Super Marital Sex Rule: The marriage is the most important element of each partner’s life. All other persons’ concerns always come after the marriage, never before or instead of it. No one is more important or of equal importance to your spouse in the super marriage.
He should have married his mother. She ran his life, runs his life, and will always try to run our marriage if he lets her. If he would have married her, it would have saved time on gas and phone bills. ,
WIFE
American marriage is under constant bombardment by extraneous influences, as is clear from the MIM factor. Work, schools, hospitals, governmental agencies, family, and neighbors continually impinge on marriages, stretching them to provide for others what the marriage can not provide for the couple itself.
When daily living was not so anonymous, so computerized, mechanical, and fast-paced, marital and family life was free to respond more to the natural cycles of life, the changes within and among people. Now the American marriage is a socially reactive unit more than it is an intimate active relationship that governs itself.
A call from school, a computer-generated message, car phones that can even let you know if you were called while you left your car, all place us under the potential continued surveillance of others. We have become a “beeperized” culture, never really out of touch as long as a little tone reminds us that a person out there needs us more urgently than the person here with us now.
Parents live longer, so responsibilities in parenting parents as well as children have emerged. In those couples who had parents living, “parenting parents resulted in obligations, distractions,” and sometimes guilt that encroached on marriage. In-laws miles away affect the marriage, with recurring themes of conflict regarding who said or did not say what to whom or who did not attend what family function or did not call enough.
It is certainly not just obligation and distraction that invades the marriage, but difficulties finding a new relationship with parents and others once we are married. Extended families require a psychological maturity that few of us attain. Sometimes it takes all of our energy to be, as one husband put it ‘just civil’. We may unconsciously resent the fact that our time which our spouse takes away from the expiring time available for relating to our parents. How much of what is done for whom relates to guilt, fear of loss, and split between loving now and loving for the past.
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