Advice to Newlyweds about How to Maintain a Happy Marriage - Research Paper Example

Advice to newlyweds about how to maintain a happy marriage: In the modern age, dual career marriages have immensely increased in number. This has caused both husbands and wives to reconsider their traditional marital roles and responsibilities. In a conventional nuclear family, husband assumes the role of bread earner for the family, whereas a wife takes care of the household and looks after the children. As wives have started to build up their careers like their husbands outside their homes, this has called for an altogether change in the share of their responsibilities towards their families.

Wives are neither ready nor able to take care of their children the way they did in the past because of their social responsibilities and commitment towards their work. As a result of this, more and more men have conventionally acceded to go against their nature and change the diapers at home, though this is not all that is required to sustain the marital satisfaction for either of the two members. While men have tried to share the childcare responsibilities with their wives to assist them in their work, wives have generally increased their demands.

They require the husbands to be equally, and in some cases, even more responsible for the childcare than them. This is one of the most common causes of marital dissatisfaction in the contemporary age. This paper suggests some ways in which marital satisfaction in dual career marriages can be increased. Household responsibilities need to be taken very seriously by both partners. If they are left upon the willingness of anybody, they will largely remain unaccepted. In order to retain marital satisfaction along with adequately managing the household responsibilities, it is imperative that assignment of the responsibilities results from mutual consent and agreement of both the partners.

Therefore, the solution of this problem obviously requires both the partners to show maximum cooperation and compromise. The first and the foremost thing that is required to solve the issue of sharing of household responsibilities is getting organized. The problem needs to be sorted out with immense care and sequence. Both partners need to identify their objectives. This should be done with due respect to each other’s feelings. After laying out the objectives, full list of the household responsibilities needs to be made.

In this list, each responsibility should be named. Time to achieve every objective should be decided. The spouse wanting the accomplishment of individual objectives should be named and the importance of the objective should be rated on a scale from 0 to 5, in which 0 signifies “no importance” and 5 signifies “extreme importance” by both partners. This initial list will clearly portray both partners’ opinions on every objective. Both partners should then select responsibilities that they would happily take.

Responsibilities regarding the left over objectives should then be assigned to the partner who wants them achieved the most. Although this is quite difficult to achieve, yet the partners don’t have much choice to avail. Also, as the results start to show up, they are usually more pleasing than originally anticipated by the partners. References: Regan, P. C. (2008). The mating game: a primer on love, sex, and marriage. Sage Publications.