"I Can't Build Relationships!" - Relations

Recently, it has become popular to explain the complication of models of family relationships taking place in society solely by the peculiarities of individual human psychology. Many popular psychological theories of "toxic" partners and "toxic" relationships are devoted to this. The only lists of psychological properties of people "with whom you should not get involved", or "relationships that should be avoided," take more than a dozen pages. Is it really?

Everything would be fine, but at the same time one fundamentally important point is missed. With the help of such explanations and "lists" people are implicitly imposed the idea that if something does not go well with their family or partner life, then the reason is rooted exclusively in the peculiarities of their personal psychology, regardless of the processes that take place in society. As a result, such people have an additional sense of guilt that they are "not like everyone else."

So you shouldn't take psychological problems out of their historical, cultural and social context. The global crisis of family relations taking place in modern society has far from only individual psychological reasons.

Report from the scene

So, for example, stating the fact of an avalanche-like increase in divorce, they constantly forget to point out that one of the reasons for this is that the generation of young people raised by divorced parents has grown up. For them, divorce is not such a disaster, but rather a completely legal way out of an unsatisfactory family situation. And this is neither bad nor good, but just a historical fact.

Serial monogamy

Few people are planning to get married "once and for all." And even if he suffers from such an illusion, the divorce statistics can sober up the most stubborn romantics. Scientists even came up with the name of such a situation - "serial monogamy", that is, since it is known in advance that the vast majority of modern young people will create families several times in their lives, there is only a faint hope that during these periods they will be loyal to their next partner.

Geometry of relations

There is an expansion of all kinds of forms of cohabitation - love triangles, squares and other polygonal structures in interpersonal relationships today cease to be something amazing and, what is important, something secret. People are getting worse at making long-term contacts, but they calmly negotiate about sexual relations "for one night" on the Internet, guided by the geographical principle - whoever is closer to go, they meet.

Social affairs

The structure of modern life comes into direct conflict with the "traditional" ideas about what family life should be like. And the clean economy plays an important role in this. Because even in the more prosperous States, fewer and fewer couples can afford the luxury of having only one working family member. What can we say about the average inhabitant of the post-Soviet territories, where even working spouses do not always manage to feed, except for themselves, at least one child.

And this is if each of them has one or two jobs and a lot of extra earnings. No, of course, there are citizens who sincerely share the wonderful beliefs from the series “God gave a child, will give to a child”, but even an increase in the general level of religiosity of the population is not able to force modern young people to massively “multiply and multiply” under such flimsy guarantees.

Career matters

The modern understanding of a "successful career" often comes into direct conflict not only with the creation of a family, but also with simply having a regular sexual partner. Because loneliness and childlessness are officially considered competitive advantages.

As a result, over the past decade, for example, a new category of single women has emerged. Successful careers, independent, educated, wealthy and extremely lonely. These young ladies seem to have long been "affordable" to get married and give birth to descendants, but in a strange way they still cannot decide on a partner.

Successful peers have all been either deeply married for a long time, or are resting after another divorce. And those whose careers have developed more modestly soberly assess their ability to “pull” such a successful young lady financially and socially. As a result, more and more such “successful women” decide to have a child “for themselves”, using for conception not even an unfamiliar “assistant”, but a sperm bank.

Planning crisis

A significant increase in the level of uncertainty in life also changes the nature of planning. And if relatively recently people, planning to have a child, could be sure that they somehow settled their lives for the next few years, now the speed of change does not allow giving any guarantees even for a year.

Considering that no more than 15% of the population have a high level of tolerance to uncertainty “in the norm”, it is understandable why people do not risk having more than one child in such a situation.

Clip thinking

It is interesting how people with “clip thinking” will build relationships, that is, those who are accustomed to multitasking, constantly changing the visual picture, regularly stimulating other modalities of perception and who, by definition, do not like to deal with long, detailed plots. With what joy will they suddenly establish long-term interpersonal relationships and maintain marital fidelity for a long time?

By the way, regarding fidelity, the only thing that the partners of such subjects can hope for is that they will simply be lazy or not interested in 'walking to the left' - simply because virtual life forms for them, by definition, are more interesting than life ' in real life".

Gadgets and relationships

A restructuring of relations is also taking place in connection with the increasing dependence of the people on gadgets. Today, all communication takes place in the presence of an electronic "witness", as a result of which the degree of involvement in each other has significantly decreased, against which the accusations of "insufficient attention" are growing like an avalanche.

Indeed, representatives of the traditional model of relations simply cannot receive from the opposite side the amount of attention they expect, if, in fact, the partner is much more interested in the screen of his gadget than in the eyes of the subject opposite.

Moral changes

Over the past thirty years, even such a conservative thing as morality has managed to bend under the pressure of modernity! For example, people "over forty" remember well that in their generation to marry "a woman with a trailer (child)" was considered a manifestation of just crazy love. More than half of today's adolescents have a history of one or two stepfathers, and their appearance in the house has long been no surprise to anyone.

In the same way, the times have sunk into oblivion when the overwhelming majority of parents adhered to the unequivocal position that the joint life of their child with a representative of the opposite sex is permissible only within the framework of a marriage union. Now all the time, parents themselves insistently recommend that lovers first try to live together “just like that” and take a closer look, and then spoil the pages of their new passport with a stamp.

New Puritanism

By the way, the reaction to these changes was not long in coming! A wave of "new Puritanism" begins to roll around the world. Under the pretext of “fighting violence,” she drives sexual relations, and all human intimacy, into such a narrow and at the same time maximally public legal field that the initiators of this movement can reasonably be suspected of lobbying the commercial interests of manufacturers of all kinds of sex dolls and other devices for “non-violent »Ways of self-satisfaction.

It looks like the pace of change will only accelerate in the coming years. So we stock up on patience and popcorn