Marriage has changed in Canada, and in the province of Quebec it is becoming obsolete. Lisa Strohschein studies the relationship between families and health, how families influence the health and wellbeing of its members. She is a sociologist at the University of Alberta.
ListenHer recent findings revealed the meanings and the reasons why people get married have evolved from the family networks and links of days gone by, to the idealized version that is more common today, the notion of the ‘soulmate’ and marrying for love.
What is new in the last decade, is that marriage has become the crowning achievement as opposed to the foundation of a life together.
‘You’re still looking for your soulmate it’s just that your soulmate increasingly resembles someone who’s very much like yourself, holds the same values, may have the same levels of education, all of those kinds of characteristics.”
Lisa Strohschein says the long-term effects of this paradigm have yet to be studied, but she says it appears to put greater pressure on the relationship; “the disappointments of marriage, as they inevitably happen, may increasingly make people say, this isn’t for me, and what you have is just a churning of people who enter into relationships thinking that this is the one, find out it that isn’t quite what they expected, leave it, and then go out searching for another partner.”
Different in Quebec
In the mainly French-speaking province of Quebec, a distinct society within Canada, marriage is becoming increasingly obsolete. It has become the norm now to co-habit. Lisa Strohschein says Quebec resembles Sweden where the trend is similar.
Strohschein says these findings raise long-term questions: “We know kids need parents who love them, what’s not entirely clear is, do they need two parents or both parents in the household?”
While the break-ups of families and relationships can have negative effects on people’s health, so too can the successful and happy marriages: “We know with very long-term marriages when one of the partner dies the risk for death for the surviving spouse is significantly higher in the period immediately following bereavement, it tells us… that there’s almost a physical connection between people and as they develop these really close emotional ties, the loss of that then requires a form of repair… so people are at greater risk in that period immediately after.”
Utlimately these evolving realities reflect how our society has changed personal relationships; “If it’s so hard to make it in today’s world.. home ownership is out of reach for young people, it takes longer to finish school, it just means that… when people start to look for marriage it’s just far later in the life-course so those choices to delay marriage or to delay intimacy really have to do with the social conditions that people face.”
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