Two days ago I was about to buy some water just outside my house when one random guy just said, “hey, I want to talk with you”, just like that. So I went to him and his two friends and we talked for a long time, a conversation about culture differences and many questions on how it works in our respective country. And we talked a lot about marriage, sex and those things. He asked me if I was married and then later on when I should marry. I answered that “it will happen when I fall in love with the right one”. His response to that was “I think the thing about love is something you know about in the western world, we don´t have it here”.
What do you respond to that? My instinct is that, no, love is something you live with automatically here, because you take care of each other so much. But of course he meant in marriage. When we marry and Sweden it must feel right and it´s strange if the couple only has been together for less than 2 years. Here, generally, people just marry. The love is created as the marriage goes on. And I mean, if you hang out everyday for several years, you probably going to start to like each other. And the interesting thing is that when you look to divorce statistics, in Sweden 47 % of marriages end up in divorce. Divorces are extremely come there but not here, and of course it has partly to do with gender inequality.
But if you look to the children it gets more interesting. Mental illness isvery low in Tanzania and very high in Sweden and it´s particularly high for adopted children and divorce children. That means that a child, generally, feels better when the parents stick to the marriage. In that sense I think we have ran so fast that we are now behind.
http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/the-biggest/10-countries-with-the-highest-divorce-rates/
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Marriages_and_births_in_Sweden#High_number_of_divorces
Att skiljas är att dö en smula…: Skilsmässa och psykisk ohälsa hos svenska kvinnor och män. MICHAEL GÄHLER. Sociologisk Forskning. Vol. 36, No. 4 (1999), pp. 4-39
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jhO1sTKFEwgNjN7k-iC1dJQWNk_gH1K_vg_B76eUTvM/edit#gid=0
http://fof.se/tidning/2006/5/sen-adoption-kopplad-till-psykisk-ohalsa
http://www.commonwealthhealth.org/africa/united_republic_of_tanzania/mental_health_in_united_republic_of_tanzania/
http://www.livlinan.org/psykisk-oh%C3%A4lsa/psykisk-oh%C3%A4lsa-och-diagnoser.html