Marriage, like all human endeavours, never stands still; it evolves with time.

Phase one-This first phase lasts until the couple start a family. Changing homes, friends and life-styles to accommodate the marriage can be difficult. However, for many, the first few years spent together — with the wife working and no children — providing themselves with a home and preparing for a family, can seem, in retrospect, to have been the best years of their marriage. Sex is usually frequent and experimentation commonplace, but sexual difficulties arising from sexual inexperience and the lack of a will to learn are widespread. Many young women complain that their husbands do not do what they like most, that they are too rough and that they are selfish. In spite of all this most young couples at this stage say that they are happy sexually and that they look forward to their problems disappearing as they mature and get used to each other. The fact that the divorce rate is highest in this phase of marriage would appear to contradict what we have just said but, as we shall see, this is not as surprising as it at first seems.

Ideally, during this phase of married life the couple are learning to resolve conflict and should be getting used to communicating with each other before children come along. If the couple cannot sort out the problems of living together, tensions arise and anger, resentment, and misunderstandings are common.

During this stage some young people become ill physically or mentally, and depression is not at all uncommon. Once things begin to go bad, sex, rather than being the cause of the trouble as many couples think, becomes the victim. Provided the basic relationship is good, nearly all these early problems can be resolved by the couple themselves or with professional help.

All these adjustments take a long time and it is essential to allow plenty of time between getting married and having a first baby. Far too many couples have a baby so soon after marriage that they have hardly had time to get used to each other as partners, let alone as parents. In most couples it is the woman who starts putting on the pressure for a baby.

Whether this pressure comes about because of the intrinsic biological yearnings of women or whether it is the result of our apparently baby-centred culture is hard to say but the result is the same. The couple, who hardly know each other have to take another human being into account and have to adapt to quite different roles too soon.

Some young couples imagine, quite wrongly, that once the wife becomes pregnant all sex should cease. This is bad enough in a long-established relationship but in the first few years of marriage it can lead to trouble. After the birth, the nights of broken sleep and new-baby routines can stress even the mature married couple but they particularly take their toll on the recently married. The new mother needs plenty of help but the young husband, still seeing himself as a grown-up boy with a permanent live-in girlfriend, often is not ready or able to cope with new burdens. The woman, fearing that the baby will change her body for the worse (the vagina, stomach and breasts are now irrevocably altered in many women’s views), fear that after only a few years of marriage her husband will go off her.

Is it surprising with all this going on that couples in their first seven years of marriage are so prone to divorce?

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