The Effectiveness of Emotional Therapy on Marital Boredom and Moral Commitment in Divorced Couples

 Marriage is the most important contract in every person's life. People get married for different reasons. In addition to sexuality, which is one of the primary issues, love, economic security, protection, emotional security, feeling of peace and escape from loneliness are some of the factors that lead to the tendency to get married. Many couples start their married life with high intimacy, but over time, this intimacy becomes difficult. Ellis says newlyweds are less likely to think that their love may fade at some point, and that's when boredom begins. In a frustrated marriage, one or both couples, while experiencing feelings of separation from their spouse and diminished interests and relationships, have significant concerns about the increasing destruction of the relationship and the progression to separation and divorce. Marital boredom is a gradual decrease in emotional attachment to the spouse, which is accompanied by feelings of alienation, apathy and indifference between couples to each other and the replacement of negative emotions instead of positive emotions, and as a result, negative emotions take over and lose. Giving initial enthusiasm leads to emotional attachment, commitment, and eventually boredom. Non-marital commitment is one of the effective factors in creating divorce between couples. Because one of the important characteristics of successful and long-term marriages is the existence of marital commitment, in fact, among the various human interactions, commitment is the most important qualitative aspect of a relationship. Adherence to the marriage covenant is also very important as a lasting mechanism and is one of the characteristics of successful and long-term marriages. Today, various approaches to couple therapy and family therapy have been developed with the aim of reducing conflicts and communication disorders between couples. The goal of couple therapy is to help couples cope better with current problems and learn more effective ways to communicate. However, researchers believe that couple therapy requires movement beyond existing therapies. Although meta-analyzes confirm that different treatments for couples' disorder have statistically and clinically significant consequences, other research findings show that a large percentage of couples fail to benefit from them. They eat or get worse some time after the usual treatments. So far, no research has specifically evaluated the effectiveness of this intervention on the components involved in couples' satisfaction with the marital relationship. In addition, the research conducted so far has usually been done on a couple (women or men), which is a generalization. Conflicts data. The present study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of this type of treatment on the two components of marital boredom and couples' moral commitment on men and women seeking divorce.

 The present study is applied in terms of purpose and in terms of method, it is a quasi-experimental in which the pre-test-post-test design with control group and follow-up stage was used. The present study with the code IR.BPUMS.REC.1399.106 was approved by the ethics committee of Bushehr University of Medical Sciences. The statistical population of the present study consisted of all couples seeking divorce in Malayer in 1398. The statistical sample consisted of 30 pairs that were selected by available sampling method and randomly assigned to experimental (15 couples) and control (15 couples) groups. Criteria for entering the study were the complete consent of the couple to participate in the study, as well as the ability to attend regular sessions, not to use psychiatric drugs during treatment, and in the case of psychotherapy or medication, at least 6 months have passed. In addition, at least one year must have passed since their marriage and they have filed for divorce, while the couples participating in the study were matched in the experimental and control groups in terms of age range, level of education and economic status. After identifying the sample group, research tools were provided to both groups and the results were considered as a pretest. In the next stage, the subjects in the experimental group underwent 12 one-hour sessions of emotion therapy intervention (Table 1). In the last step, the research tool was used again as a post-test and finally the collected data were analyzed using multivariate covariance statistical method. Research instruments included Pineas Marital Boredom Questionnaire (2003), Adams and Jones (1997) Moral Commitment Questionnaire. Data analysis was performed at both descriptive and inferential levels. Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) and SPSS-22 software were used to test the research hypotheses.

 In the descriptive findings of the research samples, the mean age of the experimental group was 35.86 ± 4.42 and the control group was 32.60 ± 7.03. The results showed that there was a significant difference in the research variables between the control and experimental groups (P <0.05) and the score of the experimental group in the post-test and follow-up stages was significantly improved.

 The results of data analysis showed that there was a significant difference between marital boredom of experimental and control couples. In other words, emotional therapy reduced the marital boredom of the experimental group. Also, the results of the analysis of research data showed that there was a significant difference between the marital commitment of the experimental and control groups. In other words, emotional therapy led to an increase in marital commitment of the experimental group. Since this research has been done on couples seeking divorce in Malayer city, so caution should be exercised in generalizing the results. Another limitation of the present study was the reliance on data from the self-report questionnaire that in this style of data collection, the participant is likely to have difficulty expressing their emotions and cognitions, so it is suggested to increase statistical power and reliability of the findings to collect information from methods. Use as an interview or qualitative study. The results of the present study can be generalized and applied in different situations by considering the said limitations. It is also recommended that counselors provide reality therapy training courses for couples at risk of divorce. In general, based on the results of the study, it can be stated that emotional therapy is effective on the components of marital boredom and moral commitment in couples seeking divorce, and this type of intervention can be used in counseling and treatment of couples, especially couples with conflict.