And I'm the one in therapy

Before I jump into this post, a disclaimer. I like therapy. I enjoy talking about things with a professional who has no emotionally vested interest in me whatsoever. I need that perspective.

With that said, I read an amazing article on New Yorker today about the origins of marriage therapy. This particular article highlights something that I think is overlooked often, "experts" with hidden agendas. In this case, the so-called Father of the Modern Marriage had a racial agenda to build the perfect race.

For Popenoe, marriage counselling was the flip side of compulsory vasectomy and tubal ligation: sterilize the unfit; urge the fit to marry. But what if the fit got divorced? “I began to realize that if we were to promote a sound population,” he wrote, “we would not only have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married.” Popenoe opened the clinic in 1930, in order “to bring all the resources of science to bear on the promotion of successful family life”—that science being eugenics. He didn’t much mind if the marriages of people of inferior stock fell apart: “Divorcees are on the whole biologically inferior to the happily married.” By saving the marriages of the biologically superior, though, Popenoe hoped to save the race.

This is a phenomenom that is not uncommon in our country. Sometimes the well-respected, well-voiced professional has neither the credentials or the business suggesting as they do. But the mass acceptance of their opinion is tantamount to professional validation.

At the same time this article was uncovering the history of marriage counseling, it also highlights a common theme with Americans that I personally have seen again and again. Americans want everything to be IT. The perfect thing. The amazing self-fulfilling, life-long dream of IT. And marraige is no exception.

"..the rise of couples counselling has both coincided with and contributed to a larger shift in American life: heightened expectations for marriage as a means of self-expression and personal fulfillment."

With that much pressure, it's amazing any marriage can survive.