Happily Ever After...
So, the girls and I are sitting there eating lunch. The topic has ranged from the impending wedding of one of our number, via the interesting program 'Middle Sex' and ended up at marriages both successful and unsuccessful across the generations.
I mentioned that astonishingly enough, many psychologists think soap operas are a good thing for adolescents and adults to watch as they show what happens to couples after the perfect day of the wedding. You know, when the bills haven't been paid, your partner has lost their job and the washing machine has broken down - again.
Another friend agreed, and stated that some marriages of our parents' generation might have ended due to the inflated expectations inculcated by the happy ever after fairy-tales, where the end of the story is the joyful getting together and skipping off into the perfect sunset, not the beginning.
But perhaps these happy-ever-after stories once had a purpose too? When the reality of a happy marriage to the individual of your choice was sheer good luck rather than your right, then these fantasy tales might have held a measure of applicable make-believe and a pattern of what should be strived for.
Until relatively recently in our history, when you got leg-shackled, it was for life - period. If you didn't get on with your chap then tough, nothing you could do about it short of murder. In those circumstances, maybe the fairy tales gave you an outlet for pent up emotions and something to daydream about, whilst being sufficiently removed from reality and heavily dosed with enough idealism in the sanctity of marriage to make the idea of adultery if not distateful, then at least not immediately attractive. Also the idea that once married, things went swimmingly and that this is the way it should be is a powerful one. If you have no option of leaving each other once married, you better make a bloody good effort to keep it going. The alternative would have led to a great deal of bitterness and wretchedness.
Bizarre that you could trace a connection (albeit tenous) between Cinderella and Eastenders but there you go. One wonders what the next development will be? The mind boggles...
posted by Shizue @ 8:38 PM
6 Comments:
I've had a similar conversation, during which we pose dthe hypothesis that our generation are less likely to have failed marriages than the few previous, as we grew up during the 'divorce boom'. Divorce came to real genuine usualness while we were little. at school i had only two close friends out of about a dozen whose parents were still together. we hoped our generation would have learned from that, and hope we're more likely to get married for the right reasons.
I got married for the right reason: my husband's the sexyest bestest wonderfullest man in the world, so we're really compatible!
See I had the opposite experience and still do in a way. When my parents separated (and later divorced) most people I knew still had both sets of parents married. That was 1989 onwards. Even now I still feel in the minority amongst my friends, BUT many tell me that although their parents are together they are not happy and I guess that's just as sad too. I think you're right in one respect - those who do get married now are probably more likely to have thought about it seriously than the sixties baby boom generation did, BUT divorce being acceptable now means a lot of people aren't bothered at all about marriage. So tell me Celine, what made you decide to get married rather than simply cohabit as they say?
None of you probably care but for the sake of accuracy, I just wanted to clarify what I meant by 'sixties baby boom generation'.I did of course mean the baby boom generation that were born after the war and came of age in the sixties (i.e. our parents) and not people born in the sixties. There, well I'm glad that's cleared that one up - even if you're not!!!
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ooh, ooh. Who deleted something? Was it extremely controversial? I'm not easily offended you know.
Nothing exciting - it was just me posting the same comment twice by accident!!!
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