Until a few years ago, the relationships of people who decided to live together as a family couple were characterised by romance, an overt or implicit skepticism regarding the role that each of them should have in the years of their marital life and a tolerance, in the form of passive perseverance.
The family, the basic ontological link, the main social fabric of human and animal presence on our planet, passed through myriad waves, cosmogonic changes, political endings of wars, adventures of persecution and annihilation. It endured with various faces and shapes, sometimes as a religious wedding, sometimes as a civil marriage, sometimes as an institution of kapatuma.
For hundreds of years, the couple’s cohabitation has aimed at creating a family, the birth and upbringing of children, the care of education and offering opportunities for the education of the children, their well-being and the recognition of the offspring in society, wherever they lived. The main characteristics of cohabitation were tolerance, perseverance and the concept of sacrifice.
It was mainly the woman who made sacrifices and deprivations of freedoms and less the man. Since ancient times, the woman has been responsible for protecting the house. The household, the upbringing and the identity of the children’s character, emerging from the mother (the language of the children was called “mother tongue,” while only the household property and the house were defined as “paternal property”). Everyone had his role, and the role of woman, although dominant and undeniable in marital relations, was not sufficiently emancipated.
The woman was responsible for the girls. The man took charge of the boys and prepared them for public life, livelihood and the protection of the girls of the family until they reached adulthood and created their own families. The roles were specific and remained strong through cosmogonic changes and political, social and economic systems, for many centuries in Western societies. Thus, through nomads, feudalism, urbanisation, agrarianism and their ruling classes – intellectual, war, labour – the ideal for these times of male domination necessarily advanced, since it was the man, the product of these classes.
However, as I have already argued, the woman retained a dominant figure in marital relations and it was her decisions, her opinion, her suggestions, her complaints that prevailed in the end. However, the unequivocal recognition of the male role and the “males” in the family against the “females” caused very serious conflicts, bitterness and family rifts. Many women, because there were neither conditions of resistance nor understanding of the difficulties experienced by women from their mothers-in-law and mothers, were forced to live in a state of constant passive tolerance and perseverance, so as not to spoil the face of the family socially, so that the children would not grow up in a broken home, in order to save their marriage. They patiently accepted to be oppressed and endured, living far from their ancestral homes and households.
During the last fifty years, the enormous and no longer controlled social, technological and economic changes, which have led to the liberation of women, their professional emancipation, their recognition as an equal member in the institution of cohabitation, but also their securing of income on behalf of the family, have provoked the just and fair reaction of women and their refusal to suffer constant coercion and family “terrorism.” They reacted by promoting the dissolution of cohabitation in any form, sanctified by the Church or not.
The exponential increase in the number of divorces and breakdowns of all forms of de facto living over the last decade further shows that it is not only women’s fair reaction to various forms of misogyny and zero tolerance towards domestic violence, verbal and physical, that are influencing the increase in the number of broken marriages. In general, the social and economic pressures they exert on men and women, lead couples to the easy (for them) dissolution of marriage or cohabitation. Most wish to escape from their own responsibilities, seek to be “freed” from a relationship they consider a “bond” (imprisonment, confinement, bondage), to feel “liberated” (a form of Spartacism). Without feeling particularly responsible for the children they have born, without the sense of dependence they have caused with the appearance of their offspring, they decide to separate, the dissolvement of the relational system they originally decided for their lives.
According to the findings of researchers in the field of demography and the statistical service, the Court Tables (court book where the cases that will be discussed in each hearing are recorded) record dozens of divorce cases submitted daily for the dissolution of marriage. In the 2000s Greece had 2500 divorces in every 10,000 marriages, in 2023 their number increased to 4200 in every 10,000 marriages. If we now add to the above the number of those who decide to dissolve their relationships exceeds 5000 in every 10,000 marriages, one in two.
At the same time, the number of people who choose to be blessed with a religious wedding with a priest and a best man in Orthodox churches has decreased to the extent that whereas thirty years ago a wedding was held every hour and limousines with grooms and brides waited patiently outside the churches for their turn to come, now it is the priests who expect a wedding on a Sunday, to open their churches! Many of the children who come from broken marriages grow up in a chasm of social division, a family division, a state of internal, mental destruction, which causes feelings of humiliation, fatigue and even revenge towards society. Perhaps, if their parents could show the resilience, tolerance, perseverance, and endurance that past couples did, then perhaps the pain of tolerance in a difficult marital relationship would be lighter than the suffering many of their children experience when their parents’ marriage breaks down.
*Professor Anastasios M. Tamis taught at Universities in Australia and abroad, was the creator and founding director of the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora and is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies (AIMS).
