A relationship psychologist explains why marriage seems harder now than ever before情感心理学家解释当代婚姻缘何比过去更艰难

We have arrived at a moment in history where the best marriages are better than the best marriages of earlier eras, while at the same time, the average marriages are getting a little bit worse. Historians divide marriage in America into three different eras. There's sort of, from the Colonial Era until about 1850, when we industrialized, the second era is from about 1850 to 1965 or so, and then we are currently in this third era.

我们已经进入到了这样一个历史时期，那就是我们所处的这个年代中最棒的婚姻要比历史上任何早期的婚姻都要好，但与此同时，当下婚姻的中体状况却不如从前。历史学家们将美国的婚姻状况分为三个不同的发展时期。第一个时期是1850年以前的殖民地时期，之后我们实现了工业化，第二个时期便是自1850年至1965年，在那之后便是第三个时期，也就是我们所处的这个时期。

And the first era was really about helping people achieve their basic, physiological, survival sorts of needs, things like food production, clothing, shelter. People preferred to love their spouse, of course, but it wasn't the reason that you married and certainly, if you didn't love your spouse, that wasn't a reason to get divorced. The institution was too sacred, was too important. And so spouses were workmates, rather than soul mates.

在第一个时期里，婚姻确实是用来帮助人们实现基本的生活、生理、生存需求的一件事，例如衣食住行。那个时候人们倾向于把爱施加给配偶，但并不意味着你爱一个人就一定要和对方结婚，同样地，如果你不爱你的配偶了，也并不意味着要离婚。那个时候的制度是神圣的，也是无比重要的。因此夫齐双方更像是一对工作上的搭档而不是灵魂上的伴侣。

And then if you fast-forward, in the second era, people increasingly want to marry for personal fulfillment and in particular, they want to marry for love. And for the first time ever, people start to say things like, "I'm not going to marry that person because I don't love him or her." That was a new idea.

然后，进入第二个时期，人们开始为了实现自我而去结婚，特别是人们开始想要为了爱情而结婚。并且这段时期也是人们第一次说出那句“我不想和那个我不爱的人结婚”，这是个新的观点。

And then as we fast-forward to this third era from 1965 to the present, we see that, these days, we are looking not only for love, and connection through the marriage, and sexual fulfillment, of course. But also for these more tricky, complicated sorts of need fulfillment. Needs like self-actualization, personal growth, and a sense of vitality. And so these days, for the first time, if you can find yourself in a situation where you'd say, "Look, he's a loving man and a good father but I'm not going to live the next 30 years feeling stagnant, feeling like I can't really grow."

接着我们进入到第三个时期，也就是自1965年至今，我们可以看到，这段时间里我们不光在追求爱情和婚姻中存在的一些关联性事务。同时还有一些更加微妙而复杂的，即需求上的满足感。例如自我实现的需求，追求个人成长以及激情感的需求。在这段时间里，也是我们第一次在某种情况下说出这样的话“看，他是个充满爱心的男人和好父亲，但我不想在接下来的三十年里停滞在这个状态上，那样感觉我无法真正的成长。”

Our expectations for what we want the marriage to provide us have gotten higher in a lot of ways, more sophisticated in a number of other ways, more emotional, more psychological, and because of this additional complexity, more of our marriages are falling short, leaving us disappointed.

我们对婚姻所能够给予的期待以很多种方式在上升，使得婚姻的其他方面更加复杂，人们期待婚姻更加感性，更加知性，并且由于这些额外增加的复杂性，我们当中有更多人的婚姻变得更加短暂，留给我们的却是失望。