In her article “Will Your Marriage Last?”, Aviva Patz provides her understandings of Ted Hutson’s experient the Processes of Adaptation in Intimate Relationships (PAIR) Project. The experiment lasted a total of 13 years and focused on studying 168 couples and how their marriage can or cannot endure their time together. While being influenced by the research of Ted Hutson, Patz over emphasizes the lack of love and affection leading to divorce and does not take into consideration of outside forces such as disillusionment or infidelity among spouses.
Patz first begins by explaining how Hutson’s research showed four major findings, one of which pushes the ideal that a continuous amount of love and affection is what is most crucial to the viability
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Disillusionment in this context is described as “Lovers initially put their best foot forward, ignoring each other’s -and the relationship’s- shortcomings. But after they tie the knot, hidden aspects of their personalities emerge, and idealized images give way to more realistic ones” (Patz 66). Disillusionment is a much a stronger factor than Patz makes it out to be. Patz provides two examples of how strong disillusionment can be and how easily it can destroy a marriage, one being Peter and Susie from Hutson’s experiment and the other being her own failed marriage. Peter and Susie experience extreme disillusionment from within their relationship. They began their journey to disillusionment by having a short courtship and then married mainly by enabled feelings provided by a large amount of jealousy Peter had. The disillusionment was then established and grew and continued growing as Peter and Susie found more and more characteristics about each other that they did not like. Eventually, Peter described his disappointment from relationship coming from the fact that Susie did not fulfill his vision for a flawless parent or homemaker (Patz 67). Susie stated that he had contrary traits, some being his jealousy and possessiveness, and she said that he found quite a bit of fault with her. (Patz 67). Patz stated that according to Hutson’s findings, the couple was