Hull, Meier, and Ortyl introduce a collection of the ideas offered by different researchers about marriage, a variety of roles, and the ways of how young people want and to develop their relations in regards to their own expectations.
The models, used in the article, prove that Americans themselves cannot understand what kind of relations they want to be involved in, this is why a kind of paradox that underscores the frequent inconsistency between human cognition and behavior takes place and makes people believe that pure relationships are what they really want and neglect the possibility that deinstitutionalization of marriage is actually the thing that destroys human relations.
Life is not an easy thing, and people try to make it more complicated by means of different attitudes to marriage that is considered to be an integral part of this life. Young people still believe in true love, faithful relations, and lifelong commitment (Hull, Meier, and Ortyl 35). In other words, young people do believe in romantic love, they want to create strong relations regardless of their sexual orientation, and they plan to have children one day.
However, personal observations and practice show that people do not actually appreciate a true worth of pure relations, prefer to get divorced instead of trying to change something and find it normal to have children out of wedlock. It proves that Americans do not know what they really want: they oppose their understanding of marriage to their own behavior in a marriage.
Hull, Meier, and Ortyl explain the paradox of marriage by the fact that people find themselves in the midst of a transition (37): people have already created a new world of intimacy and started living in it, but they are not able to believe in it and accept it as it is due to vague unpleasant nature that destroys any romantics, breaks all possible rules, and neglects any possible expectations. The paradox considered in the article may be explained by human weaknesses and unwillingness to accept personal brutality in romantic pure relations.
People enjoy their freedom of voice, choice, and ideas. They like to establish new rules in relationships and neglect the already established family norms and social rules. The authors admit that, in the past, people did not have an opportunity to resist the rules set by a society, they just had to follow a certain order; and in the present, people are free to choose divorces as the only possible way to solve family problems or live separately staying in official relations.
In my opinion, the example of my parents and the ability learn several theories of marriage taught me to believe that all problems come from the deinstitutionalization of marriage offered by Andrew Cherlin that is based on such factors like unmarried childbearing, wrong distribution of roles at home, cohabitation without marriages, etc.
People are not bound to certain rules that have to be present in relations. They lack control and believe that freedom in relations is the best option ever. In fact, I think, it is wrong, and people have to believe that some order is still necessary even if they are in free pure relations.
Work Cited
Hull, Kathleen, E., Meier, Ann, and Ortyl, Timothy. “The Changing Landscape of Love and Marriage.” Contexts 9.2 (2010): 32-37. Print.