In the United Kingdom 40% of marriages end in divorce. America has the highest divorce rate, and the highest rate of solo parents in the world. 37% of American children will grow up in a household without both biological parents. Clearly there is something going wrong here. There is more to this finding a partner thing than picking a man, scoring a date, getting married and living happily ever after. Something is causing relationships to fail more and more regularly, and no-one is taking the responsibility for what that is.
One of the most likely causes for all this is that both men and woman are putting less time and effort into their relationships and family lives as other things take precedence. The average age of first marriage for a woman has risen by 7 years over the past two decades, and at the same time the average working week of a woman has risen by 15 hours. The relationship between the figures is obvious and undeniable. As the workplace gets more and more focus for woman, relationships get less and less. This has always been a problem for men, but their focus on work was balanced by a female focus on family and relationships. Those old stereotypes are less and less true.
At the same time, all our primal drive remains the same. We still want relationships, and we still want babies. Our biological clocks will tell us loud and clear what our bodies want. As we achieve levels of success in our work life that are unheard of in former generations of women, the cost is our social lives. As we hit our 30's and have a highly successful career - but no husband - our mothers shake their heads. They have already lowered their expectations for us from a nice doctor or lawyer, to a working professional, to a man with a job, to a man who is breathing... And unconsciously we may well be doing the same.
Our culture tells us we can do it all. It is meant to be easy to hold down a job and put that effort into our work life, without losing all the energy and commitment that former generations of woman put in full time to relationships. We see the image thrust at us on television and in magazines all the time, but the simple fact is that woman don't put the same heart and soul into finding the right guy and developing a deep relationship with him that we did in former generations. We can't. There's not enough hours in the day to fill all the roles all the time. So we expect men to pick up the slack. If we can take on the work role that has been the traditional male area for so many generations, why can't they take on the role of nurturing relationships and family that has been the female role?
Perhaps you can start to see where we are going wrong here? We are so wrapped up in equality that we forget that men and woman are actually different. Woman and men have different strengths and weaknesses, and if we don't acknowledge that we are going to continue to see higher divorce rates, lower marriage rates, children being born later in their parents lives and everyone getting extremely frustrated with everyone else.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Rob Dee
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