Are You the One for Me?. Barbara Angelis De

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СКАЧАТЬ 6. Guilt

       7. To fill up your emotional or spiritual emptiness

      Wrong Reason 1

       Pressure

      

Are most of your friends part of a couple, but you are still single?

      

Are you unmarried and over thirty?

      

Are you the last person in your family to ‘settle down’?

      

Are you recently divorced?

      If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably already know about pressure. Pressure is the influence that your friends, family, society, and your own programming place upon you that gives the message, ‘You should be in a relationship, and if you’re not, something is wrong with you.’ When we feel pressured by those outside influences or our own internal ones, we may choose to get involved in relationships we normally would not choose.

      Here are some of the different kinds of pressure people commonly experience.

       AGE PRESSURE

      

A woman meets a thirty-seven-year-old man who has never been married, and calls up her friend to share her excitement. Her friend’s first reaction is: ‘He’s thirty-seven and unmarried. What’s wrong with him?’

      

You attend the wedding of your first cousin. During the reception, you hear the same thing from each of your relatives: ‘So you’re almost thirty. Why aren’t you married?’

      This is age pressure—the attitude that if you are over a certain age and not seriously involved with someone, you aren’t ‘normal.’ Of course, just what that age is varies from person to person. Whether you’re conscious of it or not, you probably have an age by which you think you should be married, or in a permanent relationship. That number might have come from things your family talked about when you were growing up, or what ages your older brothers and sisters were when they got married, or just an image of at what age a person is really grown up.

      To understand the origins of age pressure, we need to go back thousands of years in history. The economic and physical survival of a fami­ly was based on how many children there were. Sons could help with hunting, farming, and protecting the family against enemies. Daughters could help with chores and be valuable assets if desired by other males for mates. The sooner a young man or woman married and started his or her own family, the better. It strengthened the family group, or clan, by adding to their number and, in families who owned property, guaranteed that there would be inheritors to keep what the ancestors accumulated. And remember, life expectancy was less than half of what ours is now in the twentieth century. So a girl of fourteen might have had only another twenty or, at most, thirty years left to live. By the time she was in her twenties, she was middle-aged! Therefore it was natural for her family to want her married in her early teens, so she could start having children right away.

      Although we’ve come a long way from those ancient times, we are still influenced by some of the thinking our forebears lived by. So when your Aunt Mabel pulls you aside at Thanksgiving dinner and says, ‘Sweetheart, I know it’s not my business, but why don’t you find a nice guy and settle down?’ she is voicing a sentiment that has its roots in historical realities.

      Whether the pressure comes from your family, your friends, or from your own sense of urgency, the result is the same. You may compromise your standards for an acceptable partner just to have a relationship with someone.

      ROSEANN’S HIGH-SCHOOL REUNION TRAUMA

      RoseAnn had just turned twenty-eight when she received an invitation to her ten-year high-school reunion. ‘That’s when the impact of being single really hit me,’ she explained. ‘I’d been wanting to find someone special for a long time, but I was so busy starting my own business that I guess I didn’t stop to think about how I was feeling. When I opened up that invitation and thought of seeing all of my old friends, I got so depressed. I had these fantasies of showing up at the hotel, greeted by all of my girlfriends and their husbands carrying piles of baby pictures, and me the only unmarried one there.’

      ‘That’s when I met Sandy. A friend introduced us, and I didn’t really think he was my type, but decided to give him a chance. Before I knew what happened, we were in a relationship. Looking back, I can see that from the beginning, there were big problems. I kept finding things wrong with Sandy, and wanting to improve him. I didn’t like his taste in lots of things—clothes, food, movies. Even the way he kissed bugged me. But I found myself tolerating all of this stuff and telling everyone how happy I was.

      ‘Five months after the reunion, I woke up and admitted to myself that I didn’t want to be in this relationship with Sandy. I wanted to be in a relationship, period, and the combination of turning twenty-eight and facing the reunion put tremendous pressure on me to find someone so I didn’t look like I was alone. Breaking up with him was painful, because there was double pressure—all my friends and family had already been asking, “When’s the wedding?”, and now I had to disappoint them as well as Sandy.’

      RoseAnn is a perfect example of someone who got involved with a partner to lessen the pressure, not because she was really in love.

       PRESSURE FROM FAMILY AND FRIENDS

      Some people are very susceptible to the opinions of their family and friends and allow themselves to be pressured to get into or stay in relationships that aren’t making them happy. If you don’t have a strong sense of yourself, or if you are very enmeshed with your family members, you could end up having a relationship because everyone else thinks you should, not because you truly want to be with that person.

      HOW LENNY LET HIMSELF BE PRESSURED INTO MARRIAGE

      Lenny sat with his head in his hands. ‘I’ve let everyone down,’ he said with a moan. ‘What am I going to do?’ Lenny, forty-four, and his wife, Krista, forty-three, had known each other since grade school. Their fami­lies belonged to the same church and were good friends, so when Lenny and Krista began dating in junior high, their parents were delighted. ‘I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t just assumed that Krista and I would get married one day. Everyone talked about it like it had already happened—Mom would make comments like, “When you and Krista get older, Grandma’s china will be passed down to you,” or Dad would say to Krista’s father, “You know, Samuel, I always did feel like you were family, and hopefully one day, you will be.” And Krista had been trying out my last name with hers for years.

      ‘When I graduated from high school, I went into the Navy, again because my dad thought it would be good experience for me. Everyone seemed to think that when I got out, I’d ask Krista to marry me, and I did. If I look back now, I don’t remember deciding to do it. It was just the thing I was supposed to do. You can imagine how happy they all were. That’s when I started going numb. It’s not that I didn’t love Krista; I did, in a certain way. But I СКАЧАТЬ