Romantic Love and Marriage - Essay Example

Recent statistics suggests that romantic love is not the only principle of long-lasting and happy marriage. Today, the main reasons of divorces include early marriages, different opinions about their responsibilities in a family, and getting marriages without mutual feelings. One third of all families in the USA are divorced in spite of the fact that they have romantic love and true feelings when they married (Chalmers 2006). In contrast, those families and partners who did not have true romantic feelings when married are more stable unions and only 10% of such families are divorced.

Thesis Romantic love is not the only principles of happy and stable marriage. The partners in a successful marriage are those who have learned how to function after the music stops, after romance and its heart-tripping frenzy has cooled. Everyone's heard that love can't last forever, and this is true simply because you don't live forever. But love does often last a lifetime, although its nature changes over the years. Margaret Reedy of the University of Southern California has studied this idea of loving happily ever after and the age differences in satisfying love relationships.

She chose 102 married couples for her study. They were people who had been judged by others who knew them well to be very much in love (Sternberg and Barnes 22). They were divided into three groups: young adults, married an average of five years; middle-aged adults, married an average of twenty-one years; and older adults, married an average of thirty-seven years. Each of the satisfied lovers was asked to complete a list of statements, rating each in terms of how well it described his or her current love relationship.

These statements reflected a wide variety of possible experiences people might have in love relationships, and in turn reflected the six components of love we mentioned earlier (emotional security, referring to feelings of trust, caring, concern and warmth; respect, which means being able to be tolerant, understanding and patient; the ability to spend time together, working as well as playing; communication, being able to be honest and self-revealing, and being a good listener; loyalty, or a sense of investment and commitment; sexual intimacy).

Statistical results suggest that "The divorce rate in 2005 (per 1,000 people) was 3.6 -- the lowest rate since 1970, and down from 4.2 in 2000 and from 4.7 in 1990" (Divorce statistics 2008). There was, first of all, a clear indication that the nature of love in satisfying relationships is different at different ages. For example, the couples who assessed their current love alliance supported the common idea that passion and sexual intimacy are relatively more important in early adulthood, whereas tender feelings of affection and loyalty are more important in the love relationships of later life.

The findings also supported the notion that, over time, love associations are less likely to be based on intense companionship and communication, and more likely to be base