The Relative Importance of Love and Friendship in Marriage - Literature review Example

23 September The Relative Importance of Love and Friendship in Marriage People dreamof successful marriages these days. There are many factors that play their role in making a marriage successful. Two of the most important factors that play a decisive role in the success of a marriage are friendship and love. One factor that is common between friendship and love is that both inculcate positive sentiments in two people about each other. Factors that differentiate between friendship and love include but are not limited to definitions, underlying beliefs, level of comfort and openness between the partners, similarity of views, ease of expression, and the tendency to sustain the relationship till the end of the life. “The commitment to marry is perhaps the most important and most complex decision made by individuals irrespective of geography or cultural background” (Srinivasan). The financial, emotional, and psychological implications of breakup from marriage in the life of the partners are immense. Therefore, many people want to benefit from others’ experiences and know whether friendship or love is a stronger predictor of success in marriage so that they can select the right partner for marriage. Different people hold different views regarding the strength of the role of friendship in making a marriage successful relative to that of love and vice versa, thus providing the topic ground for debate. There is no clear interface between friendship and love. Many feelings and emotions are common between friendship and love, including care, empathy, respect, sincerity, expectations, and honesty. The enormity of these similar factors incorporates subjectivity in people’s judgment of whether it was friendship or love that made the marriage of a particular couple successful. Therefore, there is no robust basis of people’s support for either friendship or love as the determinant of successful marriage. One thing that fundamentally differentiates between friendship and love is that friendship does not need a physical relationship to grow whereas physical relationship is a fundamental element in the growth of love between marital partners. Since sexual health of individuals may deteriorate over the time, something more important than love is required to sustain the marriages. Friendship between two people is a stronger predictor of success in their marriage than love. It is hard to mark a strict boundary between friendship and love since the two often overlap in several areas. Both friendship and love lay the basis of every successful relationship, be that a marriage, the relationship of a mother and a daughter, or any other kind of relationship. People make friends with individuals they can place confidence in and share their feelings, emotions, and secrets with and the same holds true for love. Like love, friendship removes the barriers people normally place between themselves and others to keep them from learning about their secrets. People make friends because they like each other’s personalities and characters, and accept each other along with all of their strengths and weaknesses. Love also demands pretty much the same. The most important factor that differentiates between friendship and love is sex. Sex between the marital partners is a fundamental cause and effect of love between them. When two people enter the contract of marriage because of their love for each other, the marriage is just as healthy as the physical relationship between the two. “[F]riends may engage in casual sex, but may also become involved romantically” (Barry and Madsen 1). One of the most important reasons why certain friends get married to each other is that they want to make love to each other in a way that is legitimate both in the eyes of the religion and the culture. “Marriage is a natural institution whereby a man and a woman give themselves to each other for life in a sexual relationship that is open to procreation – a union which is publicly recognised, honoured and supported because of its unique capacity to generate new human life and to meet children’s deepest needs for the love and attachment of both their father and their mother” (“Marriage: Myths”). The importance of sex can be estimated from the fact that many marriages break because of the partners’ dissatisfaction in sex. Sex is an expression of love in marriage, so the quality of love is directly influenced by the quality of sex between the partners in marriage. However, friendship does not need sex between the marital partners to continue being with each other, and is the fundamental factor that carries the couple through to the old age when the partners hardly ever have sex with each other. Love may subside as sex recedes, but friendship between the couple sustains through time until the end of life. Friendship is more comfortable as a relationship as compared to love, and it is this comfort that helps the marriage sustain. Friends can be approached at any time for any kind of purpose. One feels free in the company of a friend because one knows that the friend is aware of one’s personality. One does not have to pretend in order to pacify the friends and thus be with them, but here love differs from friendship particularly in context of marriage. Unlike the friends, one has to care about a lot of things while dealing with a lover. People spend a lot of time thinking what they should wear and how are they looking before proceeding to meet their lovers. Some people are much more reserved as a person in front of a lover than in front of a friend. Emma Sylvester whose marriage is 58 years old shared the secret of her successful marriage in these words, “I didnt know it when I got married, but in retrospect I know its important to have the same basic values. In other words, if youre a free spender, marry somebody who understands that. If youre frugal, you need to marry somebody who understands that, because money is one of the stumbling blocks in marriages. And fortunately we had the same values on most things. Because of this, we really didnt argue. And we really didnt agonize over things. We came to our decisions by just realizing that we had usually the same goals” (Sylvester cited in Pillemer). From her quotes, it can be assessed that Sylvester is basically emphasizing upon the importance of friendship in developing the synchronization between the marital partners rather than love since lovers do not necessarily have the same basic values but friends do. Many couples in love with each other belong to different cultures that cultivate entirely different and sometimes even conflicting values whereas two people cannot make friends with each other without having common values and principles. Like Sylvester said, having same values leaves no room for arguing. Many love marriages fail as a result of the same arguments between the couple and the difference of perspectives originates in the difference of values. According to Cherlin (189), modernity that is related to the power of laws and norms shaping the family structures has weakened for the postmodern theorists and that there has also occurred a decline in the influence of such conventional sources of identity as religion and class. Cherlin (189) notes that the main source of personal identity in the present age is personal relationships. Research shows that love-making before marriage is a risk-factor in marriage. According to Bukstel et al (1978), sex before marriage increases people’s tendency to have extra-marital affairs after marriage. This indicates that what is generally assumed to be love before marriage is in effect nothing but lust, that continues after the marriage and is not limited to the sexual partner. While extra-marital affairs have a tendency to affect the marriage in a negative way, making more friends after marriage does not ruin the marriage because the individual is committed only to the marital partner on a physical level. Unlike love, friendship is neither limited to the marital partner nor does making more friends subjugate the rights of the marital partner in any way. Even when two married people are at distance from each other because of work or any other reason, friendship between them continues unaffected whereas their sexual life is affected. This essentially suggests that friendship is a stronger and more durable bond between the marital partners as compared to love. Moreover, friendship is much more flexible as a bond than love. Friends may not talk to each other for a while but eventually settle their differences and get back together whereas love does not offer this leverage. Concluding, friendship between two people is a better predictor of success in marriage than love. Since love is lust for the most part, two people that marriage each other just because they love each other may lose interest in each other some years after the marriage. On the other hand, two people who are friends with each other before marriage are better able to sustain their marriage through thick and thin because their understanding with each other develops at a higher level than bodily lust. True friends are friends for a lifetime whereas love, for the most part, cultivates on sexual health. Works Cited: Barry, Carolyn M., and Madson, Stephanie D. “Friends and Friendships in Emerging Adulthood.” N.d. Web. 23 Sep. 2012. . Bukstel, L. H. et al. (1978). Projected Extramarital Sexual Involvement in Unmarried College Students. Journal of Marriage and Family. 40: 337-340. Cherlin, Andrew J., The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage, in Susan Ferguson (ed.), Shifting the Center: Understanding Contemporary Families, Third edition (McGraw Hill, 2007), pp. 183-201. “Marriage: Myths and Realities.” Life, Marriage and Family Centre. N.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2012. . Pillemer, Karl A. “Secrets To A Happy Marriage (From the Real Experts).” Huffington Post. 11 June 2012. Web. 23 Sep. 2012. . Srinivasan, A. V. “Friendship: The Vedic Prescription for Hindu Weddings.” N.d. Web. 23 Sep. 2012. . Read More