Iranian’s Assumptions and Standards about Marriage and Marital Relationships: Qualitative Analysis of Iranian Proverbs

Assumptions and standards play a significant role in determining the marital satisfaction of spouses, and both are influenced by culture. Family professionals need to be aware of the cultural impact on their clients’ cognitions to understand them better and provide better services. The study of proverbs in any language can provide a fairly accurate picture of the attitudes and beliefs of people belonging to that cultural context in relation to different subjects. Therefore, in this research, extracting all Iranian proverbs with related keywords (wife, husband, spouse, and marriage) and their thematic analysis, we tried to extract the assumptions and standards related to the role of woman, husband and marital relationship. The three main themes and a core theme were extracted. According to the results, existing standards for women are more numerous and rigorous than standards for men in marriage. Marital relationship is also portrayed as a very important, predestined, relationship with numerous conflicts which are frequent, inevitable and insurmountable. That makes it appear bitter and frustrating in the long time. The extracted standards show that couple are expected to play complementary roles in marriage and men have dominance over women.