“The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.” -Henny Youngman
Taylor Kerscher
Alex Twite
Megan Taubner
Katie Noak
Appendix
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………....
Nostalgia in Marriage……………………………………………………………………
Divorce…………………………………………………………………………………..
Insolation…………………………………………………………………………………
Y get married…………………………………………………………………………….
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….
Citations…………………………………………………………………………………
Introduction Many factors affect how Generation Y college students today view and interpret marriage. Our findings suggest that insolation keeps college students from acknowledging obvious detrimental statistics on the increasing divorce rate. We also believe that nostalgia acts as a key factor in keeping college students optimistic towards marriage.
Nostalgia in Marriage
What factors affect marriage? There are many factors that could be taken into account from a nostalgic sense. People will feel a mixture of pleasure and sadness when taken back to a memory from the past. Nostalgia could be enforced upon the subject when forming their opinions of marriage. The stronger the bond there is between the subject and their past experiences, childhood, the more influence it has consciously or unconsciously passed down. According to the Association for Consumer Research the parent to child relationship ties are strong even if it is not a positive nostalgia:
The nostalgic urge to recreate the past within the present is, in many ways, a driving force for behavior -- how frequently we marry spouses with characteristics reminiscent of those of our parents. As other examples, we may adopt the political affiliations and prejudices of our forebears, become democrats, republicans, or even racists because our parents were.
Similarly, the nostalgic urge to recreate the past explains why so many abused children marry abusive spouses, and children of alcoholics marry alcoholic spouses -- not because their childhood was happy, but rather because they seek to recreate their idealized sanitized memories of their childhood by identifying with symbolic manifestations of the past which they find in their alcoholic or abusive spouses.
From the interview base surveys it was a common trend to find that when asked if their parents were still married, they also wanted to be married, yet they also did not have any negative opinion of divorce and people have the right to be happy. In qualitrics we asked our subjects to, in 1-2 sentences describe what you want your life to look like after college. The question was open ended for the answers to be more specific. The answers predominantly mentioned success, happiness, and achieving a dependent lifestyle. Some comments directly from the survey were: “Happy, successful, family, employed.”, “I want to have a good job and be happy and content.”, “Stable with a job and income. I want to live in a nice apartment and enjoy whatever work I am doing.”, “Having a job that I love, being able to live comfortably and to have a family.”, “I want my life to be successful and meaningful after college.”.
Relating to the state of economic stability the survey asked a yes/no question, “Would you consider getting married if you were not economically stable?” 73% of the respondents said no. The majority of respondents did not start thinking about marriage until high school and college. In college you are separated from your family and starting to become independent. You are learning your wants and needs. With this a feeling of loss, anxiety, and possibly overwhelmed at times. According to an article written by John Tierney, nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. A college student is the perfect market for nostalgia and it matches the age that people are beginning to think about what they want, and you can find what you want from experimentation, past experience, or an external source. Past experience however