- Mon, 12/19/2011 - 04:00
- 2 Comments about Why don't relationships work anymore?
Dear Queer Radical,
My grandparents have been married for 63-years and I wish I had the same type of relationship. Why does it seem like lifelong partnerships are impossible in our generation? Why don’t relationships work anymore?
Yours,
Dreamy and Despairing
Dear DAD,
Sometimes our grandparents have things we never will: hope for a pension, a lifelong job and a steady relationship. Social expectations dictate that without those things we fail.
Guess what: Just like the economy, the world of relationships is subject to historical shifts. The perceived value of lifelong marriage is deteriorating and for good reasons.
Your notion of relationships working presumes that to be successful they must last: through thick and thin, sickness and health, till death do us part.
At what expense?
Your grandparents grew up in an era when the law permitted husbands to beat their wives. It was an era of rape: Women were legally obliged to have sex within marriage even when they didn’t want to.
Feminists organized and fought these laws and social assumptions, and in many cases won. While these horrors hardly have vanished in practice, their general social acceptability has declined.
While the religious right laments the death of the family and argues that nearly all levels of violence can be worked on, tolerating rape and abuse within a relationship does not indicate that it is successful. Rather, it suggests that the relationship is destructive. Divorce, separation and breakups are reasonable solutions when violence enters the picture.
Of course people leave relationships for less brutal reasons: jealousy, boredom, irritation and sexual disinterest. After trying and failing to fix these problems, they realize the best solution to their pain is to cut ties from the source.
Old school thinking: Isn’t it always better to stick it out, to work on things and to find ways to compromise, so that the relationship can work?
New school thinking: No.
Sacrificing one’s self to the other may still be considered romantic, but it is hardly a sign of a working relationship; it is a sign of codependency.
Abandoning a sinking ship can be a highly functional strategy for avoiding drowning. After all, isn’t it better to swim apart than to sink with the ship together?
So what’s a dreamer like you to do? Date, romance, enjoy yourself: stay in touch with the present and enjoy things in the here and now. Love passionately.
And if-and-when it comes time to split, do so with grace. Sometimes breaking up is the best thing to do.
With eternal, unconditional love,
Queer Radical
Hmm - I can't avoid the thought, though, that the habit-forming years of their relationship -were- partially enabled and defined by those stable economic times. The Great Depression drove a lot of men away from their families roaming the country for work, sending money home when they could, if they ever returned or made enough to send home. The slave era drove enslaved clans and families apart. And I feel more alienated from people than I ever have; my childhood was relatively peaceful. So the progress isn't -all- good, I'd say a lot of things have gotten worse, although a cheer for sex and race politics getting along.
The implied assumption this argument rests on is that long term relationships are NEVER the result of hard work and a deep love, but always the result of an inability to walk away form something bad. This assumption is presented with nothing but off-the-cuff remarks not backed up in anyway whatsoever with evidence that our grandparents generation wasn't in someway achieving a fulfillment through those relationships. Dreamy & Despairing: I've been with my partner nearly 11 years. It has taken a lot of effort and hard work to make it last, yes, but the reward is a deep connection that, for me at least, has been far more meaningful than the sorts of shallow cycle of serial monogomy so many of our generation are caught up in. And while I agree that it is a GOOD thing that ppl now have the freedom to leave a relationship that is harmful to them without the fear of shame that once induced, the one-sided argument presented above doesn't even consider the possibility that far too many ppl from the "me" generation are too self centered to bother putting in the commitment necessary to form intense, deep, and lasting relationships of any kind, moving from lovers and groups of friends as quickly as facebook and twitter change their layouts.
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