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If listening to your heart will likely hurt you especially under time pressure, why is the average age to get married only 27 for women and 29 for men? Granted, that between the biological clock ticking and pressures from peers, family and society we feel compelled to marry early with the vow of sustaining that position till death do us part and even beyond; marriage you will agree, remains the riskiest love-venture partnership a couple engages in, in a lifetime!
Yet, over 55% of us still choose to marry, while over 50% of marriages end in divorce. In Belgium, of all places, that divorce rate goes up to 70%! Why in Belgium? I don't know!
In my new book, Heart 2 Heart, now available on Amazon, I dedicated a whole chapter on this after living two major breakups that nearly destroyed me! Even in my business partnerships, no matter how poor some of them were, I had never felt as devastated or lost when they ended.
To move on and overcome my pain, I desperately needed to understand why most of us, including me, would still deliberately want or continue to enter into a love-venture partnership knowing the odds to succeed really don't lean much in our favor! And this, despite the locked gated walls I had built around my heart to protect myself from any additional bruising! There had to be an end-gain right? Afterall, I had passed the 50++ year mark and there still wasn't any in my horizon!
But let's look at the history. In ancient times marriage had little to do with love. Its primary purpose was to bind a woman to a man to guarantee that his children were truly his biological heirs while she became his property. Men were free to take several wives, satisfy their sexual urges with concubines, prostitutes, and even teenage male lovers, while their wives were required to stay home and tend to the household.
Although Church blessings by the Roman Catholic Church (Europe) did improve the lot of wives later, their husbands could still give them back and marry someone else if they failed to produce offspring.
And even if, in most countries in the world, especially in the last forty, things changed drastically, starting with women’s right to vote, sexual emancipation, equal pay and same sex rights to marry, I can’t help but think that love in marriage was hijacked either by religion as a way to maintain its importance and/or used as a bargaining commodity to even out the lives, playing field and rights of women and LGBT community!
For more on this chapter and how I found ways to overcome my pain and heart wall, purchase your Heart 2 Heart e-book or paperback copy here
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