Sources of formation of ideas about marriage and family. Andreeva T. V. Family psychology: Proc. allowance. the total number of values that are the property of a person is not large

13.07.2020 Ureaplasmosis

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Introduction
Chapter 1. Theoretical aspects ideas about marriage for men and women

1.1 The phenomenon of marriage in psychological research
1.2 Value orientations of spouses in marriage
1.3 Ideas about the well-being of marriage in men and women

Conclusions on the first chapter
Chapter 2. An empirical study of ideas about marriage between men and women

2.1 Organization and methods of empirical research
2.2 Analysis of the results of the empirical study
2.3 Program for the development of constructive ideas about marriage among men and women

Conclusions on the second chapter
Conclusion
Bibliography
Applications

Introduction

The relevance of research. Interpersonal interaction of spouses is the basis family well-being and psychological comfort of its members. The quality of marital relations is largely determined by the compatibility of spouses, social and psychophysical conformity and consistency of their ideas about marriage. Well-being in marriage is determined through the feeling of subjective satisfaction of spouses with marital relations, which is reflected in their psycho-emotional well-being. In marriage, the image of a psychologically mature person is in demand, capable of adequate adaptation and building constructive relationships, ensuring well-being in psycho-emotional state and interpersonal interaction.

Psychology has accumulated significant theoretical and practical material on marital relations (N.V. Aleksandrov, A.Yu. Aleshina, T.V. Andreeva, A.Ya. Varga, V.V. Boyko, S.V. Kovalev, V. V. Justickis, L. Ya. Gozman, N. N. Obozov, Y. M. Orlov, E. G. Eidemiller, etc.; A. Adler, V. Satir, S. Minukhin, Z. Freud, etc.) .

Marriage in this study is considered as a sanctioned and regulated socio-historical form of relations between a man and a woman, establishing their rights and obligations in relation to each other and to children. Marriage is understood as the personal interaction of a husband and wife, regulated by moral principles and supported by values immanent to him.

The ideas of spouses about marriage are connected with how N.N. Obozov and S.V. Kovalev that the purpose of marriage can be considered by them as an economic, moral, psychological, family-parental or intimate-personal union. Among the additional components of ideas about marriage of men and women, the importance of joint recreation of spouses, the views of spouses on raising children, the coincidence of expectations from marriage, etc. is noted. Traditions of the clan system of spouses (full or incomplete family), the relationship of the parents of the spouse in marriage, the attitude towards the child in childhood in the family of origin, etc.

This study draws attention to the differences in ideas about marriage in men and women. We consider spouses' ideas about marriage in connection with their satisfaction with marriage, value orientations, socio-psychological adaptation and personality orientation, which determines the relevance of this study at the present time.

Objective- to identify the features of ideas about marriage in men and women with different levels of satisfaction with marriage.

In accordance with the goal, the following tasks:

1. On the basis of a theoretical analysis of scientific literature on the research problem, to identify the specifics of the phenomenon of marriage.

2. Determine the value orientations of spouses in marriage and analyze their ideas about the well-being of marriage.

3. Reveal differences in ideas about marriage among men and women.

4. Establish differences in satisfaction with marriage between men and women.

5. Determine the relationship between satisfaction with the marriage of men and women and their value orientations, socio-psychological adaptation, personality orientation.

6. Reveal the relationship between ideas about marriage in men and women and their satisfaction with marriage, value orientations, socio-psychological adaptation, personality orientation.

7. Develop a program for the development of constructive ideas about marriage among men and women.

Object of study- ideas about the marriage of men and women

Subject of study- features of ideas about marriage in men and women with different levels of satisfaction with marriage.

Research hypothesis: ideas about the marriage of men and women depend on their value orientations, satisfaction with marriage, socio-psychological adaptation, the orientation of the individual to business, terminal values, and the coincidence of spouses' expectations from marriage.

To solve the tasks in the study, we used methods theoretical analysis of scientific literature, subjective and objective methods of diagnostics: psychological testing (paired comparison technique of spouses' ideas about the appointment family union N.N. Obozov and S.V. Kovaleva, marriage satisfaction test questionnaire V.V. Stolin, T.L. Romanova, G.P. Butenko, the "Value Orientations" method by R. Rokeach, the method of diagnosing socio-psychological adaptation (K. Rogers, R. Diamond), the questionnaire method (orientation questionnaire of a person's focus on business, on himself and on communication (B. Bass)) and methods mathematical statistics (Student's t-test, Spearman's rank nonparametric correlation).

The study involved 60 people (30 married couples), aged 21 to 45 years old and living together from 1 to 10 years. The first group included couples in unregistered marital relationships, the second - couples in registered marital relationships. The study was conducted during 2014.

Scientific novelty of the research. It was found that the ideas about the marriage of men and women depend on their value orientations, satisfaction with marriage, socio-psychological adaptation, the focus of the personality on business, terminal values, and the coincidence of spouses' expectations from marriage.

Practical significance. The data obtained expand the boundaries of understanding the phenomenon under study in social psychology and allow us to reconsider the levels marital compatibility and ideas about marriage, from the standpoint of the maturity of the spouses and their choice of adaptive coping strategies. The information provided helps to analyze the psychological mechanisms of behavior of men and women in married couples with different ideas about marriage, as well as to determine the criteria for violations of interpersonal relationships and troubles in marriage, regardless of gender.

Chapter 1. Theoretical aspects of ideas about marriage among men and women

1.1 The phenomenon of marriage in psychological research

Due to the fact that some researchers tend to equate family, marriage and matrimony, it seems necessary to separate and specify these concepts. So, in the view of J. Shchepansky, "marriage is a socially normalized social attitude, in which the transformation of a purely personal sensual attraction into a stable mutual adaptation and joint activity to fulfill the tasks of matrimony takes place ... The transition from betrothal to matrimony in all cultures is associated with a ritual sanction: religious or state, magical or social. The adoption of such a point of view blurs the boundaries between the related, but by no means identical concepts of matrimony, marriage and family.

A family, as a rule, is understood as a small group based on consanguinity or marriage, whose members are connected by a common way of life. Marriage is an authorized and regulated socio-historical form of relationship between a man and a woman, establishing their rights and obligations in relation to each other and to children. Under matrimony in most works devoted to the study of problems of marriage family relations, is usually understood as the personal interaction of a husband and wife, regulated by moral principles and supported by values immanent to him. This definition captures the most significant features of this concept: firstly, the non-institutional nature of the relationship, and secondly, the equality and symmetry of the moral duties and privileges of both spouses. This, by the way, indicates the historically recent origin of this phenomenon. Indeed, the principles underlying marriage could only be practically realized as a result of the intense involvement of women in professional activity and social and moral orientation of the movement for their emancipation, which undermined the tradition of sexual segregation.

Characteristic for modern family lack of strict rules governing family life, leads to the fact that the family as a small group is forced to formulate and implement its group norms and values in its own way. In this case, there is an inevitable clash of individual ideas formed by each of the spouses back in the parental family. By developing their own system of views on the distribution of roles, the structure of power, the degree of psychological closeness, the goals of the family, the specific content of its functions and the ways of implementing the latter, the spouses actually create a kind of intra-family microculture of communication, which ultimately constitutes the phenomenon of matrimony.

The condition for the normal functioning and development of marriage as one of the substructures of the family is that the husband and wife have diverse value orientations. "The variety of value systems serves as a natural basis for the individualization of the individual, and therefore the system that provides such diversity has, among other things, the greatest stability." The functioning of marriage as a system occurs as a result of the interaction of the components of stability and development that violate this stability. In other words, the tendencies of preservation and the elements of destabilization form a dialectically contradictory unity of the process of self-development of marital relations.

The concept of "successful marriage" is closely related to marriage, which implies everyday, emotional and sexual adaptation, accompanied by a certain level of spiritual understanding, with the indispensable preservation and confirmation of the individual needs of each of the spouses. Over the past few years, papers have been published that draw the line between the success of a marriage and its stability. This view was formed under the influence of empirically observed facts that showed the absence of a direct connection between these states. In the work of A.I. Tashcheva showed that "the criterion of stability is necessary, but clearly insufficient for diagnosing the quality of a marriage" .

Indeed, the fact of the safety of the marriage does not say anything about the psychological side of the interaction of marriage partners - how the spouses evaluate their relationship, whether they are happy. Many marriages are formally maintained until the death of the husband or wife, despite the fact that neither of them is satisfied with the partner and their union as a whole. Stability and satisfaction with marriage, despite their conjugation, are not identical characteristics - stable marriages are far from always characterized by a high level of spouse satisfaction, and marriages where spouses are satisfied with interpersonal relationships can be unstable. The presence of such relationships was obvious earlier from ordinary everyday experience, but their statistical representativeness was established relatively recently.

1.2 Value orientations of spouses in marriage

The orientation of the individual is associated with a system of stably dominant motives that determine its integral structure. This system determines the behavior and activity of a person, orients his activity. It determines the appearance of the individual in social terms and what kind of moral norms and criteria it is guided by. The content side of the orientation of the personality, its attitude to the world around, to other people and to itself is determined by the system of value orientations. Value orientations express the personal significance of social, cultural, moral values, reflecting the value attitude to reality. Values regulate the direction, the degree of effort of the subject, determine to a large extent the motives and goals of organizations activities. According to G. Allport, the chosen goal and value orientations of a person give meaning to life, direction and serve as a unifying basis for his life.

Personal values are perceived and accepted by man the general meaning of his life. There are two types of orientation: individualism and collectivism Individualism in marriage is understood as the priority of the goals and needs of the spouses over the needs of the family. In the collectivist model, the personal values and needs of the spouses are subordinated to the needs of the marital union. Prosperous relationships are based on different combinations of individualism and collectivism, which, in turn, determines the development of those personal qualities of spouses that suggest their focus on each other.

"Values lead and attract a person; a person always has freedom: freedom makes a choice between accepting and rejecting what is offered, that is, meanwhile, to realize the potential meaning or leave it unrealized," notes V. Frankl. Value is the only measure of comparison of motives and the most important component of the subjective formative activity and the subject himself in it. According to S.L. Rubinstein: "Values are not what we pay for, but what we live for." Only in the course of a subjective choice made by a person through suffering, any social value becomes individual and determines the emotional attitude of a person to reality and to himself. Diana Pescher and Rolf Zwan point out that our central values have a historical background. Ethics is a work in the progress of value, when there is a reassessment and analysis of significant guidelines in human behavior that support the structure of his beliefs and determine the meaning and correct behavior.

To determine the semantic content of the concept of "value orientations", we refer to the interpretation of M. Rokeach, who understands by value either the conviction of an individual in the advantages of some goals, a certain meaning of existence compared to other goals, or the conviction of an individual in the advantages of a certain behavior compared to other behaviour. At the same time, values are characterized by the following features:

1) the total number of values that are the property of a person is not large;

2) all people have the same values, although to varying degrees;

3) values are organized in a system;

4) the origins of values can be traced in culture, society and its institutions and personality;

5) the influence of values can be traced in all social phenomena.

Values always occupy a certain place in people's relations as the ultimate foundations of thoughts and actions.

Researchers also introduce the concept of "similarity of family values", which is presented as a socio-psychological quality that reflects the coincidence, orientational unity of views, relations of family members to universal norms, rules, principles of formation, development and functioning of the family as a small social group. B.C. Torokhtiy and R.V. Ovcharova suggest considering the main components of the value orientations of spouses:

1) the cognitive component of the value orientations of spouses (beliefs in the priority of any goals, types and forms of behavior in a certain hierarchy);

2) the emotional component (the unidirectionality of the spouses' emotions in relation to one or another value orientation, is realized in emotional coloring and evaluative attitude to the observed, determines experiences and feelings, shows the significance of value and its priorities);

3) the behavioral component (both rational and irrational, the main thing in it is the focus on the implementation of value orientation, the achievement of a significant goal, the protection of one or another objective value).

All these three components represent the unity of emotions, feelings, beliefs and behavioral manifestations of a married couple. This connection determines the strength of the interaction of the selected components. A change in one is reflected in all other components of the value orientations of the spouses.

Significant in the value-oriented unity and marital compatibility is the coordination of the functional-role expectations of the husband and wife. Expectations are a setting for the future that holds a person together with life, makes him more stable in a period of change, inspires faith, hope and love. Positive expectations make a person more patient with the hardships of the present. The loss of positive expectations leads to the loss of value orientation. A person begins to focus on the case, falls into superstition, plunges into situational personal problems, goes with the flow.

The level of expectations provides for the reflection in the representation of the spouses of those valuable and significant roles and functions that, in their opinion, their companion in marriage could perform. As G.E. Zhuravlev, the role is made up of functions. The function manifests itself as an element of the description of some set of similar tasks. The role outlines only the outer shell of human activity and communication. The performer uses his psychic abilities to bring the role to life. Social roles are defined as a set of rules that determine how people should behave in a certain type of interaction or relationship. Wherein important role comply with social norms - standards. According to E.S. Chugunova, the source of the formation of standards is the norms of social behavior developed by society, personal experience of a person, the knowledge gained during training, the impact of mass media and direct contacts with significant, authoritative people for a person.

This opinion expands the boundaries in understanding the functional-role relations in marriage. It turns out that each role of the spouses represents separate interrelated functions, the attitude towards which forms the attitude towards the role, the idea of its content and the functions of the partner. And these ideas are based on stereotypes and traditions in which a person was brought up, through which gender identity is also laid down. J. Money notes that identity is a subjective experience of a gender role, and a gender role is a social expression of gender identity. Nevertheless, according to I.S. Kohn, they are not identical: gender roles are correlated with the system of normative prescriptions of culture, and gender identity is correlated with the personality system. The general logic of the relationship between gender role and identity is the same as in other areas of the relationship between role behavior and individual self-awareness. V.E. Kagan represents the gender role as a system of environmental standards, regulations, norms, expectations, which a person must meet in order to be recognized as a man or a woman. Several aspects of identity are proposed, which we consider in relation to role-playing behavior in marriage: adaptive (social) gender identity (personal correlation of one's real behavior with the behavior of other men and women); the target concept of "I" (individual attitudes of a man (woman) to what they should be); personal identity (personal correlation of oneself with other people); ego-identity (which for oneself represents gender. Comparing family roles with the "I" you can get a self-assessment of your own performing skills in a particular role. The more any family role is included in the "I", the stronger the identification of the I with this role This means that a person, when solving a situation of choosing actions, says to himself: “I will do this because, as a father, I cannot but do this, otherwise I will cease to respect myself and become someone else, and not myself, i.e. I won't be me anymore."

Role expectations and claims in marriage are determined by the following ideas of the spouses about the appointment of the marital union:

1) the household union provides the function of consumption and consumer services (well-established life, home economics);

2) the family-parent union provides a pedagogical function (the birth and upbringing of children);

3) the moral-psychological union provides the function of moral and emotional support, organization of leisure and creation of an environment for self-realization and personal development (the need for a faithful, understanding friend and life partner);

4) an intimate-personal union provides the function of sexual satisfaction (the need to find a desired and beloved partner for love).

Each spouse takes responsibility and initiative in the implementation of each of the functions, thus defining their claims and role expectations for a partner, which subsequently causes either consistency in the motivation of the spouses, or mismatch, disorganization and conflict relations.

Psychologist T.S. Yatsenko suggests four main family roles. This is a Sexual Partner, Friend, Guardian, Patron. When they are fulfilled, four corresponding needs are realized: sexual need, need for emotional connection and warmth in relationships, need for guardianship and domestic needs. The American sociologist K. Kirkpatrick believes that there are three main types of marital roles:

1) Traditional roles, which involve on the part of the wife bearing and raising children, creating and maintaining a home, serving the family, devotedly subordinating her own interests to those of her husband, adapting to dependence and tolerance for the restriction of the sphere of activity. On the part of the husband, in order to preserve the harmony of family relations, in this case it is necessary (strictly sequentially): devotion of the mother to her children, economic security and protecting the family, maintaining family power and control, making major decisions, emotional gratitude to the wife for accepting addiction adjustment, securing alimony in a divorce.

2) Companionship roles that require the wife to be attractive, provide moral support and sexual satisfaction, maintain beneficial social contacts for the husband, lively and interesting spiritual communication with the husband and guests, as well as provide variety in life and eliminate boredom. The role of the husband requires admiration for the wife and a chivalrous attitude towards her, reciprocal romantic love and tenderness, providing funds, entertainment, social contacts, in the field of leisure and leisure activities with the wife.

3) The roles of partners, which require both the wife and the husband to contribute economically to the family in accordance with earnings, share responsibility for children, participate in household chores and share legal responsibility. From the husband, it is also necessary to accept the equal status of the wife, and agree with her equal participation in making any decisions, and from the wife - readiness to give up knighthood, equal responsibility for maintaining the status of the family, and in the event of a divorce and no children - refusal financial assistance.

Family problems can arise due to an unrealistic system of values and ideals, the achievement of which requires unbearable tension from all family members, which leads to the depletion of the protective forces of all healthy family members. Family values are a powerful integrating factor for the family system - both at the level of spouses' interaction with each other, and at the level of interaction between parents and children. In addition, value orientations determine the dynamics of the family in general and marriage in particular. parent family is the primary social environment of the individual, the environment of socialization. Family atmosphere, relationships in the family, value orientations and attitudes of parents are the first factor in the development of personality. Parents are usually for the individual important people Therefore, the exercise of their parental and marital roles is consciously, unconsciously subsequently copied in their own family.

For coordinated relationships in the family, the system of values formed in the parental family is important. Spouses have the opportunity to analyze, revise the structure of role relations in the parental family. They choose the right one for their new family, determine social, personal value and significance, correlate with personal beliefs and attitudes, and only after that accept or reject this system of values. They internally process the information received in accordance with their own lifestyle, notes that "social life transforms the intellect through the influence of three mediators: language (signs), the content of the subject's interactions with objects (intellectual values), the rules prescribed for thinking (collective logical or pre-logical norms). )" . The changeable variety of multidirectional flows of emotions determines the "family atmosphere" against which the child's personality and social patterns develop. The nature of the parents undergoes profound changes in the process of mutual adaptation in their own family. There is a transfer of the attitude of parents to the child from their own childhood experience or a different attitude is developed towards their child.

1.3 Ideas about the well-being of marriage in men and women

marriage family adaptation gender

The system of interpersonal interaction of a person with the surrounding reality is an important component of his optimal functioning. Each person has his own characteristics in the perception and understanding of the surrounding reality. These mechanisms help him reflect reality in his own way and build his relationships and connections in society. The family is an integral part of society and fully reflects all the priority and problem areas of the state system.

The subjective well-being (or unwell-being) of a particular person is made up of private assessments of various aspects of a person's life. Separate assessments merge into a sense of subjective well-being. The idea and assessment of one's own well-being or the well-being of other people are based on objective criteria of well-being, success, indicators of health, and material wealth. The experience of well-being is due to the peculiarities of the relationship of the individual to himself, to the world around him as a whole. According to S. Taylor, L. Piplo, D. Sire: "Satisfaction is an individual's subjective assessment of the quality of the relationship, if the rewards we receive outweigh our costs. We experience satisfaction if the relationship meets our hopes and expectations." In our opinion, satisfaction with marriage is made up of feelings of subjective well-being of spouses, which is based on the fusion and combination of individual assessments of various aspects of their married life. In addition, Keywords research shows that there is a strong relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. If a person is faithful to the established and current rules, correctly and benevolently relates to others, then he feels satisfaction to a greater extent and his state of well-being increases from this interaction.

The experience of well-being (or trouble) is influenced by various aspects of a person's being, it combines many features of a person's attitude towards himself and the world around him. L.V. Kulikov notes that the well-being of the individual consists of social, spiritual, physical (bodily), material, psychological (mental) comfort. Let's analyze and compare these components in the marital union. Social marital well-being is the satisfaction of spouses with their social status and role in the family, interpersonal relationships, a sense of community, as well as satisfaction with the functional state of the family. Spiritual marital well-being - a sense of satisfaction from being part of each other's spiritual culture, awareness of the possibility of obtaining the necessary spiritual support and harmony in this with a partner. Physical (bodily) marital well-being - a feeling of good physical well-being, as well as bodily comfort from the presence of a spouse, a sense of health, a physical tone that satisfies the individual and a state of cheerfulness. Material well-being is the satisfaction of the spouses with the material side of their existence, the completeness of the security of themselves and their families, the stability of material wealth. Psychological well-being (spiritual comfort) - the coherence and coherence of the mental processes and functions of the spouses, a sense of the integrity of the marital union, internal balance. All components are closely interconnected and influence each other. The addition is the opinion of I.S. Kona, who notes that the combination of physical and spiritual intimacy harmonizes the emotional reactions of lovers, increases their empathy, which also manifests itself in the sexual sphere.

In subjective well-being, two main components are distinguished: cognitive (reflexive) - ideas about certain aspects of one's being, and emotional - the dominant emotional tone of attitudes towards these aspects. Cognitions and feelings are the consistency of beliefs, behaviors and feelings. Beliefs are to some extent determined by our affective preferences, and vice versa. People tend to rearrange their beliefs and perceptions of facts to suit their evaluative preferences. The cognitive component of well-being arises with a holistic, consistent picture of the world in the subject and understanding of the current life situation. Dissonance in the marital cognitive sphere is introduced by conflicting information, the perception of the situation as uncertain, and information (or sensory) deprivation. Emotional Component well-being appears as an experience that unites feelings that are due to the successful (or unsuccessful) functioning of the individual. Disharmony, both in any sphere of the individual and in the marital union, causes emotional discomfort, which reflects trouble in various areas of marriage.

Well-being depends on the presence of clear goals for spouses, success in the implementation of their family plans and behavior, the availability of resources and conditions for achieving goals. Trouble appears in a situation of frustration, with the monotony of executive behavior. Well-being is created by satisfying interpersonal relationships, opportunities to communicate and receive positive emotions from this, to satisfy the need for emotional warmth. Well-being is destroyed by social isolation (deprivation), tension in significant interpersonal relationships. At the same time, a new type of family is currently being formed - a comradely or friendly association, the unity of which increasingly depends on such personal relationships as mutual understanding, affection, mutual participation of its members. These are families where the equal status (position) of spouses prevails - egalitarian families (as opposed to patriarchal families, where the father alone exercises power and influence, and matriarchal families, where the mother has the greatest degree of influence). In a harmonious family, the psychological compatibility of spouses plays a cementing role in the development of their sense of belonging to the family as a public institution with a sense of identity with society. In the family, as in an intimate primary group, the emotional attraction of its members to each other is assumed - respect, devotion, sympathy, love. It is these feelings that contribute to intimacy, trust in relationships, and the strength of the family hearth.

Thus, subjective well-being is a generalized and relatively stable experience, which has a special significance, both for the individual and for the entire marital interaction. It is an important part of the dominant mental state and mood of the spouses, the basis of their understanding of marital well-being, compatibility, consistency of interpersonal partner interaction and the desire for personal and interpersonal harmony.

The main factors and mechanisms of manifestation of compatibility in marriage are considered in domestic and foreign concepts of interpersonal compatibility. According to Aya Oishoba, the main compatibility factors are the physical, economic, mental, religious (beliefs), moral and spiritual aspects of the life of marriage partners, which are regulated through trust, mutual understanding and physical intimacy. Building mutual understanding in partner relations is based on the coincidence of the capabilities and preferences of these factors. James Houran believes that marriage is a test of compatibility, which is based on a certain combination of physical, socio-demographic (economic, geographical, demographic criteria) and personal profile. The most important element of a "compatible" relationship is the mindset of the spouses. In this case, it is believed that the best formula for compatibility is the similarity of spouses to each other in many characteristics (similarity hypothesis), while others argue that compatible couples need to have similarities and differences between their characteristics (complementarity hypothesis). Compatibility testing can be an effective tool for getting to know yourself. It is known that psychological compatibility is a strong combination of emotional and intellectual levels, the correspondence of which does not always coincide with the physical attractiveness of a partner, which is a much more difficult assessment and test of the potentiality of these relationships.

As Hara Estroff Marano and Karlin Flora note (when compatible, spouses should be half of the same couple and remain oriented towards each other, despite the fact that there are many other incentives in the world. Compatibility does not depend on some personal characteristics of the spouses and is not something what they have. That's what they need to do. It's a constant process of negotiation, it's a willingness to work, where they have to connect emotionally to each other and constantly update their knowledge of each other. Lisa Diamond continues: "People need to look at best friend in a friend. The most satisfied are those couples who have too rosy opinions about each other.

Interpersonal compatibility is usually accompanied by the emergence of mutual sympathy, respect, confidence in the favorable outcome of future contacts. It acquires special significance in difficult conditions of joint life, when the achievement of a common goal occurs with a shortage of funds, time, space and the number of necessary participants. In marital relations, the spouses are also united by joint activities, including the creation of a favorable psychological climate and emotional comfort in the family, the maintenance of friendly interpersonal communication, the reproduction and upbringing of children, and the organization of household amenities. It is known that the psychological structure joint activities includes a number of components: common goals, motives, actions and results. The common goal of joint marital activity is the central component of its structure; these are common goals, values, and means that a married couple strives for. The common motive is the motivating force of the husband and wife to joint activities and actions aimed at fulfilling their functional-role operational tasks of joint life and obtaining mutual satisfaction from the result. This idea is supported by N.N. Obozov: "Compatibility as a phenomenon of interaction, communication of people can be considered as a result and a process. In the first case, compatibility is the effect of a combination and interaction of individuals, their communication. The optimal ratio in a pair, a group of personal qualities of participants (temperament, character, needs, interests, value orientation) - a condition of compatibility as a process. Coordination of behavior, emotional experiences and mutual understanding, in which the whole personality of interacting people is expressed, is a process of compatibility. Interaction, and not a combination, is already a process, the consequence of which is the compatibility or incompatibility of people (result or effect ) There is a difference between workability (the process of interaction) and harmony (effect, result)". Harmony is the consistency in the work between its participants. Consent is defined as like-mindedness, commonality of points of view, unanimity and friendly relations. Consent is reflected in somatic and speech psychomotor. Consistency is related to concrete work, activities that involve effectiveness, success and efficiency as a consequence.

Conclusions on the first chapter

As a rule, a family is understood as a small group based on consanguinity or marriage, whose members are connected by a common way of life. Marriage is a sanctioned and regulated socio-historical form of relations between a man and a woman, establishing their rights and obligations towards each other and towards children. In most works devoted to the study of the problems of marriage and family relations, marriage is usually understood as the personal interaction of a husband and wife, regulated by moral principles and supported by values immanent to him.

The concept of "successful marriage" is closely related to marriage, which implies everyday, emotional and sexual adaptation, accompanied by a certain level of spiritual understanding with the indispensable preservation and confirmation of the individual needs of each of the spouses.

Family values are a powerful integrating factor for the family system - both at the level of spouses' interaction with each other, and at the level of interaction between parents and children. In addition, value orientations determine the dynamics of the family in general and marriage in particular. The parental family is the primary social environment of the individual, the environment of socialization. Family atmosphere, relationships in the family, value orientations and attitudes of parents are the first factor in the development of personality. Parents, as a rule, are significant people for the individual, therefore, the exercise of their parental and marital roles is consciously, unconsciously subsequently copied in their own family.

Chapter 2. An empirical study of ideas about marriage between men and women

2.1 Organization and methods of empirical research

The purpose of the work is to identify the features of ideas about marriage in men and women with different levels of satisfaction with marriage.

The object of the study is ideas about the marriage of men and women

The subject of the study is the peculiarities of ideas about marriage in men and women with different levels of satisfaction with marriage.

Research hypothesis: ideas about marriage of men and women depend on their value orientations, satisfaction with marriage, socio-psychological adaptation, personality orientation to business, terminal values, coincidence of spouses' expectations from marriage.

The study involved 60 people (30 married couples), who belonged to different age group, in the range from 21 to 45 years and length of marriage from 1 to 10 years of cohabitation. IN experimental group included couples in unregistered marital relationships, and the control group included couples in registered marital relationships.

In order to provide a more in-depth process of understanding the socio-psychological aspects of marital compatibility and well-being in marital relationships, we used the following test methods:

1) Marriage Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSA) (V.V. Stolin, T.L. Romanova, G.P. Butenko) (Appendix 1);

2) Orientation questionnaire of a person's focus on business, on himself and on communication (B. Bass) (Appendix 2);

3) Technique of paired comparison of spouses' ideas about the appointment of a family union (N.N. Obozov, S. Kovalev) (Appendix 3).

Statistical processing was performed using Student's t-test and Spearman's rank nonparametric correlation.

Student's criterion is aimed at assessing the differences in the values of the average values of two samples, which are distributed according to the normal law. One of the main advantages of the criterion is the breadth of its application. It can be used to compare the means of connected and disconnected samples, and the samples may not be equal in size.

To apply the Student's t-test, the following conditions must be met:

1. The measurement can be taken on a scale of intervals and ratios.

2. The samples to be compared must be distributed according to the normal law.

Method Spearman's rank correlation allows you to determine the tightness (strength) and direction of the correlation between two features or two profiles (hierarchies) of features.

To calculate Spearman's rank correlation, it is necessary to have two series of values that can be ranked. These ranges of values can be:

1) two signs measured in the same group of subjects;

2) two individual trait hierarchies identified in two subjects for the same set of traits (for example, personality profiles according to R.B. Cattell's 16-factor questionnaire, value hierarchies according to R. Rokeach's method, sequences of preferences in choosing from several alternatives, and others);

3) two group hierarchies of features;

4) individual and group hierarchies of features.

First, the indicators are ranked separately for each of the features. As a rule, a lower value of a feature is assigned a lower rank.

Limitations of the rank correlation coefficient:

1) at least 5 observations must be submitted for each variable;

2) Spearman's rank correlation coefficient at in large numbers equal ranks for one or both of the compared variables gives coarsened values. Ideally, both correlated series should be two sequences of mismatched values.

2.2 Analysis of results empirical research

Let us present the results of the Marriage Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSS) (V.V. Stolin, T.L. Romanova, G.P. Butenko). Based on the frequency analysis, all married couples were conditionally divided into three groups depending on the level of satisfaction with marriage:

the first group is presented in the range of up to 29 points (inclusive), which corresponds, according to the OBE methodology, to an unfavorable level in marital relations and a low level of satisfaction with marriage;

the second group is presented in the range of 30 - 36.5 points, which corresponds to the average level of well-being and satisfaction in marriage;

the third group is presented in the range of 37 points and above, which corresponds to a high level of well-being and satisfaction in marital relations.

After analyzing the studied indicators, we identified those that have differences at the level of statistical trend (at p<0,1), статистически достоверные (значимые) различия по t-критерию Стьюдента, указывающие на то, что решение значимо и принимается (при р<0,05) и различия на высоком уровне статистической значимости (при р<0,001), указывающие на высокую значимость. По итогам статистики парных выборок составлена таблица 1, отражающая корреляции и критерии межгрупповых факторов по удовлетворенности браком.

Table 1. Descriptive statistics of intergroup factors on marital satisfaction

	Average GLRs for a sample of men	Average GLRs for a sample of women	t-test
1 gr. (low TSU)
2 gr. (average OUB)
3 gr. (high TSL)
Averages for the entire sample

Significant significant differences by gender were revealed, regardless of the level of satisfaction with marriage. In all three samples (i.e., at different levels of satisfaction with marriage), men have high, in comparison with the female sample, values in assessing satisfaction with marriage. This indicates that men feel dissatisfaction from marital interaction to a lesser extent and their degree of dissatisfaction and disadvantage is much less than in the female sample. This indicates that there are significant gender differences in the perception, evaluation and understanding of well-being in marriage, as well as the fact that the quality of marital relations is determined through subjective feelings of satisfaction, which are not always similar for spouses. Perhaps this discrepancy increases the zone of misunderstanding and conflict situations and indicates that men are largely satisfied with their marital relationships, while women are more dissatisfied with marital relationships.

In addition, it turned out that the average values of satisfaction with marriage throughout the sample were distributed in the range of 32.21±0.56 points with a t-test equal to 3.504, which corresponds to statistically significant data on the well-being of marital relations. This determines the trend of the entire sample towards a fairly high level of well-being in marriage and allows, based on the correlation analysis of the entire sample, to identify the fundamental criteria for well-being in marriage.

Statistically reliable data on the age of the subjects were determined in the range of 34.50±0.54 years. The indicators in the male sample are higher (36.39 years), and lower in the female sample (32.61) with a t-test equal to 3.598. This indicates that the trend accepted in society remains natural - a man is older in marriage.

Satisfaction with marriage positively correlates with indicators of socio-psychological adaptation, such as "adaptation (adaptation)", "self-acceptance", "emotional comfort", "internal internal locus of control", "desire for dominance", which in combination characterizes a psychologically mature personality capable of adequately perceiving oneself, controlling one's behavior and being adequately tolerant and adaptive. At the same time, an interesting factor was that "acceptance of others" - an important indicator that manifested itself at a significant level of significance in intergroup comparisons, was not confirmed by correlation analysis for the entire sample. This indicator, when compared between groups, was more pronounced in married couples with a high level of marital satisfaction. This indicates that it is essential in the well-being of marriage and is identified as a significant condition. The indicator "self-acceptance" appeared both in the correlation analysis of the entire sample and in the intergroup comparison. It turns out that well-being in marriage is more due to greater "acceptance of others", that is, tolerance for others, than only self-acceptance.

There was a positive relationship between satisfaction with marriage and the terminal values "happy family life" and "life wisdom (maturity of judgment and common sense achieved by life experience)". A positive adaptive coping strategy was the orientational "orientation of the spouses to the cause", representing an interest in solving problems, doing the job as best as possible and oriented towards cooperation.

The indicators "coincidence of spouses' expectations from marriage", as well as the relationship between the behavior of spouses in accordance with the family family situation, where "complete parental family", "prosperous and friendly relationships of parents in childhood" and "close relationship with parental family at present. These indicators play the role of transmitted traditions and positive stereotypes of the family system, which contribute to the development of ideas about marriage and expectations from marriage, the coincidence of which determines the well-being in marital relations. As it turned out, an important role in the well-being of marriage is played by the "joint rest time of the spouses", when they are interconnected not by a binding goal and joint affairs, but by free time and a self-controlled process, when their presence with each other is voluntary and pleasant. Significant criteria that characterize the general trend of the entire sample are "good (normal) health" and "emotional comfort of the spouses", which largely determines the psychological and somatic state of the spouses. Men's health scores are lower than women's. These differences are significant (with a t-test equal to -3.380) and determine the propensity of men more to a satisfactory state of health, rather than to excellent and normal, in comparison with women.

Satisfaction with marriage negatively correlates with such personal characteristics as "anxiety" and "distimism", which represent a reduced emotional background and negative prediction of situations, which also explains the choice of such a coping strategy as "escapism", which implies avoidance and avoidance of solving problem situations. With an increase in satisfaction with marriage, the role of the "household union", the significance of the value "neatness", the values "entertainment" and the orientational "focus on oneself" decrease. An increase in the values of these parameters to a greater extent determines trouble in marriage and a decrease in satisfaction with marital relations.

Satisfaction with marriage decreases with the increase in "length of marriage". The average values of the joint residence of the spouses were determined within 9.5 years, which represents a period of restructuring and family changes.

The duration of the length of marriage is influenced by the "level of education of the spouses" (with secondary specialized education of the spouses, the length of the marriage is longer), the "sibling position of the spouses" (the position of the youngest child in the clan system increases the stay in the marriage), as well as the upbringing and development of the spouses in childhood in full parental family, which may increase the number of registered marriages. With an increase in the length of marriage, the spouses' "orientation to communication" and the role of "family-parental union" increase. Perhaps this is the reason for the increase in the parameters "number of children" and "number of conflicts". With an increase in the length of marriage, the importance of the value of "public recognition and the happiness of others", "honesty" and "tolerance" increases. In addition, there is an increase in the indicator "poor (unsatisfactory) well-being" of spouses, which indicates a negative trend in a decrease in satisfaction with marriage and a decrease in the coincidence of expectations from marriage. The parameters "hyperthymism", "exaltation" of the spouses, the significance of the "moral-psychological union", the significance of the values "dutifulness" and "discipline" are decreasing, which in combination characterizes the violation of the optimal functional state of the spouses and reflects dissatisfaction with marriage.

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PECULIARITIES OF CONCEPTS OF THE FAMILY OF MODERN STUDENT YOUTH*

MODERN STUDENTS" VIEWS UPON FAMILY

E.L. Chernyshova Volga Region State Social and Humanitarian Academy

(Russia, Samara)

Ye.L. Chemyshova Samara State Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities (Russia, Samara)

The article discusses the features of ideas about the institution of family and marriage of modern students, compares the attitudes of girls and boys of student age to the concept of family, analyzes the readiness for marriage of young people.

The paper highlights the way today students look upon family and marriage. It also compares the views of the male and female students, analyzes their maturity for having a family.

Key words: ideas, features of ideas, the institution of family and marriage, modern youth, students.

Keywords: views, family and marriage, modern young people, students.

The institution of marriage has experienced a significant crisis in recent decades. This is expressed primarily in the growth in the number of divorces. In modern society, the family, more than ever, has become one of the institutions that take responsibility for its members. Actually, the unwillingness to take responsibility for another is one of the reasons why the marriages of young people break up. The first difficulties that arise in the family often become critical. In part, this situation is related to the socio-psychological characteristics of modern students (young people), who are often focused on personal freedom, satisfaction of desires, aspirations and are poorly oriented towards establishing strong, long-term ties and attachments.

The problems of the institution of marriage and the young family in social psychology are quite well studied. A number of studies have considered the features of modern marriage psychology, the main problems of the family (G.M. Andreeva, T.V. Andreeva, S.I. Golod, O.A. Karabanova, S.V. Kovalev, N.M. Rimashevskaya, etc. .). Such a category as “marriage satisfaction” was considered and studied in detail (Yu.E. Aleshina, E.V. Grozdova, A.G. Leaders). Studied the problem of stability

marriage and sustainability factors (E.G. Gukova, V.I. Kosacheva, V.A. Sysenko). The issues of communication in the intra-family environment are widely considered (G.M. Andreeva, S.V. Kovalev, E.V. Kutsakova, E.V. Novikova, N.N. Obozov).

Marriage is a legal designation of the entire complexity of relationships contained in the socio-psychological concept of "family". A family is “a small group based on marriage or consanguinity, whose members are connected by a common life, mutual moral responsibility and mutual assistance”.

Within the framework of the psychological approach to understanding the phenomenon of the family, it is considered as “a space of joint life activity, within which the specific needs of people connected by blood and family ties are satisfied. This space is a fairly complex structure, consisting of various elements (roles, positions) and a system of relationships between its members. So the structure exists in accordance with the laws of a living organism, therefore it has a natural dynamics, passing through a number of phases and stages in its development.

As V. Satir notes, marital relations are heterogeneous and have the following aspects in their structure:

Role relationships;

value relations;

emotional relationships;

Appraisal Relationships.

The specific role of a person is

the role he plays in the family. The family role is one of the types of social roles of a person in society. Family roles are determined by the place and functions of the individual in the family group and are divided primarily into marital (wife, husband), parental (mother, father), children's (son, daughter, brother, sister, elder, younger).

Based on the combination of family roles, role-playing relationships in the family are built. Role relationships in the family are relationships between family members that are determined by the nature and content of family roles or the type of interaction of family members in the performance of family roles. As a result, two types of role relations in the family are distinguished: role agreement and role conflict.

Value relationships are built on the basis of values that are significant for spouses.

Values are generalized ideas of people regarding the goals and norms of their social behavior. Values embody the historical experience and culture of individual groups (ethnic groups, classes, etc.), in other words, they serve as a kind of guideline with which people relate their actions.

Values are relatively common, stable characteristics of people. The values of an adult are difficult to change, so the conflict of values is one of the most difficult in family life. Values form a system of actions, life orientations, ways of human action in life. If the values that are significant for one spouse are of lesser importance for the other, this is reflected in the way of the family: the family does not appear as a single entity, it is itself split.

under the weight of internal contradictions of an ideological nature.

Traditionally, a number of values stand out in human life:

Love, emotional and physical intimacy;

Birth and upbringing of children;

spiritual relationships;

Material wealth;

Implementation of social roles;

Professional and personal growth.

Family life, planned events, the system of family relations with the outside world are largely related to the value orientations of the spouses. The presence of radically opposite life orientations among spouses causes conflict in the family; the coincidence of the values of the spouses determines the harmonious value relations.

The emotional aspect of relationships is largely associated with communication, namely with its emotional component. There are two key components in communication: emotional and informative. In family life, the emotional component is more significant. “Members of the family,” writes E.G. Eidmiller, - exchange numerous streams of emotions of different intensity, each of which, under appropriate circumstances, generates a counter current. The style of emotional relationship between any two members of the family develops independently, although it is constantly influenced by other emotional interpersonal relationships in the family. The changeable variety of multidirectional flows of emotions determines the changeable "family atmosphere" saturated with all shades of emotional experience, against which the personality develops.

G.M. Andreeva singles out their emotional basis as a defining feature of interpersonal relationships. “The emotional basis of interpersonal relationships,” writes G.M. Andreev, means that they arise and develop on the basis of certain feelings that are born in people in relation to each other.

The evaluation component of marital relations is largely associated with satisfaction with marriage, marital relations.

In modern literature, there are two approaches to determining readiness for marriage. According to the first approach (N.M. Galimova, O. F. Kovaleva, S.M. Pitilin and others), the readiness of young people to marry should be determined before the start of family life; according to the second approach (P.A. Reshetov and others), readiness for marriage can be assessed by the final result, the success of marriage, satisfaction with marriage, and harmony in family relations. However, with the second approach, it is impossible to evaluate the results of preparation for marriage, since they are evaluated after the time spent in marriage.

Readiness for marriage is a complex structured phenomenon that includes a number of aspects: physical and social maturity, psychological readiness, sexual readiness.

Physical maturity is puberty, i.e. such a state of the body in which it is ready for procreation without physiological losses. Physical maturity occurs mainly in the period from 15 to 25 years, while for boys, physical maturity occurs a little earlier - at 15-18 years old, for girls - later, at 18-22 years old. As noted by A.G. Kharchev and M.S. Matskovsky, this is due to the fact that "the reproductive function of the female body is more complicated and requires longer preparation, stable hormonal balance, maturation of all physiological systems" . This does not mean that boys and girls cannot realize their reproductive function at an earlier age, it means that in order for the reproductive function to be

lysed fully and without significant physiological losses for the body and future offspring, it is necessary to wait for physiological maturity. However, in any case, physiological maturity usually occurs earlier than social maturity.

Social maturity is the most convincing evidence of young people entering adulthood. Social maturity, according to S.I. Hunger implies "a formed system of social communications (it is necessary at the stage of choosing a marriage partner and getting closer to him), entering society in the status of a full citizen, understanding the essence of social ties, social norms, rules, duties and rights" .

The study of the readiness of modern students for marriage was carried out on the material of the following methods: the scaling method "Study of readiness for marriage"; test "Unfinished sentences"; test "Features of communication between spouses" (Yu.E. Aleshina, L.Ya. Gozman, E.M. Dubovskaya). The main objective of the study is to compare the results of testing between boys and girls, 4th year students of the Faculty of Psychology of the Volga Region State Social and Humanitarian Academy. The study involved 40 students (20 boys and 20 girls aged 17 to 19, unmarried).

At the research stage, using the means of mathematical statistics (the Mann-Whitney criterion), we analyzed the differences in students' readiness for marriage.

First, the differences within the student group in terms of gender were studied. Table 1 presents the data of mathematical analysis of differences in the readiness for marriage of boys and girls.

Table 1

Readiness for marriage (group average)

Groups Boys Girls

Marriage readiness rate 3.2 4.7

Statistics U Mann-Whitney 53,000

Significance level of differences: Mann-Whitney test (achieved at p< 0,05) р < 0,05

As can be seen, the p criterion does not exceed the value of 0.05, which indicates a significant difference between the readiness for marriage of boys and girls. In other words, girls who have reached student age (17-20 years old) feel more

ready to marry, create a family than young men of the same age.

Table 2 presents a comparison of ideas about the marriage of boys and girls.

table 2

Representations of boys and girls about the family

Indicators Boys Girls Statistics Significance level

(mean score) (mean score) and Mann-Whitney differences: Mann-Whitney test (achieved at p< 0,05)

Submissions 3.2 3.6 126,500 Not achieved

about marriage as a social

al phenomenon

Personality content 2.6 3.4 33,000 rub< 0,05

concept of "marriage"

Expectations 3.7 3.9 183,500 Not achieved

from the future

family life

As can be seen from Table 2, significantly significant differences were achieved only in relation to the personal content of the concepts of "family", "marriage". This means that in relation to themselves, to their own lives, girls evaluate their family more positively than boys. This is also noticeable in the qualitative analysis of respondents' answers. When the sentence continued, “the main thing in the family is ...”, the girls answered in a more detailed and meaningful way: “love, mutual understanding”, “so that people can trust each other, so that they have common interests, views, and love, of course”, “ the feeling that you are needed, that they cannot live without you, that there is

Performances of boys and girls

di, who care about you, and they are ready for a lot for you”, “children, of course, without children the family is inferior”, “love, feelings”, etc. was”, “well, so that everything was fine, without action” (in this context, “action” can mean nervous tension, breakdowns, etc. - E.Ch.). In other words, in general, for young men, the personal content of the concepts of "family" and "marriage" is less meaningful and more superficial than for girls.

Table 3

about the characteristics of communication in the family

Indicators Boys Girls Statistics and Mann-Whitney Level of significance of differences: Mann-Whitney test (achieved at p< 0,05)

Confidence 8.9 12.1 27,500 rub< 0,05

Mutual understanding 9.6 13.7 22,000 rub< 0,05

Similarity of views 9.4 10.2 189,000 Not achieved

Common family symbols 7.9 10.5 46,500 rub< 0,05

Ease of communication 12.1 13.7 151,000 Not achieved

Psychotherapy 10.2 12.8 48,500 r< 0,05

An analysis of Table 3 shows that boys and girls assess the significance of various factors of communication in the family differently.

So, for girls, such characteristics of communication as trust, mutual understanding, family symbols, psychotherapeutic communication are significantly more significant. This suggests that for girls, more than for boys, all-round communication in the family, the opportunity to have close, trusting relationships, is significant. Perhaps this is due to the greater family orientation of girls than boys. Young men, in turn, are more socially oriented, establishing social contacts, social achievements. In addition, girls are likely to be more emotional and, in general, more prone to intimate-personal communication than boys.

Thus, after analyzing the characteristics of readiness and attitudes towards marriage among boys and girls of student age, we can note that girls are more ready for marriage than boys; girls are inclined to a deeper personal content of the concepts of "marriage", "family"; for girls, the factor of versatile communication in marriage is of greater importance than for boys. This difference manifests itself in the following:

Girls who have reached student age feel more ready to marry, create a family than boys of the same age;

Girls are prone to a deeper personal content of the concepts of "marriage", "family" than boys;

For girls, the factor of versatile communication in marriage is of greater importance than for boys; perhaps this is due to the greater family orientation of girls than boys; young men, in turn, are more focused on society, social achievements, establishing social contacts;

For young men, ideas about the family as a social institution are quite general and, due to age, are often associated with radical judgments, a maximalist outlook on life;

For young men, the personal content of the concept of "family" is less positive; this is due to the need for personal freedom, a less profound understanding of the essence of the family and the need for it;

All students do not have an idea about the importance of such aspects of communication in the family as trust, mutual understanding and interpersonal communication, as well as similarity in views, which is due to the desire to implement these communication functions in other social groups.

Students at all times have been distinguished by ambiguity, in the modern situation, the strengthening of this ambiguity is dictated by the extremely diverse social experience of modern students, different attitudes to the world, different values and ideological orientation. Modern students are characterized by increased infantilism, easier adaptation to new conditions, tolerance for the views and ideas of others.

Literature

1. Andreeva G.M. Social Psychology. M. : Aspect-Press, 2009.

2. Asmolov A.G. Activity and installation. M. : Knowledge, 1995.

3. Golod S.I. Family and marriage: historical and sociological analysis. SPb. : Petropolis, 2004.

4. Grozdova E.V., Leaders A.G. Complementarity of spouses and satisfaction with marriage // Family psychology and family therapy. 2007. No. 2. pp. 41-56.

5. Psychological Dictionary / Ed. V.V. Zinchenko, A.N. Stoyanov. M.: Encyclopedia,

6. Psychology of the family: Reader. Samara: Bahrakh-M, 2002.

7. Satir V. How to build yourself and your family. M. : Prospekt, 1992.

8. Kharchev A.G., Matskovsky M.S. Modern family and its problems. M. : Nauka, 2010.

9. Eidmiller E.G., Yustitsky V.V. Psychology and psychotherapy of the family. SPb. : Speech, 2003.

*The article was prepared as part of the implementation of the state task of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia No. 25.1028.2014 / K on the topic "Social psychology of religious (confessional), ethno-national, legal, regulatory and managerial consciousness in modern Russia."

BELARUSIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

VIEW OF MARRIAGE DURING YOUTH

COURSE WORK

2nd year students of psychology department
Mikhalevich Yanina Valerievna

Scientific adviser -
candidate of psychological sciences,
Associate Professor O. G. Ksenda

Minsk, 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER 1
1.1. Concept of marriage 5
1.2. Young people's idea of marriage 10
1.2.1. Sources of young people's ideas about marriage 10
1.2.2. The idea of young people about the external and psychological-personal side of marriage 14
1.2.3. Young people's perceptions of the age at which one can marry, the age ratio of boys and girls, and sexual relations before
marriage 20
1.2.4. Young people's perceptions of motives for marriage 21
CONCLUSION 24
LIST OF USED SOURCES 27

INTRODUCTION
This topic is very relevant, not only now, but also in the future. Marriage or the family has always been and will continue to be the basis of society. Because marriage itself is a micro-society in which two completely different people learn to interact with each other, and at the closest level, learn to organize life, learn to love each other and discover this world in a new way. It is the family that is able to fully and naturally perform the main functions of the physical and spiritual reproduction of society, that is, reproductive and educational functions.
The institution of marriage is very unique, because, on the one hand, it is individual, and on the other hand, it is social. You can not create a marriage and at the same time be isolated from society. After all, it is in marriage that a person receives such necessary psychological and material resources as support, love, acceptance, respect, stability, prosperity for normal functioning in society. Whether a person feels loved, happy, and meaningful in a marriage will determine how they behave and perform in society. From this it follows that there is a direct dependence of well-being in society on well-being in marriage. That is why it is so important to pay attention to what ideas young people have in order to be able to correct them, to help create a good and happy family. Because recently there are negative trends in marriage and family relations among young people. The fact that it is the institution of marriage that is undergoing a fairly strong decline as a value, and in particular among young people, is of interest to many researchers from various cities and countries.
Indeed, why does something that is so integral to a person suddenly lose its significance and value? Why is there such a strong trend of divorce and single parents? The answers to these and many other questions are found in young people's ideas about marriage. They begin to form from childhood, and we will also touch on the sources of these ideas. How young people see their own family in the future, themselves as a spouse, largely determines the success or failure of its construction.
The problem of marriage affects not only the socio-psychological aspect of the individual, but also the demographic situation of the country. From the analysis of various sources, three of the most problematic trends affecting the demographic crisis in countries, in particular Russia, can be identified. The first is when children are born and later live in an incomplete family if the parents divorce, and this trend has become very frequent. The second is when an abortion is done, especially among young girls with unwanted pregnancies, which is also very common. The third, when the couple does not want to have a child at all, or only one or, in extreme cases, two. All these three most striking trends are reflected in the demographic situation of the country and the health of the nation.
Turning from the institution of marriage directly to young people, I would like to note that “adolescence is a period of life and professional self-determination of a person. This period of a person's life is characterized by the active formation of the personality, the emergence and development of significant psychological neoplasms involved in all manifestations of the cognitive and emotional attitude to the world - in assessing reality and the surrounding people, in predicting one's individual and social activity, in planning the future and self-realization, in the formation of one's own ideas about the world and about oneself. It follows from this that the way young people evaluate themselves, other people, their future and form their worldview, affects the development of their relationship in marriage with another person.
The development of marriage and family ideas for boys and girls includes the formation of adequate ideas about the relationship between love and marriage, overcoming consumer trends in relation to the family and life partner, nurturing realism and integrity in the perception of themselves and others.
Turning to young people, I want to find out what their ideas about marriage are, what motivates them to get married, what or who shapes their ideas about this union, as well as the differences in ideas between boys and girls. All this is reflected in the object, subject, goals and objectives set in this work.
Object: concept of marriage
Subject: young people's idea of marriage
Purpose: to characterize the idea of marriage in the period of youth
Tasks:

Chapter 1
concept of marriage at a young age

1.1 The concept of marriage
The family is based on marital relations, in which both the natural and social nature of a person, both the material (social being) and spiritual (social consciousness) spheres of social life are manifested. Society is interested in the stability of marital relations, therefore it exercises external social control over the optimal functioning of marriage with the help of a system of public opinion, means of social influence on the individual, and the process of education.
A. G. Kharchev defines marriage as “a historically changing social form of relations between husband and wife, through which society regulates and sanctions their sexual life and sees their marital and parental rights and obligations”, and the family “as an institutionalized community that develops on the basis of marriage and the legal and moral responsibility of the spouses for the health of children and their upbringing that it generates.
In the definition of A.G. Kharchev, the key points for the concept of the essence of marriage are ideas about the variability of the forms of marriage, its social representation, and the role of society in its ordering and sanctioning, legal regulation.
The institution of marriage has gone through many stages in historical, social and psychological contexts. Since marriage is a form of legalization of sexual relations and the assumption of obligations to the spouse and society, the roles and obligations between spouses were distributed ambiguously, depending on how they were established by society. At the moment, in society there is a certain struggle between the patriarchal form of the family, where the man dominates, and the egalitarian form, where the man and woman are equal in obligations, social roles, in the organization of life and working capacity.
The egalitarian form of relations is typical for Western society, patriarchal for Russian, but at the moment, due to the active influence of foreign values, opinions and ideas, in particular among young people, are changing from patriarchal to egalitarian. Today's young people are a new generation that faces a choice: to create marriage relations on the model of parents, where the father often dominated, or on a partnership, where the male and female roles and obligations are distributed by the spouses themselves.
The separation of matrimony as a structural unit occurred in the historical aspect relatively recently as a result of serious socio-economic transformations of modern society, which created conditions for an equal (social, legal, moral) man and woman. Marriage is a personal interaction between husband and wife, regulated by moral principles and supported by its inherent values.
This definition emphasizes: the non-institutional nature of the relationship inherent in marriage, the equality and symmetry of the moral duties and privileges of both spouses.
With regard to marital relations, A. G. Kharchev wrote: “The psychological side of marriage is a consequence of the fact that a person has the ability to understand, evaluate and emotionally experience both the phenomena of the world around him and his own needs. It includes both the thoughts and feelings of the spouses in relation to each other, and the objective expression of these thoughts and feelings in actions and actions. Psychological relations in marriage are objective in the form of their manifestation, but subjective in their essence. Thus, the dialectical relationship between the objective and the subjective is fully manifested in the family sphere as well.
The psychological essence of marriage is the confirmation of relationships in a couple, their inclusion and coordination with other relationships that future spouses already maintain. Such negotiation is not always easy. Sometimes future spouses are not ready for it, sometimes their inner circle may not approve or resist marriage. Therefore, even in cases where the problem of choosing a marriage partner is solved, the couple may have serious difficulties.
It should be emphasized that the forms of marriage are diverse. In order to better understand this problem, it is necessary to dwell on the profiles of marriage, types of marital relations and their determinants.
The theory of dynamic marital therapy mentions seven profiles of marriage based on the reactions and behavior of spouses in marriage.
Seiger proposed the following classification of behavior in marriage.

The classification of marriage profiles into symmetrical, complementary and metacomplementary is well known. In a symmetrical marriage, both spouses have equal rights, no one is subordinate to the other. Problems are solved by agreement, exchange or compromise. In a complementary marriage, one orders, gives orders, the other obeys, awaits advice or instructions. In a meta-complementary marriage, the leading position is reached by a partner who realizes his own goals by emphasizing his weakness, inexperience, ineptness and impotence, thus manipulating his partner.
In order to better understand the determinants and types of marital relations, the concept of “emotional dependence of partners on marriage” has been introduced into practice. Depending on the magnitude of the differences between partners, a marriage can be assessed as asymmetric or symmetrical, and, taking into account the degree of dependence, as favorable, doomed to failure, or disastrous. Dependence for each partner is determined by the consequences that the divorce will entail. One of the essential elements of such dependence is the attractiveness of a partner. For women, this is beauty, charm, typically feminine behavior, languor, tenderness, for a man - intelligence, charm, wit, sociability, masculinity, social recognition, and only partly beauty. If the dependence is moderate, adequate, then the marriage profile is assessed as favorable; if one partner has excessive dependence, then the marriage is categorized as “doomed to fail”, and with bilateral dependence, it is classified as “disastrous”.
To date, various forms of marriage and family relations have developed, the most common of which are as follows:

Both spouses clearly understand what they want from marriage, and count on certain material benefits. The very terms of the contract cement and help solve vital problems. Emotional attachment, which can hardly be called love, but which nevertheless exists in such a union, as a rule, intensifies over time. Although if the family exists only as an economic unit, the feeling of emotional take-off is completely lost. People entering into such a marriage have the most powerful practical support from a partner in all practical endeavors - since both wife and husband pursue their own economic benefit. In such marriage and family relations, the degree of freedom of each of the spouses is maximum, and personal involvement is minimal.

A man and a woman are trying to extract unilateral benefits from marriage and thereby harm their partner. There is no need to talk about love here either, although often in this version of marriage and family relations it is one-sided (in the name of which the spouse, realizing that he is being deceived and exploited, endures everything).

One of the future spouses somewhat "besieges" the other, and he, either due to certain life circumstances, or out of pity, finally agrees to a compromise. In such cases, it is also difficult to talk about a deep feeling: even on the part of the “besieger”, ambition, the desire to possess the object of worship, and passion rather prevail. When such a marriage is finally concluded, the "besieger" begins to consider the spouse his property. The feeling of freedom necessary in marriage and family is absolutely excluded here. The psychological foundations for the existence of such a family are so deformed that the compromises required by family life are impossible.

At a certain age, people come to the conclusion that everyone around is married or married and that it is time to start a family. This is a marriage without love and without calculation, but only following certain social stereotypes. In such families, the prerequisites for a long family life are rarely created. Most often, such marriage and family relationships are formed by chance and just as randomly break up, leaving no deep traces.

Two people unite voluntarily, because they cannot imagine their life without each other. In a marriage of love, the restrictions that spouses take on are purely voluntary, they enjoy spending their free time together, with members of their family, they like to do something good for each other, for the rest of the family. Marriage and family relations in this version is the highest degree of uniting people, when children are born in love, when either of the spouses retains its independence and individuality, with the full support of the second. The paradox is that by voluntarily accepting such restrictions, people become more free. The marriage and family form of such relations is built on trust, on greater respect for a person than for generally recognized norms.
In the history of mankind, many forms of organizing marriage relations between the sexes have changed, as a rule, corresponding to a certain level of socio-economic development of society. At the same time, not only the forms of marriage themselves are variable, but also the view of marriage and family in modern society is undergoing cardinal changes.
In this aspect, it is worth highlighting such forms of marriage as civil and legally registered. At the present stage, there is a strong tendency for young people to switch from a registered form of marriage to a civil one, where young people cohabit and do not formalize their relationship.
As statistics show, today many young people in our country prefer either not to formalize their family relations at all, or to live for some time without registering a marriage. It is believed that the most common reason for concluding a civil marriage is an attempt to rehearse family relationships, where domestic compatibility is checked, which mutual love and sexual attraction do not yet guarantee. It is likely that everyday habits will turn out to be so different that it will be easier to leave than to doom yourself to family life. And in general, a civil marriage is desirable as a preparatory stage for an official marriage. The realization that you have the right to choose and at any moment you can change your life gives a certain psychological independence and a sense of inner freedom. From research, it turned out that a large number of young people adhere to this point of view. Moreover, it was not possible to reveal any dependence on gender and place of residence. Some students allow entering into a civil marriage if it is not possible to formalize their relationship legally. A small number of young people believe that this can be forced by ordinary material difficulties (for example: a common budget, it is easier to rent an apartment together, etc.).
However, in contrast to the opinion of most students who are in an open marriage, that premarital cohabitation is the best form of getting to know a person in everyday life, adapting to each other, it has been scientifically proven that out-of-family experience can make it difficult to move from concentrating on one's own affairs to taking into account the needs and desires of other members. families, especially children. Cohabitation is not a system that successfully prepares prospective spouses for marriage, as a lack of commitment in a non-family household can lead to their absence from marriage. At the same time, a number of studies prove that cohabitation is at a lower level of happiness than formalized unions.
Also, neither the man nor the woman is sure how long this marriage will last. And this is understandable: civil marriages are based on quick and passionate emotions, and therefore short-lived. There are many difficulties in marriage, the husband and wife usually strive to overcome them: they live together for a long time, and the cohabitants have a chance to avoid difficulties - to leave.
The negative side of civil marriage is the lack of roots. People cannot ritually celebrate his anniversary, but official spouses do. It helps to remember and experience pleasant moments, a kind of psychotherapy. This provides the basis for further life together.
Another significant difference between civil and registered marriage is the presence or absence of liability. In a registered marriage, young people officially take responsibility for another person to society and their future spouse. In a civil marriage, responsibility can be easily evaded.
It is also interesting to note the fact that the lack of responsibility in a civil marriage can play a decisive role in the incompatibility of young people, as young people often like to say. That is, they see the result and find the reason in the incompatibility of the characters, when in fact it may turn out that the reason is precisely in the non-dedication to each other and the initial presence of the retreat option.
Various surveys and studies do not agree on an unambiguous opinion on what type of marriage young people prefer at the present stage. So the study of T.N. Gureeva says that a larger percentage of young people choose a civil form of marriage, and L.A. Uvykina says that, despite a completely loyal attitude towards civil marriage, only a small percentage of young people are ready to enter into such a marriage. Basically, a compromise is chosen, first to live in a civil marriage, and then formalize the relationship legally.

1.2 Young people's perception of marriage
1.2.1. Sources of young people's ideas about marriage
Since each person is brought up in a family and is part of society, the sources of young people's ideas about marriage can be divided into two large camps. The first is the parental family, the second is public information and values. Ideally, for the optimal functioning of the family, they should be similar, but as practice shows, this is not always the case.
parent family
As noted by V.T. Lisovsky, the parental family has a special influence on the process of forming the moral and psychological readiness of young people for a future family life. It forms in children, future spouses and parents, certain moral and cultural norms, stereotypes of communication and behavior, ideas about family life. The study of the marriage and family attitudes of young people and the influence of a real model of family interaction in the parental family on these attitudes shows that the ideas of young men and women about future family life are formed on the example of a real model of family relations between parents. The role settings of the mother contribute to the formation of the daughter's readiness to act as a wife-mother, the role settings of the father are the basis for the formation of a model of role behavior in the son's future family life.
According to the results of the study by T.N. Gureeva, for today's youth, the main example that defines ideas about the family is the family of parents. Also, young people take an example from the families of acquaintances. Young people can evaluate both positively and negatively the parental model of marriage. With a positive assessment, young people tend to reproduce this model, with a negative one, on the contrary, they never want to repeat it. However, as numerous studies and practice show, even with a negative assessment of the parental model of marriage, young people repeat it with even greater negative consequences. Only a small percentage of young people manage to overcome the difficulties that cause a negative assessment in parental marriage.
The ideas of adolescents and young men about their future family in many cases make up for what they think they lack in their parental home, that is, these ideas often have a compensatory character. Therefore, such ideas can contribute to the creation in young people of such a model of an “ideal” family that would satisfy only their own needs and reveal a certain consumer tendency of adolescents and young men in relation to other people, a lack of concern for others, even emotionally significant for them, possibly future ones. spouses. Such young people present their future family life as an obligatory, but not too tempting, element of adult life.
When asked if you would like your marriage to be like that of your parents, a relatively small percentage of young people give an affirmative answer. However, when asked how you see your future spouse, a very large percentage of young people indicate either their mother or their father, mainly depending on the gender of the respondents.
This is quite an interesting fact, because individually, young people evaluate their parent or parents positively, but their joint relationship and marriage model is often criticized.
Ideas about marriage, love, relationships between people are formed in young people from childhood. It is in the family that the foundations of a person's character, his attitude to work, moral and cultural values are formed. The family has been and remains the most important social environment for the formation of personality and the basis for psychological support and education. Therefore, it is also worth touching on the fact that the absence of one parent in the family can be the cause of inferior, unsuccessful upbringing of children, and therefore ideas about future marriage. In maternal incomplete families, boys do not see an example of male behavior in the family, which contributes to the formation in the process of their socialization of an inadequate idea of the role functions of a man, husband, father. The same is observed in girls.
Children brought up in single-parent families are deprived of an example of the relationship between a man and a woman in a family, which negatively affects their socialization in general and their readiness for future family life in particular. Pedagogy evaluates the indicator of identification of children with their parents as one of the main criteria for the effectiveness of family education. At the same time, the child expresses acceptance of the moral and ideological norms of his parents. The implementation of this component of the educational process in an incomplete family is deformed due to the absence of one parent.
In paternal incomplete families, the above problems are supplemented by the lack of maternal affection, without which the upbringing of children cannot be complete either.
Children who find themselves without parental care also have an inadequate idea of marriage and family relations. These are children who have either never been brought up in a family at all and have no idea how it works and functions, how its members interact. They did not see affection and tenderness from their parents, when they needed it, they were left alone with the outside world. Alienation, emotional coldness, inability to communicate emotionally, lack of communication skills - this is not a complete list of developmental disabilities.
An important aspect in shaping young people's ideas about marriage in the parental family is also the interaction of parents and children. If parents establish trusting, strong, respectful relationships with children, teenagers, and potential spouses in the future, then it is the parents, and not anyone else, who can form competent and positive ideas about marriage. Gradually, at each stage of personality development, dosing out information about the relationship between a man and a woman, openly and honestly answering the questions of children and adolescents, parents can help boys and girls to have reliable, not distorted knowledge about marriage. Firstly, they will not have fear of this union, which is largely surrounded by a halo of mystery, and secondly, they will be ready for difficulties in this union.
And the fact that parents do not prepare their children for future marriage, are ashamed to raise serious and frank topics with them, believing that they are still small, laugh it off and do not give complete and reliable information, leads to looking for this information anywhere and often incorrect, which forms a distorted idea of marriage among young people.
Public information and values
The institution of family and marriage in many countries has faced a lot of problems. These include a significant decrease in the popularity of legal marriage and a significant increase in the number of divorces, a distortion of the image of the family, love relationships. Often, young people and girls, entering into marriage, do not realize all the responsibility that they take on, do not measure their desires and capabilities. One of the reasons for such processes in society is the pressure exerted by the information space on today's youth.
The process of globalization and urbanization has provided an opportunity to use various types of media and the Internet, which serve as the main source of information for modern young people and girls, including about the “ideal” of modern relationships between a man and a woman.
On the pages of magazines, newspapers, TV screens, an example of love is cultivated, which is more passion than love. The purpose of this love is to receive pleasure. The image of family life is presented as a sexual relationship of partners, where each should be attracted to the other. “Love” is transformed from a feeling into a means. A means of obtaining pleasure, status, social protection. All this forms attitudes that contribute to the unclear understanding by young men and women of the value of the institution of family, marriage, love.
There is also an opinion that in those countries where there was a struggle with religion and the church, the value of marriage also weakened, since the church brought up and supported the significance of family relations. Throughout the history of mankind, religion and the church have served as a powerful source of information, and not only on family settings. At the present stage, young people do not listen much to this source, considering it old-fashioned and a relic of the past.
Very often, the source of young people's ideas about marriage is friends, peers, classmates, classmates. Often this happens due to the fact that there is no trusting relationship with parents, and friends are the second most important thing for people. Accordingly, if it is impossible to obtain information from parents, adolescents turn to friends for this information. They are also united by a common interest, common questions, and are especially attracted by the fact that much is considered forbidden from what interests them. Perhaps both parents and society impose too many taboos and taboos on many issues, instead of conveying the information they need to teenagers in an accessible and truthful way.
Teenagers spend most of their time in schools and institutes, so even if they do not seek to get some information about relationships, they will still be persuaded to do so by other students. However, if a girl or a boy is prepared for this in advance, then this will not have a strong impact, since they will already have the correct view.
Fiction, classical, tabloid literature, films also undoubtedly play a big role in shaping ideas about marriage among young people. Because it is interesting for young people, and they tend to believe what they watch, read, hear.
1.2.2. The idea of young people about the external and psychological-personal side of marriage
The idea of young people about the outside of marriage.
The external side of marriage means the material base on which marriage is built, the availability of housing, the organization of everyday life, the distribution of roles and responsibilities between spouses. This also includes the idea of education among young people entering into marriage, religious affiliation, nationality, the role of parents, the acceptance of material assistance from them, the presence of children in the future. Consider all these parameters depending on gender.
The material base of young people, their material status, material assistance from parents and the availability of housing
etc.................

S. V. Kovalev emphasizes the importance of forming adequate marriage and family ideas for boys and girls. At present, young people's ideas about marriage have a number of negative features: for example, at the age of 13-15 there is a progressive separation and opposition of the concepts of love and marriage. For students (according to the questionnaire "Your Ideal"), the importance of love when choosing a life partner was in fourth place after the qualities "respect", "trust", "mutual understanding". There is a clear “pushing back” of love in marriage against the background of its previous omnipotence. That is, young men and women can perceive the family as a hindrance to their feelings, and only later, painfully through trial and error, come to comprehend

niyu moral and psychological value of marriage. The task is to form an understanding of the value of the family among high school students and try to create a correct understanding of the relationship between love and marriage and the role of love as the basis of a long-term union.

The next thing that characterizes the marriage and family ideas of young people is their obvious consumer unrealism. So, according to V. I. Zatsepin, in the study of students, it turned out that the average desired spouse in its positive qualities surpassed the “average” real young man from the immediate environment of female students, similarly to male students, the ideal spouse was presented in the form of a woman who was not only better than real girls, but also surpassed them in intelligence, honesty, fun and hard work.

It is typical for young people discrepancy between the qualities of the desired life partner and the intended partner in everyday communication, from the circle; which this satellite, in general, should be selected. Surveys of sociologists have shown that personality traits that are considered significant for an ideal spouse are not of decisive importance in real communication between boys and girls.

Our study (in 1998-2001) of the premarital preferences of university students showed a similar picture in many respects.

The open form of the survey (the wording was proposed by the respondents themselves) revealed that in the image of the preferred partner in | communication, students should have such qualities as (in descending order): external data, positive character traits (different for each of the respondents - kindness, loyalty, modesty, decency, good breeding, diligence, etc.), mind, communicative data, sense of humour, gaiety, femininity, sexuality, patient attitude towards the respondent himself, general development (spiritual, outlook, professionalism), diligence, balance, calmness, health, material security.

The image of the future spouse includes: moral qualities (as a total index of various character traits: honesty, ability to keep one’s word, decency, fidelity, kindness, etc.), mind, appearance, cultural development, attitude towards the interviewee himself (loving, patient , yielding), temperament properties (equal answers - poise and impulsiveness), sense of humor, generosity, hospitality, communicative qualities, femininity. Some students found it difficult to name the qualities of the future wife.

Table 2. Characteristics of the image of a girl with whom I would like to communicate, and qualities that students of the University would like to see in their future spouse (Faculty of Philosophy)

The official delegation of the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by the chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, took part in the work of the assembly.

In his speech, Metropolitan Hilarion stated "the purposeful destruction of traditional ideas about marriage and the family" in the so-called developed countries.

“This is evidenced by such a recent phenomenon as equating homosexual unions with marriage and granting same-sex couples the right to adopt children,” Metropolitan Hilarion said in particular. - From the point of view of biblical teaching and traditional Christian moral values, this indicates a deep spiritual crisis. The religious concept of sin is finally eroded in societies that, until recently, perceived themselves as Christian.

In addition, the metropolitan raised the topic of the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and other regions, and also explained the significance of the WCC for Russia and the world as a whole.

No other report at the Assembly has evoked so much excitement, admiration and indignation from the audience.

The reaction of the Assembly participants to these words was different. Some already during the report energetically shook blue cards in the air - this is how, according to the procedure, disagreement is expressed. Others, after the speech, approached the microphone, expressed solidarity, and then surrounded the speaker in a tight ring and warmly thanked.

In order to better understand what is at stake, here are a few quotes from the Metropolitan's speech itself.

- Did you know in advance that you would “break the hive” with your performance?

I have a very good idea of the atmosphere of the World Council of Churches, I know the mood of the people and the approximate alignment of forces. One of the weaknesses of the WCC is that the balance of power in the Christian community is not presented here quite adequately. For example, the largest Christian Church, the Roman Catholic Church, which morally stands on fairly conservative positions, is almost not represented here at all. A very loud voice in the WCC is always heard from the Protestants of the North and West, but the Protestant churches of the South - in particular Africa and the Middle East - are underrepresented.

The discussion after my talk showed that most members of the World Council of Churches - despite the prevailing liberal agenda - are on conservative positions on moral issues. For example, a delegate from one of the Protestant churches of the Congo said, in response to my report, that all of Africa shares our position on family ethics and the inadmissibility of equating same-sex unions with marriage. And the whole of Africa is a lot, a whole continent.

The Middle East also supports this position. The metropolitan from Egypt spoke on behalf of the pre-Chalcedonian churches - and they agree with us. Therefore, I think we have a fairly broad support in the World Council of Churches. I think our position on moral issues is shared by two-thirds of the non-Orthodox members of the WCC. But still, one should not forget about the liberal voices - these are, first of all, the churches of Western Europe and Scandinavia, as well as part of the American churches. It should be taken into account that they are the main donors of the Council - they provide it with the main financial support. In this regard, they traditionally have a very strong position here.

What is the point then in the work of the Russian Orthodox Church at the WCC? After all, Western "liberal" churches still do not admit they were wrong. Are you ready to compromise with them?

We never compromise with anyone. But let's remember the gospel parable of the sower. When we sow a seed, we never know whether it will fall on stony ground, or thorns, or birds will peck at it, or whether it will fall on fertile soil. There were about 2,000 people in the plenary session of the WCC, and I think there are many among them whose heart is just fertile soil. They'll take what's been said to their churches, tell what they've heard. You yourself saw that many people came up to me and thanked me for my speech. At the same time, there will always be dissenters, and we know this in advance. But I never try to adapt to someone else's style, to someone else's standards. I know that I have been given fifteen minutes and I must use them. After all, when else will there be an opportunity to speak to such an audience, and will it be presented at all?

I believe that the voice of the Church should be prophetic, it should speak the truth, even if this truth is not politically correct and does not meet modern secular liberal standards. What is happening now. In this sense, our witness to the WCC requires a certain amount of courage, a willingness to hear and respond to criticism, but it also requires benevolence. We cannot simply "castigate the vices." We must speak to people about the truth of God, but speak with love and respect from the position - as long as this position does not diverge from the Gospel.

The delegate from the Methodist Church of Africa still objected to you. According to her, same-sex marriage is not such a terrible problem, the worst thing is that teenagers commit suicide when they realize their non-traditional orientation and think that they will be condemned for it, and the Church, criticizing homosexuality, seems to contribute to such condemnation. What are you ready to answer?

These are two completely different topics that should not be confused. Domestic violence, teenage suicides and many other social disasters that are characteristic of our country, third world countries, and so-called developed countries - all these problems require the attention of the Church. But one does not exclude the other, and one is not directly related to the other. We are not saying that other problems should not be solved. But there is something that threatens Christian civilization as such. We are talking about the basics of family ethics, that the Church is called to protect the family as it is described in the Bible, that the Bible is our common teaching basis.

The second topic of your report - on the seemingly equally painful issue of the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and other regions - did not cause such heated discussion as the topic of same-sex marriage. What do you think of it?

Representatives of churches in the Middle East, North Africa and all those countries where Christians are being persecuted are just very concerned that the World Council of Churches has voiced this topic, reacted to these acts of violence and contributed to changing the situation for the better. But the WCC has for many years been dominated by a European liberal agenda. And for many Europeans, it is completely uninteresting to think about those Christians who are persecuted and killed for their faith. For these Europeans, it is more interesting to think about the observance of so-called democratic freedoms.

There is an opinion that words, statements, declarations - what the Assembly of the WCC is doing - do not really affect the fate of those Christians who are being killed, say, in the Middle East ...

We are not limited to words and declarations. Declarations are made to be followed by action. Although, unfortunately, very often in the modern world people on declarations end their activity. For example, in 2011, the European Union made an important statement about the persecution of Christians and even proposed a mechanism for their protection, namely, that any political and economic support to countries where Christians are persecuted should be carried out only in exchange for guarantees of the safety of Christians. This is the mechanism that political leaders should have set in motion. But we don't see it happening. So far, the declaration has remained only on paper.

Unfortunately, much of what is said in an inter-Christian context also remains only good wishes. At the same time, many of the churches present at the WCC Assembly have leverage over state leaders. If we talk about the Russian Orthodox Church, then we are closely cooperating with the leadership of the Russian Federation on international issues, including with the aim of protecting Christians in the Middle East. If we talk, for example, about the Church of England, then it also has the opportunity to influence the position of Great Britain in such matters. There are many such examples.

In your report, there are words about how "Christians are the most persecuted religious community on the planet." What is the reason?

Let's look at the whole history of Christianity. For the first three centuries, the Church was persecuted almost everywhere. Then times changed, but waves of persecution against the Church arose again and again, and they came from different directions. For many centuries the Orthodox Church lived either under the Arab, or under the Mongol, or under the Turkish yoke. In the 20th century in our country, when godlessness became the official ideology, the Church was subjected to the most severe genocide: most of the clergy were physically exterminated, almost all monasteries and more than ninety percent of churches were closed. And until recently, the Church remained persecuted - the people of my generation still found this time. Christ clearly told his disciples that in this world they would be persecuted. This is what happens, albeit intermittently.

Among many believers in Russia, the attitude towards the WCC is reserved or negative: the ecumenism movement is perceived as an attempt to recognize insignificant differences in creeds, which means, in fact, to recognize the faith itself as insignificant. Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox Church has been participating in the work of the WCC for many years. What could you say to people who do not understand why all this is necessary?

If such people were with us at the Assembly now, they would see that no one here is engaged in the search for doctrinal compromises or attempts to bring together different Christian denominations. Each confessional group is clearly defined and has its own position, which it expresses and defends. And there is no doctrinal rapprochement. Of course, at the very beginning, when the ecumenical movement was just being created, and this happened in the pre-war period, and when it took shape, and this happened after the war, many people had dreams that by participating in such a movement, doctrinal differences could also be overcome. But now it has become obvious that these dreams are unrealizable, they were based on erroneous analysis.

The differences between Christians of different denominations are much deeper than one might expect. Moreover, these differences are only deepening and new differences appear, which did not exist in the middle of the 20th century, when the World Council of Churches was created and when the ecumenical movement was institutionalized. As an example, I can draw your attention to the gulf between conservatives and liberals that has developed in the Christian community today and that fifty years ago it was even difficult to imagine. I mean the gulf between conservatism and liberalism, not in doctrinal questions, but in moral and social questions.

The Protestant Churches have come a long way in the last fifty years, and it seems to me that this way has taken them farther away from Orthodoxy than the previous four hundred and fifty years of the Reformation's development. We are now separated from each other very far and cannot speak with the Protestants of the West and the North with a single voice. In this regard, the WCC provides an important platform for the exchange of views. For the Russian Orthodox Church, this is primarily a platform where we can express our position in defense of traditional Christian moral values. No matter what theological problematic is now dominant in the WCC. It has largely been brought under the jurisdiction of the Faith and Order Commission, which is older than the WCC itself. But even within the framework of this commission, there is no rapprochement between Christians of different confessions. Such a task has not been set before the WCC for a long time.

- What is your personal result of participation in this Assembly?

This is already the third assembly of the WCC in which I participate as the head of the delegation of the Russian Orthodox Church. The first took place in Harare (Zimbabwe) in 1998. Our Church sent a small delegation of three people there, which expanded to five during their stay there. I was then a hieromonk. And the fact that we did not have a single bishop in our delegation was a signal for the WCC - a signal sent deliberately. We were very dissatisfied with the agenda of the Council, the method of decision-making and the fact that there was less and less space left for witnessing Orthodoxy.

We then took a number of vigorous measures to change this situation, and we changed it. At the initiative of the Russian Orthodox Church, in the same 1998, a pan-Orthodox meeting was convened in Thessaloniki (Greece), and the head of the Department for External Church Relations, Metropolitan Kirill (the current Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia - ed. note) took a tough stance. A statement was adopted in which we demanded that the World Council of Churches listen to the voice of the Orthodox, ensure our participation not only in the discussion of the issues on the agenda, but also in the formation of the agenda itself, ensure that decisions are made only by consensus, provide additional mechanisms for interaction between the Orthodox Churches and the WCC. These mechanisms are still in operation.

The measures taken, in my opinion, helped to rectify the situation to some extent. We now have every opportunity to declare and defend our position in the World Council of Churches. In this regard, the situation in the WCC has changed for the better. The Assembly in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in 2006, where I was also the head of the delegation, and Metropolitan Kirill participated as an honored guest, testified that the WCC was ready to listen to the opinion of the Orthodox Churches and was ready to take into account their position. And this Assembly also demonstrates this readiness. Another thing is that we, of course, do not count on the unanimous consent of all participants. We see in the WCC a clear dominant feature of the liberal wing of world Christianity. I repeat, it occupies a proportionately larger place here than in the real balance of power in the Christian community. But our participation in the work of the WCC has a very definite meaning - we use this site as a missionary field.

At present, the WCC unites over 330 Churches, denominations and communities in more than 100 countries of the world, representing about 400 million Christians. Today, among the members of the WCC there are Local Orthodox Churches (including the Russian Orthodox Church), two dozen denominations from among the historically established Protestant churches: Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists and Baptists. Various united and independent churches are also well represented. Of the Orthodox Local Churches, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Georgian Orthodox Church do not participate in the activities of the WCC.

The Roman Catholic Church, not being a member of the WCC, has been closely cooperating with the Council for over 30 years and sends its representatives to all major conferences of the WCC, as well as to meetings of the Central Committee and the General Assembly. The Pontifical Council for Christian Unity appoints 12 representatives to the WCC Faith and Order Commission and cooperates with the WCC in preparing materials for local communities and parishes used during the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.