The challenges of marital life: Factors of marital life decline

Abstract

A human is a social being, who wants to achieve relations with other people. The most common form of close emotional relationships in adulthood is marriage. A married relationship can be implied in various ways and, although marriage lasts as a constant form of emotional attachment, contemporary marriage is in crisis. Actual social circumstances place various challenges before married life. In this work we have focused on some aspects which we recognized as potential factors of marriage destabilization. These include various empirical researches both in Serbia and abroad: the role of age in marriage, cohabitation, importance of primary family, children, economic stress, mechanisms of coping with stress, affective attachments between partners, solving conflicts, communication competence, distribution of house chores. Those are the factors that experts face in counseling and therapy works, solving marriage crisis. We see the quality of a married relationship as a multidimensional phenomena consisting of marriage satisfaction, marriage stability, marriage cohesion, marriage compliance. In this paper, we tried to show the complexity of marriage relationships in a nutshell and present the current research directions in this area of psychology.