Women and Social Construct of marital Commitment: A Case Study of Isfahan City

The present paper is an attempt to study marital commitment from the viewpoint of women through a constructionist approach and based on their interpretation depict a comprehensive picture of the reasons and factors causing the commitment as well as changes in the commitment in the couple’s relationship. The construct of marital commitment has been studied through an interpretive approach based on grounded theoretical method. The sample for this study consisted of 38 women with marriage experience who were selected through targeted and theoretical method. After confidence building, the necessary data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interview and analyzed through three-stage open, axial and selective coding.
The findings of the research indicate that childhood and adolescence life experiences, paradox of individual values, personality traits, joint life experience, consumption/leisure lifestyle, prescribed marital norms, need to experience love and women’s modern achievements, as causal conditions, construct commitment into a volatile issue. In such contexts as epistemological contradictions, hegemony of the discourse of sexual satisfaction in the couple’s relations, relative welfare of society and under the circumstances of media intervention and intercultural relations, the volatility of the issue of marital commitment leads to two types of women’s interactions: A group of women, through positive assessment of their marriage and by using appropriate education and consolidation of life skills, have caused commitment-based sustainable marriage to turn into a normal situation. In contrast, another group, through negative assessment of their marriage and clandestine separation from their husband, have faced negative consequences such as breach of commitment, promotion of multiple emotional and sexual relations, divorce and lack of mental health.
Awareness and proper approach to the consequences can reduce the degree of problems stemming from cognitive changes of marital commitment to the minimum level.