12.2.3: The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective:

 12.2.3: The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective: 

Changing Symbols With symbolic interactionists focusing on face-to-face interaction, their research on marriage and family covers many topics. 

For our purposes, let’s take another quick look at historical change and see how changing symbols (ideas and expectations) underlie marital adjustment. 

The Love Symbol: Unrealistic Expectations In 1933, sociologist William Ogburn noted that people were placing more emphasis on personality as they chose a husband or wife. 

A few years later, in 1945, sociologists Ernest Burgess and Harvey Locke observed that affection, understanding, and compatibility were becoming more central to marriage.

 These sociologists were observing a major shift in mate selection, a trend that has amplified until “affection, understanding, and compatibility” are now considered an essential part of a “healthy” marriage, and we have a difficult time understanding why they weren’t always essential aspects of marriage. 

Today’s husbands and wives take it for granted that their spouse will—or should—meet most of their emotional needs. 

These expectations have been bound symbolically into what we call “love,” idealized in phrases like “Love conquers all” and “Find your true love.” Love is now so prized and expected that our “natural” response has become “Why else would you marry?” 

Our cultural expectation of “finding your one true love” who will bring you “true happiness” sets us up for disappointment. 

We come to expect that marriage will give us some sort of perpetual emotional high. 

Marriage simply cannot deliver this. 

When disappointments arise in marriage, as they inevitably do, and usually fairly soon after the “I dos” are said, spouses tend to blame one another. 

Each believes that the other has somehow failed the relationship.

Their engulfment in the idea of love—what love is supposed to do for them—blinds them to the reality of day-to-day married life.

 Our culture promotes an impossibility: that marriage, ideally a lifelong relationship, should be based on a temporary emotional state.

 Changing Ideas about Children Ideas about children have also undergone a deep shift, so much so that some customs of earlier generations can seem strange to us. Some historians say that people in medieval society viewed children as miniature adults, and they made no sharp separation between the worlds of adults and children. Other historians disagree (Aries 1962; Corsaro 2017). Whatever the reality might be, at the age of 7, boys began to work as apprentices, learning an occupation, while girls remained at home, learning homemaking duties associated with their future wifely role. 

These customs don’t make sense to us.

 We consider age 7 to be a tender phase of early childhood, not a time for apprenticeship. 

In short, children have undergone a cultural transformation from learning adult occupations into impressionable, vulnerable, and innocent beings.

 As ideas of children have changed, so have ideas of parenting. These new expectations have placed stress on marriage. 

Changing Expectations of Parenting As mentioned in an earlier chapter, until about 1940 U.S. children “became adults” when they graduated from the eighth grade. 

For most, this was the end of their formal schooling, and they went to work. 

Because we now expect children to be dependent much longer, and we think of 14- and 15-year-olds as children, not as young adults, we expect parents to continue to nurture them for many more years. 

We have even developed new ideas of “good” parenting, notions unheard of during earlier generations, such as expecting parents to help their children achieve “self-actualization” so they can “reach their full potential.” 

These changed expectations have placed greater responsibilities on the already burdened shoulders of parents. 

Changing Marital Roles 

Just as you would expect, as parenting roles shift, so do marital roles. It used to be assumed as “natural” that the husband would be the breadwinner, that his earnings would be the primary source of support for the family. 

It was also assumed that the wife would be the homemaker, that she would stay home, take care of the house and children, and attend to the personal needs of her husband and children. 

If each did these things well, they were considered a good husband and father, wife and mother. 

Traditional roles—whatever their faults—provided clear-cut guidelines for newlyweds. 

After a couple married, each knew what to expect of the other. Today, the roles of husband and wife are not defined clearly, and newlyweds are expected to work out their own marital realities. Although this gives them a great deal of flexibility, it also produces tension and conflict. A couple’s ideas may not mesh. Who is supposed to do what housework? 

How should they divide child-rearing responsibilities? How much should they save? 

How much should they spend? 

On what? 

Wives are asking to what extent they should be career-oriented, while husbands wonder how much more they should focus on the home. 

When guidelines for any role, including marriage and parenting, are unclear, frustration and discontent are inevitable.

 How do you fulfill a marital role if you can’t agree on what that role is? 

That the idea of love can be a source of marital conflict and divorce might sound strange, but you might be able to see how the idea that love brings unlimited emotional satisfaction can be a source of shattered dreams. 

Our new ideas about children, parenting, and how to be a husband or wife also place tremendous pressures on spouses.

 These pressures and their related tensions create an “emotional overload” that becomes a push toward divorce. 

In Hindu marriages, the roles of husband and wife are firmly established. Neither this woman, whom I photographed in Chittoor, India, nor her husband question whether she should carry the family wash to the village pump. Women here have done this task for millennia. As India industrializes, as happened in the West, who does the wash will be questioned—and may eventually become a source of strain in marriage. Credit: James M. Henslin Hearing from the Author: Hindu Marriages Listen to the Audio