Co-creating A Life Together

Getting married and sharing life with a loving partner remains one of the most important and compelling dreams for young people today. Harrar and DeMaria (2007) found in their survey of attitudes about marriage that 96% of those people who were polled say that they want to get married someday despite the fact that so many marriages in the United States result in divorce each year.  85% of those people who responded said that marriage is fundamentally a partnership in which two people are co-creating their lives together.

Men and women as well as gay and lesbian couples who are able to get married today are looking to co-create a marriage that is mutually satisfying and that allows each partner to not only fulfill their own personal and professional goals, but also the goals of their partnership.** Toward this end, everything in marriage must now be negotiated. Society’s institutions, laws and customs largely determined the rigid roles and responsibilities of the 1950s; today’s roles and responsibilities are being re-thought and determined by the couples themselves (Coontz, 2005). Couples today have to be partners in having their marriage work. Coontz (2005) writes that married couples today “need to be more intentional about their lives and about the reasons and the rituals that help them stay together.”

What many couples want today are the choice and the responsibility to co-create and design their lives together. In today’s marriage, it is important for both spouses to have choice over their career, their lifestyle, their family aspirations and their future. They don’t want their roles and responsibilities to be dictated by societal institutions. Women, like men, want to be free to pursue a career. Many more men, like women, want to participate in raising their children and in the routines of the household. Both individuals in the marriage also want to know that they are equal contributors in their marriage and they have equity or fairness in their roles and responsibilities. In this context of choice and responsibility, couples today must actively engage with each other in how to build, sustain, and deepen their commitments over time (Coontz, 2005).

References

Coontz, S. (2005) Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. New York, New York: Penguin Books.

Harrar, S. & DeMaria, R. (2007) The seven stages of marriage: Laughter, intimacy, and passion, today, tomorrow, and forever. Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest.

**Same-sex marriage became legal in the United States on June 26, 2015, when the Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage in all fifty states.  The Supreme Court also required all states to honor out-of-state same-sex marriages.

Posted in Partnership Marriage