MEDIATION POST #330.  

A SENSITIVE SUBJECT

A friend was telling me about a play he had seen recently in the West End. Not Shakespeare or Shaw or Pinter or Agatha Christie or Noel Coward. I don’t know the title or the playwright but it was a play that dealt with modern themes – in particular experimenting in marriages and relationships and intimacy.

Looking back – I am in the senior citizen category – I have always seen the mid 1960’s as a moment of change. Life was pretty straight-laced. Yes there were Teddy Boys and Knife Crime and the Death Penalty but you doffed your school cap – yes school caps – when a hearse passed by in the road laden with flowers;  the phrase “your Sunday best” meant you were dressed smartly; relatives were addressed as “Aunt” and “Uncle”. Family life was stable and very rarely did you learn of divorce. Then along came liberation, fulfilment, Woodstock, drugs and self-discovery. Things changed.

The absence of divorce did not necessarily mean most marriages were good.  It was just that a divorce was very difficult to obtain and very weighted against the wives.  The small number of divorces  concealed the large number of fractured marriages and was not evidence that all was well. It wasn’t. A bad marriage often condemned an unhappy couple to pain, confrontation and distress. Sometimes the husband was the victim but much more often it was the wife who suffered the most. Marital violence was a given as the husband went in search of “his bundle of matrimonial rights”.

The pressure for change did, eventually, liberalise unhappy husbands and distressed wives from a relationship of bitterness and worse. The law was changed to make it easier for bad marriages to be bought to an end and people emerged into the daylight blinking as a second chance beckoned to find a long term partner and a happy marriage. Some rejected the option of a binding relationship and, dispensed with vows in church or synagogue preferring, instead, a less formal common law relationship.

Progress comes at a price. For some couples, new found freedoms offered  an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the first marriage and enjoy a fulfilling second marriage but, for a greater number, uncertainty persisted and confidence in commitment, love and loyalty faded. Relationships struggled to find permanence and fulfilment as people increasingly asserted a right “to find themselves”.

There are some generalisations here, I accept, but a change for the worse is underway.  Life should be about Give and Take with the emphasis on the Giving. But with the focus today more on individual fulfilment the order has been reversed and Taking has the upper hand.

At the end of the day, like most things in life, balance is the key. Excessive emphasis on Taking makes us too selfish and excessive  emphasis on Giving makes us too selfless. We need both but in balance. We need individualism, ambition and self-fulfilment but we also need the generosity of sharing and being ever-mindful of the needs of those closest to us.

Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of selfish and upsets the required balance where Give and Take can exist in fulfilling harmony.

Enjoy Mother’s Day.

GRAHAM PERRY