Imagining self in a changing world – an exploration of "Studies of marriage"

Subjectivity is what makes a person a unique subject, different from other persons and her social environment, and distanced enough from her experience to be able to reflect upon it and create her own future. In this chapter, I will examine the life of married couples in a changing country. A country groups many individuals, and because of its social and political institutions, it constraints what is possible for people to live or want for themselves. A marriage is a curious alliance between two lives for an unpredictable period of time, which strongly canalizes each of the partners’ lives. However, a person is never reduced to his or her national history, or the story of his or her marriage: even in the tighter frame, a person keeps becoming a unique human being. This chapter is thus a modest attempt to account for the fact that, within a group of six couples married at the same time and living in the same societal conditions, each couple grows differently, and each person becomes absolutely unique… In order to explain the generation of uniqueness in such constraining forces, my proposition is to examine people’s imagination of alternatives, and their personal life philosophies.