http://www.bohemia.cu/2008/02/01/nacionales/1-parejas.html
COUPLES
Romeo and Juliet to the beat of reggaeton
People’s criteria to choose a partner have changed in Cuba in the last few years, assures Dr. Patricia Arés, president of the Cuban Society for Psychology.
By: Vladia Rubio (nacionales@bohemia.co.cu) / Photos: Juan Carlos Gort
"At the end of the trip there’s you and me in one piece", goes a very old song. But the last fifteen years have made inroads into the relationships between men and women in a country where, until then, love had managed to sidestep the effects of time on Cuba.
However, despite so much unsteadiness, adversity and a remarkable rise in the divorce rate, living together remains the favored choice of teenagers and adults alike.
So it says Dr. Patricia Arés Muzio, president of the Cuban Society for Psychology and a renowned expert in the topic of families and relationships who uses her vast research as a professor and daily practice as a psychologist to assure that "the parameters to choose our partner are on a changing trend. Up until the special period, a person who had certain values and qualities was good enough, but now all age brackets take into account solvency and a given social status as an essential requirement to be met by the partner of choice".
Cubans are taking longer and longer before deciding between a consensual or a formal marriage, says the expert Patricia Arés
Before the 1990s, unions in Cuba searched for a certain social symmetry as to age, culture and educational level, but the economic crisis brought with it, in general terms, a return to disparate relationships, noticeable in the number of young women with much older men or elderly women or vice versa, both trends being based on the search for better standards of living, Dr. Arés remarks.
"This is a rather retrograde indicator vis-à-vis social and gender development. It’s a U-turn towards a number of patriarchal features in partner selection, mainly in the case of women", she adds.
Q: How do marriage and other types of love relationships behave today from a statistical viewpoint?
“For some time it has become increasingly clear that consensual unions are outnumbering formal marriages. However, it’s interesting to see that today people are waiting for a longer time before they get legally married. While in the 1980s women would usually get married between the ages of 22 and 24 and men between 24 and 28, they do it now when they’re over 28 and 30 respectively.
“Young people in turn are also delaying more and more the moment to go formal, and therefore there’s a growing number of those who move in together to live under the same roof with his or her parents in an attempt to stretch the dating period, and not always with marriage in mind. That is, today he stays in her place for the night and tomorrow she stays in his, without any household or family-related responsibilities entering into the equation, unlike the case of consensual unions.”
Q: Cubans would seem to be taking longer to decide on this kind of informal bond as well…
There’s less prejudice, anxiety and fascination by things forbidden among younger boys and girls.
“While it used to be a common thing to do before the age of 20, now it’s more typical among those over 28 or 30, simply because they think of themselves incapable of creating and maintaining a family. It’s mostly the case of young males, who usually say ‘I don’t want to get married or have kids yet’. Having a child is another step that Cuban women are putting off until they’re between 22 and 24, long after the age when they would usually get pregnant in the past.
"All these decisions are based on economic, housing and migratory issues. In general, the new couples have no place of their own, so they just move in with either family and live together with up to three generations, sometimes in very small houses in detriment of their privacy.
"All in all, couples who cohabit before they’re 30 tend to be unsteady, but that doesn’t mean they have given up marriage; it’s just a postponement", she points out, underscoring the link between these decisions and the priority that young people must give to other projects, some studies reveal.
“Nevertheless, a survey conducted among 150 youths involved in a program to spread higher education showed that they have broadened some of their personal projects to make room for professional upgrading, a decision their families welcome with open arms as they deem it a change for the better”.
Q: What are the main difficulties facing Cuban couples nowadays?
“I believe couples, and particularly the young ones, are under a lot of pressure on the basis of the challenges they have to deal with. A recent study revealed a wide range of key conflicts that Cuban families must solve, ranging from disagreements as to their children’s education, how they share out housework, coexistence, the family budget, and food. Also significant were issues like sexuality, professional development and ideological differences, in that order.
60 out of every 100 married couples get divorced before the ninth year, a decision mostly taken by the woman.
"Couples sometimes lack the ability to communicate in order to solve their problems, a flaw often related to what they previously learned from their families: 66% of the subjects were children of divorced parents, and as such they were more used to situations of discrepancy and misunderstanding than they were to affection. A culture to develop mature love relationships is yet to take root.
"However, I can assure you that Cubans are very passionate people for whom a love relationship ranks high among their personal interests. They have not given up living together, not even those who know only too well what breaking up feels like. Nevertheless, a number of social and other projects have turned into a hotbed of negative values among couples. We’re still very emotional, but some shortfalls have been piling up in our lives. And bear in mind that another reason for these unions to be so many goals down on the scoreboard is that they live in a global context where there are less and less ethical restrictions and more and more pragmatism and directness, by no means a favorable climate for true love to blossom. "If we researched into love relationships among young and adult people in the rest of Latin America, we would probably find similar situations".
Q: How do social dynamics work for Cuban couples?
“Couples are always swimming against the tide. Our social projects not always take them into account, say, when they throw a party in the workplace or when prizes are given or internationalist missions are assigned. Some entities go to great lengths to keep their employees and strengthen their commitment while they disregard the problems within a family or a relationship. There’s hardly any setting where these issues are properly looked after. Not so from the political and legal standpoint, but social and institutional demands have taken a different turn. Not to mention that most couples have little or no opportunity to be intimate, given our housing problems and the lack of hotels, motels or any other place where they can love each other in private".
Middle-aged adults keep voting for living together as a top priority.
Q: Any comment about these links among youngsters and teenagers?
“As a country we strive to preserve certain values at those ages, when they are very supportive, loving and loyal to their groups. They favor groups rather than couples, in keeping with their development as individuals in boarding schools, amid large families or in homes of divorced parents. They try to find new ways of loving, a process of innovation where the minuses might outweigh the pluses, regardless of any fresh values they may learn.
"They start having uncommitted or group sex or developing open relationships only because it’s a fashionable, recurrent practice of their generation. Yet, when they come to see us we get the impression sometimes that they do it out of peer pressure, since the ways they learned when they were growing up are a far cry from those habits, which they accept all right, but when the time comes to find a girlfriend or boyfriend their feelings of possessiveness and faithfulness prevail as much as the spirit of the exclusivity clause. And when they want a steadier link, they become harsh judges of the same girls and boys with whom they often had a little bump and grind before.
"They describe those ‘petting-and-necking encounters’ as enjoyable, pleasant and harmless. But I keep saying that it’s only on the surface, what with so many troubled teenagers I have seen in my office who can’t stand the thought –or the sight– of their sweetheart fooling around".
Q: Are our youngest ones reconsidering the concept of shyness? Have other barriers to physical contact come up?
How they share out the household chores and manage to live together remain a cause for conflict in most couples.
“The line between what’s good or moral for men and women is given by the circumstances. It used to be that in boarding schools and other contexts boys could not go into the girls’ dormitory, or they did it but only after a ‘man alert’ that made every girl get dressed in no time. Today you go in one of those dormitories and see boys and girls playing cards, a boy with his head laid back on a girl’s thigh, a girl leaning on the shoulder of the boy beside her, feet resting on arms or the other way around, and so on. They all get physical but not necessarily aroused.
"Those limits to or codes for physical contact and what can be erotic or not have changed depending on cultural principles, environments and practices. It reminds me of that joke making the rounds out there about the nudist colony where two men are watching a girl and one tells the other: ‘Can you picture her in clothes?’.”
Q: Could this extension of "boundaries" affect the way they enjoy sex?
“It depends on how you look at it. It’s not that they feel less pleasure, only that they have less prejudice. There used to be more lust, mystery, fear and anxiety among them, as well as less knowledge about each other.
Because of their upbringing, young people in Cuba have a keener sense of groups than they do of couples.
“Still, I insist that ever since they are born humans are social, not instinctive, beings. Sexuality is an impulse, but as social beings we must subject such an impulse to codes of assessment, morality and ethics. When they embrace those habits they do it because the whole group agreed to; therefore, even if it could be seen as a negative value, they deem it a moral practice because they are not imposing anything on anyone.
"I don’t think it’s a matter of rating their sex habits as healthy or otherwise, but there’s a risk involved. As a psychologist, I can say that you must build your sex life. Basing it all on purely physical grounds is a bad move, since you would be giving yourself to someone all the way, and it’s dangerous to surrender your sensations and emotions to someone you don’t really know.
"Experts just don’t seem to agree on whether or not these links between males and females involve positive or negative values. So far, however, whoever has made an in-depth psychological study of love relationships can say for sure that love is a triangle which ties together intimacy, commitment and sexuality."
---ooOoo---
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"Al
final del viaje
estamos tú y yo,
intactos",
aseguraba hace
ya mucho el
trovador. Pero
los últimos
quince años sí
han dejado mella
en las
relaciones de
pareja.
Hasta ese
momento los
lazos amorosos
entre cubanos
habían sorteado
con buen viento
y fortalezas el
paso de los
calendarios por
la Isla.
