You are right about what society expects from people, it is the norm for man and woman to marry and settle down, buy a home and have children, so the parents have lovely grandchildren and great grandchildren to look after. I am not so sure that this is the reason that this idea of a happy family is not working anymore; Certainly, I would agree that at times it doesn’t work for some people, but it does work for the majority.

We get to the point of, are we in control of our lives or is someone controlling us, well no one is controlling us, however, the way your mother and father raised you is controlling you now. It was the same with them, the way they were raised gave them the ideas and the knowledge to how they would think and raise their own children. This is learnt behavior as our parents were teachers that showed us how we should act and behave in our future life.

As we grow up we tend to mimic how our parents behaved, or how they did things in life, how they handled crisis in an emergency, there are certain traits that are handed down from generation to generation, such things as drug taking, alcoholism, some mental inflictions have also been passed down. It is mainly attitudes and practices that we pick up from our parents though. This even extends to who we choose as a partner, research has shown that boys will find someone that is similar to the mother and girls will find someone who is similar to their father.

Some women do become career mothers, because that is what they want to do, I am not sure if the children would feel smothered though, this would depend on how the mother was raised herself, if she was spoilt by her mother then she is more than likely to spoil her children. The same thing goes for fathers, if your father did a lot of things for you and talked a lot with you then you would more than likely do the same with your children.

I think that many people have always wondered what the point to life is, what is the point to getting married and having children; do we go through all these happy times, sad times, crisis etc and then die? Well I unfortunately don’t have an answer for that question. No one has. Whether we get married or not, if we have children in or out of marriage is a decision that can only be made by the individual.
One can certainly ask advice about these things but ultimately it is up to the individual what they do. There are women that never get married, never have children, because that’s the decision they have made, the same with men. If you look back into these people’s lives and history you would probably find something has happened to turn them off this, or even something their parents have done or said that has made them to make this decision.

I don’t think it is natural instincts that have made us think along the lines of getting married and having children, but social pressure put upon us as we grow that does it. Back in the early English days and even up till a point here in Australia, there was no such thing as divorce, you were married for life, and that was that. So that has been passed on from generation to generation.

Your loathing of internal and external forces I would say came from you watching your parents as they proceeded in life and raised you and your siblings. Many of us have followed the pattern that was expected of us by society and been married to the person that we thought was going to be for life, but ended in divorce because we did not like what our partner expected us to do, or one had done something wrong to the other.

You’re right in saying”The norm isn’t always best for everybody”. And this will continue to happen for generations to come. I think (and this is my opinion only), if you sit down and look at the way the world is heading these days and go through all the options available to you, so that you have a happy life, then you will be ok, talk to your partner about what you want to do, the best way to make a future marriage successful is to talk about all the possibilities together, then there will be no surprises around the corner.

Now I have only become aware of the above material and facts over the last two and a half years, and I am 62 years old. I completed a Advanced Diploma in Family Therapy and Counselling and now I am a University student completing a Graduate Diploma. My appologise for a long answer but I felt that it needed to be answered correctly.

Bazza

By the way, I’ve thought about alot of that stuff too. =)