Author: Evelyn Martinez (Page 4 of 7)

Pro-marriage traditionalists and alt-right pundits love to argue that human marriages were much simpler and more harmonious in the good old days — by which they seem to mean 1950s-style single- breadwinner marriages — skimming over the tiny matters of widespread patriarchal enslavement, indentured servitude, domestic violence, the legality of marital rape, and the inability of American women to own property in their own name until at least 1839. But those gold-standard marriages actually represent a historical anomaly. As Stephanie Coontz asserts in her book Marriage, a History, for thousands of years, most women and children shared the tasks of breadwinning with men.

• In this paragraph the writer is bringing up how old school generations viewed marriage by bringing up an author from a book. 

The notion that love should be the main reason to marry began to take hold only in the late-18th century, according to Coontz. Before then, as Northwestern psychology professor Eli Finkel points out in his study of the history of marital satisfaction and success in America, marriage was mostly a matter of survival. Having a spouse helped you harvest the crops and produced more workers to do the same. If Pa brought home a deer and Ma fried up some griddle cakes real nice, and then Pa played the fiddle while Ma cleaned up, what you had right there was a healthy marriage. Pa didn’t need to confront his inability to properly tune his fiddle or sing in key, let alone address his recurring tendency to step on the punch lines of Ma’s jokes when entertaining company. If the dirt floor was swept and the corn was high, all was well.

• The writer in this paragraph brought up a senterio for us to get the image of how marriage worked back then. And explained that if the marriage had equality then it was a perfect marriage. 

Starting in the mid-1960s, Finkel asserts, married couples began to expect not just emotional sustenance and sexual satisfaction from each other but also a kind of mutual empowerment. He suggests that this at least partially explains why the divorce rate started to climb around then: High expectations turned good marriages into great marriages, while those uneasy, imperfect pairings began to feel hopelessly inadequate. Whereas marriage was once seen as a joint effort to achieve the good life, these days marriage looks more like a joint attempt to live your best lives — together and separately.

• In this P. the writer talks how high expectations are ruining marriage and sometimes people just stay in marriages because they are used to that person with them. 

Which is … a lot. It’s hard enough just to live peacefully with someone by your side making noises, emitting smells, undoing what you’ve just done, interrupting, undercutting, begging to differ. Once you throw in Tinder, internet porn, and our scrolling, tl;dr attention spans, marriage seems not just antiquated but utterly absurd. So why do I love this torturous state of affairs so much? The daily companionship, the shared household costs, and the tax breaks are not enough. Maybe I’m the sort of weak bird who would rather wait for her very flawed mate to come home than go out preening and showboating just to wind up with another flawed mate in the end.

• In this paragraph the author brings us how modern things are ruining traditions and how the internet is making things lose their meaning. 

And yet there’s something distinctly reassuring about breaking down, falling into disrepair, losing your charms, misplacing your keys, when you have an equally inept and irritating human tolerating it all, in spite of a million and one very good reasons to put on his walking boots and take his love to town. If marriage is irrational, in other words, as with child-rearing and ambition and art, that’s also part of its appeal. Even when my husband and I go through a rough time, bickering more than usual over how many tantrums a 12-year-old should throw per day or how long a particularly fussy loaf of bread should be left to rise, after we’ve spent a few weeks staring at our phones at night instead of enjoying each other’s company, I can always trust that we’ll enter an equal and opposite period of humble satisfaction and connection. The other day, in the wake of such a market correction, we began our morning walk with the dogs (who are too neurotic to be walked by one person alone), and my husband announced, “The first thing I thought when I woke up this morning was, You don’t have what it takes. You never did and you never will.” This made us both laugh loudly for a solid block.

• This paragraph the writer brings her personal life and talks about her marriage. And how theres a balance of support that her and her partner give each other. 

Marriage can’t simply be about living your best lives in sync. Because some of the peak moments of a marriage are when you share in your anxieties, your fears, your longing, and even your horrors. That commitment, the one that can withstand and even revel in the darkest corridors of a life, grows and evolves and eventually transcends a contract or a ceremony the way an ocean overflows and subsumes a thimble of water.

• Here the writer talks about how in marriage the pair need to have dark times to build a stronger bond. 

My husband is a good person who makes great bread and has a perfect golf swing (not that I know or even care what that means). He also wears golf shirts, which are perhaps the least-attractive article of clothing available to humankind. I myself am a wise guru type of writer who knows everything about everything, which makes me about as appealing a mate as Jabba the Hutt, if Jabba talked to his dogs more than his children and blamed his hormones every time he fed someone new to the rancor. We are both catastrophically flawed.

• The author bring the bad side of her argument to prove that marriage is something nice if they show each one their flaws. 

But by unearthing our most discouraged moments together without turning away, by screeching at the moon side by side, admitting “This is all our fault,” we don’t just reaffirm our love, we reaffirm our shared and separate ability to face the unknown from this point forward. That’s why sickness and death are key to marriage vows. Because there is nothing more divine than being able to say, out loud, “Today, I am really, truly at my worst,” knowing that it won’t make your spouse run for the hills. My husband has seen my worst before. We both know that our worst is likely to get worse from here. Somehow that feels like grace.

• The way that the writer concluded her article was by giving her a reason for why she prefers to stay married. She add facts about her personal life