Mamma mia!: Holy or sinful?
The Italian Mommy embodies all the paradoxes of Italian life. A beacon of self-sacrifice, he always gets his way. An apparent martyr to the needs of her family, she commands the same family without hesitation. She is capable of making life both easy and incredibly difficult.
It’s no wonder that “Mamma mia” is the most used phrase in the Italian language!
Italian mothers: the best housewife.
Much more than in the United States or the United Kingdom, 21st century Italian mothers tend to be housewives while their husbands go out to work. A recent survey showed that it is quite acceptable in Italian family traditions for the average young son in Italy to spend around fifteen minutes a day with his father, but several hours with his mother.
It’s no wonder, then, that you learn to follow all of her cues: how to dress, where to go, what to eat, who to see. And such is the bond that is formed in childhood that it continues into adult life: one in three married adult children sees their mother every day, and seven out of ten single men are still living with their mother at age thirty-five years old.
‘Mothers’ Italian boys: The growth of the ‘Mammoni’.
In other countries that would make them the object of jokes and ridicule. Not so in Italy. Here, there is nothing strange about men wanting to stay with their mothers as long as possible, even when they are married, and it is applauded as the right thing to do. The average age for an Italian to marry is thirty, one of the highest in United Nations statistics.
And that has led to a growth of what is known as’Mammoni‘- men who are still tied to their mother’s apron.
A recent story in a Roman electronic magazine told of an Italian lawyer in his thirties, a prominent and very powerful figure in an intensely masculine and competitive world. Newly married with a baby, he still takes his dirty laundry for his mother, who also irons his shirts, buys his underwear, and gives him food to take home in case his new wife can’t cook. ..
Is this the archetypal stereotype of the Italian mother? Maybe. But it is having a very real effect on Italian marriages.
Italian mothers and marriage.
To a shocking one, three out of ten Italian marriages now fail specifically because of men’s unusually close attachment to their mothers.
Psychologists conclude that children in Italy who are pleased by their Italian mothers into adulthood make them too emotionally immature to deal with the demands of a relationship with another adult woman in the form of a wife:
“The husband is used to being adored and when he does not receive that unconditional love from his wife, he runs back to his mother.”
Italian marriage: do you have a future?
Perhaps this is why recent United Nations statistics have shown that the marriage rate in Italy is now at its lowest point: Italy is 23rd out of 27 countries (the United States is at the top of the table) in terms of how many people per capita get married each year.
Will this trend continue? As with many Italian things, there are regional differences: the south of the county is still a more patriarchal society than the north, cities are more accepting of women and men have the same rights and responsibilities as rural districts.
So, does the Italian marriage have a future? That will largely depend on the new generation of men in Italy and the ability of the younger generation of women to change a mindset that has been around for generations.
