Couples
need to find a balance between their romantic ideals and the realities of
married life or coupledom. Spending lavishly on a wedding that will be over in
a flash is entirely impractical and frankly (pardon my expression) irrational.
In the world of marriage counselors,
there is a saying that there is an inverse ratio between the size of the
wedding and the length of the marriage. Ted Huston, Ph.D., a professor of
psychology at the University of Texas, carried out a long-term study on newly
married couples. He called it the PAIR project, an acronym for Processes of
Adaptation in Intimate Relationships, and followed 168 couples through the
first two years of marriage. He found that couples who began their
relationships with a high degree of romantic mythology with high expectations
about what love should be had a more difficult time adjusting to married life
than those who started out with more realistic expectations of marriage.
Large
weddings are so romantically charged that the mundanity of modern marriage can
be a huge letdown. In my private
practice as a couples' therapist of 20-plus years, I see firsthand how most
couples regret spending thousands
on a wedding especially when they are experiencing hard times.
Maria Shriver
said recently that she would never have had such a big wedding looking back on
it--and she could afford it. "
Nice read
Posted by: sylvia | June 29, 2017 at 05:01 AM