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THE CONFESSIONAL: Gloria, 38
My career is very important to me. I need to feel purposeful and that I'm constantly growing and learning. As a result, I often choose work over relationships. My mother, because of a bad marriage, had to give up a lucrative job. She's always felt unfulfilled, and in some respects, I believe that she resents us (my dad, my siblings) for keeping her from realizing her goals. And I see my sister, who needs to be Suzy Homemaker to make her husband happy. I feel like her identity is totally wrapped up in her status as a wife and soon-to-be mother. I don't want that to happen to me. At the end of the day, you can point to your achievements and say, "That's mine and no one else's." That's important to me. I worry that I would be less inclined to take opportunities because of my partner.
2. Le Divorce: Unhappily Ever AfterIf our careers are a convenient excuse to avoid commitment, then the collective fear of divorce is an even bigger doozy. I mean, who would be brave enough to get in a car if it meant you had a 50 percent chance of dying before you got where you were going? Talk about some bad odds!
Having lived through the record-setting divorce decade of the 1980s, many of us have developed a natural suspicion of the marital institution. Because our parents were expected to get married, have kids, and put everything else on hold (many times before they were sufficiently ready), disillusion, dismay, and divorce frequently followed. As a result, many of us are understandably gun-shy, having seen the devastating effects that divorce can have. Even if our parents gallantly stuck it out for the sake of the children, putting up with the constant turmoil in our younger years often made us wish they hadn't.
Whether it was watching our parents quarrel, toil away in unfulfilling relationships, or suffer the hardships that accompany a single-parent lifestyle, we swore that that would never be us; we vowed to never end up in a similar situation. Now that we're older and, we hope, a bit wiser, many of us still haven't quite gotten over the past.
THE CONFESSIONAL: Teri, 29
My parents are divorced. My dad is remarried to a woman eighteen years his junior and is a workaholic, and my mom is single and dating. My mom tends to date guys with a lot of money and older or much younger. I take marriage really seriously. I have seen too many people look at it like, "Well, you can always get a divorce, so what the heck." I think it would work for me because I am not one to settle for just anyone I am comfortable with, and I am realistic on the downsides because I have seen it all before.
With the 50 percent marital survival rate lodged firmly in our brains, there's a lot more riding on our choices. The stakes of love become so high that it becomes virtually impossible to relate to others in a calm and nonvigilant manner. We worry that the wrong choice of partner could lead to an unhappy union, culminating in an acrimonious and bitter divorce.
If he even as much as glances at another girl, we mentally file him away as a serial cheater. If he innocently asks us to do the dishes one night, we imagine a life of household chores and domestic drudgery. If he doesn't call three nights in a row, we brand him a raging commitment-phobe, thus conveniently avoiding dealing with our own anxiety about commitment. And his socks, the ones that looked so cute lying on the living room floor when we first started dating, suddenly morph into deal breakers once he's moved in.
With so many failed marriages, soured relationships, and broken unions, many of us assume that in order to be successful in love, we have to beat the system and find the one person who is perfect for us in every way, the one person who will never, ever land us in divorce court. But as we all know, there's no such thing as a divorce insurance policy.
THE DOCTOR IS INParents who got divorced can have a very big impact on women in terms of fear of commitment, especially if it was a volatile divorce or if the divorce didn't make sense to the child. For instance, if a child saw that the parents get divorced but had thought that the parents loved each other (never saw them arguing or having any open conflicts), and all of a sudden it came out of the blue, then often when these children grow up into adults, they start distrusting their own judgment of their own ability to love and be loved.
-- Debra Mandel, Ph.D. Continued ...
