For many years, men and women have been changing the way we interact with each other. The traditional family, with marriage as the fundamental building block of society, is being challenged. According to the American Psychological Association, approximately 40-50% of first marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate for second marriages is even higher, with approximately 60-67% ending in divorce.

Marriage as a social institution was designed to serve two main purposes: to create a stable society and to ensure paternity.

Anthropologists believe stable social arrangements were needed when loosely organized groups of hunter-gatherers settled into agrarian civilizations. A significant element of this new social arrangement is that it bound women to men, guaranteeing that a man’s children were his true biological offspring.

The Industrial Revolution ushered in the emphasis on gender with the separation of the sexes into different silos: husbands became wage earners outside the home. Wives became homemakers. Loving and being loved was understood in terms of the gender of the partners.

In the 1940s, the concept of “social role” became a prominent theory that accounted for how people behaved. The terms “sex role,” “male role,” and “female role” began to be widely used based on the assumption that men and women were different kinds of people. Men were viewed as stronger, bolder, more logical, and more reasonable; women were seen as weaker physically but stronger morally, more refined, more understanding, and more sensitive. These differences were explicitly........

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