From a date to a relationship Essay

Submitted By Jessie-Zhao
Words: 3371
Pages: 14

From a date to a relationship: how much getting-to-know-you does actually go on before marriage?
1. Introduction
Marriage is common to all cultures (Murdock 1949), suggesting that it plays a central role in our species reproductive strategy. The marriage problem introduced by Gale and Shapley(1962) is a decision problem that allocation of agents from two disjoint sets. Since people all desired to have a long, stable relationship, there are researches conducted toward finding ways to maintain the marriage. Before entering the marriage, mankind needs a period for dating to understand each other, match and make a decision to go into a relationship. This article tries to summarize what to know before getting into a relationship. There are not a lot of articles to state directly which we should know before marriage. We can make an attempt from summarizing the articles related to marriage and divorce. The reason why people end their marriages and the factors to keep marriages probably be the factors we should know before relationships.

2. Why is this issue interesting and important?
Becker illustrated that since marriage is practically always voluntary, either by the person marrying or their parents, the theory of preferences can be readily applied, and persons marrying can be assumed to expect to raise their utility level above what it would be were they to remain single. Explain it in an economical way, people fall in love can reduce the cost of frequent contact and of resource transfer between each other by sharing the same household. In other words, it is better for society to gather the resources and thus save sources and cost less. Getting into relationship can be good to the sustainable development of society. But what lead us into a marriage? Compared to married persons, single persons have several differences such as they even allocate their time in different ways since married persons have more responsibilities to allocate their time and goods supplied by a mate. Therefore, it is essential to explore the connections between single and marriage. The obvious explanation for marriages between men and women lies in the desire to raise own children and the physical and emotional attraction between sexes (Becker 1981).

3. What is the basic model of relationships?
Before we find the factors to form a relationship, we first need to know how a relationship builds from economical aspect. Also, Professor Becker make a metaphor that each marriage can be considered a two-person firm with either member being the “entrepreneur” who “hires” the other at the “salary” and receives residual “profits”. The marriage market chooses not the maximum household commodity output of any single marriage but the maximum sum of the outputs over all marriages, just as competitive product markets maximum sum of the outputs over all firms. The theory also implies that men differing in physical capital, education or intelligence, height, race, or many other traits will tend to marry women with like values of these traits, whereas the correlation between mates for wage rates or for traits of men and women that are close substitutes in household production will tend to be negative. As an addition, many later researchers develop their studies with the premise of acknowledging the theory of Professor Becker’s theory and make supplements to it. Following recent developments in the theory of household behavior, we assume that utility depends directly not on the goods and services purchased in the market place, but on the commodities produced “by” each household. Household-produced commodities are numerous and include the quality of meals, the quality and quantity of children, prestige, recreation, companionship, love, and health status. Consequently, they cannot be identified with consumption or output as usually measured: they cover a much broader range of human activities and aims. Single persons generally allocate their time differently than married