课文翻译

Why Marriages Fail

1 These days so many marriages end in divorce that our most sacred vows no longer ring with truth. “Happily ever after” and “Till death do us part” are expressions that seem on the way to becoming obsolete. Why has it become so hard for couples to stay together? What goes wrong? What has happened to us that close to one-half of all marriages are destined for the divorce courts? How could we have created a society in which 42 percent of out children will grow up in single-parent homes? Even though each broken marriage is unique, we can still find the common perils, the common causes for marital despair. Each marriage has crisis points and each marriage tests endurance, the capacity for both intimacy and change. Outside pressures such as job loss, illness, infertility, trouble with a child, care of aging parents and all the other plagues of life hit marriage the way hurricanes blast our shores. Some marriages survive these

storms and others don’t. Marriages fail, however, not simply because of the outside weather but because the inner climate becomes too hot or too cold, too turbulent or too stupefying.

婚姻何以失败

安妮·罗艾菲

如今，以离婚告终的婚姻如此之多，我们最神圣的誓约听上去都不再真实了。“婚后永远幸福”和“直到死神将我们分开”这类话语似乎快过时了。夫妻长相守何以变得如此困难？哪儿出了问题？我们到底怎么了，竟然有差不多半数的婚姻注定要为离婚走进法庭？有42%的儿童将在单亲家庭中长大，我们怎么把社会弄成这样了呢？虽然破裂的婚姻各有其独特的情况，但我们还是能找到致使婚姻无法维持下去的共同因素、共同原因。凡婚姻都有其危机时刻，都要经受对持久力的考验，经受对既能亲密相处又善应对变化这种能力的考验。外部压力，如失业、疾病、不育、抚育孩子、赡养年迈的父母，以及生活中其他种种烦恼，都

会如飓风横扫海岸那样对婚姻带来打击。有些婚姻经受住了这些风暴，有些则不然。但婚姻失败并不是简单地由外部天气造成的，而是由于内部气候变得过热或过冷，变得过于狂暴或过于麻木造成的。

2 When we look at how we choose our partners and what

expectations exist at the tender beginnings of romance, some of the reasons for disaster become quite clear. We all select with

unconscious accuracy a mate who will recreate with us the emotional patterns of our first homes. Dr. Carl A. Whitaker, a marital therapist and emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, explains, “From early childhood on, each of us carried models for marriage, femininity, masculinity, motherhood, fatherhood and all the other family roles.” Each of us falls in love with a mate who has qualities of our parents, who will help us rediscover both the

psychological happiness and miseries of our past lives. We may think we have found a man unlike Dad, but then he turns to drink or drugs, or loses his job over and over again or sits silently in front of the TV just the way Dad did. A man may choose a woman who doesn’t like kids just like his mother or who gambles away the family savings just like his mother. Or he may choose a slender wife who seems unlike his obese mother but then turns out to have other addictions that destroy their mutual happiness.

如果我们来看一下自己如何挑选配偶，看一下在爱情最初的甜蜜阶段有着怎样的期待，婚姻触礁的一些原因便显而易见了。无意中我们都精确地选中了能和我们一起重建我们第一个家庭的情感模式的伴侣。婚姻心理治疗专家、威斯康星大学精神病学荣誉教授卡尔·A·威塔科尔解释说：“从幼年起，我们每一个人心里就对婚姻、女子气质、男子气质、为人母、为人父，以及其他各种家庭角色有了自己的样板。”我们每一个人都爱上具有自己父母气质的伴侣，能帮助我们在心理上重温以往生活中的欢乐与苦难的伴侣。我们或许会以为自己找的男人与爸爸不同，可是到头来，就像爸爸那样，他酗酒，或者吸毒，或者一次又一次失业，

或者就像爸爸那样一言不发地坐在电视机前。男人或许会选择一个像自己母亲一样不喜欢孩子的女人，一个像自己母亲一样把家里的钱全都赌光的女人。或者他会选择一个苗条的妻子，与体态臃肿的母亲看上去似乎不一样，可结果发现那女子有其他的嗜好，这就毁了双方的幸福。

3 A man and a woman bring to their marriage bed a blended concoction of conscious and unconscious memories of their parents’ lives together. The human way is to compulsively repeat and recreate the patterns of the past. Sigmund Freud so well described the unhappy design that many of us get trapped in: the unmet needs of childhood, the angry feelings left over from frustrations of long ago, the limits of trust and the recurrence of old fears. Once an individual senses this entrapment, there may follow a yearning to escape, and the result could be a broken, splintered marriage.

男女双方都把意识到的和未意识到的对父母共同生活的混杂记忆带上婚床。人类总会不由自主地去重复并再现过去的生活模式。西格蒙德·弗洛伊德入木三分地描述了我们许多人所陷入的自设的不幸罗网：童年时期未能满足的欲望，多年前的挫折留下的愤怒情绪，信任受到限制以及旧日恐惧的重现。一个人一旦意识到自己陷入这样的困境，就可能渴望逃脱，其结果可能是婚姻破裂、分崩离析。

4 Of course people can overcome the habits and attitudes that developed in childhood. We all have hidden strengths and amazing capacities for growth and creative change. Change, however, requires work—observing your part in a rotten pattern, bringing difficulties out into the open—and work runs counter to the basic myth of marriage: “When I wed this person all my problems will be over. I will have achieved success and I will become the center of life for this other person and this person will be my center, and we will mean everything to each other forever.” This myth, which every marriage relies on, is soon exposed. The coming of children, the pulls and tugs of their demands on affection and time, place a considerable strain on that

basic myth of meaning everything to each other, or merging together and solving all of life’s problems.

当然，人们能够改变童年时期养成的习惯和形成的看法。我们都有潜在的活力，都有令人惊叹的能力使自己得以成长和创造性地变化。然而，变化需要有所行动——观察自己在糟糕的模式中的作用，公开遇到的难处——而行动却有悖于关于婚姻的神话：“我与此人结了婚，我所有的烦恼就会烟消云散。到了那时我算是获得成功了，我将成为此人生活的中心，此人也将成为我生活的中心，我们将永远视对方为自己生活的全部。”这一维系所有婚姻的神话不久就被打破。孩子降生了，需要有人爱、需要有人花时间照料，这些拖累在相当程度上打击了那个说什么视对方为自己生活之全部，或者说什么夫妇融为一体解决生活中所有问题的神话。

5 Concern and tension about money take each partner away from the other. Obligations to demanding parents or still-depended-upon parents create further strain. Couples today must also deal with all the cultural changes brought on in recent years by the women’s movement and the sexual revolution. The altering of roles and the shifting of responsibilities have been extremely trying[ trying: difficult or annoying; hard to deal with] for many marriages.

对金钱的关心以及由金钱造成的紧张关系使夫妻产生隔阂。对苛求的父母或仍需赡养的父母应尽的责任进一步加剧了紧张关系。如今，夫妻双方还必须应对近几年来妇女解放运动和性革命所带来的各种文化变革。角色的改变、责任的变更对相当一部分婚姻都是极其严峻的考验。

6 These and other realities of life erode the visions of marital bliss the way sandstorms eat at rock and the ocean nibbles away at the dunes. Those euphoric, grand feelings that accompany romantic love are really self-delusions, self-hypnotic dreams that enable us to forge a relationship. Real life, failure at work, disappointments, exhaustion, bad smells, bad colds and hard times all puncture the dream and leave us stranded with our mate, with our childhood patterns pushing us this way and that, with our unfulfilled expectations.

就像沙尘暴侵蚀岩石、海浪蚕食沙丘，这一切以及生活中其他现实问题逐渐毁灭对幸福婚姻的幻想。那些伴随着浪漫爱情而来的欣喜若狂的美妙感觉实际上都是自我欺骗、自我催眠的梦幻，而这种自欺、这种梦幻使我们得以去缔结良缘。现实生活、工作中的失败、失望、劳累、体臭、重感冒以及艰难时世都会打破幻想，使我们与配偶间的关系陷入困境，使我们面对以这种或那种方式左右我们的儿时行为方式时毫无办法，使我们面对无法实现的种种期望时一筹莫展。

7 The struggle to survive in marriage requires adaptability, flexibility, genuine love and kindness and an imagination strong enough to feel what the other is feeling. Many marriages fall apart because either partner cannot imagine what the other wants or cannot communicate what he or she needs or feels. Anger builds until it erupts into a volcanic burst that buries the marriage in ash. 维系婚姻的努力要求有适应能力、灵活性、真挚的爱和亲切和善，还要有足够强的想象力，去感受对方的感情。许多婚姻破裂是因为男女双方都不能想像对方需要什么，也不会表达自己的需要和感情。于是怒气越积越多，最后如火山一样爆发出来，其灰烬终将婚姻埋葬。

8 It is not hard to see, therefore, how essential communication is for a good marriage. A man and a woman must be able to tell each other how they feel and why they feel the way they do; otherwise they will impose on each other roles and actions that lead to further unhappiness. In some cases, the communication patterns of childhood—of not talking, of talking too much, of not listening, of distrust and anger, or withdrawal—spill into the marriage and prevent a healthy exchange of thoughts and feelings. The answer is to set up new patterns of communication and intimacy.

所以，不难看出，婚姻要美满，交流是多么重要。不管是丈夫还是妻子，必须能告诉对方他/她的感受，以及他/她为什么会有这种感受。不然的话，他们就会把导致进一步不幸的角色和行为强加给对方。有时候，儿时的交流模式——不讲话、讲得太多、不听对方讲话、不信任、生气、与对方相处时的冷漠等——

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