Some Things Change, Some Things Stay the Same (Part 1)

As part of our 50th Anniversary celebrations, our CEO Brendan Madden has decided to look back at the last five decades to see how exactly relationships in Ireland have changed.

In the first part of this series, we delve into the past and see while some issues have been consistent since the 1960s while others have become more prominent in recent times.

As Ireland’s leading independent relationship counselling service over the past 50th years we have been at the forefront of helping individuals and couples respond effectively to the challenges they face in achieving healthy and sustaining personal relationships. Over that time, we’ve noticed the impact of the changes he foresaw in the striking differences that have emerged in both the type of issues brought to our service and their relative importance. As the service was quite small in the 1960s statistics from that period are based on small numbers of cases and limited in detail. However data gathered from the early 70s onwards show some striking changes and also some similarities with more recent data.

Financial concerns were always an issue for couples from the beginning and still feature in a high proportion of cases. However these concerns are now more typically about conflicts in regards to budgeting of jointly earned income as opposed to a common problem reported in the 60s, 70s and 80s where wives were heavily dependent on their husbands for the household income and complaints frequently focused on husbands limiting access to or squandering income required for the household. Another common complaint up to the 1980s was that wives felt unappreciated by their husbands and unfulfilled in their roles as housewives. Now wives are much more likely to report feeling overburdened with work and home demands.

Issues that have not changed significantly over the years include alcohol issues which ranged from 10% to 14% over the 40 years, infidelity from 15% to 19%, and sexual problems from 24% to 30%. While these issues have stayed broadly within the ranges indicated over the past 40+ years other issues such as communication problems have jumped dramatically from as low as 38% in the 70s to a consistent 85% and financial issues from 13% to as high as 38% (possibly reflecting recent economic issues). These large changes reflect a greater expectation of couples today that they should communicate more consistently and share both information and decision making about family issues and a sense of grievance and disappointment when they don’t.

A striking feature of the comparison with date from 40 years ago in the emergence of brand new issues that were simply not large enough in the 70s to merit their own separate category. These include parenting conflicts now averaging 30% reflecting greater expectation of male involvement, past relationships now 32%, reflecting late marriage and prior relationships and step families now 12% of issues reflecting family breakdown and formation of blended families.

The emergence of these brand new issues which prior to the late 80s simply were not significant reflects the impact of the changes identified by Handy on the lives of couples and families. They clearly show how the changes in role demands and expectations for both men and women place enormous demands on couples which in many cases they are ill equipped to handle.