Create a 10 page essay paper that discusses Couples therapy/therapeutic techniques for couples who have experienced extra marital affairs.Marriage has been becoming increasingly unstable in many count

Create a 10 page essay paper that discusses Couples therapy/therapeutic techniques for couples who have experienced extra marital affairs.

Marriage has been becoming increasingly unstable in many countries for the past few decades. For example, a high proportion of all first marriages in the United States are likely to end in divorce, whereas remarriage with new partners are not less prone to dissolution (e.g., Lillard and Waite, 1990).

In the United States, the divorce rate had risen steadily from 2.5 per 1000 population in 1966 to a peak of 5.3 in both 1979 and 1981 (Clarke, 1995a). On the other hand, the marriage rate reached a historic high of 16.4 per 1000 population in 1946 and started declining (Clarke, 1995b). Both rates continue to decline and for the 12-month ending with September 2003, the marriage rate and divorce rate were 7.6 and 3.8, respectively (Sutton and Munson, 2004). Indeed, divorce is one of the salient features of modern life that has important implications for social and public policy (Fan and Lui, 2004).

Family structure in the United States changed rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century. A wide variety of family forms increasingly replaced the two-parent family norm. In 2001, 69 percent of children lived in two-parent families, down from 77 percent in 1980 (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2002). Divorce is common. About half of all recent first marriages are expected to end in divorce (Ooms, 2002). Of children born into two-parent families, 34 percent will experience a disruption of their parents’ union by age 16. One-third of all births are out-of-wedlock. And couples opting to cohabit rather than marry is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon. Forty percent of all births occur within cohabiting unions rather than marriages (Bumpass & Lu, 2000). Some European countries also experienced a precipitous decline in marriage rates but have recently seen those rates level and even rise