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Essay on A Perspective on Playing House

Decent Essays

The ‘Perils of Playing House’ is an article that is designed to point out to the reader all the pitfalls of couples living together before they get married. It illustrates all of the possible unhappy endings to a relationship, as well as what happens to couples during the relationship as the couple lives together and begins to grow on one another. It also covers a lot of the reasons couples move in with each other before they get married, and who really pushes for the marriage; the man, the woman or the families. There are so many reasons that people move in together nowadays. Some couples do it to save money; one rent, and set of utility bills is cheaper than two. Some do it to see if they are compatible with each other and will be …show more content…

However, this article also demonstrates the Social Exchange Perspective; as long as there are more rewards than not, people will stay together (Benokraitis 2011). People get married because it’s easier than living alone, or apart from someone they are comfortable with and they have already lived together so long that they have material items jointly or even children together. Not only that, but it’s also easier to stay together rather than go back to dating. After living with someone for a length of time people forget how to behave with someone new, interact outside of a long term comfortable relationship and it’s hard to find a new comfort zone. The ‘Perils of Playing House’ very succinctly proves it point. It set out define some of the pitfalls of moving in with someone before marrying them, pointing out how sometimes moving in together could clearly be disastrous. With the exception of the opening couple of the article there were no “happy endings” in any of the cases discussed in the article. Except at the very beginning, the article started out on a very happy note. The couple moved in together to save money on taxi rates, and eventually got married. Six years later they are still together. That doesn’t sound perilous, that sounds like it worked out pretty well, so how is it that this is the only recorded

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