A Strange Myth: A Perfect Family
What a psychologist points out about “longing for a perfect family”.
A question forms in my mind as I watch families gathered together to eat in movies and TV shows. “Do these kinds of families really exist?”
A family that doesn’t exist
The most unrealistic and cliché, yet regularly portrayed scene in Korean soap operas is probably that of the whole family eating and chatting around the dining table. This happens almost on a daily basis and the group sometimes includes the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and even neighbors. It’s quite a supernatural phenomenon. Imagine trying to get all those family members together for a meal in real life. We all know what would happen.
It happens every Lunar New Year and thanksgiving. Emotional spats and blazing rows frequently lead to the denouncement of relationships and divorce, and once in a while things get heated enough to end up on the evening news. Of course, there are families that spend their time laughing and enjoying each other’s company, but by no means is it because they don’t have problems or conflict. It is because they respect each other and have the decency to respect each other’s boundaries.
Perfect families only exist in soap operas, and this becomes all the more evident with time. Take divorce for example. Divorce once used to be something unimaginable to me. It signified the failure of one of the most important decisions in one’s life. I considered it to be a catastrophic event on par with unemployment, and I thought that there was something inherently wrong with people that went through divorce. Many characters in American TV shows and movies at the time were divorcees, but I just assumed they served to show the dark side of American society.
But divorce is no longer a big deal. Some of my friends are divorcees and a pair of them even got remarried to each other. According to Statistics Korea, 4.5 people out of 1000 were divorced in 2018 which was surprisingly low considering what was going on around me. Single parent households have risen to 10% of total households due to the steady increase in divorce rate. This means one in ten households only have one parent. Extend this view to the diversification of households and you’ll see that we’re drifting further and further away from the large extended families that dine together on TV.
Everything stems from conflict
Families, by nature, are the source of conflict. Married couples face conflict on a regular basis because of differing opinions and tastes, and family issues require patience since they are very rarely immediately resolved. The longer the relationship, the deeper the emotions. Long lasting relationships are held together by the glue of intimacy, which is why it takes a lot to break them. The problem is, it isn’t just positive emotions such as intimacy that grow deeper. Trivial slights and disappointments and tiny betrayals accumulate over time and balloon into complicated issues.
Counseling psychology states that it takes the same amount of time to resolve an issue as it took for it to become one. The same goes for conflict and misunderstandings within the family. The amount of time that issues were tossed aside and not addressed will be the amount of it takes to unpack all the baggage between family members.
The potential for conflict increases exponentially when you have children. There are hardly any couples who share exactly the same ideas about division of labor, the child’s education, and which childcare, kindergarten, elementary school, or after school activities they should send their children to. And the decisions don’t just influence yourself, which makes it harder to yield. Then, yet another axis of conflict is thrown into the mix as the child grows up; the child itself. Children start to become self-aware at around the age of 3 which is when they begin to question everything their parents say. This is a natural developmental process through which the child discovers who they are, which means the conflict arising from this process will only intensify until the child becomes an adult and leaves their family home.
This basically means that all growing families are perpetually in a state of conflict. I guess you could say that conflict is a symptom of growth. But of course, it must by grounded in trust. Trust is what holds a family together and without it, a trivial argument can be enough to rip a family apart. The same goes for children. If they believe that the reason why their parents push them to study is for their own good and not because the parents want to save face, they will try their best as a member of the family despite the occasional whining and grumbling. But if they begin to doubt their parents’ motives, they will rebel and deceive their parents and maybe even consider them as enemies. Trust leads to confidence. If we aren’t able to trust each other, we lose faith in ourselves. And lack of confidence makes us susceptible to being swayed by other people’s opinions.
What’s interesting about the movie <Parasite> is how Kitaek’s (Kangho Song) family is more honest with each other than Mr. Park’s (Seongyoon Park). Kiteak’s family have suffered numerous failures which has resulted in them living in a sub-basement home without the means to even pay their phone bills. But what’s ironic is that they don’t harbor any resentment or ill feelings towards each other despite their external circumstances. They probably had their fair share of conflict. One of them has pipe dreams while the other makes the family lose money because of shoddy work as they fold pizza boxes, so you can imagine how many things they probably didn’t see eye to eye on. But they were able to get along and be honest to each other because they didn’t push aside or try to hide any anger or resentment and expressed them on the spot. Kiteak’s family trusted each other enough to face their conflicts.
On the other hand, Mr. Park’s family looks perfect from the outside. They live comfortably in a gorgeous house enjoying all the luxuries that money can buy and there doesn’t seem to be any conflict. However, the seemingly lack of conflict is not because it doesn’t exist, but because they hide it so well. And it all stems from a lack of trust. The little secrets they keep from each other begin to chip away at their trust in each other. These cracks are what enabled Kiteak’s family to latch onto Mr. Park’s family in the first place.
How to welcome conflict
Conflict is not something that is welcomed in Korean society. I mean, there probably aren’t any countries that actually like conflict but Korea is particularly fearful of it. The same goes for families, which is why we don’t like this part of us to be exposed and sometimes even deny its existence altogether. Families are actually the social group with the most conflict. But the problem isn’t conflict itself but how you react to it. Newlyweds especially encounter a lot of conflict and disagreements as they come face to face with the fact that their subtly different values and attitudes clash after years of living by themselves.
When I look back on how I’ve changed after I got married, I come to the realization that marriage was almost a process of rehabilitation for me. Through my wife, I was able to discover weaknesses in myself that I never noticed before. My timid yet ridiculously prideful self would have been out there causing more trouble than I am now if it wasn’t for my wife reigning me in. My wife’s presence, which I initially felt was holding me back from all my potential, turned out to be my safety valve. It was through this process that I realized I was far from perfect and that we were nothing like the couples in the soap operas or movies. I wouldn’t have been able to accept my wife’s criticism if it wasn’t for this realization.
In my denial and rebellion, I would have missed the opportunity to become a better person, but worst of all, I would have lost the most important partner I have in my life. The perfect families we see on TV don’t exist, and believing that these kinds of families are the norm is not only unrealistic but unsound. It prevents us from acknowledging and accepting our own reality.
We’re all similar but different at the same time. Our different thoughts, attitudes, and goals are important elements that distinguish us as distinct individuals. These differences also mean that conflict is inevitable. Conflict between humans will never be completely resolved unless we all become identical clones like in the movies. There is bound to be a difference in opinion and viewpoint which will lead to conflict. The question is, how do we convert this conflict into compromise?
The key to managing this kind of conflict is trust. We’re able to compromise without questioning our counterpart’s intentions and be satisfied with the result and cooperate as long as we trust them. The same goes for families. They will be able to get along and convert their conflict into compromise if they trust in each other’s good will. This experience of learning to compromise through conflict based on trust will help us to trust each other and ourselves more, leading us to become healthier families as well as individuals.
