178 ■ FLOW
a few weeks each winter in the Caribbean. Later he decides to marry and
have a child. As he realizes these latter goals, however, he discovers that
they are incompatible with the prior ones. He can’t afford a Maserati
any longer, and the Bahamas are out of reach. Unless he revises the old
goals, they will be frustrated, producing that sense of inner conflict
known as psychic entropy. And if he changes goals, his self will change
as a consequence—the self being the sum and organization of goals. In
this manner entering any relationship entails a transformation of the
self.
Until a few decades ago, families tended to stay together because
parents and children were forced to continue the relationship for extrin
sic reasons. If divorces were rare in the past, it wasn’t because husbands
and wives loved each other more in the old times, but because husbands
needed someone to cook and keep house, wives needed someone to
bring home the bacon, and children needed both parents in order to
eat, sleep, and get a start in the world. The “family values” that the
elders spent so much effort inculcating in the young were a reflection
of this simple necessity, even when it was cloaked in religious and moral
considerations. Of course, once family values were taught as being im
portant, people learned to take them seriously, and they helped keep
families from disintegrating. All too often, however, the moral rules were
seen as an outside imposition, an external constraint under which hus
bands, wives, and children chafed. In such cases the family may have
remained intact physically, but it was internally riven with conflicts and
hatred. The current “disintegration” of the family is the result of the
slow disappearance of external reasons for staying married. The increase
in the divorce rate is probably more affected by changes in the labor
market that have increased women’s employment opportunities, and by
the diffusion of labor-saving home appliances, than it is by a lessening
of love or of moral fiber.
But extrinsic reasons are not the only ones for staying married and
for living together in families. There are great opportunities for joy and
for growth that can only be experienced in family life, and these intrinsic
rewards are no less present now than they were in the past; in fact, they
are probably much more readily available today than they have been at
any previous time. If the trend of traditional families keeping together
mainly as a convenience is on the wane, the number of families that
endure because their members enjoy each other may be increasing. Of
course, because external forces are still much more powerful than inter
nal ones, the net effect is likely to be a further fragmentation of family
life for some time to come. But the families that do persevere will be in