STABILITY OVER SELF: A CONSTRUCTIVIST GROUNDED THEORY OF THE MARITAL PARADOX AMONG PAKISTANI COUPLES

Abstract

Marriage in Pakistani society is widely regarded as a lifelong institution sustained by cultural, religious, and familial obligations, yet a pervasive paradox exists whereby many couples remain in marriages characterized by emotional dissatisfaction, conflict, and psychological distress. This qualitative study used Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006) to explore this marital paradox among 14 Pakistani married individuals (seven couples) recruited through purposive sampling across diverse regions and socioeconomic backgrounds. Iterative coding yielded eight theoretical categories, social and cultural pressures, emotional regulation and acceptance, fear of divorce and reputation, financial dependency, children as a stabilizing force, coping through distraction and faith, gender role expectations, and emerging hopes for change, which together generated the grounded theory of stability over self. This theory establishes that marital endurance in the Pakistani context is sustained not by mutual affection but by the convergence of sociocultural obligation, economic constraint, religious duty, and internalized coping, mechanisms through which individuals repeatedly subordinate emotional need to relational and social continuity. Stability over Self extends Western marital frameworks such as commitment theory, social exchange theory, and the vulnerability-stress-adaptation model, which center individual affect and satisfaction, by identifying collectivist obligation as the primary mechanism of marital endurance. Beyond Pakistan, this theory offers a transferable framework for understanding marital stability in other collectivist societies across South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia, with implications for cross cultural counselling practice, family policy, and international research on marriage and wellbeing. A key limitation is the study's reliance on a small, non-probability sample, which constrains statistical generalizability though not conceptual transferability.