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Video: Why Women Strive To Get Married - Relations
If you study the market for psychological services, you will find a huge number of trainings, webinars from the category “How to Marry a Millionaire (or at least someone)”, “Become a Real Woman” or “The Art of Getting What You Need from a Man”. The essence of all these programs: you have to become a certain type of woman in order to be needed and desired.
Bride traps
A heartbreaking picture for a qualified psychologist: a man with an engineering degree teaches how to become an ideal wife. We will not indicate the real names - let it be something like "Return to Feminine Nature." The online meeting is free of charge: this is a well-known marketing ploy to interest and gather a group for a paid continuation, which will cost thousands, if not tens of thousands of rubles. About 10-20 thousand women of any age from different parts of the country connect to the broadcast and absorb, like sponges, patriarchal dogmas in the hope of happiness.
Women's training is an incredibly popular and profitable business. The price tag for a two-day seminar on attracting, pleasing and training an ideal male can vary from 3 to 50 thousand rubles (or even more). And no matter how expensive the participation, there will certainly be demand. It is especially beneficial to arrange expensive trainings for women over the age of 35. By this time, successful business women are already earning enough to afford such leisure, and despair enough to get married to go to extreme measures.
Anything is used: theories of the distribution of male and female roles, dance rituals for the liberation of female energy, the practice of visualizing ideal men, family constellations on the maternal side, teaching sexual games and techniques, Vedic astrology, board transformation games …
It is important to note that the purpose of this article is not to discount these specific tools. Maybe in some cases they show their effectiveness, but nevertheless they have no evidence base. The contact bases of organizers of this kind of events have hundreds of thousands of email addresses. If you know a little about digital marketing, you know that if you have the addresses of potential customers, you almost have their money. The rest is just a matter of successful copywriting and competent mailing. And what to serve under the sauce of a successful marriage is already the tenth thing.
Sometimes qualified and reliable psychologists and coaches conduct their workshops and trainings, calling them women, because women are in fact their target audience. At the same time, they present worthy material. The purpose of such events:
- explain from a scientific point of view the mechanisms of interpersonal relations;
- teach communication techniques and psychological self-help;
- to bring the participants closer to a more adequate understanding of their needs and goals, existing skills and zones of proximal development.
But this is very rare.
How can you distinguish this training from the esoteric mousetraps for lonely hearts described above? It is always important to remain critical. Mistrust (and even public proceedings in the case of fraud and moral damage) definitely deserve this kind of attitude and advice:
- A woman is obliged to give all her strength, health and time to a man, sacrificing her own interests and dreams.
- A woman should not support her family, she should be able to demand money from a man, because otherwise she takes on a masculine role, thereby upsetting the balance in relationships.
- A man's ability to pay is the only indicator of his strength and importance, therefore, relationships should be based on exchange: only in response to a decent financial content, a woman is obliged to provide emotional comfort (and not only).
- A woman is obliged to demonstrate only gratitude and appreciation to a man, no matter how he behaves, because such is the female nature - to be always soft, joyful and contented.
- A woman should hide her intellect from a man, pretend to be stupid and helpless so that he does not feel threatened and competitive and wants to take care.
- A woman must always look perfect and please the eye, have sex only in erotic lingerie, fight age and hide flaws, otherwise the man will choose a more attractive alternative.
This list is not made up specifically for this article. All of these postulates can be heard in public trainings, popular seminars and open webinars. Hopefully, as you read this, you will be thinking, “How can you even believe such a thing? Does someone really start to behave this way with men, just to get married?"
Unfortunately, too often, such information hits the target. Colorful examples, charisma, self-taught NLP techniques, inflating emotional tension and the atmosphere of such events help. But the most important thing is that the creators of such propaganda understand exactly that it is easy to make money on someone else's pain. Especially if this pain is inherent in one way or another to everyone.
There would be someone near
- We live in an era of change - nothing can be done about it, and this is not our fault. The lion's share of human communication has gone digital, and the social activity of most people is declining. The frantic pace of life, deadlines and the long journey from work to home steal our time and energy.
- We see each other less often, hug less often and feel the warmth of loved ones.
- We learn more about common parenting traumas from popular magazines and build up grudges on loved ones instead of rebuilding affection and trust.
- We feel the pressure of templates, gender stereotypes, advertising slogans, ideal bodies on billboards, and this only reinforces our anxiety, shame and self-criticism.
As a result, we are drowning in barely conscious loneliness and isolation: there are almost always people around - only not those with whom we would like to be close.
We all suffer in one way or another, and we all want to find a way to make our life easier. The easier and faster the better. What comes to the rescue is what seems to be familiar and familiar, which carries a message of reliability, wisdom and care - the image of a family. Only not the one where parents climb with their problems, but their own, and also ideal.
A comparative analysis of gender beliefs in Europe and Russia shows that we are still leaning towards traditional conservative views about gender relations. For us, the need to have a permanent relationship seems unshakable, and the idea that marriage is outdated causes an active protest among Russians.
On the issues of women's self-realization, the opinion is unequivocal: work is good, but in fact all women want to be housewives and mothers
From the first days of life, admonitions are pouring on girls: "When you grow up, you will find yourself a husband, then everything will be fine." And when the girl grows up and plunges into the real world, where the institution of marriage dies, a wave of reproaches and worries begins: “Are you still alone? Will you have time to give birth to children? Look, no one will get married like that."
Personal happiness
The system of these conservative values is held by a thread: we see examples from other countries, we read about the equality of women, sometimes we even start to fight for the possibility of self-realization and freedom of choice. And this gives rise to a painful conflict inside: from the outside, you already want to be liberal feminists and make independent decisions about your destiny in the world, but deep down there remains a feeling of defenselessness and vulnerability.
And where is he, this husband, when he is so needed? The one to whom you come home, you will hide behind him, like behind a stone wall, from all the horrors of demanding modernity, and you can again be yourself - an agreeable housewife who does not need anything for happiness except him. I want to make sure that he appears as soon as possible, and I don’t even feel sorry for money, especially since there are craftsmen who are ready to teach him to be whatever he wants - just to stay in the safety that the weight of the ring on the ring finger brings.
Only this model does not work, unfortunately. Loneliness is that existential reality with which each of us is forced to come to terms in order to find the meaning of life and freedom. Without shifting responsibility for our safety and success to others, we reveal our potential, we understand what we are capable of and how to apply it. Only accepting ourselves with all the shortcomings, meeting face to face with our fears, we open a place in our lives for happiness and fruitful relationships with other people, without codependency, high expectations and inner emptiness.
This does not mean that marriage is evil and a direct path to neuroses. On the contrary, the support of a like-minded person is one of the significant factors of mental health for any of us, regardless of gender.
