Lifestyle Choices

Almost every healthy person at some time has had a desire to be married. This is the most natural thing in the world.

There may be various reasons for this desire— love, sex, security, companionship, and so forth —but the urge is usually there. And yet it takes far more than a mere urge for one to be happy in marriage. Surely there must be some counsel that young and old can follow to avoid the mistakes so many are making every day. (more…)

Training: If you have had training you can probably find job opportunities through your professional body or through reading or advertising in your professional journal.

Assuming that you haven’t had any training prior to marriage and aren’t coping with pre-school age children, what is available? Most women are unskilled. Only 6 per cent receive any further training when they leave school. However, there are suitable training courses for `mature students’, the official description of any woman over twenty- three. You can exploit a talent which you already possess and are practising in your home (sewing or cooking) or be trained by a firm who wishes to employ you, or at one of the many courses at a local technical college. Generally what is difficult to acquire isn’t really the training, or even the job, but the determination to forget embarrassment, laziness or shyness — and go out and get it. (more…)

Depression is about twice as common in women as it is inmen. There are probably many reasons for this, and some of them are connected with marriage. Recent research points out that married women more likely than married men to feel unhappy; to have are feelings of inadequacy; to have difficulty in sleeping; to fee apathetic or inert and to behave in a passive way; to have bouts of depression, and to have symptoms of mental ill- health in general. Unmarried women, on the contrary, tend to have better mental and physical health than both unmarried men and married women.

Men, on the other hand, tend to have better mental health when married than when not married. Unmarried men in the United States have a suicide rate twice as high as married men. Men who lose their wives are usually more prone to depression than women who lose their husbands, and men tend to remarry as soon as possible. Though it may not seem like it on the surface, the man may be more dependent than the woman, even though he may not play an obviously dependent role. He is more likely to get depressed when the marriage is over or when his conventional role as sole or main bread-winner is upturned. He may feel inadequate and helpless if he realizes that his spouse can and does manage well without him. (more…)