There are no Soulmates = first lesson in marriage 101
In The Atlantic;In response to:
The First Lesson of Marriage 101: There Are No Soul Mates
A course at Northwestern University teaches students about what makes a healthy relationship.
Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.
Yet nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that. The goal of their course is to help students have more fulfilling love relationships during their lives. In Marriage 101 popular books such as Mating in Captivity and For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage are interspersed with meaty academic studies. Students attend one lecture a week and then meet in smaller breakout groups to discuss the weekly topics, which range from infidelity to addiction, childrearing to sexuality in long-term relationships.
At first glance this class may seem a tad too frivolous for a major research university. But the instructors say it’s not an easy A and its reputation as a meaningful, relevant, and enlightening course has grown steadily over the 14 years it’s been offered. In fact, teachers are forced to turn away eager prospective students every year. This spring, the enrollment will be capped at 100. The class is kept to a manageable size so that students can grapple at a deeply personal level with the material during their discussion sessions.
The Marriage 101 professors believe college is the perfect time for students to learn about relationships. “Developmentally, this is what the college years are all about: Students are thinking about who they are as people, how they love, who they love, and who they want as a partner,” says Alexandra Solomon, a professor and family therapist who will be teaching the course along with a team of four other faculty, all affiliated with Northwestern University’s Family Institute, and 11 teaching assistants. “We’re all really passionate about talking about what makes a healthy relationship.” The professors see the course—which requires journaling exercises, interviews with married couples, and several term papers—as a kind of inoculation against potential life trauma.
Historians tell us that marriage education in America began as a way to keep women’s sexuality in check. “Marriage education has been for hundreds of years aimed at women. It was considered their responsibility to keep the marriage going,” Stephanie Coontz, co-chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families and author of Marriage: A History, tells me. During the 1920s and 1930s, Coontz explains in her book, fears about s*xual liberation and the future of marriage led eugenics proponents like Paul Popenoe to become enthusiastic about marriage counseling. “If we were going to promote a sound population, we would not have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married,” Popenoe wrote............
The First Lesson of Marriage 101: There Are No Soul Mates
A course at Northwestern University teaches students about what makes a healthy relationship.
Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.
Yet nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that. The goal of their course is to help students have more fulfilling love relationships during their lives. In Marriage 101 popular books such as Mating in Captivity and For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage are interspersed with meaty academic studies. Students attend one lecture a week and then meet in smaller breakout groups to discuss the weekly topics, which range from infidelity to addiction, childrearing to sexuality in long-term relationships.
At first glance this class may seem a tad too frivolous for a major research university. But the instructors say it’s not an easy A and its reputation as a meaningful, relevant, and enlightening course has grown steadily over the 14 years it’s been offered. In fact, teachers are forced to turn away eager prospective students every year. This spring, the enrollment will be capped at 100. The class is kept to a manageable size so that students can grapple at a deeply personal level with the material during their discussion sessions.
The Marriage 101 professors believe college is the perfect time for students to learn about relationships. “Developmentally, this is what the college years are all about: Students are thinking about who they are as people, how they love, who they love, and who they want as a partner,” says Alexandra Solomon, a professor and family therapist who will be teaching the course along with a team of four other faculty, all affiliated with Northwestern University’s Family Institute, and 11 teaching assistants. “We’re all really passionate about talking about what makes a healthy relationship.” The professors see the course—which requires journaling exercises, interviews with married couples, and several term papers—as a kind of inoculation against potential life trauma.
Historians tell us that marriage education in America began as a way to keep women’s sexuality in check. “Marriage education has been for hundreds of years aimed at women. It was considered their responsibility to keep the marriage going,” Stephanie Coontz, co-chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families and author of Marriage: A History, tells me. During the 1920s and 1930s, Coontz explains in her book, fears about s*xual liberation and the future of marriage led eugenics proponents like Paul Popenoe to become enthusiastic about marriage counseling. “If we were going to promote a sound population, we would not have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married,” Popenoe wrote............
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Comments (24)
Apparently enrollment is capped at 100 students per semester.
are required to take divorce 101.
I get it that some people like the idea of marriage and I have nothing against it per se. But it isn't working in the modern world.
In the States, there is something like a 50% chance if marriages ending in divorce. And with divorce comes all the legal battles, animosity, financial wars, etc.
These leave people battered, broken and often hurt or bitter.
As I say, I am not against it per se, but it is a system from another era which just doesn't seem to be working so well in this era.
Before that it was like an agreement between two people involved......it is only historians that has made all relationships to have been Marriages.......in Lakota system it was making blood connection, but a separation happened, when the woman put all the mans stuff outside the teepee.....just simple like that and he had to find an other place to sleep.
So in fact, we are only moving back to old systems....and more the Church loosing it's grip, less meaning the marriage is going to have.
Then over time,say a period of twenty years ,it will be as high a rate as anywhere else smaller than the US..Just off to a slow legal start?
The stigma there is the same about divorce,therefore persons can dodge both marriage and divorce.They will not marry,instead dissolve a relationship,or multiples relationships over time (like marriages).?
Sorry Jim..whenever Molly compares Ireland to the US,I find her viewpoints
intriguing.
How does one dissolve a non-commital relationship (with or without kids) in
Ireland?Without abandonment?
One does wish you Irish Lassies the best! Maybe consider moving soon.
(I read your legislation from 1995.
The five years would tie into how long you have been at CS in anonymity give or take.)Tick-Tock.
^^^
Have you recognized anyone on here who is seeking another,from within a vowless relationship.
I delete most mail contact,unless I have seen them here for years,and decline ALL male contact, in person,even in the US.
( Big country )if you know what I mean.
For me, it isn't about the money,travel,
or the pedestal.
It's about their heart.
Being married is not a prison sentence,or a guarantee.
Neither is divorcing an act of harm.
No heart should be shamed.
There are much bigger decisions between two people than that when
all is said and done.
Your Heart's Legacy is your lifetime of interactions with all people.Some
people do come and some do leave,
love them like there is no goodbye.
yes I have.......I have dig about it from own experience to very comfortable information from Academical research by regression......and also about 30 years ago, I met a very known Lady in Finland, who are able to check in a Spiritual way, if your Soul Mate is in your life of now or not.
My very clear understanding about Soul Mates is, that they go hand in hand trough a lot of lives, still sometimes not together in all lives......one good example is, my own Daughters situation......she is able to get information from the other side,through her writing hand.....it is like forced from the other side, it is so fast, that nobody can normally write anything understandable in that speed and it is coming in poems......and she got in that way, the information from her real Soul Mate, that he is not coming to her life now, but that there is going to be a man still, that love her.....and I think she has that man now.
But the Soul Mate is not at all, what people are talking about and believe in.....they believe, that a Soul Mate want most of the things they want by them self....yes little like cloned......but the True Soul Mate is the other part of a learning journey together, where the difference have to be overcome and the True Love has to show it's power.
So now you have it from me.....so it is not all about what we want, it is about what we need to learn.
I've been wasting years waiting????
I better take in the welcome mat from my front door.
don't be sure, that could be the right one.....perhaps you have looked too much for a perfect one
If I understood correctly, then it is two persons overcoming their egos to find love is egoless.That self-love is part of it,b because they are like timetravellers.
Their love is not bound in anyway to each other except for they know this is their infinite love.
yes, very close like that......the two Souls know they belongs to each other, but the Matrix, as I have named it, that we have built up in these life, by adopting all from the society, can make us so blocked, that it is hard to identify our Soul Mate and also turn us to dig in a wrong direction.
I don't think there are so many gentlemen available anymore.......some years ago, when I was in Canada, I came down from a building with the elevator and there was a older Lady deeper in and I was closer to the door......so when the door opened, I step aside and let her go first out....when we was both outside, she stop me to go and said to me,"do you know, that there are very few gentlemen anymore, who give way for a Lady as you now did"
8:00 Awakening and Disconnection
Paul Bowman Popenoe
was an American
" agricultural explorer "(?)
and eugenicist.
He was an influential advocate of the compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally disabled, and the father of marriage counseling in the United States.
and this is sounding eerily familar.
(Culling/Breeding)It was years ago.
There is always artificial insemination if one must contract premarital romance.