Is it possible for a woman to be married and happy? For large numbers of women in the Republic, it seems, it is not. In unprecedented droves, women are packing their bags and, as one women put it "walking back to happiness". What on earth has induced women - who have been traditionally construed as the cornerstones of the home, the guardians of the young, the containers of self-control, conscience and morality - to abandon what was for generations their traditional and supposedly most fulfilling role? Research on depression says that marital bliss was frequently not as blissful for women as it was painted to be. Indeed, this research identified married woman as among the least likely people to be happy. Married women suffer depression far more often than their single counterparts.
Conversely, statistics on depression suggest that marriage is good for men, providing them with nurturance, status, love, a sexual partner, genetic/biological continuation and a carer for their material world and environment. They have been found to be in better physical health after middle age, to be psychologically less stressed and half as likely to commit suicide as their single counterparts.
But if marriage is supposedly of such psychological and material benefit to men, why are they also moving so frequently from one marriage to the next?
There's a general perception that marriage for life is over. People say that serial marriages and diverse relationships - rather than death-us-do-part monogamy - will be the family configurations of the 21st century. Marriage, as we have known it, is to be replaced by serial monogamy of unpredictable intensity, strength and duration.
The classic explanations for the demise of this most sacred institution have become simplistic, repetitive and predictable. They have suggested that discontent has centred on who does the shopping, cooks the meals, minds the children, does the laundry and, most importantly, who cleans the toilet. In summary, who gets the better deal and who gets the greater street cred for what they do. Having done a cost-benefit analysis, it was found women in particular began opting out.
Traditionally, women complained that their worth was undermined by the menial tasks they undertook, the lack of social affirmation of the housewife or indeed the working wife, the disincentives for women to work outside the home and the prohibitive price of creche and child-minding facilities when they did. Other explanations as to why people became dissatisfied with their marital roles are that these roles have undergone such a shift. Today, men and women are different, their expectations are different, and their self-definitions have changed or been changed for them. The previous apparent complementarity of marital roles, with husband as provider and wife as supporter, have transmogrified into a competitive symmetry, with each seeking satisfaction, status and support.
But while women are re-inventing themselves, men are left in confusion with the ambiguity of their newly prescribed roles. With the dismantling of patriarchal power and privilege, men have been plummeted into a social vacuum from which "new men" are expected to emerge. However, men object that they are being asked to be emotionally sensitive in the manner defined by women, not in their own masculine manner of self-expression. They are not to be allowed to gain support from the secrecy and succour of previously male-only enclaves: the club, the pub and the golf club. All kinds of previous crass allowances - in jokes, attitudes and behaviour - have become politically incorrect and legislatively punishable.
While attitudinal changes are welcome, there are also many courteous older men who say that they are now afraid to pass the most civil of compliments to a woman, lest it be defined as sexual harassment or innuendo.
The increase in the number of women managers in the work-place, allied to the increase in the number of successful female-headed, single-parent households, has sent a message to men that they are intellectually, biologically and psychologically dispensable to marriage, mating and fatherhood. Many have viewed themselves as dispossessed of the symbols of their masculinity.
In the past a "good husband" was often defined as a good father and provider with non-drinker and non-violent as added attributes. A women was defined as a good wife if she was a virgin before marriage, a prolific mother, a careful spender of her husband's hard-earned cash and if she was adequately, but not obsessionally, house-proud. Men held the power and the purse strings, and the capacity to give or to withhold finance, advantage and protection to their wives and children. They drove the family car, decided on family outings, arranged all the major household appliance purchases and literally and symbolically held the remote control in the household.
Domestic violence was often high, and this is not confined to women. Many men also claimed the pain of hidden oppression in marriage, and research has also unveiled a substantial percentage of men who were not just psychologically, but physically attacked by wives and equally disempowered and disbelieved when they sought legal or social understanding of their situation.
One of the major explanations for the cessation of marriage was that a new social climate and financial support allowed previously oppressed victims of marriage to leave. But there is more to it than that. People are no longer simply seeking the absence of aggression. They are actively searching for multi-layered validation of self, gender, role, societal participation and potential. In 21st century dual-career, dual-income families, there is an implicit expectation, particularly among equally educated professional couples, that roles are equal, tasks are divided and commitment is mutual.
As home help and safe child-minding arrangements become more difficult, expensive and complex to obtain, and as the definitions of marriage and parenthood have become equally more complex, dual careerists are faced with work, traffic and travel, social, financial, emotional and marital overload. The old notion that children cemented and consolidated a marriage has been replaced by research suggesting that marital quality decreases and stress increases with the arrival of children. Despite the joy and enrichment it may bring to personal and family ideals, married couples now have to negotiate new roles as parents. Furthermore, as life expectancy increases, so too does the life-span of marriage. Now, one could conceivably live in wedded disharmony for up to 70 or more years.
Whether any, all, or none of the above explanations for the changes in marriage are sufficient, what is significant is that in the Republic there were, at last count, more than 120,000 people who had been left or who had left their marriages. This is a cause for concern rather than an object of critique. What is it that has not been provided in our society to allow the continuation and survival of what is indisputably, when it works, a valuable, safe, emotional, sexual and psychological context for men and women, and a nurturing and supportive milieu for children?
I think that we have been too quick to embrace diversity before exploring the possible means of retaining people in relationships, discovering what is required to allow people to live in dignity, mutual respect, equality and love together - "for as long as they both shall live".
Because, marriage is still important to us. Despite the fin-desiecle pessimism and new millennium materialism, the statistics for marriage are doing a turnabout again. While divorce may be rampant, marriage is also on the increase, up one-sixth in the Republic since early 1998. The vast majority of people still choose marriage as a way of life.
At the end of the day, despite all the contraindications, there are also clinical and marital therapy findings that men and women can resuscitate many marriages and that they can live together. International research indicates that up to 96 per cent of people aspire to marriage at some time in their lives. Regardless of the so-called break-down of marriage, people find themselves wishing and wanting to undertake the process again and again. Marriage has, perhaps, been overly researched in its negativity. What about the many, many happy, nurturing, loving and fulfilling marriages that continue in this post-modernist age? What are their ingredients? What is the crucial factor between workability and unworkability? Here are some possibilities. In a society that valued marriage, a Constitution that guarded it, a social climate that discouraged divorce, and a religious code that was dogmatic in its injunctions that families stay together, there was a belief that relationships were sacred and durable. They were therefore worthy of work during the hard times and understanding during the distressing times.
While one would not wish to return to any forms of oppressive past, there has been an overcorrection in our approach to marriage. The media construction of marriage has proliferated an image of erosion, a powerful message of immediacy, consumerism, instant gratification, infidelity, and the rights of parents to "personal" happiness over the rights of children to stability. The media have taught us an intolerance of patience, of waiting it out until it gets better. We flick from one channel to the next if subjected to even seconds of boredom. Additionally, many men and women report that they cannot compete with the media images of masculinity and feminism and physical perfection that are portrayed as a norm. If you are not it, you are out.
To have challenged past practices of oppression, which at one time were legally sanctioned by marriage, was a good thing. But in classic tradition the baby has been thrown out with the bath water. The best has been lost with the destruction of the worst. Common sense and clinical experience confirm that a good marriage is not a bad way to live one's life.
For the clinical psychologist or family therapist, the pain of marriage breakdown is a daily reality in the eyes of rejected husbands, abandoned wives and distressed children, some of whom struggle with confused sibling relationships; with half brothers and sisters who may be biologically unrelated to each other. Children are often also attempting to deal with a series of parental surrogates.
New marriages are increasingly under strain in their attempts to deal with the parenting of these new complex configurations in the reconstituted family. This is not good for mental health, not to mention marriage.
So before we construct too many obstacles to people even imagining that they might love someone right through to older age, let us call a gender cease-fire. Is it possible for men and women to be good friends again? Nietzsche may have had a point when he said that "it is not lack of love but lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages". It is possible to re-invent and reconstruct institutions, as we well know from the recent systematic dismantling and renewal of many our most revered Irish institutions. Surely if we have survived what we have survived together, men and women can work out new marital roles for a new millennium.