Myth or Maxim

There are many myths about the family and marriage that are thought of as fact. For example, as a young girl I believed that you grow up and fall in love with the one prince charming who was destined to be yours. Then you continue on to wear a big white dress, marry, and live happily ever after for the rest of forever because you are so in love. It is crucial for us to be able to recognize what is real and what is not. Most myths have a tiny bit of truth in them that we can usually relate to. This leads us into thinking that these notions are true. Sometimes our idea of family and marriage is based on unrealistic standards that could never be upheld. In order to maintain healthy relationships and be confident in said relationships we must comprehend the difference between myth and truth.

One common myth about family life is that your marriage will be happier if you add children into the mix. Many studies have disproved this myth showing that raising children takes so much effort and energy that couples usually don’t have time to keep working on and building their own relationship as much as they did prior. Children also add to the financial stresses that may already be prevalent in the marriage. This causes more disagreements and sometimes more time spent working, and less time spent together. Having children does not put stress on every marriage, if you continue to learn and grow closer as a couple through these years then there wasn’t really a solution needed. However, on the flip side if your relationship continues to slide downhill the relationship was probably on its way under.

The next myth that I would like to address is the belief that half of all marriages end in divorce. Is there really even a proper way to collect the data on this? You could start by taking all the marriages from the state of Michigan in the year 2017and all the divorces in the state of Michigan in the year 2017 and go from there. But how many people who got married in different states decided to get divorced in Michigan? Another thing to take into consideration is how many couples who were married in previous years got divorced in 2017? There are also varying rates of divorce between different social status’, religions, generations, and cultures. It seems that there simply is not a way to calculate a completely accurate divorce rate.

Another myth about marriage that is widely accepted in is that happy marriages don’t contain any conflict. Conflict is normal in relationships, and even healthy and strengthening if you handle it in the proper way. One cannot expect to have a close and meaningful partnership, friendship, or any other kind of relationship completely free of conflict. It is simply in our nature to disagree on somethings, but conflict is okay. The important thing is how you engage in the conflict. Conflict is usually between two goods, mutually exclusive, but equally good. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints it is my belief that our Heavenly Father created this world with conflict. He created land conflicting with water, he created light conflicting with darkness, and he created male conflicting with female. We cannot expect to live a conflict free life if Heavenly Father gave us the example of good conflict to begin with. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog this week! I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about marriage and family and how I can someday strengthen my own.