Why Don’t Marriages Work?
Greetings, Henry here today. Why do more than 50% of marriages not work? A certain number of people who get married are mentally ill, and another percentage are character disorders. Such people are usually very hard to live with successfully. But that small number does not account for the 50% divorce rate. What does?
The psychologist Dr. Carl G. Jung tells us that we all have within our own hearts the person who will complete us, an ideal image of the magical other. When we find our love we feel like we have found the person who completes us like no other. Now we are going to have the perfect relationship, the perfect marriage. Our partner is, of course, finding their perfect figure in us. Their feeling, like ours, is that now everything is going to be perfect.
The problem is that once we marry, we discover that our partner is not perfect nor do they really fulfill our image of the perfect partner. They are also finding out the same thing about us. Bummer.
What we have to do is become more conscious. We have to get to know this magical figure within our own hearts. It is never easy is to get to know this other side of our own personality. Jung called this aspect of our personality the anima in men and the animus in woman. The key is that to help the process of making our marriages work we need to get to know ourselves better. Strange as it may seem the old Greek phrase “Know thyself,” is critical to our success. Once we know that image in our own minds, we can start to to see our partner for who they are, instead of getting mad at them for not being our ideal person.