Marriage: What’s It Good For?
Summary
TIME’s feature, “Marriage: What’s It Good For?,” reports that marriage is not as necessary as it used to be. PAIRS CEO Seth Eisenberg argues it’s not marriage that’s broken, but that couples haven’t learned the new rules of love and intimacy.
Belinda Luscombe considers the future of marriage in today’s TIME Magazine feature, “Marriage, What’s It Good For?”
From the perspective of the upcoming Royal wedding of Britain’s Prince William and Catherine Middleton and a recent national survey, the report comes to the early conclusion, “What we found is that marriage, whatever its social, spiritual or symbolic appeal, is in purely practical terms just not as necessary as it used to be.”
PAIRS is featured in the article’s final question, “What to Do About I Do?”
“The basis of marriage changed in the last century,” says Seth Eisenberg, president and CEO of the PAIRS Foundation, one of the biggest relationship-education operations in the country. “But very few couples have had a chance to learn really what are the new rules of love and intimacy — not because the rules are so difficult to learn, just because no one told them. To interpret that as meaning there’s something broken about the institution of marriage itself would be a horrible, horrible mistake.”
Marriage educators’ solution is to bolster marriage, to teach people how to better communicate with their spouses. While they believe their techniques could work with any couple, they’re big advocates of the legal union. Marriage is like glue, says Eisenberg. You can build something with it. Living together is like Velcro. “The commitment of marriage gives people the opportunity to grow and thrive in ways that other relationships do not,” he says.
For the full article, visit time.com.
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