Marriage Transition throughout the Life-Cycle

Marriage Transition throughout the Life-Cycle

Marriage Transition throughout the Life-Cycle

Introduction

Although many family life cycle transitions like the onset to marriage, parenting, and retirement are normative and anticipated, previous researchers have suggested that the individual and the 1 Page 2 family system can still experience a great amount of stress and difficulty in managing these transitions. Marriage qualifies as a life cycle transition that is both normative and anticipated, and yet, has the potential to be highly stressful (Boss, 1988).

Becoming a couple is one of the most multifarious and difficult transitions of the family life cycle even though it is often perceived as the least complicated and most joyous. This romanticized view of the transition to marriage may supply to a couple's lack of adequate preparation and subsequent difficulty and distress during the transition. In this report we will discus the change that marriage produces through out life cycle.

Discussion Many people consider marriage as the unimpeded, blissful joining of two individuals (Antill 2004). Marriage really represents the merger of two entire systems combining together in developing a new, third family system

Intrapersonal Developmental Issues

Intrapersonal issues like personality characteristics, attitudes, beliefs, values, marital expectations, and degree of idealization significantly affect an individual's and subsequently a couple's transition to marriage.

Personality researchers and theorists have indicated that the maturity course of an individual's personality may have genetic origins and predispose an individual's personality to remain the same or deteriorate over the life span (Antill 2004). Regardless of personality etiology, the absence and/or presence of positive/negative personality characteristics affect the stability and satisfaction outcomes of marriage (Bader 2002). Marriage to a similar other promotes steadiness in the intraindividual organization of personality attributes across middle adulthood (Adler 2000). It can be noticed that newlyweds' personalities do play an important role in the courtship/mating process with marriage partners selecting mates with similar personality characteristics to their own ideals. Similarity allows for more recognizable patterns of communication, empathy, and understanding (Around & Pauker 2001). Individuals who are psychologically healthy (i.e., emotionally stable) are more likely to be maritally satisfied than those individuals who were psychologically unhealthy. The personality priorities are almost exclusively complimentary (i.e., opposite) rather than symmetrical (i.e., similar) related to the subsequent pursuit of marital therapy of couples. Stable marriages are more similar in intelligence, pretension, radicalism, tender-mindedness, mutual trust, acceptance, enthusiasm, and genuineness. Personality factors that reduce the likelihood of stability and satisfaction include the lack of warmth and extraversion; passive-aggression; borderline pathologies (Bader 2002); bipolar disorders; feelings of insecurity, unfairness, depreciation, and powerlessness; disagreeableness, emotional instability, inconsiderateness, and physical abuse chemical abuse; depression.

Attitudes, Beliefs, Values, and Expectations

Differences in personal attitudes, values, and beliefs can cause strain in the new family system (Around & Pauker 2001), particularly if the couple does not possess the resources to manage differences. While forming a new family subsystem, couples may incident differences in needs and values over issues like: family leadership, gender, loyalty, money, power, sex, privacy, and children (Adler ...