Why do we have unsuccessfull marriages?

Stroke his ego,  don’t ever deny him sex, keep the house clean, look good all the time, forgive him when he cheats, have male children for him. The list goes on. Just last week I was going through my newsfeed on Facebook when I saw a status update from a friend of mine which read something like this:

“Hi Guys,Have you ever wondered why marriages in the past lasted more than marriages in this generation? Our mothers treated marriage differently and I would recommend this book : Fascinating womanhood to guys. You can download it from this link. I read it and I have learnt so many things about being a good wife”…

I rolled my eyes at the yet again societal thought train that a failed marriage is solely attributed to women. That the only gender that has to read and be educated on a supposed manual for married life is women. Following the comments, I was not surprised to find that, there were a lot of women who in their quest to be the perfect wife had downloaded and read the book light years ago. Now what surprised me ,was that most of the people who had read the book were single young women.

I didn’t download the book, however I sat down to ask myself why truly marriages in the past lasted more than present day marriages. I do not have any concrete evidence to back me up, but I do believe divorce rates are significantly higher than say 20 years ago.

I really wanted to understand the underlying factors that accounted for this social phenomenon. So  I started to recollect how life was, back in the day when I was a little girl. Mind you, I am only in my early 20s, and as relatively young as I may be, I find that society has gone through incredible social and cultural changes. To confirm this, just compare 2001 to today. I remembered that as a child, the number one social champagne was to ‘send your girl child to school’.TV, Radio and Print media were filled with feminists and International agencies educating and persuading our society that the girl child was not a lesser being as was previously thought.  

Apparently back then, girls were brought up for one sole purpose only: to have a dignified place in the kitchen. I remember how in a lot of families, it was only the boy child that was given a chance at education. The girls remained at home to help their mothers with their craft, whatever that would be.

Now using the conditions in my childhood as a point of comparison, I decided to imagine how things were, when our parents were growing up. That would be say 20-35 years before our  ‘send your girl child to school’ campaign started. I resolved, from a few articles and my own intuition that in the 60s, a woman was brought up to be totally dependent on a man. She was taught how to cook, clean, and appease the ego of a man, and nothing else. A woman’s main accomplishment back in the day was to get married and have kids. Most of the opportunities in life were reserved for the men, and due to this a woman was largely constrained financially.

Now coming back to the 90s when I was growing up, due to the very influential campaigns run by feminist and others who believed in the cause, the social consciousness changed a lot. Not only were girls given an opportunity to be educated, it was found that girls could actually compete academically with boys and in some cases be better than them. A woman was given the most important empowerment tools; education and self worth. She grew up hearing and believing the mantra ‘What a man can do, a woman can do better.” She found herself doing very well in class, and sometimes beating the boys to it. She realized that her worth was much more than her child bearing and home keeping abilities. She was told she could achieve anything she wanted, despite her being a female, and she began to dream for more, aspire for more, much more than just being married and bearing children.

Now I realized that the upbringing of the boy child has not gone through any significant changes , at most negligible. Men are still brought up as the head of the house, the provider, the decision maker, the king. In households which have both male and female children, the boys do not help with household chores like cooking, sweeping, washing etc The boy is left playing video games whilst his sisters enjoy the heat from the kitchen. Most mothers often attach accolades to their sons names; making the boy think he is superior to his sisters.

So I ask myself, what happens when you join a woman who has gone through this liberation process to a man who has been brought still holding the archaic mentality of yester years? Certainly a natural disaster!  I find that the most successful and happy marriages are the ones that have men who understand and appreciate the value of a woman. For me, I believe that contrary to what society holds as true, a man has a huge role, if not a huger role to play to ensure the success of a marriage. Unfortunately, till we get to that level of understanding as a society, the entire burden rests on the woman