From The TimesSeptember 20, 2008
What couples argue about - then and now.
We quarry the 70-year archives of counsellor Relate to reveal what our grandparents argued about - and what we row over now
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article4786340.ece
Bad sex, jealousy, interfering in-laws, suicidal husbands, loose wives, spouses hiding in boxrooms and ladies who are unfortunate enough to come from Reading... it was all in a day's work for marriage counsellors in the earliest days of Relate, the nation's largest provider of relationship counselling and sex therapy, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this month.
When you delve through its archive of case notes from the 1940s, then read Relate's latest survey of couples' complaints - as revealed exclusively to Body&Soul - it becomes clear that over seven decades of bust-ups and bickering, much of our bad behaviour in relationships has changed - but human nature doesn't seem to have advanced one jot.
Relate began as the Marriage Guidance Council (MGC) in 1938, launched by a small group of volunteers aghast at Britain's rising divorce rate. It began offering counselling in 1943, and in the first five years saw more than 8,000 clients. But marital crises proliferated: in 1942, there were 12,000 petitions for divorce, by 1947 this had more than trebled to 50,000. Our current divorce figure is around 149,000, says the latest confirmed government research.
The MGC itself didn't start life with the most harmonious of internal relationships: one co-founder, the eugenicist Dr Edward Fyfe Griffith, had some disturbingly bizarre ideas, proposing that pre-marriage medicals be conducted in order to stretch the bride's hymen, and suggesting that anyone found guilty of pre-marital sex should be ostracised from society.
His decrees were, mercifully, rejected. But Relate's archives show that Dr Griffiths wasn't the only one entertaining strange notions.
Couples seeking help often had surreal styles of marital conduct. “There seems to be something like open warfare between this couple,” reports one counsellor in 1948. “She mentioned that on one occasion he deliberately poured tea on the floor. He said that a month after their marriage she hid in a boxroom of their house for an hour-and-a-half.”
Beyond marital farces, the bust-ups could get far more serious: “The wife has always been rather a good-time girl,” reports one case study. “She seems to have had various affairs during the war. After a row arising out of one of these, the husband went off to Blackpool and as a result of an encounter with a prostitute, he caught syphillis. He wants his wife back, because I love her'.”
Clearly, the early counsellors weren't trained in non-judgmental reporting. “I feel that in his rather limited way, he is rather fond of her but that he has very little idea as yet of what marriage means,” writes a practitioner in the 1940s. Another case history declares: “They have not managed the sexual relationship at all. He would go out of the house saying he was going to drown himself, and return in the early hours, as proud as a lord.” Even geographical bias comes into play: “She is extremely ignorant of the whole question of sex and marriage in general, and it is unfortunate that she comes from Reading,” concludes one note, obliquely.
“It's all my mother-in-law's fault”
In the best music hall tradition, husbands tended to blame the wife's mum for their troubles. A third of couples in a 1948 study on “marital disharmony”, published in the National Marriage Guidance Bulletin, felt stressed by in-law tensions. As this exasperated counsellor records: “They have the mother-in-law living with them and he complains that she is the cause of all the trouble. I don't think that the mother-in-law is by any means the whole of the problem. The sexual relationship seems to be far from satisfactory. In fact, he eventually admitted that full intercourse had never taken place. I am anxious to see the wife, but so far she has not replied to any of my letters.” Bad sex again.
It was rife: the 1948 study found that two-thirds of couples seen were “affected by sexual maladjustment” and a quarter “showed gross ignorance of sex - nearly 300 of the wives were sexually unsatisfied”. Problems seem to have begun early in most marriages, and after the six-year point they tended to get more serious. A third of couples felt stressed by in-law tensions. About a quarter of couples in the survey said that penury was driving their marriages on to the rocks, and one in eight felt their relationships were pressured by the lack of decent housing, due to the severe postwar shortage.
Economic hardship was not the only external factor affecting early marriage guidance counsellors' work. Lack of training and outright prejudice against the idea of therapy made the job tricky, too. “It made me laugh later on, how we were trained,” says Joy Ross, 91, of Purley, South London, who worked with the Marriage Guidance Council in the early 1960s. “We sat about in groups and read short instruction books, so little was known about relationship-counselling techniques.
“And counselling itself was thought at the time to be rather absurd. You had to be careful when people asked what you did for a living. Many people thought it ridiculous - that you were a quack.” Ross is thrilled at how counselling has become an accepted practice in the past few decades, but she adds that the basis of relationship problems has not altered at all. “Human nature has not changed since we were apes. Whatever they are squabbling about, people's arguments ultimately are about who makes the decisions. It's the first thing that needs to be sorted; who's the boss of what bits or who's going to be the boss of everything.”
One fundamental change since the Forties is the trend away from marriage towards cohabitation. In 1940, there were 426,100 marriages in England and Wales. By 2005, this had fallen to 244,710, the lowest annual number since 1896. To reflect this, the council changed its name to Relate in 1988. But Nick Turner, the director of the modern-day Relate Institute, agrees that Ross's view still holds water.
“One perspective is that human beings are the same now as ever they were, with the same heartaches and trials and anxieties,” he says. “But there are two key things that have changed in my 17 years of professional clinical practice: working lives and technology. Nowadays both members of a couple are probably working, so that creates pressures on both sides of the relationship, and problems with finding balance.” Indeed, Relate's new survey of 200 couples shows that work/life balance is currently the biggest cause of bust-ups, with more than a third of couples saying that it causes rows.
The challenges of new technology
The other change, he says, is the internet. “New technology is presenting new challenges. A lot of couples are troubled because one partner is using the internet for porn or making inappropriate communication with other people via the web.”
We're back to spouses hiding away in boxrooms for hours. Though nowadays they are most probably logging on to something.
What couples argue about - then and now.
We quarry the 70-year archives of counsellor Relate to reveal what our grandparents argued about - and what we row over now
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article4786340.ece
Bad sex, jealousy, interfering in-laws, suicidal husbands, loose wives, spouses hiding in boxrooms and ladies who are unfortunate enough to come from Reading... it was all in a day's work for marriage counsellors in the earliest days of Relate, the nation's largest provider of relationship counselling and sex therapy, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this month.
When you delve through its archive of case notes from the 1940s, then read Relate's latest survey of couples' complaints - as revealed exclusively to Body&Soul - it becomes clear that over seven decades of bust-ups and bickering, much of our bad behaviour in relationships has changed - but human nature doesn't seem to have advanced one jot.
Relate began as the Marriage Guidance Council (MGC) in 1938, launched by a small group of volunteers aghast at Britain's rising divorce rate. It began offering counselling in 1943, and in the first five years saw more than 8,000 clients. But marital crises proliferated: in 1942, there were 12,000 petitions for divorce, by 1947 this had more than trebled to 50,000. Our current divorce figure is around 149,000, says the latest confirmed government research.
The MGC itself didn't start life with the most harmonious of internal relationships: one co-founder, the eugenicist Dr Edward Fyfe Griffith, had some disturbingly bizarre ideas, proposing that pre-marriage medicals be conducted in order to stretch the bride's hymen, and suggesting that anyone found guilty of pre-marital sex should be ostracised from society.
His decrees were, mercifully, rejected. But Relate's archives show that Dr Griffiths wasn't the only one entertaining strange notions.
Couples seeking help often had surreal styles of marital conduct. “There seems to be something like open warfare between this couple,” reports one counsellor in 1948. “She mentioned that on one occasion he deliberately poured tea on the floor. He said that a month after their marriage she hid in a boxroom of their house for an hour-and-a-half.”
Beyond marital farces, the bust-ups could get far more serious: “The wife has always been rather a good-time girl,” reports one case study. “She seems to have had various affairs during the war. After a row arising out of one of these, the husband went off to Blackpool and as a result of an encounter with a prostitute, he caught syphillis. He wants his wife back, because I love her'.”
Clearly, the early counsellors weren't trained in non-judgmental reporting. “I feel that in his rather limited way, he is rather fond of her but that he has very little idea as yet of what marriage means,” writes a practitioner in the 1940s. Another case history declares: “They have not managed the sexual relationship at all. He would go out of the house saying he was going to drown himself, and return in the early hours, as proud as a lord.” Even geographical bias comes into play: “She is extremely ignorant of the whole question of sex and marriage in general, and it is unfortunate that she comes from Reading,” concludes one note, obliquely.
“It's all my mother-in-law's fault”
In the best music hall tradition, husbands tended to blame the wife's mum for their troubles. A third of couples in a 1948 study on “marital disharmony”, published in the National Marriage Guidance Bulletin, felt stressed by in-law tensions. As this exasperated counsellor records: “They have the mother-in-law living with them and he complains that she is the cause of all the trouble. I don't think that the mother-in-law is by any means the whole of the problem. The sexual relationship seems to be far from satisfactory. In fact, he eventually admitted that full intercourse had never taken place. I am anxious to see the wife, but so far she has not replied to any of my letters.” Bad sex again.
It was rife: the 1948 study found that two-thirds of couples seen were “affected by sexual maladjustment” and a quarter “showed gross ignorance of sex - nearly 300 of the wives were sexually unsatisfied”. Problems seem to have begun early in most marriages, and after the six-year point they tended to get more serious. A third of couples felt stressed by in-law tensions. About a quarter of couples in the survey said that penury was driving their marriages on to the rocks, and one in eight felt their relationships were pressured by the lack of decent housing, due to the severe postwar shortage.
Economic hardship was not the only external factor affecting early marriage guidance counsellors' work. Lack of training and outright prejudice against the idea of therapy made the job tricky, too. “It made me laugh later on, how we were trained,” says Joy Ross, 91, of Purley, South London, who worked with the Marriage Guidance Council in the early 1960s. “We sat about in groups and read short instruction books, so little was known about relationship-counselling techniques.
“And counselling itself was thought at the time to be rather absurd. You had to be careful when people asked what you did for a living. Many people thought it ridiculous - that you were a quack.” Ross is thrilled at how counselling has become an accepted practice in the past few decades, but she adds that the basis of relationship problems has not altered at all. “Human nature has not changed since we were apes. Whatever they are squabbling about, people's arguments ultimately are about who makes the decisions. It's the first thing that needs to be sorted; who's the boss of what bits or who's going to be the boss of everything.”
One fundamental change since the Forties is the trend away from marriage towards cohabitation. In 1940, there were 426,100 marriages in England and Wales. By 2005, this had fallen to 244,710, the lowest annual number since 1896. To reflect this, the council changed its name to Relate in 1988. But Nick Turner, the director of the modern-day Relate Institute, agrees that Ross's view still holds water.
“One perspective is that human beings are the same now as ever they were, with the same heartaches and trials and anxieties,” he says. “But there are two key things that have changed in my 17 years of professional clinical practice: working lives and technology. Nowadays both members of a couple are probably working, so that creates pressures on both sides of the relationship, and problems with finding balance.” Indeed, Relate's new survey of 200 couples shows that work/life balance is currently the biggest cause of bust-ups, with more than a third of couples saying that it causes rows.
The challenges of new technology
The other change, he says, is the internet. “New technology is presenting new challenges. A lot of couples are troubled because one partner is using the internet for porn or making inappropriate communication with other people via the web.”
We're back to spouses hiding away in boxrooms for hours. Though nowadays they are most probably logging on to something.
