Sociology - Family Relationships - Marriage - Essay Example

It is both a physical and a mental need of every human being. People need to get married in order to develop a healthy society where children know who their parents are and the parents are liable to fulfill their children’s individual, social and economical needs. This is fundamental to the development of a progressive and humanistic society. Marriage squeeze is potentially an imbalance between the number of brides and grooms in a certain community. For example, the African America men tend to marry white American ladies leaving almost 43% African American women between the ages of 30 to 34 years unmarried.

(Newsweek cited in Darleene, 2007). However, the women of the community tend to restrict themselves to African American men because of several reasons. Thus, there are more grooms in the African American community than brides. Marrying down is a term used to refer to the cases when an individual from a certain social and economic class tends to marry another from a lower class. Most African American women tend to marry down as they usually find no choice but to marry lower class men of their race.

Some of the key factors that play a decisive role in the continuation of marriage are unemployment, lack of trust, lack of love and sincerity, abuse (either verbal or physical or both), infertility, unrealistically high expectations and financial distress. These are the factors that tempt the individual partners of the couple to break down the marriage in general. However, the most fundamental factors that decide whether or not a couple will stay married are the ability of either of the two partners to compromise, the degree of importance they impart to their relationship and the time they allow for the issues to get settled.

If a couple is determined to stay married, nothing can destroy it. Sooner or later, every thing gets settled down and the two start to find comfort and peace in their